You may know her from her "Sunday With" column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

An author, ghostwriter and interviewer of A-list celebrities, Cindy Gaber joins us this week on Nevada Week In Person.

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(Amber Renee Dixon) Cindy Gaber has spent 30 years as the senior film writer for the New York Times Syndicate, and she has a way with celebrities that enables her to pull from them some meaningful and inspirational content.

She's also celebrating the release of her fifth book in her Ascenders series saga called X-Catcher.

Cindy, thank you so much for joining us.

-Amber, thank you so much for having me.

-I'm so happy to have you.

You have lived in Southern Nevada how long now?

-Thirteen years now.

I'm a Chicagoan, and I made the trek across the country.

-How did you get here?

(Cindy Gaber) For love.

My high school boyfriend, who we just parted ways over the years, he went to one school, I went to another school for college.

He wrote a letter to my dad's house, who through the miracle of mail made it to my dad's new house in Phoenix.

And he basically said if you're single and you want to have lunch someday let's have it, and we long-distance dated and then I moved here and we got married.

-Oh my gosh, a love story that sounds a little bit similar to the Ascenders series, based in Chicago as well.

What is it about, and what was your inspiration for this series?

-Ascenders is about 17-year-old Walker Callahan who gets in a horrific car crash with her mother and wakes up in a new house.

Some of her things are there and a lot of much nicer things than there used to.

She's going to private high school the next day.

First period music class, the teacher has long blonde hair, grungy shirt.

He turns around and he's like hey, I'm Kurt.

I used to have this band.

And this goes on all day.

Heath Ledger and Robin Williams and other people are there as teachers.

And we find out Walker died last night, and she doesn't go to heaven, she doesn't go to hell.

She goes to a limbo, but you are required to go back to high school because true fact, the human brain doesn't fully form till you're 25, which is when your frontal lobe gels-- which is a great excuse for kids if they get in any trouble-- my brain is not formed.

-But in this case, in this movie, since their brains haven't fully formed at that age, they're going to high school in a different realm.

-A different realm; it looks like the UP of Michigan.

But the one thing is you have a reset in your body.

You could go fling yourself off a cliff and nothing's going to hurt you anymore.

You cannot have any damage.

You can do daredevil things.

But you're not allowed to go back and check on your former life.

And Daniel, one of our main characters, must go back.

He told his little brother who's six, don't ever go anywhere without me.

They were in a plane crash, and he knows the kid is at the site of the crash.

And Walker, who's our main character, wants to absolve her mother of this car crash.

So they go back to Chicago as ghosts halfway through the book, and they get to do some fun ghosts things and look for the brother, and they're also on the run from demons who look a lot like them, who want to put the kibosh on their very existence.

-What has the feedback been, and is this a young adult type of work?

-That's the funny thing.

It started off as a young adult book, but then we had this massive readership that's people of all ages, including a lot of guys which surprised me, I thought, because it has a huge epic love story in the middle.

They can time travel, so they can go back to the past and in book five, they go back to huge historical events.

One is the earthquake in 1906 in San Francisco, so they have to go deal with that and find somebody.

But the deal is if you die in the past, you're never born in the future.

So whenever they go back into past time loops, it's super dangerous because if anything happens to you, you're done too.

So it's got a lot of that, a lot of we want to stay together as a family, this core group of friends.

And a lot of people just find different-- I've had everybody from someone who's about to lose their mom who found a lot of compassion in the book and thought it was nice to read with her about moving on to, you know, I've done many Comic-Cons where all kinds of fan things have happened over the years.

-Tell me more about that, because it is providing some comfort to people who have dealt with death.

-It's so amazing.

We were at Outlander-Com at the Rio.

We were invited because we're an epic love story with time travel to Outlander-Con.

So us and a million guys in kilts.

-Wow!

-So we had one funny experience, really The actors were bored, there wasn't a lot to do, so they grabbed our book and read it out loud, the first chapters.

That was fun to hear it in a Scottish accent.

But at one point a woman came up with her friend and the friend kept saying, go talk to her, go talk to her, and they were crying.

They came up, and they said that they had lost a nephew in one of the recent school shootings at the time, and they'd like to think he was in a beautiful place like Ascenders and it gave them comfort which-- I started crying, they were crying, and it was like wow, this right there was like I'm so glad I wrote this.

-Congratulations on the fifth book in that series.

Just one part of your story, though.

You have the column with the Review-Journal, work with the New York Times Syndicate talking about films.

Where did your interest in those areas stem from?

-You know, I was that kid who was either reading books under their blanket, lying to my mom saying I wasn't, and then I got a TV and it got a lot worse, because then I was watching movies till 3:00 in the morning.

She'd be like, is that TV on?

No.

Why is there a light?

I don't know.

So I was that kid, and I always loved films.

Early in my career, I worked at the Sun Times in Chicago for many years under Roger Ebert.

The deal was we'd both go see a movie, just us, and if he liked it, he'd maybe do the interviews, but if he didn't, I would do them, or if he liked the celebrity.

But he didn't really want to do many interviews anymore, so we'd sit there and he wouldn't say much.

He would just be like, it's yours.

And it was cool.

-What a tremendous influence I imagine he must have been in your film critique.

-He was amazing.

He's an amazing writer and just a nice person, so it was really fun to-- you know, they'd be like it's just the two of you for Titanic or whatever it was.

So it was very cool.

-How exciting.

Okay, so with your interviews with celebrities, we have spoken ahead of this interview, and you brought up that you have interviewed Will Smith on multiple occasions.

-Zillions of occasions.

-What's he like?

-You know, is anything going on with him, Amber?

You know, it's just the same ol' same ol'.

He's always been such a funny, nice guy that, I mean, I was shocked when this happened at the Oscars because I've never seen him at these press junkets they do in L.A. be anything but just super accommodating, giving people hugs, taking photos.

