To me, the real surprise during the final Survivor wasn�t that Richard won (I blame Greg and his stupid number vote), but the application videos CBS showed snippets of. A goofy one of Dirk hunting firewood, a goofy one of Sean (no relation) in the shower with bugs, and a goofy one of Susan (this one�s embarrassing) singing a homemade flower analogy on how sweet she was. Like opening a biker�s yearbook and seeing he was on the pep squad.
I always figured that these videos were picked by surliness. �Hi, I�m _____, I really hate the _______, and I love insulting people behind their backs.� But they didn�t seem to be. We only saw bits of three out of sixteen qualifying tapes (I can�t imagine Rudy doing a skit or tap dancing to get on the show), but from what they aired, the tapes weren�t showing grim money hungry backstabbers, but likable people you WOULD want to spend 39 days on an island with.
Was this a comment on human nature, that people turned greedy just because of a little starvation and a million dollars? Or that the uber-greedy disguise themselves as nice people, knowing full well what they�ll turn into after a month of sunburns and rat on a stick? We can see what the end result of putting these people on an island/house/Winnebago/boring house is, but how close is this to the original intention? Did they want Swiss Family Robinson or Swiss Family Springer?
I honestly don�t know what the producers want. And it�s frustrating because, I�ll admit it, I want to be on one of these shows. It�s like admitting you want to be a rock star: everyone does, but publicly saying it shows some level of planning that indicates optimism only beat by Lyndon LaRouche on election day.
To further compound the embarrassment, I applied to be on one of them last year.
I saw an ad in the paper from MTV, seeking people who looked 18-25 to live in a room being taped for a week. The physical act of making the tape and blurting for five minutes why they�d want me was too big an embarrassment to get by (plus I didn�t know what to say). But this wasn�t a process of reviewing tapes, they were just doing interviews at night in their Times Square building. So tape problem averted.
Maybe it tells something about me that I can�t remember the reward for doing this. There was some definite incentive: a t-shirt or $10,000 or something. I don�t remember if everyone got it, or if it was split among the people who stayed in the bunker the whole time, or if there even if you could opt out of the bunker. All I can tell you for sure is bunker and camera.
Times Square was on my way home of my interdimensional commute from New Jersey to New Jersey via Manhattan, so it wasn�t out of my way. I showed up at the building, and found a small line snaking around the side of it. There were close to a hundred people in line, but it was small compared to what it would have been for a Real World or Road Rules. No one�s heard of this thing yet; I can get in on the ground floor.
Flyers explaining the taping were going around, so I grabbed one. This was a Millennium Bunker; people would be locked deep underground Times Square (probably just the basement of the building) from Christmas Day to New Year�s Day, coming out to see the nuclear/divine holocaust that Y2K and the Rapture have wrought. The whole thing would be broadcast live on MTV�s web site and on MTV itself. The details were nice, but the key was: chance to be famous.
Lines like this turn into little bunches of people talking, geographic cliques. My clique had five people in it. As usual, I forgot to get any names. One guy was short, a slight hint of an eastern European or Russian accent, and had a plain white shirt on, the kind you�re forced to wear in second grade when you�re taking the family picture. Another guy, shorter with a stubbly head, bragged that his dad had a very important producing job for Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. He also said that he hated Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. Two girls who worked at an airport came here just for the hell of it. I was the fifth, who was also here for the hell of it.
One of the girls casually mentioned how the media had worked with her family in the past. Her uncle and a bunch of his buddies got in blackface, made a racist parade float, and drove it through on the tail end of an otherwise family-friendly parade. She said the reporters who filmed it didn�t portray it fairly, because they weren�t really pretending to drag someone to their death on the back bumper, one of them was just drunk and falling off the float a lot. Plus, they DID get town permission to build a float. We all decided not to ask her any more questions about her family.
The clique made a general agreement that I was not 18-25 looking. Since I just came from work, I was wearing a shirt and tie, not the slackerwear that everyone but the little European guy had on. MTV probably had anti-bouncers ready to throw out anyone who doesn�t need to show ID. I took the tie off and undid a top button or two. Now I felt like a salesman in a hotel bar trying to strike up a conversation with one of the waitresses. Not at all who I really am, but maybe the MTV people would like it.
The line slowly moved forward. I didn�t have cable so I hadn�t watched much MTV lately, but I tried talking about the little bit of recent knowledge I had. Turns out the people I was with hadn�t watched much, either, not even the guy with the producer dad. We�re not fans, we�re just here to be celebrities. I doubt Colleen or Gervase were CBS viewers before this summer either.
Our clique reached the end of the queue, and got to enter the posh un-MTV lobby. An elevator took us to the nineteenth floor. We were in a hallway, the cramped dirty kind with cracked linoleum that never make it on New York postcards. Three seats that looked like they were ripped from a ballpark in the forties were against one wall. Everyone else got the privilege of sitting on the floor. We continued waiting.
Authorization forms passed around. The European guy had just moved from his parents� to an apartment without a phone, so he was asking our clique if he could put one of our numbers down, and then he�d call us and see if we got a congratulations call for him. Then he remembered a friend�s phone number, and put that one down. Putting his parents� phone number down was never an option, although he never said why. There was a lot of unexplained backstory in the room.
Someone with a clipboard gave the hallway a pessimistic pep talk. Out of all the applicants the day before, they were only holding onto a scant three or four people. This wasn�t even to go in the bunker, it was to survive the first elimination round. This was a mixed blessing: on one hand the rest of the slots would have to be filled by us; on the other, most everyone was making the same mistakes. He said to be very high energy, to just let loose once the cameras rolled. It wouldn�t be all that honest to have non-zany people act zany just for an interview, but if it worked, we�d all go for it.
