Wednesday, March 08, 2000

It's Not So Easy

For its 30 million viewers, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is a diverting way to spend an hour. But for at least one contestant, it was the longest day in his life

Jonathan Kay
National Post

In 24 hours, my friend Brian Kalt could be rich. Right now, though, he hasn't got much more than the shirt on his back. Somewhere on the way from Lansing, Mich., to New York City, United Airlines lost his bags. Tomorrow, he may have to appear on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire wearing the wrinkled chinos and plaid shirt he's got on now.

But Brian is calm. It's 10:30 p.m., and we're in his Upper West Side hotel room, a few blocks south of the ABC studios. Tonight's plan was to go out for a drink, but he can't seem to get the Millionaire producers off the phone. For the last hour, they've been pumping him for sound bites and anecdotes -- grist for Regis Philbin if Brian gets to the hot seat tomorrow.

"I have a picture of myself with Alex Trebek," Brian says into the phone. "And I'm glad I got it. When I was on Jeopardy!, the first thing my friends asked me is what Alex Trebek looked like in real life ... It was Teen Jeopardy!, actually. I was five feet tall, so I had to stand on a box ..."

The producer changes the subject. Presumably, he isn't interested in setting Regis up to plug rival game shows.

"How I met my wife? That's an interesting question ..."

Sara, who up to now has been chatting excitedly with me about the couple's new home -- and the possibility of paying it off with Millionaire prize money -- shoots Brian a nervous look. She's not fond of this tale.

"A friend told me about this Web site, jewishpersonals.com ... Yeah, I know, it's a little embarrassing ..."

Reluctantly, Brian tells the story. But he chooses his words carefully. Brian may have to repeat it tomorrow for a television audience of 30 million. Sara is sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, head in hands, giggling nervously.

---

On television, each episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire lasts one hour. In the studio, it lasts almost four and audience members are forced to stay put during the whole thing (they warn you to visit the bathroom beforehand). Just like at the Grammys, empty seats aren't tolerated.

To pass dead time, and to keep the audience's energy level high, ABC uses a warm-up act. The day Brian's show is taping, it's a club comedian named Quentin Heggs.

"I would love to see more black people on this show," Quentin tells us while Regis and the contestants are still in make-up. "We had a wonderful brother here on the show yesterday. He looked so fine -- wearing a suit and all ... But the poor fool didn't know a damn thing. Hey -- there should be a black version of this show: Who Wants to Pay the Rent -- You could have questions like 'Put the following pimps in the order in which they were arrested.' "

We all laugh. Quentin is black. So it's funny.

An elderly white lady in the front row catches Quentin's eye. "Ooooo-weeeee!" he yells, looking the septuagenarian up and down with mock arousal. "Let me drive Miss Daisy!"

And then the 10 contestants come out -- seven men and three women. All are white, the lone hint of ethnic diversity being provided by Dario Carnevale, a slicked-back central casting Italian from Miami. The others conform to the pasty-skinned argyle-socked Millionaire aesthetic. As far as sex appeal goes, only Sally Beard from Colorado stands out. She's the one, I suspect, that the Millionaire people would like to put in the hot seat. Sally's blond and thin -- and the presence of her identical twin sister in the crowd would make for good TV.

Brian is introduced eighth -- to the wild cheers of Sara and me. He looks well-rested, despite the ordeal of last night. We spent the wee hours with Millionaire's producers talking through the mini-crisis caused by Brian's lost bags. (They have a permanent suite in the hotel where contestants stay.) His plaid shirt, they decided, couldn't be worn on air. Apparently tight patterns play havoc with the camera. I offered one of my shirts -- but none of them were acceptable either. White dress shirts reflect too much light -- and all my golf shirts were adorned with logos, which, I learned, are not permitted. (Look carefully -- you will never see a pony or alligator on any Millionaire contestant.) The agreed upon solution was for Sara to buy Brian a shirt at The Gap in the morning.

Before coming to New York, Brian calculated the amount he could reasonably expect to win today was $27,000. "According to the Millionaire Web site, hot seat contestants have won an average of $81,000," Brian told me last night. "But you have to divide that by three -- because usually only about three out of the 10 people make it to the hot seat -- four at most."

