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Colleen Haskell
« on: Jul 28th, 2003, 4:30pm » |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61947-2003Jul15.html?nav= hptoc_c
Question Reality
'Survivor' gave Colleen Haskell fame she didn't enjoy, fans she'd rather avoid and a movie career she didn't want. So she escaped to an ordinary life and an ordinary job ... making a reality TV show
Colleen Haskell spent a day this spring taping a reality show in a ballpark with fellow producer Mike Bollow. (Jerome De Perlinghi)
By Liza Mundy
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page W10
"It just isn't something I'm comfortable with," says Colleen Haskell, who, contrary to the cliche, looks taller than she did on television. She's still knife-slim, though, her hair still toast-colored and tousled; even wearing several more layers of clothing than she did on the desert island of Pulau Tiga, she's still got that sleepy Ellen Barkin beauty, as well as that soft, puddingy accent in which she is saying, Sorry, she doesn't want to be rude. No offense.
She just doesn't want to talk about "Survivor."
The thing is, people who don't want to talk about a topic generally have something about it they are dying to say, so before long Colleen Haskell elaborates on why she's not going to talk about "Survivor," the breakout reality TV show on which she was one of the first 16 ordinary-person castaways. "I know I said I wasn't going to talk about it, and here I am, chatting away," she finds herself saying, acknowledging a talkative side that has tended to get her in trouble. By way of example, she offers a moment during the taping of "Survivor," when an off-screen producer interviewed her for one of those so-where's-your-head-at-now conversations that are a fixture of the show. "How's Greg?" the producer asked.
Colleen knew exactly what the point was. She had sensed from the start that the producers wanted a romance, and that this was why she had been put in the same tribe with Greg, the silly boy from Brown. Nothing was going on between them except goofing around and hanging out; by now their so-called affair was a running joke among the cast and crew, and it was in that spirit that Colleen said what she said next.
"When we go off together, it's all about sex," she confided. "That's all that's been happening. It's a really passionate affair right now. Things are going great." She laughed at the absurdity of what she had said. Sometime later she got voted off the island and resumed her regularly scheduled life, thinking that when "Survivor" aired, if it aired, no one would watch a television show that featured a bunch of average people camping.
But then "Survivor" was airing, and her "it's all about sex" line aired along with it, and suddenly everybody -- the nation, the world -- thought Colleen really had hooked up with some guy she'd met on a TV show. Her friends and family knew her well enough to see she'd been kidding, but strangers, apparently, did not. In an interview on "The Early Show," Bryant Gumbel asked if it was true that she'd had sex with Greg. As if there wasn't real news out there, somewhere, to report! "I'm like, 'Survivor'? It's a game show?" Colleen says now, but wherever she went people had this image of her, this sex-kitten image that was, like, congealed in the national consciousness. An average of 28 million people watched "Survivor" during its first run in the summer of 2000; its ratings were so high that soon there was a second "Survivor" in production, and other networks were scrambling to get reality shows out there, and designers were sending Colleen clothes, and agents were setting up auditions, and it's all been lunacy and strangeness since then, and that -- see? -- is why she doesn't want to talk about "Survivor."
"I don't want to be defined by it," she says, departing to trot into left field of the Chicago White Sox' baseball stadium, the unlikely place where celebrity has led her. There's a new reality TV show being filmed here today, and instead of starring in it, Colleen is helping produce it. As a way of escaping her own reality-TV past, she is creating her replacement. Just now, you could say, embodied in Colleen Haskell are the alpha and omega of American reality TV, the beginning and the end.
Or, if not the end, embodied in Colleen Haskell are the beginning of American reality TV, and the glut we're in right now.
It seemed a doable notion: Write an article about someone who'd been on a major reality TV show, and see what the experience, in sober retrospect, felt like. Find out where a reality gig leads a normal person, or even a not-quite-normal one; what do the people who go on these shows want, and what do they ultimately get? Colleen Haskell seemed an obvious candidate: A native of Bethesda, she was studying advertising in Miami when, four years ago, she was shopping at a mall with a friend and saw a notice for non-actors to audition for a television show to be set in Malaysia. So lightly did she take the idea of being selected that in her audition tape, she urged CBS producers to "pick my friend." The "Survivor" creators picked Colleen instead, presumably because she was perky and wholesome as well as being, clearly, a hottie, Ginger and Mary Ann rolled into one. On the island, her haircut withstood the most trying circumstances. A member of the goofy, overmatched Pagong tribe, she outlasted her fellow tribe members and could have had a shot at winning had not Kelly Wiglesworth won immunity on the day that everybody had intended to vote Kelly off. They were obliged to vote Colleen off instead.
But Colleen by no means went away. After the show aired she did the obligatory rounds on Letterman and Regis, but because she was fresh-faced and funny she also did "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," "Politically Incorrect," "Access Hollywood." She did a Blistex commercial; appeared in made-for-TV movies; played the romantic lead in a commercially released movie, "The Animal." She bared her midriff on the cover of Mademoiselle; asked by one interviewer what the women of "Survivor" did when they menstruated, she revealed that the women were allowed to bring tampons.