I mean, one of the nicest.

If you made a top 10 list, he'd be right on there as one of the nicest.

-So then what do you imagine happened for him to get up there and slap Chris Rock in defense of his wife and just comments that Chris Rock made about her?

-Right.

I think it's such a dual-edged sword.

I mean, violence is never the answer.

But on the second part is him and Chris Rock have had a beef for a number of years.

Chris Rock has made jokes about them in the past.

Chris Rock doesn't watch her show, obviously.

He didn't know she has alopecia.

I believe that.

I mean, he made a joke.

It was, you know, not the worst joke there could be, but I sat there thinking, what if Will didn't do that?

What if he just at the end when he gave his speech-- because he was a lock for winning, everyone knew he was going to win-- he just at the end said, you know, something in hia speech.

If he would have just said, you know what, I just want to give a shout-out to Jada.

You've gone through a lot, and I just think you look beautiful tonight.

That would have done it for me right there.

You know, he could have handled that a lot differently.

-I don't know if there's a connection with this, but reading one of your interviews with Lady Gaga, she had a quote that said I think it's important that we guide artists and take care of them on a psychological level as they begin to rise, because everything changes.

The truth is people think we change as people.

It's not us that changes, it's everyone around us that changes.

Have you seen that in the development of celebrities?

-You know, you see it and, I mean, there are people especially-- I'll give you a little teaser-- one of them that did one of the big YA series that became a huge movie.

Super nice to begin with, and then as time went on, like a nightmare, you know.

It's just you see them change.

It's easy.

A lot of times the reporters who have been the same for many years will sit there and go okay, how's this going to morph out, especially if they're super young.

You know, if you think, Will's been at this since he has been super young, so you think he wouldn't do it, and Lady Gaga was right.

I mean, fame is such a weird thing.

People think they want it, then they get it, then they don't want it, so it's such a double-edged sword for people.

-What is your approach when interviewing a celebrity in order to get them to open up?

-I try to use humor if you can.

Some of them you can't, but if there's any way to use humor, it's always good because that's the least-- they expect you to come in and be like, what about that tabloid headline, and that's not what I write about.

I write about the actual making of the movie or fun things about their career.

So if you can be-- you know, I'm not going to go there with them, then they relax a little.

My favorite on that one was James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano.

Never did interviews, super-private guy, and finally they made him for the movie The Mexican, which was Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Gandolfini.

Nobody cared about Brad Pitt for the first time in history.

No one cared about Julia Roberts, but James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano, and just through the whole interview, I kept saying like, what's going to happen next season?

What's going to happen next season?

And he finally stopped and gave me that really mean Tony look on purpose and he goes, you ask me one more time, I'm going to put you in a headlock.

So I did it one more time, and he did.

He put me in a headlock, and I was like you have just written my story for me.

A headlock from Tony Soprano?

We have photos of this now.

-Do you remember a time when you tried to use humor and it did not work?

-There's a few of them that are just so strange, like Faye Dunaway is one of those old-time stars.

They dim the lights when she comes in, you know, they close the curtains.

It's very-- you know.

And Tommy Lee Jones has been a challenge for most of the press.

So there's a few times, or sometimes when they're rockers it's tough.

I remember when we did at the height of their heights, we did One Direction.

They had their movie, and this was a funny story.

There's a little girl next to me, her mom snuck her in, and I just was in the front row so I said Harry, why don't you come down and give little Susan a kiss on the cheek because she's your biggest fan.

So he did.

He was so sweet about it.

He came down, gave her a kiss, and I said wow, that's your first kiss and it's from Harry Styles.

And her mom's right there, and the kid goes, it's not my first kiss.

And the mom was like, what?

(laughter) That was a fun little moment.

But mostly they're all nice.

-Did that become part of the story?

-That became part of the story.

I mean, crazy things happen.

-Tell me about ghostwriting.

I don't quite understand how it works.

You're writing on behalf of someone else who doesn't want to be known.

-You're writing on behalf of a star who has a book deal and doesn't write or maybe doesn't even think that much about writing and doesn't want to think about it.

So they hire somebody like me, and you keep continuously interviewing them and then hoping that works into a book.

Or you have somebody who's just so busy, like I did Olivia Newton John's book that came out a year ago, and she's so busy plus she was struggling with cancer treatments.

So she just wanted someone to put her exact words on paper, which was amazing because she was so nice.

-There are some others that you've ghostwritten like the Black Book of Hollywood Beauty Secrets.

How does that work?

Where are you getting these from?

-I went for years, I would go on these press junkets and ask the stars for their beauty tips, and it just became a fun little book series that took off.

It was on The Ellen Show-- like weird things happen with books-- Ellen picked it up one day, so that's all you need.

It's like yay!

Thank you, Ellen.

-What are some of those beauty secrets that stood out to you?

There's got to be some weird stuff in there.

-So many weird-- I mean, they were like-- the one that actually works is if you take a spoon, put it in your freezer at all times, a metal spoon.

Then if you have bags in the morning, just lay down on your couch, put the spoon part on your eyes and all that stuff will go down.

-Yes, I've done that.

I don't know.

-It's okay.

-Just a little bit of everything.

-It's like getting a good makeup artist.

That's the thing.

-Last thing, you always write "make it count" when you're signing books.

Why?

-I do because I think sometimes we just go through our lives so fast and it's thing to thing to thing.

So always since book one when I sign them, I always put "make it count" just to make people think if you could do something that would help somebody today, even if it's a little thing, you make that day count just in its own way, and I always have kids talking about that.

So like one little thing.

-Cindy Gaber, thank you so much for coming in and joining us on Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.

To see this week's edition of Nevada Week, tune in on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. or anytime you wish at vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

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