McMahon’s ‘Star’ Now Interactive : Television: ‘Star Search’ is using 900 telephone numbers so viewers can cast votes. A call costs $1.99. Proceeds go to Muscular Dystrophy.

“You can do it . . . you can be a star . . . “ --from “Star Search” theme song

*

In an age of digital Newtons, NoteBooks and ThinkPads, Ed McMahon still sticks with a little black book.

The perennial TV host is hardly a progress-retardant Luddite. He demonstrates his fax machine and says he has a couple of computers he’ll learn, some day. And come February, his long-running, unduplicated, syndicated one-hour talent/variety show, now bannered as “Ed McMahon’s Star Search ‘94,” will take a small step onto the giant information stuporhighway.

In the history of television, pop-culture talent shows are as old as black and white, but now “Star Search” is going interactive. Using 900 telephone numbers, viewers will choose the winners among this season’s finalists, reaching out and anointing someone--that kid singer from Cincinnati or that guitarist from Galveston, Tex.

Major Bowes had his gong, Ted Mack his postcards, Arthur Godfrey his applause meters, Chuck Barris his scale of 1 to 10 and now “Star Search” turns to the telephone to judge what McMahon announces each week as “the world’s greatest talent competition.”

But that little black book?

It’s McMahon’s more traditional way of keeping track of the show’s “alumni,” inscribing winners and challengers (the words “losers” and “amateurs” are never used) who have gone on to earn certifiable show business stripes. His head count after 10 years: about 50 people. McMahon flips through the little book, his familiar baritone voice loudly, proudly proclaiming Sinbad, Dennis Miller, Rosie O’Donnell, Jenny Jones, Martin Lawrence, Tiffany--almost echoing the voices of Major Bowes intoning a Frank Sinatra, Arthur Godfrey a Julius LaRosa and Chuck Barris a Pee-wee Herman.

While his little black book is testimony to “Star Search” career enhancement, it also exemplifies the long odds that young performers face in their search for stardom.

In the show’s first 10 years, more than 200,000 singers, musicians, dancers, stand-up comedians and “spokesmodels” sent in videotapes or showed up at auditions or were spotted by the show’s roving talent hunters.

Of the average 20,000 annual applicants, only 160 are chosen to compete (that includes solo performers and members of groups), and eight acts survive through the finals, earning prize money of $25,000 each--marked down from what was once $100,000.

“We found out the prize wasn’t as necessary a lure as it was in the early days,” McMahon explains. “Now the performers just want to be on the show, to compete and be seen.”

But back to the little black book.

Those “about 50” names culled from 200,000 performers represent odds of roughly one chance in 4,000 of someone ever showing that “you can do it . . . be a star.”

Daunting prospects? For McMahon it’s as daunting as the chances of anyone being on one television show for nearly 30 years--as he was with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show”--or appearing for 11 years on broadcast television’s only variety show.

*

“It’s a killer business,” he says. “You have to have a strong ego with all of the rejection that’s in it. But the strong ego also means that these young people have a lot of pizazz and a lot of gumption. You need it. People will do anything to get our attention, to get an audience.”

He shows his morning mail with its collection of self-induced audition tapes. He recalls the group that danced on a Santa Monica corner as he drove down Wilshire one day, hoping to grab his attention. He remembers a driver in St. Louis who brought along his cousin to tap dance for him after he was dropped off at the airport. He talks about the cards he carries with instructions on how to audition for the show.

That eternal lust for show business fame, McMahon believes, is one reason “Star Search” has lasted into its 11th season and is scheduling its 12th. (It’s seen locally on Saturdays at 6 p.m. on KCBS-TV Channel 2.)

“Everybody has a kind of little dream that maybe they have enough talent to become a star. When I get out and travel, the young people ask me about the show. I now have a whole new group of fans--kids,” says McMahon, 70.

To keep and attract young audiences, “Star Search’s” producers experiment, going from a weekly hour to a daily half-hour, then back to the weekly hour, and last year moving from Hollywood to Disney World, fleeing the building that became the Chevy Chase Theater. And this season: judgment by 900 numbers.

Next February’s finals will be a two-part affair. The first week, the usual four studio judges will be replaced by the telephone system to let viewers cast their votes after the two finalists in each of eight categories perform. Each call will cost $1.99 (McMahon says the money will go to the Muscular Dystrophy Assn., the charity that draws him to Jerry Lewis’ side on those annual Labor Day telethons).

The second part of the final will be taped a few days later for broadcast the following weekend, with McMahon in front of a video wall of 16 screens, linked by satellite with all of the finalists in remote locations as performance highlights are replayed and viewer decisions are announced.

*

Even with the latest technology changing his show, McMahon will still retell the finalists one of his oldest stories, the one about his first “talent contest.”

He goes back 53 years to high school. Lowell, Mass. Seventeen years old.

“Since I was 10 I wanted to be a radio announcer. I practiced seven years with a flashlight for a microphone. Now there was a competition for an announcer’s job. I thought I’d nail this baby hands down.

“I came in second to a guy named Ray Goulding. Goulding was so good he was lured to Boston, where he teamed with Bob Elliott and they became a great team. But I got the radio job when Goulding left.

“You see, you don’t have to come in first to win and have a career in this business.” He pauses. “Maybe the story will ease some pain.”