And now she wasn't talking?
"I don't know why; I don't even know the girl," said the flabbergasted publicist for E!, the tabloidy cable network that is currently employing Colleen as a reality-show producer. But Colleen's turning down an interview request only made her seem more intriguing. What, precisely, had driven her into seclusion? Was it sitting for interviews in which she heard herself saying things like, "I've learned the importance of under-eye concealer"? Was it the fact that there are about a dozen Colleen Haskell Web sites now, sites maintained by obsessive male fans who have amassed an extensive collection of what one describes as "Hot Sexy Non-Nude Pictures"? And if all this was so bad, why -- in her escape from reality TV -- was she perpetuating the trend that "Survivor" started?
Because there's no doubt that "Survivor" did, indeed, start a trend of extraordinary breadth, if not extraordinary depth: In this, the so-called summer of reality, there are at least 100 reality shows, new and relatively established, jostling for, well, survival. The offerings include noxious "Survivor" spinoffs like NBC's "Fear Factor," in which people subject themselves to eat 'n' gag stunts that may someday result in the extinction of earthworms everywhere; dating shows, in which women with overdeveloped grooming skills compete for men who turn out to have unrevealed personal problems; talent shows like "American Idol" and its own horrifying offshoot, "American Juniors," in which young people compete for recording contracts while stage parents suffer nervous breakdowns. They include, yes, "Survivor" (a sixth episode just aired), as well as "America's Next Top Model" ("Ebony, the color of your skin is so beautiful, but the texture of your skin still needs a lot of work!") and "Blind Date" ("I don't know, he just seemed kind of girly!") and of course MTV's venerable "Real World" ("My frustrations in the house had been building up, but unfortunately, I hit the wrong person!"). They include fringe cable shows like "American Chopper," in which a father-son motorcycle-assembly team build their own relationship while building Harleys ("I do more [bleeping] work around this [bleeping] place than you do!"), as well as "House Hunter," in which producers try to rev up the anomie of house hunting by means of voiceovers like: "Now, all Mike and Chris can do is wait. Will their offer be accepted?"
It's been suggested that the roots of reality TV lie in old stunt shows like "Candid Camera" and romantic contests like "The Dating Game," but it seems equally plausible that they can be traced to "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," in which the public was encouraged to believe that the life of wild animals consists of hunting and killing and mating and giving birth, when in fact, the real life of wild animals consists mostly of snoozing and hiding. Reality television attempts to convince us that human contact consists of arguing and dating and confessing and regretting, that our existence is unrelentingly dramatic, when in fact, so much of human contact consists of one person saying something boring to another, like: "I think we've run out of batteries."
"Want me to run back to the car and get some?" says Colleen, who along with two other producers has arrived at U.S. Cellular Field -- the Chicago ballfield formerly known as Comiskey Park -- to tape a segment of the reality show she's now working on. This new show, which began airing on E! in the spring, is a slight, whimsical thing called "The Michael Essany Show." The rare reality show with a sense of humor, it features a real 20-year-old, Michael Essany, a child of the Midwest who through a sort of insane tenacity manages to lure celebrities to the living room of his parents' home, where he interviews them in booming late-night-talk-show-host style. In a very real sense, Michael Essany illustrates the self-conscious determination of the people who go on reality TV today: Unlike pathbreakers like Colleen Haskell, who blundered into the genre unknowing, Michael Essany has had the lifelong ambition to appear on television, and reality television is, for him, a means to that end. "Do you know the story?" he will say in an interview; the sort of hyper-directed Bill Clintonish person who already sees his life as a compelling narrative, he describes how his grandmother introduced him to Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin; how his mother preferred Regis and Kathie Lee; how, in 1996, young Michael tried his hand at talk-show comedy writing by composing a top 10 list for "The Morning Show." How, to his surprise, Regis read it aloud on the air.
Inspired, Michael resolved to create his own talk show in his home town of Valparaiso, Ind. To that end, he acquired some video equipment and contacted a local public access channel, which told him that he would have to put together three shows before they would agree to air him. At the age of 14, he went to the library, where he obtained contact information for Hollywood talent agencies. He called them, throwing out names to find out which celebrities they represented; once he got a name, he sat down and wrote a letter introducing himself as a young man who aspired to the sort of stardom they had achieved.
"It was this long, drawn-out process for every star," he says. All told, he contacted 500 celebrities before three -- Ed McMahon, Timothy Dalton and Leeza Gibbons, a former anchor for "Entertainment Tonight," who has her own production company -- agreed to travel to Valparaiso and be interviewed. His mom taped them; public access aired them; through more scrambling and meticulous Rolodex cultivating, he eventually interviewed more than 100 celebrities and near-celebrities, the flotsam and jetsam of American pop culture, people on their way down or their way up, Kevin Bacon, Sinbad, Carrot Top. One day a tiny article about him appeared in Details magazine, where an associate of Leeza Gibbons saw it and showed it to her. This was right about the time when "Survivor" was proving the viability of the reality genre. Gibbons commissioned a reality show about his show, and the rest, as Michael puts it, "is history." Which is to say: there are two "Michael Essany Shows" now, the interview show itself, a relatively straightforward home production that continues to air on public access in northwestern Indiana, and the reality show about his show, which the E! producers assemble from interview footage as well as real-life shots of guests hanging out with the Essany family in the kitchen, or venturing into such heartland institutions as bowling alleys.
