ArtsBeat: Oprah Winfrey Revisits Whitney Houston Interview
Oprah Winfrey is repackaging her 2009 interview with the pop star Whitney Houston for a Thursday night special on OWN, her ratings-challenged cable channel.
The two-hour special, Remembering Whitney: The Oprah Interview, comes five days after Ms. Houston was found dead in her hotel room at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. A private funeral will be held on Saturday.
OWN is billing the program on its Web site as a no-holds-barred conversation. The interview was originally shown in September 2009 as the season premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show, and it makes sense that OWN would queue up a repeat of it now, given that several networks and cable channels have scheduled special shows about Ms. Houston. OWN has started to repurpose old episodes of Ms. Winfreys talk show in an attempt to raise her profile on the channel, which is named for her but has suffered from a lack of Oprah programming in its first year.
CBS This Morning showed some excerpts from the interview on Monday morning. At the time, Ms. Houston had not produced a new album for seven years. She told Ms. Winfrey who famously dubbed her the voice that she turned to heavy drugs after the release of The Bodyguard in 1992. Because I knew then we were trying to hide pain. I was trying to hide the pain, Ms. Houston said.
In a review at the time, Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times wrote:
The interview hardly needed all the promotion and advance publicity: it was an intimately pe! rsonal c onversation between two of the most public and scrutinized celebrities in the world. The contrast could not have been sharper or more colorful: Ms. Winfrey is a beloved star who has put her career and her multibillion-dollar business ahead of everything else; Ms. Houston is a beloved star who let everything get in the way of her career.
Ms. Houston didnt hold back, but there was one moment when the diva seemed in denial. Ms. Winfrey cited an article describing the pain and disgust fans felt for the careless way Ms. Houston had mistreated her voice, which the article and Ms. Winfrey described as a national treasure.
Wow, Ms. Houston replied, but she didnt address whether she had squandered an amazing gift.