The long and happy death of the celebrity profile: there's more entertainment coverage than ever, and that's why it's so crappy.

• Author: Welch, Matt

As THE AUDIENCE at Hollywood's Comedy Central Stage snickers expectantly at the German prog-rock strains of Einsturzenden Neubauten, Richard Rushfield, dressed in a pompous black turtleneck, begins to solemnly recite a Details magazine cover profile of Keanu Reeves. "He was diffident and shook my hand," Rushfield reads archly, to laughter. "I knew I wanted to engage him in crazily serious things. Death stuff. How do you jump into that without being crude when all you have is 90 minutes?"

The punch lines--crafted as earnest prose by the well-regarded Details Contributing Editor Bruce Wagner, lampooned as pretentious ass kissing by the Vanity Fair-employed Rushfield--keep coming: "There he was. Handsome as expected you get the automatic hetero crush, metrosexpuppy love. But he's invisible, too.... I turn back to look at him. He is moved, subtly quaking."

Wagner's piece, from November 2003, contains most of the devices we've come to loathe in celebrity profiles: precious descriptions of banal interactions, an intrusive and unabashedly narcissistic use of the first and second person, and a hyper-inflationary regard for the interviewee's wisdom and earthly importance. (Sometimes all in the same sentence: "Now here he is, impossibly innocent, eating fruit, you can almost smell him, very Siddhartha.")

These well-worn tropes, deployed daily over the explosion of celebrity coverage across all media (most jarringly at "hard news" outlets such as CNN), were more than enough to sustain an entire night of comedy last May, when Rushfield and his pals from the satirical Hollywood zine L.A. Innuendo gave a series of readings they called "Adventures in Profiling." The celebrity profile, once the canvas upon which much of the groundbreaking "New Journalism" of the 1960s and '70s was painted, is now a laughingstock.

The root cause of the decline and fall is no great secret, even if the underlying economics aren't always appreciated. "These days, what the writer wants to say, and the reader wants to learn, and the actor wants to reveal, are wildly at odds," wrote veteran Hollywood interlocutor Tad Friend in a widely circulated 1998 essay for Spin. "The compromise is heavily weighted toward the actor.... It's a return to the 1990s, when studio minions misinformed us that Bing Crosby was jolly and Rock Hudson was girl crazy."

Well, not quite. Hudson didn't have to contend with supermarket tabloids hunting down every peccadillo (or, in the astonishing case of...