In all of this, Michael was infinitely more directed than Colleen and her fellow castaways. Four years ago, when the first "Survivor" was being taped, the concept of reality television was so novel that even the producers didn't know whether the thing would fly. Cast members were asked to sign a clause saying they realized the show might never air. "Nobody knew what the heck we were doing," says Colleen, now an associate producer on E!'s version of "The Michael Essany Show," meaning that she is the lowest person on a tiny totem pole that consists of her boss, executive producer Kevin Greene, and his subaltern, Mike Bollow, who today is wearing black wraparound sunglasses even though it's cloudy.
It's a Friday morning and the three producers are waiting outside the stadium in a little huddle; presently they are met by some White Sox publicity people and led through the bowels of the empty
stadium. When they emerge onto the field, the cleaning crew is power-washing the seats in preparation for a game tonight, with the result that jets of cold water keep blowing into the camera equipment.
"I told you to keep the case closed!" Kevin Greene will say over and over, and Colleen and Mike Bollow will look at him unmoved, clearly used to executive producers freaked out by the unforeseeable challenges of reality-show sets.
Because Colleen is fundamentally a friendly person, it is just minutes before she decides to break her moratorium and talk about "Survivor." She reveals, for example, that when the tribe members set up camp, few of them were taking the escapade seriously. Well, some of them were: Richard Hatch clearly wanted the million dollars, but the rest of them were having mud battles and singing silly songs in the jungle. "Half the time we were rolling our eyes," Colleen says. "We were taking off our mikes; we would have to redo the tribal councils because we all voted for Jeff, the host. I wonder if the people who are going through this now saw us and thought we were so serious," she says. "I wonder if now they go into it more seriously."
The answer, clearly, is yes; reality show casts now comprise not only people like Michael Essany who are serious about achieving fame, but famous people who are no longer as famous as they would like to be and who, in the wake of a show like "The Osbournes," are serious about using reality television as a way of reviving their famousness. Liza Minnelli was planning a reality show until she and her husband proved too unpleasant even for VH1; Roseanne is planning a reality show that will follow her life, which in turn will have to compete with an entire show, "Star Dates," in which a parade of washed-up celebrities go out with ordinary people. "Celebrities love hanging out with reality characters," observes Mike Bollow; there is, now, a mutual-famousness back-scratching going on, one that doesn't include just film stars. Today's segment of "The Michael Essany Show" features Carlos Lee, a White Sox player whose management agency felt it would be good exposure for him, appearing in a skit with Michael's neighbor and on-air sidekick, Mike Randazzo. The gist of the skit is that Lee will pretend to put Randazzo through spring training; just now, Lee is lobbing balls near the left field wall, and Randazzo is trying to catch them. "I'm white, I can't jump!" says Randazzo, a nice young man for whom clever
joking is clearly an effort; it's painful to watch ordinary people trying to be funny without the benefit of professional comedy writers.
"There you go! Very nice!" shouts a coach who has materialized in left field to help. "Are you thinking about your girlfriend? Do you have a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend?"
"I watch it all with a raised eyebrow," says Colleen, standing in a gangway of the stadium, keeping a log of the action to be used by editors back in L.A. It is a staple of reality television, she says, that you -- the character, the ordinary person, whatever -- are urged by producers to do things that you wouldn't normally do, like, ever. "It's like, oh, let's go into the woods and have a picnic, and oh, could you wear a bikini?" says Colleen, as she watches Randazzo and Lee capering ridiculously in the outfield. She's not sure it's good, having one's dorky spontaneous moments show up on national television. Because they get twisted and turned into something else. And maybe that's fine with the people who go on reality shows now; in the most recent "Survivor," for example, the two most winsome females took off their tops in return for chocolate. In essence, they planned their own dorky spontaneous moments, and as a result, they've signed deals with Playboy.
Now, Playboy is just part of the career calculations people make. Now, there are hundreds of reality characters living in Los Angeles, cobbling together almost-famous and near-famous careers; staying in touch by means of listservs in which someone who was on the first "Survivor" refers to it as S1, not to be confused, you know, with S5; letting one another know about celebrity dodgeball tournaments and other events where they show up to wave, maybe be filmed, maybe get paid to wear designer clothes. "Everybody's life was changed by it," says Colleen, who also lives in L.A. but avoids almost all of her reality colleagues except Kevin, her current boss, who worked as a producer on "Survivor" and hired her for the "Michael Essany" job; and Jenna Lewis, a single mother she befriended on the island. Voted off slightly before Colleen was, Jenna also moved to L.A., where she has compiled a typically mishmash career that included a regular bit part on "Nash Bridges" before it was canceled; gigs hosting the VH1 talk show "The List"; and appearances in televised adventure races.