The cast of the hallway was a pretty dead on sampling of the people who wanted to be on MTV. The goth, the white rapper, one or two girls who got dressed up for a nightclub, and a bunch of regular people who just want to be a little more famous.
I tried to figure out who�d make it out of the present group. None of my clique, that�s for sure. We were too normal looking, too average. No dyed hair, no facial piercings, not a single snowboarding experience among us. If they were looking for one or two normals to balance out the freaks, then someone in the clique would have a chance, but otherwise we�d snooze up the screen.
There were a set of beat up wooden doors that led to the interviewing room. As someone came out after their interview, they were instructed to not say what questions they were asked. Rats; no way to prepare an answer for these questions. Most people were trying to figure answers nonetheless. We felt like Miss America contestants.
I didn�t have a music career of any sort to get publicity for through winning this, so I had nothing on the line if I lost. I relaxed; it felt like a party once half the people leave and the other half sit around the kitchen. I accidentally turned into an audition coach for the rest of the crowd. All I did was say what Mr. Clipboard did, to stay high energy and not be boring. But the crowd was listening to anyone talking, and I was the only one talking.
This much nervous energy with nothing to focus on made everything even remotely funny became much more so. I made my usual trying-to-be-funny comments a bit louder than normal, and the group seemed to like them. �Hey, what�s going on behind these doors? Brainwashing by Pepsi? Promising to have ADIDAS tattooed on your forehead as a prerequisite to being in the bunker?� Nothing award-winning, but the moment needed comic relief, and I was the only one doing it. For a minute, I was the coolest guy in MTV.
Then I got interviewed. A regular camcorder was set up pointing at a very comfortable chair in what looked like a gigantic storage closet. I sunk into the chair, and politely waited for them to change tapes. Psych up. Be just like in the hallway. I tried getting creative with spouting how comfortable the chair was, but a comfy chair can only generate so much decent material, so there was a unfilled silence before the camera got a new tape and turned on.
I said my name into the camera, and then the first question came. �So, are you afraid of the Millennium?�
Oh yeah, this was a Millennium thing. I wrote a whole commentary on how stupid the Millennium was. If I spat it out at them now, it�d sound like I passionately hated the Millennium instead of occasionally snickered at it. I gave them thirty seconds� worth and stopped, thinking I�d better not get into the Vonnegut part of it and peg myself as someone�s who�d spend the bunker week reading.
�So you�re NOT afraid of the Millennium.�
�Uh, nope.�
�So why do you think you�d be worth saving? What special skills do you have to offer?�
Well, that was it right there. Every single person in the hallway thought they were special enough to have a week of television devoted to them. And why? No one knew. The goth could say because he�s a goth, the white rapper could say because he�s a white rapper, and me the assistant editor of a trade magazine could say ...? This was the same tape dilemma, only live.
When you boiled it down, the crowd was just a bunch of people who wanted to be on TV because it was inherently good to be on TV. It�s power to get yourself recognized, get attention for whatever you do, feel the love of millions of people each week. It�s getting the opportunity to star in commercials and TV shows, make a career out of being YOU. It�s a magic wand and the Midas touch put together. It�s the American dream.
But those thoughts never come in a handy twenty second speech, so I was scrambling for words. I wasn�t a goth or white rapper or much of anything superficially interesting. I was, uh, a writer, and, uh, a twin. Which one would play better? �Well, um, I�m a writer. I could write down, uh, what happened. For future generations.� Real good; might as well say I�m into the alternative music scene because I�ve got a Matchbox 20 album. Should have tried twin.
The camera was pretty much turned off right then, so I left. I walked past the wooden doors toward the elevators, but with one last chance at an appreciative audience. �Oh God, it was terrible! They stuck needles in me!� I wasn�t allowed to say what questions they asked, but I was perfectly free to outright lie. And the audience liked it again.
Before I left the building I hit the bathroom. It�s very weird to think that the available piece of toilet paper on the roll could have been that extra sheet that one of the Foo Fighters decided he didn�t need. Or that the germs I was getting from the toilet seat came from the Wu-Tang Clan. I went home, thought about how I could have answered the questions better, and sat in a bucket of disinfectant.
A week or two later, I got a call. Not MTV, but the European guy. He still had the phone numbers of the clique from before. He had made the first cut. Huh? This guy was my first pick to get voted off the hallway. He was as normal as a peanut butter sandwich.
He had no idea how to make it through the second round, and was calling to ask if I knew. I need to stop pretending to know everything; people are starting to believe it. I said that MTV probably saw him as the normal guy, the one who didn�t have a false front, the one the audience could relate to. Just be yourself just like in the first interview, and that�ll work better than any phony posturing you could do, I said.
He said he didn�t act like himself during the first interview. He jumped around and ranted like a baboon on speed. High energy, just like me and Clipboard said people should do. Nuts; why�d I have to Flanders out when I was being interviewed; maybe they�d have liked my Vonnegut thoughts. I said to keep the hooting and ranting up, run the camera-ready nutjob routine until you make it to the bunker and can become yourself again.
I didn�t hear from him after that, so I�m guessing he didn�t make it through the second elimination. I don�t know what strategy he tried. I�d like to say I watched the webcast or MTV the week it was on to see if he made it, but I don�t have cable and the only computer with an internet connection I had access to was so slow it�s disorienting to watch streaming video of glaciers.
I still want to do one of these things, although the tape dilemma stopped me from applying to Survivor II. Most everyone�s got a desire on some level to be on a show like this. We all have lives interesting enough to keep ourselves entertained 24 hours a day, so why shouldn�t a camera editing together a few minutes of footage a week find us entertaining? We just want the American dream, that�s all.
Ironic O. Henry footnote: the bunker broadcast got so little MTV publicity most people never knew it existed. As far as I know, the 'winners' are still in there.