WWTBAM Bored

I'll write up the experience some other time if I have any spirit to. I was able to make one of the earlier times than previously planned. Not that it helped them to like me. They "took my picture" without a flash, & said "not to worry that there was no flash". This is just the height of badness. I got asked 3 questions, 2 of which had of course been answered on my questionnaire but I lit into them all with ebullience to the max. Then out of there.


I don't know why I put myself through this. Well, I can still pass the test. It wasn't very hard, but 40 out of 70 in my group didn't pass it. It might actually be a smaller figure of passers, as I did the count of people in the room after passers were ushered in. But as I was shown the door out, a new group of 70 was ushered in, & there were still about 15 people left from my group "to be interviewed". If that's what they wanna call it.


It was obvious that one of the 4 interviewers was interviewing the chosen few; their interviewee got to sit in a chair instead of on a bar stool, & the interviewer was loud enough that we got to hear her coaching people before she sent them in for their taping; "they'll ask you to pretend you've just won $40,000.00 & don't say 'yah, I won $40,000.00', be really excited".


Hey, I wouldn't need that coaching. I can do it. Just let me.

Oh, that's too bad!

dammit!

Well, crap! They just don't recognize a good thing when they have it right in front of them. Sorry, ghost.

I am sorry to hear this.

I give you respect and kudos for trying. Most people would rather just sit home and complain. Some people will always have a better chance than others, but it's still a numbers game, and most people don't get selected, so I wouldn't take it personally.

Sorry, ghost. That bites.

Damn, sorry

I'm sorry, ghost.

Wow, that was fast. Rejection e-mail came today. 2 hours ago. It also reminds me you can only audition 5 times/year under current rules.


They don't like me because I was on in the Regis days, they don't like me because I've tried out a lot (this is the 1st time in about 5 years, though), OK. But some of the other rejectees are inexplicable. An older guy who looked the part (I still like to think I don't look my age, but I probably now do) was just as miffed as me & didn't hide it. He'd been cracking up the waiting people around him earlier. He'd have been great on the show.

A young man I was in line with, & who took the test at my table, was a late interviewee too, & wasn't interviewed by the prime interviewer. I'm not 100% sure he wasn't sent it to be taped, but I don't think he was. I can't imagine what they had against him.

Occasionally the "lesser interviewers" would get what they thought was a good candidate, discuss it with someone, & send that person tape-way. So don't get completely discouraged if you get "lesser interviewer". Save that for the rejection letter.


But I saw one of them go on & on drawing info out of a musician who was going to buy bigger & better drums with the million; he was really getting into being coaxed to shine, too; & then I believe they sent him out the wrong door too.

As long as I'm doing a slight bit of write-up here: The Cure Lounge was absolutely the worst place I've ever been to for a quiz show audition. Dark. I had to keep repositioning my scantron sheet to even get enough light to see it. WWTBAM could at least have trucked in some lights. Noisy. There was loud music playing in the room where the interviewees were funneled into that leaked out into the test-taking room. Really distracting during the test.


While this is not the 1st BAM audition where they've let sound of the interviews leak out to the people waiting to be interviewed, this was the one with the most leakage. Since we were all sitting about 4 feet away. I guess they thought that loud music would mask their interviews, or something. Geez, didn't the club even have another room, besides taping room, where they could do those interviews in privacy?


To take the test, we were sitting at long card-table type of tables. About 6 or 8 to a table. If we'd wanted to cheat, we could have, we were so close. I switched a broken chair for the one next to me; next thing I know, hapless soul is seated next to me in broken chair.


People had to yell for pencils. I tried to get a sharpener, to no avail. A lot of people had envelopes with the tests missing.


When they called out the passers' #s, they called mine twice (not in a row; just later in the # callouts, again). I had planned to make a funny about that to the interviewer, but got rushed out so fast I never had the chance.


Some poor soul with worse handwriting (what looks like "104", my #?) probably never even got to be interviewed.

One of the few questions I didn't know or guess correctly is one I still can't get an answer to out of google, unless both my top choices are wrong, that is.

Some more write-up, as long as I'm back here for the moment.

A couple of people I was talking to in line would have made great contestants as "what they want on tv" for older people. They looked their age, which I guess is important (sorry to them if they're reading this) but had quirky personalities that came through in line & would have on tv, I think. One took time out to talk to me from writing stuff in a book; they told me it was their Personal Journal, & they write everything they do into it. They asked their mate, also in the line, what was the name of the street on which they'd bought their Starbucks drink, so they could write it down. I really mean they write everything. They had, not knowing that BAM would be coming to do an audition in Boston, flown down (using airline points) to NYC to audition earlier this summer. Stayed at the Y, which cost something like $120.00 a night. This is NYC. They didn't pass that test. Would have taken it again the next day but had already booked return flight (which got cancelled but too late for them to reaudition). This would have made a tv-ready story, but it didn't appear they passed this test either; at least I didn't see them in the interview room.


Another person in the line got some last minute jitters about "what kind of questions will be on the test"; I explained to them I hadn't taken it for about 5 years, but they used to be questions recycled from recent shows, & that I was at a disadvantage as I hadn't been watching the summer reruns, but they should feel glad they had been. They still pressed me for old questions I remembered, so I dug up one where I was asked about Bret Favre & didn't at the time even know who the hell he was. They whipped out their cell phone & started looking up Favre's various teams. Then they found a trivia site & started quizzing those around them about when Alaska & Hawaii became states. I got that right, having been alive at the time. I would have thought they were alive back then too, but they didn't seem to remember this. I told them about the web site BAM was running that "play the game" contest on earlier this year, so they tried to find it on their phone. I didn't see them in the interview room either, sadly.