"You want to hear the dream?" says Colleen, now 26, explaining why she thinks that working in TV -- rather than being on TV -- will get her where she wants to be: an independent producer of travel videos. Specifically, she is nursing the idea of a travel book, and companion video, that would teach children about geography. There's a long way, she allows, between the dream and the reality of what she's doing now: Tomorrow Michael Essany will interview Freddy Rodriguez, an actor from the HBO drama "Six Feet Under," so Colleen's immediate task is to come up with a gimmick to get Freddy out into the community. Kevin tells her that somebody at E! called and suggested they visit a funeral home, where Freddy, who plays an embalmer, could talk to a real embalmer about embalming. "I know, I know," says Kevin. "It's grotesque. It's macabre. But."
"Omigod, I have to call -- listen to me dialing! Just listen!" says Colleen, calling Burns Funeral Home and Crematory near Valparaiso. "Yes, I was wondering if I could talk to the funeral director?" she says. "Or someone? Yes. My name is Colleen Haskell. We work for 'The Michael Essany Show.' Have you heard of it? Excellent! Could you have him call me?" She hangs up, and says: "I think they have a funeral or something tomorrow. I'm sure he'll never do it." But within the hour the director is calling back; sure, he's heard of "The Michael Essany Show"! Sure, he'll talk to Freddy Rodriguez! In the next hour or so Colleen -- who is staying overnight in Chicago, before flying to D.C. for a family visit -- will hear from him five or six times. She tries to be gentle, explaining that she's officially off duty. He calls back over and over and over.
"There are a couple of reasons people go on these shows," says Kevin Greene, a bright, pleasant fellow with a shaved head who, as executive producer of E!'s "Michael Essany Show," has the responsibility of taking reality TV -- well, one sliver of reality TV -- into the next generation. "Some want attention; they want a career in the fame business . . . Colleen has been the most successful: She's a beautiful girl, she photographs well, she has a certain natural talent. And of course, whatever the end result, some people go on 'Survivor' to win a million dollars. I don't know why people go on the dating shows. I mean, are you going to meet your soul mate on national television? When 25 girls are in a room, they don't want the guy; they want to compete with each other."
It's the morning after the White Sox shoot, and Kevin is sitting in a coffee shop in Valparaiso's tiny downtown area, caffeinating himself in preparation for a day of taping at the Essany house. The production crew has been in Valparaiso for eight weeks. They're staying at a Courtyard by Marriott, where their meals, often, consist of instant soup made with water run through the coffeemaker. During the day, they tape. At night, they plan episodes over White Russians at the Strongbow Inn. They're reduced to desperate entertainment options: Last night Kevin and Mike Bollow watched "The Animal," which they'd found on sale in a truck stop. "The Animal" represents the apogee, or the nadir, or both, of Colleen Haskell's post-"Survivor" film career: It features the "Saturday Night Live" comic Rob Schneider as a man who is nearly killed in a car accident, then reassembled by a mad scientist using animal parts. The gimmick is that, being composed of animals, Schneider acts like . . . animals. It is Colleen's role, as his love interest, to get licked. "It's a terrible movie," says Kevin, who is looking forward to giving her grief about it.
It's easy to see that the time in Valparaiso has been harder on Colleen than it has been on the two male producers, who if nothing else have found it profitable, romancewise, to be Hollywood producers in a Midwestern town. "It's great for girls," says Kevin, who has a date tonight with a "very nice nurse" he met at a local club. "It's going to be culture shock when I go back to L.A. and get treated like a loser." For Colleen, he admits, the pickings have been slimmer. "She actually cares about things like men's career aspirations."
The chief career aspiration Kevin cares about, just now, is his own. For him, as for Colleen in her own way, reality television presents an opportunity to professionally redefine himself. Up to now his experience has mostly been in the financial end of television production; he was a line producer on the original "Survivor," meaning that he managed the bottom line, the money. It was a huge and novel undertaking, moving a production crew to remote terrain, building roads, a sewage plant, recreational facilities, a whole tent city. The boom in reality television that followed "Survivor" opened up new options: As networks scramble to throw together reality shows, they're looking for people with experience in the genre, and so Kevin began segueing into more creative work. A gig with "The Next Action Star" -- a vehicle for would-be Arnold Schwarzeneggers -- was followed by a stint as a producer on MTV's "Sorority Life," a reality show in which sorority sisters have emotional crises, pledge eternal solidarity and, of course, get drunk and take their clothes off.
"Sorority Life," Kevin explains, was a different sort of reality show than "Michael Essany": Though both feature people whose youth makes them more willing to do dumb-ass things, "Sorority Life" was what he calls a "reality-driven" show, meaning that it was based on an existing situation. As such -- Mutual of Omaha-like -- it required lots of cameramen filming hundreds of hours of boring action, and lots of patient story editors who could patch the footage into something racy. In contrast, he says, "The Michael Essany Show" is more like "Survivor," an "event-driven" show in which real people are put into a situation the producers have contrived. Event-driven shows are more efficient, but they do require ingenuity. "I look at it as my job to make a situation as interesting as possible, and then to drop them into it," says Kevin.
