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Gossip hound Perez Hilton's first TV special, What Perez Sez (about Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards), premieres tonight on VH1. ''Even if you don't like me, you'll still be able to watch the show and enjoy it because it's jam-packed with celebrities,'' he assured EW.com Friday, phoning us from the Las Vegas airport, where he'd just touched down for the weekend's festivities. A sampling of the stars you'll see on the special: Simon Cowell, Michael Bublé, Pete Wentz, M.I.A., and Mandy Moore. (Two you won't see: Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson, who denied his interview requests.) While 70 percent of the special was shot before the VMAs — including a chat with Amy Winehouse taped three days before her August hospitalization for ''exhaustion''— he was looking forward to wrangling more stars on the red carpet. In the meantime, we turned the tables and had readers pose questions for Perez (né Mario Lavandeira) on our PopWatch blog. Here, his answers...
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's start easy. DONNER wants to know what you'd like to be doing in 5 or 10 years. What are your long-term plans?
PEREZ HILTON: Well, I'll always do the website because I love it. I'm celebrating my third blog-iversary this month. But I think I need to really take it up a notch and get it to the point where I have a staff of people helping me with it. I think it's gotten to the point where the website is bigger than just me. I get about 5,000 to 6,000 e-mails a day, and I'm kinda bummed, because up until about two months ago, I used to answer all my e-mails.... I just hired my sister two months ago to be my assistant, but she's just coordinating this, arranging that, placing that order. I'm moving my mom out [from Miami], too. She'll be my second assistant. She can do stuff like going to the bank, going to the post office, and driving me to meetings so that I can multitask and work while in the car.... I don't get much sleep. Monday through Thursday, I average four hours a night. And then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I try to get like seven hours. I'm totally dead, but I love what I do, and I feel really lucky to do it and be my own boss. It sounds really cliché, but I am living my own American dream. I'm at a point now where I'm able to help my family.
JANINE, a minivan-driving mom of three who says your website is her porn, wants to know a bit about your sources. Are they mostly anonymous? Do they contact you? Do you have regulars? How reliable do you feel they are?
My best sources are always my friends, people that I've known well for a while and that have given me accurate information in the past and are unbiased. Thankfully, I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in my address book and in my phone. They're everyone from publicists, managers, agents, assistants, nannies, dog walkers, neighbors, people at clubs, people at bars, and drivers to celebrities themselves. Anything that I get from a reader whom I don't know — I would say almost all of those I don't post, unless I know someone who knows who they're talking about. Like if it's a post about Nicole Richie, I can call my sources that know her and see if that's accurate or not. Or, if someone sends me an e-mail with pictures. [Laughs] Photographic evidence always helps, like that picture of Vanessa Hudgens, which I actually thought was fake and was a little stunned to find out was real. I feel horrible because not only did I think it was fake, I didn't know that allegedly, the photo was taken about a year ago, when she was only 17. So technically, any website that runs that picture could be sued for kiddie porn. Serious stuff.... It doesn't matter if you're a star or regular folk, no one should be taking naked pictures of themselves or making a sex tape if they don't ever want it getting out there. It will happen. So don't do it, kids. I don't know why people have not learned.
NEXT PAGE: ''I'm all about equalizing and normalizing: Why is it okay for US Weekly to write about John Mayer's secret relationship with Cameron Diaz but it's not okay for me to write about [one man's secret relationship with another]? That's homophobia.''
