Et tu, Bruno?: Gotcha journalism, celebrity-style

It's one thing for TMZ.com to send videographers into the world to pester celebrities outside of nightclubs in hopes that they'll be drunk enough to issue forth some kind of tirade against, oh, say, Lindsay Lohan and her naturally red hair. It's quite another for an ostensibly reputable TV newscast -- oh, who am I kidding, putting "reputable" and "TV newscast" together in the same sentence -- to dump sad news on celebrities busy preening merrily on the red carpet of a premiere.

And yet, that's precisely what KCAL's Dave Clark did last night at the Pantages: Button-hole celebrities for their reactions to the death of Bruno Kirby. It's a fairly amusing and eminently lazy piece, incongruously combining Kirby's death -- which, let's face it, probably in the scheme of things doesn't deserve this much air time -- with a puff piece about the premiere of a musical, juxtaposing big red-carpet smiles with expressions of sorrow.

It excels as an exercise in measuring spontaneous emoting from people who didn't really know the guy (why bother hunting down his onscreen co-stars when there's a random pile of celebrities amassing in one place?), however, with Jennifer Tilly's gape-mouthed response (they worked together, sort of, as voices of CGI mice) -- "Omigod, are you kidding?" -- the most dramatic. Robert Davi (ID'd in the piece as "Robert Dabi" -- fading fame's a bitch, innit?) ruefully shakes his head for the cameras more than he ever would have in real life because he understands that's what's expected of him. Lorenzo Lamas is a veritable fount of information: "I had no idea he was ill," Lamas says, confessing that he never worked with Kirby but "I liked his work." You can almost see the gears whirring in Lamas's brain trying to place the name, the face -- and he succeeds, noting accurately that Kirby did both comedic and dramatic roles.

Clark's next assignment: Asking red-carpet trollers what they thought about the capture of JonBenet Ramsey's killer, or just offering them current-events quizes in general.