And what makes a situation interesting, of course, is character conflict, what Kevin calls "train wrecks." In the case of "Michael Essany," conflict lies in the inherent comedy of Hollywood celebrities coming into contact with small-town America as well as with one another. To this end, Kevin has tried to pack the show with celebrities of wildly divergent backgrounds. Whereas Michael formerly would interview only one guest per show, Kevin has worked to book at least two stars or pseudo-stars, an assortment that has included Mila Kunis of "That '70s Show"; the "supermodel Frederique"; the psychic Gary Spivey; Jamie-Lynn Sigler, aka Meadow Soprano; and, to enhance the train wreck potential, at least one local talent. "I don't want any downtime," he says, a goal that isn't always achievable. Recently they had the glamorous food writer Nigella Lawson, who was supposed to appear with a local balloon sculptor, but the sculptor was delayed by a birthday party.
Kevin also is constantly pitching new reality shows to networks and development companies. It seems inevitable that one day there will be a reality show where people try to kill one another, for example, and indeed Kevin has in mind a show based on "The Most Dangerous Game," a short story in which a group of shipwrecked people are hunted by a mad count. In Kevin's version, they would hunt one another. "They wouldn't really kill each other," says Kevin, who is still refining the idea; they'd just shoot each other with paintballs. He has other ideas, too: A dating competition in which a bunch of guys engage in boyfriend-type challenges. "Like, how long does it take them to fix a leaky toilet? Write a poem? Put together a bookcase? Relationship stuff, but competitive. Fox was interested in that one. NBC was interested for a while."
"If this genre were to collapse, what would I do?" says Kevin. "I'd either have to go back to being an accountant or doing physical production work." Now, though, his main worry is how tonight's nurse is going to react to a place on his cheek where he cut himself shaving. "She's not going to kiss me, is she?" he says. If there were a reality show about the making of a show about "The Michael Essany Show," that would be an excellent sound bite.
Michael Essany lives with his parents in a subdivision in Valparaiso called Shorewood Forest. It's a well-groomed, contemporary neighborhood, with pansies planted at the entrance, rambling stone walls and a shallow, man-made lake in the middle. Not far away is Valparaiso University, where Michael is a junior majoring in political science. The Essanys' is a classic Middle American household, with mauve-colored swags at the windows, and mini-blinds kept tightly drawn against the sunlight. There is a strict rule that guests, including celebrity guests, must take their shoes off at the door. "Look at all the shoes, and we don't even have a guest in here yet!" says Kevin, who is worried that there are so many people already here, they are bound to be getting in the way of the production.
Those people include: Michael Essany, his mom, Tina, Kevin, Mike, two production assistants, a couple of cameramen hired for the day from Chicago, a photographer from E!, this writer and a photographer for The Washington Post. It's a lot of people. Things will get more packed as the day goes on, to the point where the photographers and cameramen will be scuttling up the stairs and otherwise scrambling to stay out of one another's shots. Meanwhile, Michael is pacing back and forth, energetic, jumpy, nervous. When the producers arrive he is wearing a yellow shirt and jeans, which he changes for gray slacks and a blue blazer. With each outfit, he wears odd-looking bedroom slippers that look like loafers. He himself is fairly odd-looking: doughy, duckfooted, with dark hair and dark eyebrows and a vampiric pallor suggestive of someone who rarely leaves the house. And in fact, the production crew marvels, he rarely does leave the house. He doesn't have a driver's license, for one thing. "I've never seen him leave the house except for skits," says Colleen, and sometimes he won't even leave to do those. He declined, for example, to do the segment in the funeral home. Michael will later say this is because he thought it was in bad taste. The crew guesses that it's because he's a hypochondriac and fears he will catch something.
There is, one senses, a reasonably good-natured, but powerful and ever-present tension between Michael and the reality show producers, who have had occasion to study him and have decided that, while talented, he and his family are inexpressibly strange. "For the last episode we wanted to have a big block party, but they didn't know any of their neighbors," says producer Mike Bollow. "They're shut-ins." In keeping with the train-wreck philosophy, the producers have chosen to play up the strangeness. In one excursion, Mike says, they got Michael to visit some local college kids who like to watch his show and get high. "There were beer and bongs, and they're talking like normal kids talk, and he didn't understand; he's much less cool," says Mike, who readily agrees that the producers' goals are often at odds with Michael's. "He wants to be a legitimate talk-show host, but when we do the reality part we end up making fun of him, because he's such a social outcast. We have to do that. If you just showed his show, it would be unwatchable. Whenever I try to show people cuts of the show, they just can't watch it, because they don't like Michael Essany."