But I know that Brian's odds are better than that. During rehearsal this afternoon, he and the other nine contestants played six Fastest Fingers rounds. Brian won three and came in second twice. The smart money -- my money anyway -- is on him.

But on the first Fastest Fingers -- which requires the contestants to put four heist movies into chronological order -- Brian falters. His answer is correct, but his time, 6.49 seconds, is three quarters of a second off the leader. Shane Demmitt, a stiff, 28-year-old law student from L.A., jumps out of his seat pumping both fists.

For Brian, watching Shane ensconce himself in the hot seat stirs up mixed emotions. "On the one hand, you've spent the whole day in rehearsal with these nine people," he tells me later. "There's a lot of bonding and you want them to do well. On the other hand, the show's only an hour. The longer they spend answering questions, the less of a chance you have of getting there yourself. So, you want them to do their thing and get out of there quickly."

My emotions are rather less conflicted. I want Shane to guess wrong at the first question and slink off the stage.

Unfortunately, he notches up $64,000 before stumbling. For $125,000, he is asked which composer did not compose a Requiem Mass: Mozart, Brahms, Rossini or Verdi. According to Shane, Verdi. According to fact, Rossini. Regis shakes Shane's hand and the remaining nine contestants prepare for another shot at Fastest Fingers.

This time, Brian delivers. The question requires him to place four memoirs -- Iacocca, Tis, Sein Language and A Life on the Road -- in chronological order of publication. Brian's time is weaker than before: 7.34 seconds, but when the scores are displayed, only his name is illuminated. Every other contestant -- Dario, Sally and all the rest of them -- answered the question wrong. Sara and I cheer deliriously.

What follows next is slightly anticlimactic. Brian, now perched in the hot seat, doesn't feel right. He's diabetic, and worried that the excitement might have affected his blood sugar (It's climbed to 300 mg/deciliter, I later find out, three times his target resting level). "I need a break," he tells Regis.

The cameras stop and Quentin comes bounding out of his bullpen, giving out free Millionaire T-shirts to audience members who sing TV sitcom themes for him. (The highlight: Quentin and an Edith Bunker sound-a-like perform a multiracial All in the Family duet. The lowlight: Saved by the Bell rendered in a nasty Long Island accent. I expect the perpetrator to be booed and hissed out of the studio but, to my horror, half the audience joins in enthusiastically.)

And then Brian returns, insulin-injected. I notice that Sara is no longer sitting in my section. During the break, she was discretely moved to the camera-friendly "Relationship Seat" in the first row -- the better to capture her beaming and squirming as Brian starts to climb the money ladder.

Brian breezes through the preliminary questions. Egypt, Angola, Romania, Kenya -- which is not in Africa? How many watts in a gigawatt? What kind of fruit is a clementine? Without using a lifeline, he glides to $16,000.

Sara does well, too. Her role, for the most part, is to applaud (along with the rest of us) when the "applause" sign flashes. But after Regis makes Brian tell the story of how they met, he turns to Sara and asks her to describe the first date. The story is not world class -- a misunderstanding about whether they were supposed to meet at Penn Station or Grand Central Station. But she tells it lucidly, eliciting a solidly appreciative "awwwwww" from the audience.

And then, for $32,000: The Royal Air Force, the Irish Republican Army, The U.S. Air Force, The Royal Navy -- in which organization did Jack Aubrey, hero of Patrick O'Brian's 20 novels, serve? Brian doesn't know this one. And so he elects to poll the audience, using the first of his three lifelines. Regis directs us to select an answer using the push-button consoles located on our seats.

By some miracle, I happen to know this one (when I play the online version of Millionaire, I usually don't get past $1,000). And so I instruct the dozen or so audience members within earshot to pick Answer D, Royal Navy. The gesture makes me feel involved. If Brian earns the million, I think, I'll be able to claim some of the credit.

