As a path to fame, ‘reality’ bites

Atlantic City —  The crowd in the lobby of the Tropicana Hotel-Casino was primarily Tuesday afternoon Atlantic City geriatric, but 10-year-old Tiffany Evans smiled cheerily with every autograph or photograph request. She stood at the end of a receiving line with her new cohorts -- the Chinese New Dynasty Acrobats, a few magicians, a comic juggler and a muscular aerial act.

Just this May, Tiffany had won the grand prize on CBS’ “Star Search” and now was the star of a summer variety show at the hotel. Five or six times a week, she belted out the last two numbers of the Ed Sullivan-like show and retreated to the lobby for the autograph session while a production assistant at a table next to her sold Tiffany-autographed posters for $5 and “a limited edition” Tiffany pin for $25. Even the most effusive of fans ignored them.

It may seem all that exposure on a network show hasn’t taken Tiffany very far. Yet at least she’s in show business, which can’t be said for many other reality TV-created celebrities. Though the television landscape has been dominated lately by instant celebrities who once trod the byways in blissful anonymity, few have made much progress on their entertainment resumes thereafter.

Are you paying attention, any of the remaining contestants on “Last Comic Standing” or “Cupid’s” Lisa Shannon ... to say nothing of the thousands of singing wannabes auditioning for Round 3 of “American Idol”?

“If you think any one of 260 million Americans can become a star at any given time, then fine, believe that,” says Bernie Brillstein, the legendary talent maven of Brillstein Grey Enterprises. “This is just no way to prepare for stardom. You can’t find it under a rock. Under a rock, friends, is dirt.”

While there are a few recent reality-show folks who have made some post-show headway, in most cases, the gains are limited. Richard Hatch, the first “Survivor” winner, got a radio talk show in Boston but also got himself arrested in a domestic assault case (he was ultimately acquitted). His “Survivor” nemesis, Rudy Boesch, wrote a book, “The Book of Rudy: The Wit and Wisdom of Rudy Boesch,” but his scheduled book tour coincided with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their aftermath, so he was out of the news loop. Another “Survivor” star, Colleen Haskell, made a Blistex commercial and appeared opposite Rob Schneider in the movie “The Animal” but is now apparently much happier behind the scenes on the production team of “The Michael Essany Show” on the E! network.

“Every time one of these shows is on, the individual value of one person is diluted. There have now been six or seven winners on ‘Survivor’ alone. Who remembers them?” asks Robert Thompson, the Syracuse University professor who runs the Center for the Study of Popular Television. Thompson adds, echoing Brillstein’s sentiments, “If you want to be a star and you are thinking, ‘Should I take tap dancing lessons and keep on singing or should I get on a reality TV series?’ then you should probably just learn how to act and dance and take your chances that way. The chances of you making a long career in show business from a reality show are really, really, really small.”

BACK TO SCHOOL

Helene Eksterowicz excused herself to close the door of her office. The noise from the hall was making it hard to hear on the phone. It’s not the office of a Hollywood production office, as some may have predicted after her long run on “The Bachelor,” where she successfully got a marriage proposal from the moderately hunky Aaron Buerge. She is the psychologist at an elementary school in a small southern New Jersey town, working in the same office she had before she was on the highly rated ABC show.

“I’m sorry. It’s busy, at least with paperwork, even in the summer,” Eksterowicz says. “Otherwise, things are fine.”

Earlier this year, Eksterowicz saw her relationship break up over coffee at a nearby Starbucks. Buerge apparently got cold feet and, while she was upset, the 27-year-old Eksterowicz is moving on. She does some public appearances in and around Philadelphia, mostly for charities, like Manna, which feeds AIDS shut-ins in the city. Oddly enough, the person whom she pals around with most these days is Gwen Gioia, one of the show’s runners-up.

“People can’t believe we are friends, but when I found out she too was from near Philadelphia, we had an immediate connection,” Eksterowicz says. They are working on a book together about their “Bachelor” experiences and, though the appearances and such are rarer as time goes on, Eksterowicz is grateful for the experience.

“More reality shows are starting seemingly daily, so all this will eventually go away,” she says. “But my view of life is that you take the opportunity as it comes and see what you can do with it. I’m always open to something different. The other day, I joined a new gym, and even that is exciting. I will always remember this as something that way.”

The question then is, how will people end up remembering Eksterowicz and the rest of those who were once their TV idols?

“It’s getting pretty tough to keep people straight. Now seven times 16 people have done ‘Survivor.’ It’s not just Rudy and Richard anymore,” says Ben Pappas, the senior writer who covers reality shows for US Weekly. “On the other hand, our best-selling cover since US went weekly was when we had Andrew Firestone from ‘Bachelor III’ on the cover. I don’t know if it was the entire Firestone family buying thousands of copies, but if you get a good reality person at the right time, it seems to work.”

On the other hand, Pappas says, it remains to be seen if even Richard Hatch, a few years from now, is anything more than a tough “Jeopardy!” question.

“But that might be true for Russell Crowe too,” he notes. Speaking of other celebrities, he adds “someone goes into rehab and it is a story for a week and then they forget them. Trista Rehn may be the star of ‘Bachelorette’ and getting $1 million to have her wedding broadcast, but she was at a celebrity softball game in Chicago and a lot of people didn’t really know why she was famous.”