Whether or not that's true depends on how you feel about a 20-year-old person whose aspirations are so mammoth and concrete that he already knows his late-night show, when he gets one, will be set in Chicago ("I feel that the shows on the coasts have gotten stale," he says); who writes comedy in his bedroom upstairs, then tries out the lines on strangers; whose parents have reconfigured their household in service of his ambition. To the right of the Essanys' front door is a living room that has been transformed into a talk-show studio, complete with desk, microphone, coffee cup, skyline backdrop and track lighting built by Michael's father, Ernie, an engineer. There is a blue curtain separating the interview studio from the dining room. There is a video camera on a tripod, which Tina Essany operates, taping the interviews and then preparing them for the cable-access show.
The E! show is different from the show that Tina tapes; the E! cameras, two of them, are on all the time, roaming the house as people are getting ready. Tina, for example, is washing dishes just now, amiably recalling how it was hard, at first, to call celebrities by their first names, how "the hardest was Henry Winkler." A little after 1 o'clock, the doorbell rings. It is Minda Gowen, a bone-thin woman who is the publicist for Shawn Ashmore, an actor in the movie "X-Men 2" and one of today's celebrity guests. Now the cameras are actively roaming; the principals are miked; it is as if the whole house were on amphetamines. "Hi Michael! Minda!" says Gowen, who is wearing tiny hip-hugger jeans and Dingo boots. "We're very excited! We're huge fans!"
Now there is even more motion and hubbub; Shawn Ashmore is ringing the doorbell and Michael Essany is opening the door and shaking Shawn's hand and asking him to remove his shoes, which Shawn, obediently, does. "Ice Man! Thank you so much for coming out!"
Shawn Ashmore, whose character in "X-Men" suffers some sort of genetic disorder that causes him to turn things to ice, is a surprisingly scrawny action hero. Wearing jeans and a loose tan shirt, he has scruffy brown hair that may or may not be teased, a light beard and blue eyes of the type commonly described as "arresting." Michael
offers him doughnuts and shows him around the house, making his way back to the family room, where a mantel holds baby photos as well as congratulatory cards Michael has received, with inscriptions like, "Goal-setting is the strongest force for human motivation."
Already Michael is asking hearty, interviewer-type questions, saying things like, "What's the coolest thing you've ever gotten at a garage sale?" and, "How much has your movie made?"
"Uh," says Shawn, who looks as if he's just been woken up by being poked with a cattle prod. One minute, he seems to be thinking, he was at home in L.A. Then he was on a plane. Then in a hotel room. Then in a limo. Now he's here. In some guy's living room in Indiana.
"I saw 42 million!" says Michael.
"Yeah," says Shawn. "Uh. Um. What, this weekend?"
"Congratulations!" says Michael.
"Thank you," says Shawn.
"We've got a fresh fruit platter!"
"Excellent. I love fruit."
"We also have ICE!" says Michael. Shawn laughs politely and settles in. It's impossible not to. The Essanys are an irresistible force, with their slipcovers, their deli platter, their old console television. Gradually Shawn can be seen surrendering to his environment, so that by the time Freddy Rodriguez rings the doorbell, Shawn is sitting at a counter in the kitchen, as comfortable as a regular at a bar. "Mom! Freddy's here!" says Michael Essany, opening the door to greet Freddy Rodriguez, who is short, and good-looking, and full of energy, wearing a fur-lined jean jacket and blinking around the house and saying, over and over, "Awesome." Introduced to Shawn Ashmore, Freddy Rodriguez says: "I loved the movie, man. The movie is awesome, man. I had seen the first movie and I thought, man, I hope they develop that character." Abruptly it seems very normal: a party where some people are world-famous and some are totally obscure.
And some are in the middle, like Michael Essany, who is working hard to keep his share of the limelight. Just now he attracts everyone's attention by reading aloud a newspaper article announcing that Fox is introducing a show called "The Ortegas"; part scripted comedy, part reality show, "The Ortegas" will feature a "family" played by actors including Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. The gimmick is that the family's son conducts a talk show from their back yard. "Michael Essany, call your lawyer!" Michael crows, reading aloud the last line as everybody participates in his outrage. They are shocked that one television show could imitate another! Never mind that "The Ortegas" is based not on "The Michael Essany Show," but on a British show, "The Kumars at Number 42." "I hate the way everybody has copied 'Survivor'!" says Minda Gowen. Michael decides to take the gag and run with it; he calls his lawyer's office and sets up a conversation for later.
Meanwhile Kevin Greene is hovering anxiously, worrying that everything is going so well. This is exactly what a reality producer doesn't want. He doesn't want Freddy and Shawn to be getting along. What he wants is people nervous and weird and awkward. It was much better a couple of days ago, he says, when Weird Al Yankovic and Nikki Ziering, a Playboy model and erstwhile "The Price Is Right" hostess, who clearly had no idea where she was or what the hell she was doing there, were milling around the living room and nobody knew what to say to each other. Eventually, Ziering relaxed to the point where she lay down across Michael's desk. That was good, too. "We need something dramatic and interesting," worries Kevin. "That's what makes it a reality show." He takes comfort that Freddy Rodriguez has brought along a childhood buddy who is African American. "They don't get black people in their house very often."