But disaster strikes. Thirty-nine percent of the audience, wooed by the "O" in Patrick O'Brian's last name, erroneously pick the IRA -- exactly the same percentage who take the correct answer. And so Brian is forced to use a second lifeline. He calls his former boss, a federal appeals court judge in Louisville, Ky. Brian gets his answer -- but goes down to a single lifeline in the process.

Regis proceeds. For $64,000, who composed the theme to The Bodyguard? I hold my breath. This, I know, is exactly the sort of bubble gum question Brian feared. "I'm not afraid of the questions that one out of a hundred people know," he told me before the show. "Chances are, I'm the one-in-a-hundred dork who knows it. What scares me are the questions that everyone knows except me -- the sort of things you learn in Entertainment Weekly. I'm terrified that I'll get up there and, for $500, Regis will ask me how many guys there are in Backstreet Boys."

And yet, despite it all, he nails it: Dolly Parton.

But he is not so lucky going for $125,000: Milwaukee, Chicago, Nashville, Atlanta -- Where did Oprah get her start in television? (Again, I surprise myself. I know the answer to be Nashville, having seen Oprah's A&E Biography in January.) "I think it's Chicago," he says, "But I really don't know." He uses his last lifeline, and two wrong answers are dropped from the list, leaving Nashville and Atlanta.

But he is still left with a blind 50-50 guess. I curse my fellow audience members. If 39% of them hadn't imputed terroristic attitudes to Jack Aubrey, Brian would still have his phone call left. He could call half the middle-aged women in North American and they'd probably know.

The seconds tick away. "I'm only 51% sure," Brian says, overstating his certainty by 1%, "but I think it's Atlanta."

I feel as if I'm in one of those dreams where someone you know is in trouble and you're powerless to help. I wonder what would happen if I just shouted out the answer. (Later, Brian told me that the producers had warned him of this eventuality. "The sort of person who would shout out something," a producer told him, "is probably the sort of person who will give you the wrong answer.")

"Final answer?" asks Regis.

"Final answer," says Brian.

And thus did Brian's trip to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire end. With good grace, he steps out of the hot seat, shakes Regis' hands and leaves the set. Sara applauds, her telegenic smile only slightly dented. Brian has won $32,000.

---

That night, Brian, Sara and I go out for dinner with a few New York friends. There's an odd mood in the air. None of us are such big shots that $32,000 doesn't seem like an amount worth celebrating; and yet, somehow, an air of consolation hangs over the table. It's as if the ocean of difference between a million and 32,000 looms so large in our minds that we are incapable of appreciating the Great Lake separating 32,000 and zero.

But Brian, at least, seems genuinely pleased with his winnings. Over steaks, he relates to me a lesson the show's executive producer related to the contestants during rehearsal. "A lot of people come on the show and use their lifelines early," says Brian. "Then they get to, say, $8,000, and they don't know the answer to the question. So they guess. And, 75% of the time, they guess wrong. After the show, people ask them why they didn't just take the $4,000, and they say, 'I got all the way to the hot seat on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. There's no way I'm going to settle for $4,000.' But think about it -- if you went to Las Vegas and you won $4,000, how would you react?"

I nod my head, chewing the steak he's bought me.

"You'd call everybody," Brian says. "You'd call every person you know."

LIFE OF BRIAN:

1972 Born in Detroit, Mich.

1977 Receives World Book Encyclopedia as gift from grandmother.

1978-1986 Reads World Book Encyclopedia.

1986 Gets job at local library. More reading ensues.

1987 Appears on the first annual Jeopardy! Teen Tournament at age 14, wins $5,000.

1987 Participates in high school Quiz Bowl.

1990 Moves up to College Bowl at University of Michigan. Named to UM "all-star" team as a freshman, travels to first of three national championship tournaments.

1991-93 Brian's College Bowl team wins UM championship three years running.

1994 Attends Yale Law School.

1999 Is turned down for a slot in a Jeopardy! reunion show.

1999 Auditions unsuccessfully for NBC's 21.

2000 Appears on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, wins $32,000.

Total winnings $37,000 (US)

Brian's self-estimated hourly wage for pursuing trivia obsession four hours a day, over 25 years of literate life $1.10 per hour, before taxes.