Daily Breeze, Sept. 26, 2001
Our adventurer tries out for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"
BY COREY LEVITAN
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM SORENSEN
"Someday," an old teacher told me, "you're gonna need to know what the highest peak in the Alps is and you're gonna be sorry you didn't pay attention."
OK, so I made that up. But it might be true, I can't say, since I didn't pay attention.
What I do know is that I have arrived at the day when I need an answer to that question. I'm driving over to try out for "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" at the Universal City Hilton hotel. The hit ABC game show usually gets its contestants from a phone-in line. But for whatever reason (and they're very secretive about EVERYTHING), the producers decided to hold in-person auditions in L.A.
They're administering three written exams -- at 9 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. -- to the first 400 people who line up for each. Those who pass proceed to in-person auditions with staff members.
It is now noon. The bonus to not taking the earliest test is that I get to glom questions off a friend who did. (Besides, I might do anything for a million dollars, but I still like my sleep.) The highest peak in the Alps was one of the questions.
When I call the Daily Breeze seeking answers, a female colleague, who insisted that my editor remove her name from the story, responds.
"I'm not going to help you cheat!" she insists after I make the mistake of telling her the truth about why I need her to look things up on the Internet.
"It's not cheating," I claim. "They're allowing us one pre-exam lifeline each." Only silence comes back in my cell phone earpiece, not the names of any mountain peaks.
Luckily, my father resides on moral ground as low as most of the rest of us do. (And he used to be a school principal!) He calls back with the right answer (Mount Blanc) and several others.
I feel like a million dollars when I line up outside the Hilton knowing that getting every single answer wrong is no longer in the realm of possibility for me. Of course, all 400 people feel like a million dollars or else they wouldn't be here.
Alexis Rodriguez, a 29-year-old attorney from North Hollywood, says she would use hers to pay her debts.
"Law school was expensive," says the Hastings graduate.
One man, who identifies himself only as John, can taste the bread so badly that he not only drove all the way from Grand Terrace, he claims to have told his employers he was in a hospital.
"Don't put that in your article or I might get in trouble," he says.
As the moral ground here seems to be well below sea level, I assume that some of these people have received outside help similar to mine. This worries me.
L.A. resident Marc Anthony DiBello, 40, confirms my suspicions. And the outside help he's received comes from the highest of all possible stations.
No, not Regis Philbin.
"I believe that God is on my side," says the church worker. As proof, DiBello says he and the Big Guy have already won two cars together -- on "Wheel of Fortune" in 1996 and "The Price is Right" in 1998. (My guess is that God gets to drive the newer one.)
After three hours of waiting in the searing sun, we are herded into a ballroom with red velvet chairs that appear to be left over from a shady real-estate seminar. We're greeted in a New Yawk accent by a woman named Nikki, who asks us to raise our hands if we're related to Michael Eisner or anyone else employed by the Walt Disney Company, parent to ABC, "including Mickey Mouse."
The first question on "Millionaire" is always so ridiculously easy it never manages to weed out the dummies. (What does the color green mean on a stoplight?) And this one is no exception. The people who ARE related to Disney employees know enough not to raise their hands.
For some reason, we are warmed up with a screening of Kathie Lee Gifford's guest-starring turn from celebrity "Millionaire." Not only is Philbin's former morning-show co-host smug (even for her), she's ill-equipped to answer the simplest questions without help from Dana Carvey.
"Is there a BEE over here?" Carvey yells from the gallery behind her, revealing the letter to choose when Gifford is stumped by "What is the 'Wizard of Oz'-inspired nickname for Seattle?"
Perhaps Gifford would have known more about the Emerald City had cheap child labor been available there.
"We're gonna get started," Nikki announces "Please turn off your
cell phones."
We are handed a flat of cardboard, a "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" pen and then a test You know that nightmare where you're back in school taking a final exam, only you haven't attended one single day of class all year? Well, in mine, I'm also half an hour late, my pen is broken AND I'm naked.
Scanning the test for my Alps question, I draw a (Mount) blank. In fact, none of the questions I was told about are there. With all the millions going to the show's winners and to Philbin's monochromatic suits, I didn't figure "Millionaire" would have enough left over to prepare more than one quiz.
Someone must be hitting the dry cleaners lately, because these are totally different questions. And a good many are killer.
"Which fruit is most closely related to a clementine?" reads one. "A) apple, B) pear, C) tangerine, D) date."
Let me save you some time: The song running through your head right now does not provide the answer, my darling. (By the way, the "Millionaire" people warned me not to reveal any of their exam questions in this article. I guess this means I'm blackballed from the show, which is fine. I can make a million dollars on my own. At my current salary, it would only take 20 more years -- as long as I don't pay taxes or ever have to eat or live anywhere.)
I finish before the 12-minute limit is up. No matter how hard I study the inside of my eyelids, there is no clementine information there. (And, as my little protest, I refuse to look up "clementine" when I get home. In fact,
I never want to know what the friggin' thing is.)
Nikki New Yawka instructs us to remain seated while our tests are graded in another room. For entertainment, were are asked to perform whatever stupid human tricks we can come up with. To elicit volunteers, she merely hands out additional "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" pens.
"Who wants one?" she says as the examinees focus their nervous energy into pouncing like ducks on a sliver of stale Wonderbread.
One man's trick is dislocating his wrists, one woman does an impression of some animal, one guy claims he looks like Jon Voigt even though he doesn't.
It's a good sociology experiment: If you get a large number of people nervous and then bored, just about anything can coax them to make asses of themselves.
In between, Nikki responds to a barrage of questions with disappointing, though polite, answers of her own.
"We have a passing grade but we will not tell you what that grade is," she says.
"You do not receive your tests back," she says. "You will never know how you did."
Those were her final answers.
In addition, we are informed that, should we fail, we will never be eligible to apply in person again. (We're still eligible as phone-in entrants. But good luck ever getting a call back that way.)
Mercifully, the list of winners is called out within a half hour. Rodriguez is among them, I am not.
"Nothing much happened," she tells me later. "They took me to another room and asked me about myself. Then they said they'd call me back."
Before hearing the list of names, we are told that our class had the highest percentage of passers Nikki ever saw, more than 20 percent. I can't tell you how good that makes us "non-passers" feel as
we are asked to "please leave the building."
I am surprised to find DiBello waiting for an elevator with the rest of us losers. Where was God in all this?
"He was with me," DiBello says.
"It was me that screwed up."