Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
I did!
part 1
by David Loftus
I was not a particular fan of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" when it first hit the airwaves in the late summer of 1999. I may not even have seen an episode until many months into its first season, but after viewing a few shows I felt it might be an easy way to make some money. This became especially clear after I caught but one episode apiece of its imitators, "Greed" on Fox and "The Weakest Link" on NBC, which were mean-spirited and sent nearly all their contestants home penniless.
In contrast, "Millionaire" had a warmth and supportiveness: there were no time limits once you got in the hot seat (I understand this has changed since Meredith Vieira became the host in 2002), and anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the contestants took home some cash, as opposed to only 1 in 10 on those other shows.
I called the phone-in audition a few times in the fall of 2000, I think, but didn't become fairly systematic about it until the spring of 2001. Nearly a dozen times I managed to answer the three first-round questions (and, once or twice, the five-question sequence instituted in early summer of 2001), but I never got the followup call.
What I noticed from watching the show and playing the game online was that my tough spot could be the midlevel questions -- say, in the $8,000 to $50,000 range -- because those tended more often to be oriented to pop cultural (TV shows and AM music), cuisine, and consumer goods (for example, toys and fashion). Above $50,000, questions had more of a tendency to run toward the classic areas of history and literature. For instance, one of the few times I managed to get to the million-dollar question on the online game, it sought the name of the original illustrator for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books, which was a snap for me -- John Tenniel. So if I could get the audience and a phone-a-friend to get me through those midlevel questions, I could make some real money on the show.
Then it was announced that "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" would visit cities to conduct auditions in person.
THE LIVE AUDITION (July 24, 2001)
A team from the show came to Portland. The publicity said they would be taking groups of hopefuls at 9 a.m., 2 p.m., and 6 p.m. at the Hilton Hotel. At first I figured I'd join the line between 6 and 7 a.m., but then I realized a lot of people are used to rising at that time to go to work (this was a Tuesday morning), so I figured I'd better start a little earlier. I finally settled on 4:30.
The alarm went off, and I took a quick shower and walked downtown to get in line about 5:10 a.m. There were already more than a hundred people there. For the next four hours we traded stories in a festive mood and watched the line snake around the block twice before the doors opened at 9.
Show staff handed us numbered tickets: I was number 105 in the door.
Several hundred of us gathered in a hotel conference room for the written exam. A few rows in front of me, I recognized Brian Coakley, a local boy I had interviewed for Harvard three years before (he was accepted, graduated a few years later, and eventually pursued his stated goal at Oregon Health and Science University of studying neurosurgery) with his father, a principal at a suburban high school.
The exam consisted of 20 Fastest Finger style questions -- where you must put four items in order -- to be completed in a total of 4 minutes. On the whole, I found the time quite adequate -- in fact, I went through all the questions in only 2 minutes -- but there were half a dozen I was unsure about or just plain didn't know, so I spent the remaining 2 minutes pondering them and changing some answers.
The first was an easy one, something like place the following body parts in order, moving from the feet up: pelvis, larynx, pancreas, tarsals. But the second or third one caught me up short -- place the following First Ladies in order by birth, starting with the earliest: Rosalynn Carter, Bess Truman, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush. Then there were the awful consumer goods questions such as place the following toys in the order in which they were introduced to the market: Tickle Me Elmo, Teddy Ruxpin, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Strawberry Shortcake.
My favorite was one I knew would leave the vast majority of people in the room stumped because Americans are typically execrable at world geography, which is plain to see on the show. It was: Put the following rivers in order, heading east from the U.S. -- Tiber, Volga, Liffey, Loire. I had seen the Tiber in Rome, the Loire is obviously in France (southeast, I thought, though it turns out to be in the southwestern Bordeaux region, but that didn't affect the answer), and the Volga is Russian. The tricky one was the Liffey. Since I had read lots of James Joyce, I knew that one flows through Dublin, however, so the correct answer was: Liffey, Loire, Tiber, Volga.
It was reported that only 10 to 14 percent of hopeful contestants pass the written test. As a staffer remarked when we finished, "That was a lot harder than you were expecting, wasn't it?"
It took a long time to grade the exams (unfortunately, we never got to find out our score, never mind which questions we got right and wrong, and what the correct answers were), so one of the associate producers kept the crowd occupied by asking who had come the farthest (a group of people had flown up from Phoenix, Arizona during the night, I believe), what we would do with a million dollars, and so on, and also posing a few verbal trivia questions. I won a "Millionaire" T-shirt by answering a trivia question about John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World (the question was: which country's revolution is described in that book?).
They announced the successful candidates, a much smaller group that was herded into elevators and taken to small conference rooms on a higher floor. There I filled out a questionnaire in an attempt to explain why Regis and the viewers would find me fascinating. Staffers took a Polaroid shot of each of us to go with our file, and then we were interviewed briefly by two staffers with a videocam, no more than 90 seconds -- presumably to assess how we came across on camera.
A postcard came in the mail less than a week later to say the producers had chosen me for the pool of show contestants. Nearly three months were to pass, however, before I got the phone call that summoned me to New York.
(There are photos from the trip to New York!)