Filling a Seat Not Yet Spoken For : Television: America’s Talking, a 24-hour-a-day talk-show network that will premiere July 4, is conducting a nationwide search for a host.

Although it at times seems otherwise, not every man, woman and child in this country has hosted a talk show. But if a new cable network, America’s Talking, has anything to say about it, we’ll be much closer to citizen/talk-show parity by the end of the summer.

America’s Talking, which will premiere on July 4 (which, as its press notes observe, is “America’s birthday,” and therefore a day usually given to outdoor barbecues and baseball more than channel surfing), will be a 24-hour-a-day talk-show network featuring 14 hours of original, er, new chatting a day.

As part of its start-up preparations, the channel is conducting a nationwide talent search: One nobody from our country will become a Somebody, hosting his or her own program and pulling in $75,000 a year (a hefty sum, to be sure, but certainly nowhere near the celebrated David Letterman’s $14 million annually or the paycheck Oprah Winfrey brings home on a weekly basis).

That national talent search came to the Century City Shopping Center last Thursday and Friday, as a steady stream of aspiring celebrity hosts (including this reporter) did their best not to humiliate themselves in front of a smattering of disinterested witnesses. The winner of the nationwide contest will host his or her own show from the network’s corporate offices in Fort Lee, N.J.

This was the drill: Bring your own videocassette, and they tape you for 10 minutes. Spend your first minute describing the kind of show you’d do for them. With the rest of your time, give them a glimpse of your winning stage presence. They give you back your tape, which you mail off with your own stamps. (You can also send in a homemade audition, but do so before May 16.)

With all the hopefuls, America’s Talking won’t have to worry about blowing its budget on nearly blank videotapes anytime soon. But its moguls better invest in a few “Applause” signs--the early-morning audience Thursday was spotty and unenthusiastic. Not to say that those of us auditioning gave them anything to cheer about, but that never stopped the audiences for Maury Povich or Chevy Chase.

“There’s something liberating about dying on someone else’s time,” observed one of the participants after meeting with silence from the crowd.

Aspirants seemed fairly divided between earnest folks thinking they might be able to bring something valuable to their audiences, people in it for fame and fortune and jokers out on a lark. Heidi Hendler, 29, a motivational lecturer, was one of the former: She suggested a series titled “You!” that would “emphasize the individual” and deal with matters of self-esteem.

“It’s so crucial for us to put smiles on people’s faces,” she said. “So many shows focus on tragedies--we should focus on ourselves.” (If my audition had done that, it would have focused on tragedy.)

Though the fledgling network’s executives have to be happy with the turnouts--which has drawn in the thousands to some of the cities they’ve visited--they might be less than sanguine about attitudes expressed about the talk-show format at the auditions. “I’m sick of these talk shows!” said one member of the audience at the audition when called on stage by one of the applicants. A couple of auditions focused on whether it was possible to do anything new or interesting with the talk-show format.

Bennie Thornton and Emmy Daniels spent much of an audition discussing whether the world even needed another talk show, which was sure to win over America’s Talking’s judges.

Daniels, 22, a comic and actor who said his name is Emmy because he hopes someday to win one, called the late-night talk-show wars “ridiculous” and had harsh words for the afternoon talk shows that find their hosts darting around the studio audience. “You should focus on the guest, not the audience,” he said. “That just incites more turmoil and tension, and you don’t draw any conclusions, you don’t solve anything.”

Curiously enough, however, the subjects the hopeful hosts most wanted to interview on their shows were other interviewers. Oprah Winfrey was mentioned most often. “I’d ask her if she thought I had a shot,” Thornton explained.

Then there were the folks who didn’t take it quite so seriously. Rob Siegel, 26, a waiter and aspiring writer, opened his audition by tracing many of his childhood traumas to the TV series “Hello Larry,” then got into an extended discussion over the art of bagging groceries with Daniels, who quickly became the other applicants’ guest of choice.

Mike Muratore, 29, and Tymon Shipp, 29, both actor-comics, attended together, each interviewing the other for his audition, turning each into a fairly entertaining mockery of the process. “Anyone want to share half a toothpick?” Muratore, a guy with a more-than-passing knowledge of Howard Stern, asked, proffering the chewed-up stick from his mouth, before launching into subjects like pornography, transvestites and homelessness (“If you’re going to be a homeless guy, be a happy one,” he advised).

Shipp, on the other hand, transformed his audition into an infomercial for Muratore’s dating service. Shipp said he’d like to date Halle Berry or Angela Bassett, to which Muratore responded, “Oh, we can hook that up, that’s easy.”

Even though their audience seemed more bewildered than amused, the two didn’t seem to care. “Where else can a comic find stage time in the afternoon?” Muratore asked after the audition.

“We’ve performed before worse,” Shipp nodded.

“Talk shows stink,” Muratore said. “It’s bizarre--I can’t even watch them anymore. It’s so sad, you want to kill yourself.” He said his guests would be “freaks--I’d get the people who were the survivors of ‘Faces of Death.’ ”

“I’d get that guy who goes into water with the crocodiles,” Shipp said.

“Geraldo’s the only guy who’s into freaks, but he goes too far. He grills people,” Muratore added. “Geraldo is evil.”

That’s America Talking.

According to a poll commissioned by the upstart network, 29% of Angelenos said they thought they’d make a good talk-show host. I was not one of that 29%. I lost points immediately, with my declaration of purpose.

“This program will operate on the assumption that we are a civilization in decline,” I portentously intoned, “proof of which will be the existence of the show itself.” I introduced my dog, too big to be a lap dog but in my lap nonetheless, explaining that I hoped to get her on the payroll, kind of like Tom Arnold, even though she wouldn’t do much, but the camera could cut away to her if the interview got boring.

My guest and I discussed the Nixon funeral (“My favorite part,” my interviewee ruminated, “was the recorded message from Courtney Love followed by the 18 minutes of silence”) and Bob Dole’s declaration that the latter portion of the 20th Century will go down in history as the Age of Nixon (“He was right,” my subject observed, “except for the ‘90s, which will be the Age of Urkel”).

We smoothly segued from Nixon to the only topic capable of following a fallen world leader: the Olsen twins, the lovable blond moppets of TV’s “Full House.” Who, my informed source relayed to the world, are not robots. (“A scoop, and right here on this stage,” I boasted. “Just imagine what we’ll unearth on the real show.”)

The audience, shockingly enough, sat in dazed silence. “This is one of those interviews where there would’ve been a lot of cutaways to the dog,” I summarized. Nonetheless, we did inadvertently discover what might have saved “The Chevy Chase Show”: an affable, well-behaved pooch.

Perhaps most curious of all was the fact that none of the applicants had any trouble with moving to New Jersey if they got the gig. As Patrick Steinfeld, a lawyer wearing a jacket that could only be described as red , put it, “I live in Santa Barbara, which is known for its beaches and girls in thong bikinis. I’m looking forward to New Jersey’s freezing weather.”

Which just goes to prove the lengths to which people will go for a little fame.