Ever dream of working in showbiz? Then talk to Gaye Hirsch ’84, Senior Vice President of Current Programming at the C.W. television network. She helped make movies for Tom Cruise’s production company, Cruise/Wagner and held a gig with HBO, before settling down to oversee shows like Gossip Girl and Smallville at the C.W. The Sun had the opportunity to sit down with Hirsch in Los Angeles this summer to talk about her path to show-business:

The Sun: So you’re a pretty big deal. Would you mind explaining what exactly your job entails?

We try to avoid keeping The Sun’s content inbred; it’s often seen as both self-promotional and perhaps a conflict of interest.

That said, there are times when you have to make allowances; when a former editor is exemplary and interesting enough, that, though he or she may claim that “they majored in the Sun,” everything else he or she has done far surpasses it.

Howard Rodman ’71 is one such dude. He’d be the first to claim that he’s not quite the “Hollywood Insider,” and he may be right: much of his work, though celebrated, happens to be “unproducable or unpublishable” — a common trope of his.