Bobbie Wygant: 1926—2024

Last month, Bobbie Wygant died. At Splice Today, we often post her interviews of actors, filmmakers, entertainers, and a few politicians. She was a star on local Dallas television, on air when Kennedy was assassinated. She had to improvise and carry on with interviews; it was the most significant day of her career, “the biggest thing that has happened to me, in all of my years on camera.” That’s from an interview posted in 2018, two years before Wygant became more widely known to the world. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, Wygant posted a brief introduction and invitation to her archive.

Since then, Wygant’s people have been uploading clip after clip after clip of unedited junket interviews, almost all for specific movies. She’s got plenty of general interviews—Jerry Lewis, James Stewart, Liberace, Sharon Tate—but most are the raw footage that made up so many promotional materials from the 1970s through the 2000s. Wygant interviewed Burt Reynolds in London for Starting Over, a great movie with James L. Brooks’ first feature script, but what sticks in my mind is Reynolds and Wygant complaining about the pound. “It’s really painful at first,” he says, “but it helps once you begin to think of the pound as a dollar.”

At the top of that interview, Wygant says she’s “not a native Texan, but I adore Texas, and I especially adore Dallas-Fort Worth.” Moments later she’s cued and asks, “Are we rolling?” Her channel is an invaluable resource for candor in between moments when Wygant and the people she’s interviewing are “on.” She liked making small talk, and she had favorites: Tom Cruise, Jodie Foster, Spike Lee.

A sampling: Todd Field for Eyes Wide Shut, John Waters for Cry Baby, Zach Braff for Garden State, Floyd Mutrux for American Hot Wax.

I’m pretty sure she first went viral because of her habit of leaving some stars nonplussed: Michelle Pfeiffer turned to ice when Wygant asked if she ever reconsidered having an interracial child, Amy Irving did a double take when Wygant asked if “all Jewish people call their grandmothers bubbe.” More recently, an early interview with Jodie Foster went around because Wygant kept prodding her about when she was going to get a boyfriend. Beyond social media, her archive will likely serve several generations of documentarians and researchers.

There will never be another reporter treated as well as often as Wygant and her peers. These people were flown out to New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, all over the United States—including Baltimore in that Cry Baby interview—and wined and dined and treated with the candor of the ultra-famous, famous, come-ups, wannabes, and also-rans; something else sobering about her channel are all of the names that only come up once, and those who went too soon: River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Chris Farley. In most of these interviews, the subjects—and often Wygant—are in front of a small, practical set of objects related to the film: she talked to Cillian Murphy for Red Eye in a mock airplane aisle; all the stars of Bowfinger sit in front of cut-outs of Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; Cookie’s Fortune by Robert Altman was granted a whole mock-crime scene.

But that was in 1999, when everything everywhere was flush. There are still some long-lead press, and there are press screenings, but how many people are flown out? Are any local television reporters being flown anywhere to report on entertainment?

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith