In the living room of Michael Essany’s house, on Shorewood Drive in the Shorewood Forest subdivision here, there is a talk-show set.
Other families have a seating group, maybe an end table with some porcelain knickknacks. The Essanys have given the space over to what their third and youngest son has dubbed — for publicity purposes, because the charm of it helps him book guests — “the living room of late night.”
The handsome, hefty desk on which he taps pencils and blue index cards was a 17th-birthday present, just the right something for that kid who declared his intention to become a talk show host five years earlier.
The big cathedral window that is the stuff of real estate agents’ dreams has been covered over by an $80 Manhattan skyline backdrop, selected at a local wallpaper store over the other two options, Paris and Hawaii, and mounted on panels by his dad, Ernie, an electrician at U.S. Steel.
“This is where I do my monologue,” he says, moving to the wooden platform at the edge of the living room to which his mark, a cutout star, has been scotch-taped. Above, the bank of fluorescent lights shines semi-professionally.
“And this,” he says, sliding through the blue curtains, “used to be the dining room. This is now a shrine.”
An offering on the altar of show-business ambition, it is decorated with scores of celebrity head shots, an impressive number of them signed and an even more impressive number including Essany. It has all the national magazines containing articles about him, half a dozen in all, ranging from Teen People to Entertainment Weekly.
“Now I’ll show you my room, where my political interests are reflected,” he says, without a trace of self-consciousness. “I never want to be a politician. But being a public servant appeals to me, and the best way to serve the public is to be a role model and to make people laugh.”
Michael Essany has no driver’s license. He was home-schooled through high school to concentrate on his talk-show career. He has few close friends beyond the kid from the neighborhood, Michael Randazzo, who is also his sidekick.
And when he turned 20 in October, a camera crew from E! Entertainment Television, the cable channel whose last reality series focused on Anna Nicole Smith, was there to catch Essany’s official but also redundant passage out of his teen years.
“The Michael Essany Show,” a reality show about Michael Essany making his local-access cable talk show, will debut on E! this March, its heartland-boy-with-a-crazy-dream story the uplifting near-opposite of the desultory “Anna Nicole Show” decadence.
“It’s like a real-life `Larry Sanders,'” Essany explains, “except my show is more like `The Tonight Show’ meets `Survivor.’ Will I book a guest? Will I get the show done?”
And as a result, Essany’s talk show, or at least the excerpts of it that E! plans to show after chronicling him putting the show together, is finally going national, the biggest jump for an area cable-access show since “Wayne’s World” moved from “Saturday Night Live” to the movies. (The talk show itself can be seen on access channels throughout northwest Indiana and in portions of Will and Cook Counties at various times, including 7 p.m. Fridays.)
“Whenever someone says, `Michael, don’t you miss out on going to prom?'” Essany says, “I always say, `When did sacrifice become a bad word?’ I worked hard at something I finally achieved and I have no regrets. The one downside to having worked so hard during my teen years is I feel like a middle-age man. I feel like 35 or 40. Whenever someone says I’m 20, I’m surprised.”
For all of the would-be “Tonight” host’s moments of preternatural self-possession, he also has a capacity to disarm with boyish humor.
And while his single-mindedness may read as a little odd on the page, he’s actually sweet in person, all politeness and self-deprecation.
“We’re on the last day of production until the series is renewed and we go on to win several Emmys,” he explains at one point, then pauses. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I have to remember, I’m still a dork.”
Dork may well be the expectation of most of the celebrity guests he has wrangled during the last half-decade and 88 shows, a number of whom, from Carrot Top to Kevin Bacon, have visited the Essany home, removed their shoes per mom Tina’s cleanliness rules, and taken part in what is much closer to a junior “Tonight Show” than it is to “Wayne’s World’s” fictional amateurism.
But what’s most remarkable about Essany is not that his ambition and drive landed him on the “Tonight” show last spring, or that he’s made all this happen from such an unlikely spot.
It’s that he’s actually really good at what he wants to do.
When he was on with Leno, he ventured a joke about bandleader Kevin Eubanks.
In struggling to book celebrities, Essany told Leno, “I’ve been rejected more than 900 times. I think that breaks Kevin’s old singles-bar record.”
“That was my first laugh on `The Tonight Show,'” Essany now says.
Backstage, according to Essany, Leno told him, “You’ve got the goods.”
“I remember what I said. I said, `You, too.'”
This Friday night, the last of E!’s two months of taping, Essany is taking his own show out of the living room for the first time. He’s on a stage before a crowd of about 150 in a small theater at Valparaiso University, where he is a political science major, doing his monologue.
Tonight’s guest Joey McIntyre, the singer and “Boston Public” star, is used to signing autographs, Essany tells the crowd, “but here he had to sign the autographs and the Honor Code.”
Jennifer Lopez, it said in the paper, wants to appear in the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus. Essany can see the slogan now: “Come see the big bottom under the big top.”
A 12-year-old was just admitted to an Indiana college. The problem won’t be the schoolwork, says Essany, stretching the corners of his mouth down and back just like his hosting idol, Johnny Carson, used to in anticipation of a punch line. “The question is whether he can hold his liquor.”
Except for the host’s long but boyish face and topical references, it might be 30 years ago. Even offstage, Essany seems like a guy who’s more comfortable in slacks than blue jeans, and there’s something inescapably old-school about his mannerisms, from the unassuming hands-in-pockets pose to the expressive eyebrows and reflexive smile and the way he holds the camera’s gaze for a beat after getting a laugh.
Yet the crowd, many of them Essany’s classmates, loves the monologue he’s written, so gracefully does it flow and so perfectly pitched is it to this audience. The executive director of university relations loves it, too. He allows himself to speculate about there someday being a Michael Essany Theater on campus.
Backstage, McIntyre, who has schlepped first to Chicago and then to northern Indiana to appear on this cable curiosity, mostly as a favor to E!, is watching on a monitor, cracking up, obviously delighted that this lark is turning out to be so entertaining.
“Classic,” the Boston native keeps saying, a term of high New England praise. “He writes his own material? Get out. We’re witnessing history here.”
A minute later, Essany appears in the hallway and McIntyre, who knows about teen stardom from his days as the youngest New Kid on the Block, shouts, “You killed. How’s it feel to kill, dude?”
But there’s no time to savor the moment.
Essany’s got to adjust the two cameras to have them ready for the guest segment. He’s got to get one of the two wireless microphones he owns attached to McIntyre.
He’s got to hunt down sidekick Randazzo, who’s somehow disappeared when he’s supposed to be in the crowd, running the Give-Joey McIntyre-a-Hug contest.
“That’s what happens when you put your friends to work,” McIntyre says, watching Essany scurry out into the lobby.
Essany traces his obsession with the talk-show world back to a commemorative top-10 list he sent in to “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee,” his mom’s favorite show, that Philbin read on the air.
He can still quote the best of the reasons he gave for the duo still being together at their 10-year anniversary: Perennial Emmy also-rans at the time, “they don’t have to fight about who gets to keep the Emmy,” he wrote.
“I decided that the next time I got a laugh I wanted to deliver the material myself,” Essany says. “The talk-show format I just knew was perfect for me, but how many 12-year-old talk-show hosts are there?”
Essany watched that show with his mom and both were floored, recalls Tina, a homemaker and former piano teacher.
“That was a real shocker. I’m crying,” she says.
But in another way, it was not so surprising, she adds: “You saw this kid was so persistent. You know that he’s going to be successful. He strategizes everything. He does. He has a long-term plan. My husband and I say he doesn’t take after us. But as a parent you just do whatever you can to make it work.”
Philip Potempa is a features writer for the Northwest Indiana Times who’s been covering Essany since he was 12.
“Most kids like this have got a pushykind of stage mom,” Potempa says. “His parents are not like that. This is all his drive.”
Randazzo, the sidekick who doubles as a computer science major at Purdue University North Central, recalls that “when we’d hang out we wouldn’t play basketball or run outside. We’d always be doing something with a camera. We would re-enact `Rocky’: You’re the boxer’s point of view and you’re getting punched. We set up the camera during `Monday Night Football’ and tried to be Al, Frank and Dan.”
Indeed, the scant money that mounting the cable show has cost him — the microphones and videotapes — Essany earned, he says, by working as a wedding and events videographer before starting the talk show.
Essany at 13 went to see the local cable-access executive, pitching his idea for a professional late-night talk show produced in his living room. He was told to finish three or four of them, bring them back, and, sure, he could have a time slot.
It took him a year, and a whole lot of diligent writing and faxing to celebrities and publicists. But by going through the publicity department of the then-fledgling WB network, he managed to land a phone interview with Ed McMahon, who was then co-starring in a WB sitcom, as his first celebrity guest and to get the three shows together.
Another key moment came early on. Rachel Karzen was working as TV host Leeza Gibbons’ personal assistant, came across this handwritten interview request from an Indiana teenager, and saw something endearing in it. She convinced Gibbons to be a guest; Gibbons appeared by phone on the third show. Then last year, after the “Today Show” had done a brief piece on Essany, Leeza Gibbons Productions signed the boy host to a talent deal — about which he’ll only say that you don’t make a lot as a first-timer, but “I’m doing better than most people my age.”
The idea from the start was to do a reality show, says Karzen, now a development executive for Gibbons.
She pitched it at a meeting this year with E!, the last of half a dozen ideas she presented to the entertainment-based cable channel, and they bought it almost instantly, recalls E! Networks development vice president Kary McHoul.
“It’s wish fulfillment,” McHoul says, “but it’s a reality show and a talk show and there are celebrities and the family is so great . . . and it’s a little `Waiting for Guffman,’ too, like, `Is this real?'”
The footage arriving from Indiana, she says, is living up to the promise they saw in the idea, so much so that the debut was postponed from January to March to be able to give it a better launch, after the second season of “The Anna Nicole Show.”
“Our group is so, like, hates everything, and this show, everybody loves it,” McHoul says.
Of course, E!’s presence already changes the nature of Essany’s reality. Guest bookings are much easier, with the six shows he’s shot while E! cameras are there including manic guy Tom Green, the singers Jewel and Kelly Rowland, and David Brenner, in a nod to Essany’s sense of talk-show history.
He genuinely sees the E! show as another step on the ladder, to”hopefully introduce myself to a national audience, familiarize them with my style, establish myself as a positive role model.
“Then maybe three or four years down the road, I elevate myself to the more traditional late-night host and move beyond this reality stuff.”
It is all part of the master plan. “My teen years were stressful,” Essany says. “They were exhausting. I chose that. I wanted to feel that once my teen years were concluded, I had done something positive with them.
“People, now that I’m just breaking on the national scene, think I came out of nowhere, but I’ve been struggling. You cannot imagine the rejection of saying to a celebrity, `I’m 15 years old. Can you come to my house and do a show?'”