Meanwhile, Michael is working for the opposite effect: What he wants is an interview that works, what he wants is this, everybody laughing and comfortable. "Freddy, you're up!" he tells Freddy Rodriguez, and he and Freddy go into the living room. An experienced actor, Freddy knows just what to give an interviewer, so even when Michael asks Freddy, who is originally from Chicago, how he feels about Michael Jordan's retirement, Freddy reacts as if this were a fresh, interesting question. When Michael asks what it's like, on "Six Feet Under," when Freddy has to stand beside a corpse played by a stark-naked actress, Freddy laughs and says it's weird, adding: "When the show started, we couldn't get anybody to be the corpses. Now they're lining up."
Of course they are. Everybody wants to be on television, any way they can. And now it's Shawn Ashmore's turn: "Ice Man!" says Michael Essany for about the 50th time, and he asks Shawn, again, how much money "X-Men 2" has made, and Shawn, like Freddy, knows how to bounce the energy back. They talk about whether Shawn has his own action figure (yes); whether he has managed to curtail his nail-biting (no); and whether, in a third "X-Men" movie, Shawn's character will be able to get close to his girlfriend, who has the unfortunate characteristic of being lethal to the touch (maybe). "You'll probably get there before I do," says Michael, who tends to make hubba-hubba-type jokes.
And now there's one more guest: a young man from the Valparaiso area, Nic Carullo, who suffers from juvenile diabetes, and is planning to visit Washington to talk about progress in combating that disease. "You know, I've got to ask you something," says Michael when Nic takes a seat. "I've read a study that says that guys named Nick, Jake and Tony are physically stronger and tougher than ordinary men. I've never interviewed a Nick before, so I thought I'd ask: Do you find that to be true?"
It's an astonishing question to ask someone who suffers from juvenile diabetes. Nic, a slight, brown-haired boy of 15, replies: "I don't know."
"You don't know," Michael repeats. Trying another tack, he says: "If you could be any superhero at all, which would it be?"
"I would say, maybe, ah, maybe Superman," says Nic.
"Would that be because of his superpowers, or because he gets to go out with LOIS LANE?" Michael asks.
"Uh," says Nic, "because of his superpowers."
It's a train wreck, but not the right kind. "We may not use this," says Kevin, as Nic Carullo pulls out some of the medical equipment that keeps him alive, including a hand-held device that he describes as an "external pancreas."
"I thought you had a beeper on!" Michael Essany says. "I thought: This guy is popular! He's getting calls!"
Mercifully, the interview ends. Shawn and Freddy take a break in their respective limos. Presently Michael's father gets home from work and they all head for the mall, where the whole group -- Michael, Freddy, Shawn, Nic Carullo, Nic's parents, Minda the publicist, assorted far-flung members of the Essany family who have shown up -- parades past J.C. Penney and B. Dalton en route to a photo shop where they will pose for a "family photo." The mall is a challenging environment for a reality film crew. There are people everywhere, and only two cameras. Kevin Greene is doing his best to direct the cameramen. "I need a picture of this girl over here! With the white shirt! Get a picture!" he says, pointing to a clutch of squealing girls.
The parade ends at a photography studio where employees are required to wear beanies with little propellers. The manager of the shop, Sharon Jones, was warned in advance that they were coming. Glad to oblige, she snaps the shot, fiddling with the composition, saying things to Shawn and Freddy like, "Lower your chins, guys! There you go! Thank you! Everybody say cheese!"
"I'm loving this," exults Mike Bollow afterward. "She's just a witch! Ordering people around! It's hilarious!"
They exeunt with as much fanfare as when they arrived. At the exit Michael Essany and Kevin Greene shake hands, and Mike Bollow poses with Freddy Rodriguez and everybody, presumably, has gotten what he needs, publicity or a résumé credit. Which makes it all the more surprising when, independently, so many of the principals confess their dislike of reality television.
"I don't like the way reality shows dominate so much of American television," says Freddy Rodriguez. It is not clear that he realizes he is on one right now. "Do you know how many out-of-work actors there are now? Every year, when pilot season comes around, let's just say you have 100 new TV shows that all these actors have a chance to audition for. So now, half of those television shows are reality shows, so that's half of the opportunities that remain for actors."
Even Michael Essany has reservations. "I'm not a big fan of reality TV in general," says Michael, who was not wild, he says, about the episodes of the reality version of his show that aired on E! in the spring. "I felt the direction was off," he says. "It wasn't representative of the show we do. I felt like the reality part of it was overemphasized," and that there was not enough of him, Michael Essany, doing his interviews. In striking an agreement with E!, Michael says he made it clear "I didn't want my life to change, or how I did the show," but it's clear that the reality show has changed a great deal: For one thing, it's E!, now, not the young striving interview host, that actually books the talent.
It's also E! that controls how Michael Essany is portrayed to the wider world. Michael understands this, and says that he is always resisting E!'s tendency to make fun of him and his community. Take the cow, for example: There is a clip of a mooing cow that was used to introduce the reality show, and the cow, he feels, is not fair. It is not accurate. "There aren't that many cows around here," he says. The cow, he feels, makes fun of them, and being made fun of is "a threat we're constantly on guard against."
