With six Oscar nominations to her credit, more than 100 songs on the Billboard charts and a catalogue estimated to be worth half a billion dollars, it’s odd that songwriter Diane Warren isn’t more of a household name. That figures to change this week when the creator of iconic hits for everyone from Aerosmith (“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”) to Celine Dion (“Because You Loved Me”) is celebrated in a PBS special, “Diane Warren: Love Songs,” airing Saturday on L.A.’s KCET and various other times across the nation. Then on June 8, Universal Music Enterprises releases the CD, “Due Voci,” featuring some of Warren’s best known hits performed by a new romantic singing duet with the same name that she's developed.

Warren spoke with Eric Estrin about how seeing names on album covers led to schmoozing with...

Hollywood seemed like another world to Ashok Amritraj when he was a boy, but his world-class tennis skills gave him a passport to success -- and his love of American movies ultimately drove him to produce more than 100 of them (“Bringing Down the House,” “Shopgirl”). As chairman of Hyde Park Entertainment, he recently committed to financing and producing a new series of films based on Andy McNab’s Nick Stone novels set in the world of British Intelligence.

Amritraj spoke with Eric Estrin about playing bad Hollywood tennis, doing business out of the Polo Lounge and going independent with the aid of Roger Corman.

Growing up in India in a city called, at that time it was Madras, now it’s called Chennai, I...

Equally renowned for his high-wire personal life and his dizzying success as a film historian, actor (Dr. Melfi’s shrink in “The Sopranos”), writer and Academy Award-nominated director (“The Last Picture Show”), Peter Bogdanovich comes to California this week as part of the Turner Classic Movies Road to Hollywood Tour and the TCM Classic Film Festival. Bogdanovich gained widespread critical and popular acclaim for directing films such as “Paper Moon” and “Mask,” but fell from grace after a series of personal calamities and professional missteps.

He spoke with Eric Estrin about Stella Adler’s “Brilliant, darling,” being a one-man show for Roger Corman and squeezing it out of Boris Karloff.

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Like the runaway bus in his popcorn classic hit “Speed,” Graham Yost’s writing pace can’t be allowed to dip under 50 mph. without jeopardizing anything that gets in its way. His writing career has veered from TV comedies to prestige miniseries. He served as a co-executive producer, writer and director on this week’s HBO blockbuster “The Pacific,” and is also showrunning FX’s “Justified,” which premieres Tuesday night and looks to be TV’s next big-buzz hit.

Yost spoke with Eric Estrin about his rise from “Turkey Television” to the exhilaration of “Speed.”

I grew up in Toronto. My dad Elwy Yost had a show about movies on TVOntario, which was basically Ontario’s PBS, for 25...