Not Laughing Now

Susan Torres clapped and cheered on cue as she sat hour after bottom-numbing hour watching television shows being taped.

But the Fremont High School sophomore isn’t applauding anymore.

She is among hundreds of teenagers who say they been cheated by audience recruiters who promised to pay them for filling seats and clapping enthusiastically at game shows produced at Hollywood television studios.

Instead of earning thousands of dollars for class fund-raising projects, high school students across Los Angeles complain they have been victimized by a pair of “audience service” companies that lured them into studio seats and then didn’t pay them.

Television producers hire the recruiting companies to provide happy and energetic audiences for 100 recurring live-audience game shows and syndicated comedies that are taped locally each television season.

Because thousands of people are needed to fill audience seats, recruiters have to pay people to watch. Fees of about $10 per person are typical--although the rate varies depending upon the length of the show’s taping and whether the recruiters provide bus transportation for groups. Payments as high as $35 are made when special audiences are needed.

Recruiters regularly turn to school, church and social groups for help. They promise that audience-sitting is an easy and fun way for members to raise money for their organization.

For many groups, that has turned out to be true.

But not for some student groups at campuses such as Dorsey, Long Beach Poly, South Torrance, Manual Arts and Granada Hills high schools--where youngsters sat through television tapings this year in hopes of earning money for such things as a civics trip to Washington, sports equipment and athletic uniforms.

Torres, a member of the cheerleading squad at Fremont in South-Central Los Angeles, and dozens of her friends attended shows to raise cash for new uniforms and cheerleading camp.

Torres said she attended 47 shows over the past year--even skipping her school’s winter formal dance when an audience recruiter put out a call for people for a game show on prom night.

The cheerleaders and their friends worked for the Hollywood-based ESP Audience Services until earlier this year, when show payments failed to arrive. ESP ceased business and declared itself insolvent April 6, listing assets of $1,000 and debts of $153,000.

After that, the Fremont students attended shows for RCAM Audience Services, which has an office in Newhall. But they say RCAM hasn’t compensated them for shows it sent them to as recently as June 29.

“I was devastated when I heard we weren’t getting paid. I wanted to cry,” said 18-year-old Kendra Lewings, who attended 40 tapings. “We earned that money.”

Fremont teacher and cheerleading squad advisor Connie Smith-Szekula said the two companies owe her students a total of $4,880 for working “The Dating Game,” “The Big Date,” “Ordinary/Extraordinary” and “Bzzz!”

When Smith-Szekula complained to ESP lawyer Daniel Weintraub that her youngsters had been treated in an “utterly despicable” manner, he sent her a letter that said, “Unfortunately, there is simply no money with which to pay creditors.” Weintraub did not return a reporter’s phone calls.

Neither did Ric Murray, head of RCAM.

Dorsey High School history teacher Jim Berger said Murray doesn’t return his calls, either. Berger says RCAM owes his students $490.

“At first, for two months they said the check’s in the mail, that they had a payroll problem, that the computer broke down,” Berger said. “Now I’m thinking about taking them to small claims court.”

Berger’s students began attending tapings of shows last October to raise money for an honors class trip to Washington, D.C.

“I’d drive kids to the bus stop and pay for tokens and then follow the bus with a load of kids in my Ford to the taping up at KTLA in Hollywood,” Berger said.

The youngsters earned $2,420 from ESP before the company ceased operations and left hundreds of dollars unpaid, Berger said. He said that when he complained to the producers of “Bzzz!” they wrote him a check for $920--the amount his youngsters had coming to them from ESP for that show.

Kristine Augustyn, assistant to Stu Billett, the executive producer of the now-canceled show, said students from five schools helped fill the 125-seat “Bzzz!” audience. She said her company ended up paying for its audiences twice--once to ESP and later directly to the schools.

“We just made a decision to help them out,” Augustyn said. “The schools don’t have a lot of money. We felt bad.”

Augustyn said her show is not reimbursing audiences provided by RCAM, hoping instead that the audience service company eventually will pay.

Other producers say the audience dispute has victimized them, too.

Eric Schotz, executive producer of “Ordinary/Extraordinary,” said he was jolted when RCAM failed to deliver the promised audience for a June taping of his reality-based variety show.

“One group out in Chatsworth never got picked up,” Schotz said, and those that did arrive included people too young for his show’s demographic target.

“We scrambled and had everyone on the staff calling everybody they knew to come down to the taping. We had producers in chairs.”

“A lot of producers are taking a lot of heat over this,” acknowledged Missy Nocera, manager of group recruitment for Hollywood’s largest audience service company, Audiences Unlimited. “And it’s making it harder for us.”

Her 17-year-old company group is based in Universal City. It provides audiences for about 55 shows, filling 33,000 studio seats a month during the peak television production season.

Nocera speculated that ESP and RCAM ran into difficulty when they started filling studio seats with “people too expensive for their budgets.” Audiences Unlimited pays between $8 and $10 per head.

Some of the shortchanged high school students, meantime, say they are going back to more traditional money-generating methods.

“On television they want you to keep laughing and clapping. They feed the audience candy to keep you hyper,” said Robin Davis, a 16-year-old Fremont High cheerleader.

Now, she said, to get new uniforms, “We’re going to have to sell candy.”