Another pair of people were not so charming; one told me the other had passed the test before, & gotten to the taped interview by, they thought, holding the hand of the same-sex person they attended the test with & "trying to look gay" even though they weren't. Gay. I didn't want to expend the energy to tell them what I thought of all this. When I taped the actual show, one of the people sitting next to me in the ROF told me that if they won the FF they were going to come out on national tv because gay people needed a quiz show winner. I wanted to tell them that we were all under enough pressure & not to add that to it, but I had been asked if I wanted to sing the song I had sung at the audition on the show, if I won the FF, & I'd said "I guess so, if I can" instead of "yeah!", which is possibly why I got those bad FF buttons. My neighbor had probably told them about their plan to come out on tv. With auditions come gimmicks. Its only worse now. Bring back the phone game!


I don't know if "pretended to be gay" person passed the test this time. Or the person they came with, but that person was into telling the story, not holding hands, so I don't know if either were going to use the same gimmick.


The test questions did not appear to be from recent shows, unless my memory is really that bad. Except for one, which was at least modeled on a very old high-level question. And I think I flunked it this time around too. Got to look it up.

My gosh. I just looked it up & I got it right!


Maybe me & that younger person I previously mentioned from the line got interviewed at the end & got shown the no-taping door out because we scored too high? I very rarely score so high, I have to tell you. There's only one Q I'm sure I got wrong. That's one that younger person got right; they discussed it with their SO after the test. But there was an arithmetic Q on the test which I was too flustered to do in my head, so I did it on the test envelope (not the scantron; they warned us about that) & then erased it really well. I must have erased it really well, because I did at least get to the interview stage. Younger person said that Q was the one Q they just skipped over; they couldn't do it in their head at test time either.

ghostjmf wrote:Wow, that was fast. Rejection e-mail came today. 2 hours ago. It also reminds me you can only audition 5 times/year under current rules.


They don't like me because I was on in the Regis days, they don't like me because I've tried out a lot (this is the 1st time in about 5 years, though), OK. But some of the other rejectees are inexplicable. An older guy who looked the part (I still like to think I don't look my age, but I probably now do) was just as miffed as me & didn't hide it. He'd been cracking up the waiting people around him earlier. He'd have been great on the show.

A young man I was in line with, & who took the test at my table, was a late interviewee too, & wasn't interviewed by the prime interviewer. I'm not 100% sure he wasn't sent it to be taped, but I don't think he was. I can't imagine what they had against him.

Occasionally the "lesser interviewers" would get what they thought was a good candidate, discuss it with someone, & send that person tape-way. So don't get completely discouraged if you get "lesser interviewer". Save that for the rejection letter.

Sorry to hear about your experience, ghost. Frankly, from reading your and others' posts, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth...oh wait, that's taken...

I'm 58, a MAWG, was on in the Regis days...twice! The last FF I played was won by franktangredi. Prior to June, I had last auditioned in 2011 and did not one, but two videos; one was a standard interview, the second could potentially have been used for promotion. Yet I got the rejection postcard within 10 days. Why was the result different this time? Who knows?

I'm not sure there is a prime interviewer. The 3 or 4 that were interviewing at my audition are all producers (handler or wrangler seems like a better term); the one that themanwho interviewed with turned out to be my producer for the taping. And only of the others was in the testing room.

My interviewer commented on how many game shows I've done (a few more in addition to the Regis BAMs). I told him that since the last one was in 2000, that qualified me to be a "new face". Don't know if that impressed him.

Please let us know when your show airs.

Here in Boston we get one episode a day, at 12:30pm, so I'm trying not to read the "b" transcripts. I sure hope you're an "a"! In all ways.

There were no male interviewers at my audition, though there was an older man guarding the door to the taping so that none of us rejectees went through it, since it was marked "exit" just like the other door. Our door. He was the one who loaned me a stapler when I realized I was being asked to hand my questionnaire in (I had printed it out & filled it in ahead of time; a lot of people hadn't) but hadn't stapled it. Maybe that counted against me. I dunno.


There were a younger man & woman "working the line" waiting to get in. They were not interviewers. Well, the man wasn't, & I don't think the woman was. The woman was also one of the "crowd wranglers" for people taking the test.


I took the "no-one in line before 12:00pm" on the web site I'd gone to seriously. That was stupid, as there were over 70 people in line ahead of me by then. The people around me in line had all seen the publicity on the local station, WCVB, that airs WWTBAM, & that publicity said to show up by 12:00pm, they told me. The show took 70 in at a time, so I went in with the 2nd batch. They got another 70 in as I exited, but there were only about 10 people left in line at that point, around 3:30pm, so I don't know if I'd made it down there at 4:30pm, as planned, if I'd even have gotten to take the test. Someone asked one of the interviewers "when do you leave" & they said "6", whereas the publicity said "you have to be in line by 6:00pm to take the test", not "we're packing it in by 6:00pm".

As I put on my "about yourself" at the J! audition earlier this year, my 1st FF was won by T. L. Cubbage, who I only learned during J!'s Battle of the Decades this year had by the time he got on BAM won at least the J! teen or college tournament. He went on to win more J stuff after that. He didn't win Decades, but got pretty far.


J! was not interested in talking to me about any aspect of my BAM experience. I kinda knew that from previous discussions of J! auditions, but figured since Decades was airing at that time (May), & my BAM experience featured a J! star, they'd care. They did not.

grebelschnitz wrote:I'm not sure there is a prime interviewer. The 3 or 4 that were interviewing at my audition are all producers (handler or wrangler seems like a better term); the one that themanwho interviewed with turned out to be my producer for the taping. And only of the others was in the testing room.

She told me that her previous job had been as an AP on Teen Mom right here in Sioux Falls. I was so sure that was going to be my in.