30 Seconds to Achieve Your 15 Minutes

Martha Schoeman, a retired social worker from New York City who will turn 80 next week, sat in a dressing room on the Hollywood lot of TV station KTLA last week and waited for her turn to perform a rap routine built around the lyric “I’m a sexy granny.”

Her hair was styled in blond curls. She wore a short skirt and a lace blouse. In a few hours, she would climb on a nearby sound stage and spend 30 seconds flaunting her rhyming chops in front of TV cameras and a studio audience for a chance to win $25,000. For the moment, though, she was enjoying dessert, courtesy of the Fox network. “I love acting. I would get up on stage every morning, afternoon and evening,” she said, pushing aside a paper plate piled high with cake. As for displaying her talents on television, she said, “I’m not doing it for the money.”

Schoeman, who raps under the name Fruity Nutcake, came to Los Angeles to appear on a weekly television show called “30 Seconds to Fame.” The program premieres tonight on Fox, home to another talent show that has enjoyed success this summer: “American Idol.”

On “Idol,” singing hopefuls endure the often rabid scrutiny of a panel of judges, with winners selected by a voting process that relies on viewers at home. The show has pulled in around 10 million viewers for its Tuesday edition and slightly fewer on Wednesdays, according to Nielsen Media Research. Those figures make it one of the 10 most-watched prime-time programs this summer.

“30 Seconds to Fame,” billed as “the fastest-moving talent show ever,” pines for a similar response. The program is the brainchild of television producers Michael Binkow and Joe Revello, who set out to update a format already seen in the 1950s and ‘60s on “Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour” and in the ‘70s on “The Gong Show.”

On those programs, Binkow said, ordinary folk may have had the luxury to display a particular talent at leisure, but nowadays “things are moving much quicker.” The half-minute time limit was introduced for the benefit of increasingly jittery audiences, he said. “We think of this show as a remote control: You watch someone for 30 seconds, and if you don’t like their act, it’s over.”

At the taping of the first episode last week, 24 contestants lined up in the wings. Among the acts were two tap-dancing brothers, a comedian who mimicked Rodney Dangerfield in Spanish, a young man who juggled three whirring chainsaws, a magician who extinguished flames that seemingly came out of his wrists, a woman who sang the national anthem complete with an echo (“Oh say, say, say ... can you, you, you see ...”), a quintet of acrobats from Africa, a ventriloquist and an old-fashioned clown. Their routines, which flowed into one another seamlessly, were promptly ended by a gong when the time ran out.

The mostly young and collegiate studio audience, instructed before the show to laugh and clap in the right places, responded enthusiastically during the first round of the program. Then it came time to decide which three contestants would advance to the second round, with audience members recording their votes--”One is yes; two is out”--on keypads.

Unlike the “Stupid Human Tricks” of “Late Show With David Letterman,” most acts on “30 Seconds” were hardly bizarre. That may be because half of the contestants, according to the producers of the show, are based in Los Angeles, and a lot of them are professional entertainers, not ordinary Joes. A large number carried membership cards in the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. For these performers, the show’s allure has less to do with the taste of the fleeting fame something like “Human Tricks” offers than with the chance to advance their show-business careers.

“I just thought if some random producer is watching this on TV, then maybe he’ll remember me,” said Danielle Hartnett, 24, after she found out that her routine, which encompassed “operatic tap dance with musical theater and soul stylings,” did not carry her through to the second round of the show.

Hartnett lives in Santa Monica and has a degree in American studies from Yale University but is pursuing a career as an actress. She had no illusions about winning the cash prize, she said; as a member of AFTRA, she settled for the standard union $1,008 performance fee she received for participating in the show. (Nonunion contestants earn at least $250 for being on the show in addition to three days’ worth of lunches. Out-of-towners receive an extra $150 in pocket money, and Fox picks up the tab for hotel accommodations.)

When asked why he had come to perform, Chad Taylor, a Santa Monica comedian who bragged about having juggled everything from chainsaws to his “ex-girlfriend’s implants” on the nightclub circuit, said, “It was a job, basically.” He had tried his luck on talent shows that accepted only amateurs as contestants and was glad, he said, that “30 Seconds” also welcomed professionals like him.

Additional contestants patiently waited for their turn. Among them was Olga Polonciuc, 33, a recent immigrant from the Moldova Republic who now lives in Las Vegas. A circus artist in her native country, Polonciuc has close-cropped blond hair and the lithe physique of a ballerina. Her act consists of spinning a metal cube frame around herself, which she initially developed on the circus stage. She is not a member of any actors union but said, “It’s fantastic to be on a TV show. You can do everything you want in this country.”

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“30 Seconds to Fame” premieres tonight at 8 on Fox. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).