It is generally agreed, though, that the one person whose fame from the latest round of reality programming is undeniable is Kelly Clarkson, the first “American Idol” winner. Her debut record went to No. 1 and sold more than Madonna’s latest album, which came out at the same time. Even though her movie, “From Justin to Kelly,” bombed, she is still on magazine covers and has a recording contract.

“If this is the end, if Kelly Clarkson never sells another CD, she is a name that will be remembered for another generation,” says Syracuse University’s Thompson. “ ‘Star Search’ was a relatively cheap show of people who didn’t always win our hearts. ‘American Idol’ is part of the entertainment-industrial complex. ‘ All right, that movie wasn’t good. But I have a feeling it will be played on DVD for a century. It has that camp-but-sweet quality. Little kids will be watching it in their jammies for many years to come.”

“American Idol” executive producer Ken Warwick admits that Thompson’s assessment of his show’s intentions is correct.

“It was never the idea to find the most-talented amateur and send them back to the church choir,” Warwick says. “It was always our intention not just to find someone to win, but someone the people put there, and that 10 years from now they will not only be as big but bigger. Kelly Clarkson has a magnificent voice, and I would love to think she will be around 10 years from now.”

But Warwick says he and the other producers, concerned about the overkill that destroyed such shows as ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” are trying to be careful to allow a lot of time between editions of “American Idol.” That’s why you won’t see the mega-hit “Idol” on Fox’s fall lineup.

First, he says, there needs to be time for the winner, and presumably the runner-up, to find his or her performing legs. Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken, the winner and runner-up of the last “American Idol,” got a lot of publicity, including each appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and have appeared in an “American Idol” touring show, although their names are hardly on the lips of the nation’s disc jockeys these days. But also winnowing what he said were 70,000 initial auditions is a long road.

“The majority of these people are OK-ish or boring. We’ve got to find people with personality or we risk failure,” he says. “This is not like ‘Survivor,’ where they are dealing with differing personalities to make a good TV show. We truly want to find a star.”

REAL ‘CHARACTERS’

Sherri Spillane, though, thinks she can make stars out of reality-show folks. Spillane is a one-time Vegas showgirl who started the scandal practice (Joey Buttafuoco was one of her clients) at the offbeat Ruth Webb Talent Agency in Los Angeles. She has become somewhat of a specialist in reality players, repping people like Rudy Boesch and Kevin and Drew, whom she likes to describe as “the bald-headed guys who constantly argued with each other” on the original “Amazing Race.”

“They were the one couple who stood out as having some panache,” she says, claiming she has gotten them a pilot -- of which type she won’t reveal -- “that looks like a go.”

Spillane says someone who flops in an early round of a show wouldn’t have any long-term chance. “You would have to develop a following and a style,” she says. And even then, she, as the agent, has to figure out a proper niche. She’s gotten Boesch a Navy SEAL action doll, and Susan Hawk, the backbiter on that first “Survivor,” has kept busy doing local commercials and game show appearances.

“But, really, anyone who goes on these shows thinking it a gateway to stardom will have a shock,” she says. “I have to admit that even my people are more character people than young, beautiful types who will be the next Brad Pitt or even Pamela Anderson.”

Several reality-show women, though, seem to have taken the Pamela Anderson route, shedding their clothes for Playboy magazine pictorials. “Survivor” Amazon winner Jenna Morasca and the losing middle-school teacher Heidi Strobel shared Playboy’s August cover. Darva Conger, who won on “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?,” and Jerri Manthey, another “Survivor” contestant, also took the Playboy bare-all route to further fame.

“Obviously, if you can get a Darva Conger, who was at the peak of her fame, you go for it,” a Playboy spokesman says. “But we don’t just go after everyone. A woman has to be reasonably attractive, and it has to be in that window of her 15 minutes of fame. We are, after all, selling magazines.”

As reality shows mature, though, save for “American Idol” or “Star Search,” they may well not be looking to make stars.

“I’m getting orders from producers not to interview actors but find real people exclusively,” says Susan Gish, owner of the Philadelphia Casting Co., which has cast several network reality shows, including NBC’s “Looking for Love” and Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.” “They ask us not to contact our talent pool, even the ones for commercials. They now seem to want people with some personality but a real-person personality. That must be what is working now.”

Sometimes for Gish the old Rolodex comes to a stop at a reality subject. She says she used to cast Zora Andrich, the “Joe Millionaire” winner who lived in nearby New Jersey, for commercials and modeling before she became famous, “but she has a Los Angeles agent and doesn’t do $600 commercials anymore.”

But Colleen Kelleher, who was an early “Fear Factor” favorite, “still comes in for those $600 commercials.” Gish says Kelleher was recently in a TV ad for the New Jersey Arts Council.

“The governor was in it too. She was in a scene with five other people and you wouldn’t have known it was her, to tell the truth,” Gish says. “I think she is going to continue to work on her craft. She is used to having the camera follow her now, so the experience was good for her.

“Still, if she didn’t have some training, some talent, she wouldn’t even get these commercials. If I were on a reality show, like they say, I wouldn’t give up my day job.”