All in all, he has reservations about surrendering himself to reality television, but doing so still seems worth it to him. "I just feel like being in a position to do this show helps me do what I want to right now: show the viewing public that when I get a late-night talk show, I've earned it. I've paid my dues."
On one wall of the bar of Chicago's Hotel Sofitel is a bank of built-in televisions, arranged like the cubicles on "Hollywood Squares." Famous faces flicker on the news stations: Ted Turner; Steve Case; Marion "Mimi" Fahnestock, the elderly woman whose anonymity was recently stripped away when she was outed as having once been, long ago, JFK's mistress. Near them is Colleen's face, not on the television screen but glancing over at it, drinking wine, enjoying a respite before she catches the plane to visit her family. She's glad to be temporarily away from Valparaiso. She likes what she does, but . . . eight weeks of living in a hotel room. Eight weeks of Michael Essany. The strangeness of that household. The rawness of the aspiration. The arguments over the cow.
"The family are like: This cow isn't going to win you any friends in this town," says Colleen, who admits she has shifted roles. When she first started producing the show, she felt sympathetic toward the Essanys, saw her role, in part, as shielding the family from the manipulations of reality producers. Now, she's on the side of the producers. Now, she finds it irritating when Michael can't do the show because he's got finals. Now, she's on the side of the cow. The cow is funny! "They're like, 'You're making us look rural!' We're like, 'You are rural!' They don't get the joke. The other week I had a moment when I had to laugh. I looked at Michael, and he was talking to me, and I was like, you're delusional. He's this sweet guy, he's very talented, he's good at what he does, but he thinks he's going to be the king of late night. Living in his parents' house until he's 50!"
She's not sure that doing the reality show was a good decision for him. Even if he wins the cow war, she is not sure he will win the greater image war. She is not sure that people going into reality shows fully appreciate what the experience will do to them; how long the image will linger. "You think, I'll be famous for a week, but then it lasts for the next two years. It affects every decision you make, everyone you interact with. You get weird e-mails from people who weren't weird before. A teacher at my school, when 'Survivor' was airing, on the last day of class, handed me a script. He thought I had connections. You don't want to see that desperate side of people, the side that wants to feed off you."
And the ludicrous thing is, suddenly she did have connections: Agents and publicists flocked to the party in which the "Survivor" cast was reassembled to watch, and celebrate, the airing of the final tribal council. Colleen -- like all of them, but even more than all of them -- was doing talk shows, giving interviews. Before the final episode aired, she had been set to take an advertising internship in San Francisco, but now her agent was calling and saying she had an audition for "The Animal." She went, figuring she'd never get it. She got the part, she felt, only because of her "Survivor" celebrity. Because somebody, somewhere, thought it would help ticket sales.
Making the movie wasn't fun. She would call friends from her trailer, telling them how much she hated it. Giving interviews wasn't fun; in L.A., she knew people who would meditate all day before going on Leno. Colleen would spend the day on the beach; she would space out and miss meetings with heads of studios. "It was very immature and stupid," she says. "But this wasn't something that my whole life I'd been wanting." She was sick of people studying her butt size, asking whether she was going to grow her hair long or keep it short. "I started becoming very self-conscious about the way I looked, and my image and what I was wearing, and I'd never cared about that stuff before," she says. One day she was sitting in a greenroom before some publicity gig or other and abruptly told her agent, "No more auditions. No more anything."
She still wonders if it was a mistake. Yours isn't the only life that changes when you have celebrity. "My parents -- neighbors were coming over, they were going out to dinner more, they had more friends, and I stopped doing it and their extraneous friends drifted away. Their life was exciting, too, and now it's not as much." People talked; they gossiped. When she started pursuing low-level production jobs, people thought it was weird having a reality star in the cubicle next door. Because people, she believes, don't want a TV face in the cubicle next door. They expect TV faces to stay on TV. "A guy at my last job said, 'Aren't you embarrassed to be here?' Because I had been on 'Survivor,' and I'd done a movie, and now I was working at an office job doing the same thing he was, making minimum wage. And I was like, 'No.' "
Odd as it sounds, she's proud of the work she does on "The Michael Essany Show." Thinking up skits. Trying to make them work. " 'The Michael Essany Show' is not the best thing in the world, but I like the work I'm doing," she says. She feels like now, she has some control over what she's doing. And what she's doing, like everybody, is pitching . . . more reality shows.
She's thinking, for example, about one that would be set in a youth hostel. An international reality show. It might be a way to the thing she wants most: a job that allows her to travel, to explore, to have spontaneous conversations with people who don't already assume they know her. That was the thing about her old life she liked, and it's the thing, about her life, that she is only now getting back.
"I don't like losing my anonymity," she says. "I like my anonymity. It gets me through life. Before I was on the show, people would say to me: You look so unique, you look so different, what's your ethnicity? Now people say: You look so familiar."
"The Michael Essany Show" will resume on E! on August 17.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Eric.
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