The Apprentice LA - Episode 11

I’d like you to all close your eyes, while we all take a 30 second moment of silence, in memory of Tim, the Potential Apprentice.

[silence]

My friends, with the swoop of his wrinkly old hand, Donald Trump has kicked me off of the show. It was a good run, and a good fight, but my quest to be Donald Trump’s 6th helper was cut short on Sunday.

As you might imagine, my last 5 days have been crazy—I’ve done about 60 radio, TV, and newspaper interviews (which explains the extra tardiness of this recap), and there will be more next week. Below is one of these, a podcast:

Podcast Interview (Part 1): http://apprentice.tubecasts.com/digicasts/tcAPPR070404.mp3
Podcast Interview (Part 2): http://apprentice.tubecasts.com/digicasts/tcAPPR070405.mp3

Anyway, canned as I may have been, nothing will stop me from poring through the details of exactly how it happened—

Backing up to the last night of task 10 (day 30 overall):

I’m in the house, hanging back with Stephanie and Frank while James is in the boardroom. At this point, the real problems with the team hadn’t started yet—there was that little awkward moment where the I had told Nikki to watch out for James attacking the rollerblades idea, but in the episode that seemed a lot worse than it actually was at the time because they mixed Frank’s dark, ominous interview into the scene. The fact is, it wasn’t until James returned from the boardroom that night that the shit really hit the fan for the first time for me and Arrow.

So I was sitting around outside when I heard the girls return, and they got cute and pretended Nikki was fired. The three of them then came over and told me that I had gotten trashed in the boardroom by Trump, and that he had called me “disloyal.”

Not good.

I proceeded to call Trump a bastard (if I’m killed in the next few days, you’ll know why), and when James returned I went inside to hear what had happened from him. He said that he was disgusted after hearing Nikki advise Trump to ask me if I want to go to the other team, and “that she thinks I will say yes.”

James was being clever here—she never said she thought I’d say yes (which would imply that she and I had talked about it), but rather, “I’d be curious to hear his answer.” This was a weird thing for her to say, no doubt, but James reacted in the way he did because he wanted it to seem worse than it was. Steph and Frank jumped on board, and suddenly I was being accused of disloyalty to the team for the sake of Nicole, only minutes after being accused in the boardroom by Trump of being disloyal to Nicole for the sake of the team.

It’s actually pretty funny.

I kept arguing the same point to the three of them: “Yes, I wish she was on the team. Yes, I was rooting for her to survive that boardroom. No, I did not suggest to her that I wanted to switch to Kinetic. And no, I had never, and would never, give anything but 100% of my effort during a task—the only time I had ever or would ever talk to Nikki was between tasks.” And so, I argued, why should it matter? How was I hurting Arrow at all? And how did they, as friends of mine who had spent the last month with me and Nicole, not understand that I would never let my relationship with her affect my performance?

But it was too late. Because here’s the thing—how many times this season have you seen a consensus attack in the boardroom (a lot), and how many times has Trump not fired the person being consensus attacked (zero times). So if the goal in this game is to protect yourself and avoid being fired, there is a lot of incentive to form, and be a part of, a consensus.

When Surya was around, we were all basically safe—by week 8, he was the consensus firee. Suddenly, with Surya gone, a loss would leave us fighting with each other, and no one knew if they would be the one on the chopping block. Now, my loyalty to the team had come up, and you better believe a light bulb flickered in the heads of those three—“if we’re all mad at Tim, we’re all safe.” Further, there was incentive for them to make it as big a mess as possible—“if this becomes a huge blowup, we can point to what a distraction it has become on the team.” And I knew it at the time—just the fact that this team blowup took place was enough to condemn me, regardless of whether I had a strong argument as to why I was right, because it would be viewed as a “distraction” either way. The three of them formed an unspoken alliance during that argument. And I’m not saying all of this in hindsight—I knew all of this the second that blowup happened.

So they brought me outside for an interview. The producer’s first question: “So Tim—was she worth it?” I gave him the finger. Second question, “So what do you think your teammates will say in the boardroom if your team loses?” So I explained that this was suddenly a “do or die” task for me, and the first one of that kind for me (remember, none of this started until after the Universal task). I said that I would be on the hot seat if we lost, regardless of what transpired during the task, so that the only safety for me would be a win.

As hopeless as that sounds, it was late in the game. I had figured out that by the end of task 12 it would be down to the finals—and we were about to start task 11, so two wins was all I’d need. Moreover, if we won task 11 it would leave the teams at 4-2, which would warrant another shuffle, and I'd be out of this bad spot. So I really just needed to make sure we won this next task.

So, I returned from my interview, and despite telling Nikki I was coming back outside later, I went straight to bed. I was angry as hell that she had asked Trump that question—regardless of whether it was as bad as James said it was, or whether she had had good intentions, she had inadvertently thrown me under the bus by giving James the bait to cause that blowup. After calling me out the day before and starting this whole hideous mess, she had made things even worse now doing what she had just done. Thanks, babe.

So, the next morning, when we’re all brought to the LA Times building for the task announcement, and put on lockdown while we waited for Trump to put his hair on, I wouldn’t give her the slightest glance. She kept giving me a look like, “What the hell? Why didn’t you come back outside last night?” and I kept looking elsewhere.

We had overheard that Heidi was the new PM, and as a team we had discussed the night before that we thought Heidi and Nicole would both want to be PM for this one, and that we hoped that would cause tension between them. So though we were supposed to keep quiet during the lockdown, James asked the girls, “So Nicole, I assume you’re the new PM, right?” to stir the pot. Kind of awesome.

So Trump comes in and talks about the LA Times for 20 hours (I must say, the printing factory machines were damn cool), and announces the new task—we’d be creating a newspaper supplement for a mouthwash that would go into the LA Times.

We leave, and head to our photo/graphic design studio, where we’d be from 10am until we had to leave (as per the dossier) at 1am that night. The dossier added that we would be able to use a specified emergency copy center the next morning beginning at 5am, but that both teams could not use it simultaneously. Our presentation would be at 2pm the next day.

So, after picking up lunch from Baja Fresh, we arrive at the studio, and begin preparing for our meeting with the SmartMouth executives, which would take place at 11am. While we were having this discussion, Ivanka rolled in, straightening everyone’s spines. She asked how it was going, and Steph explained what we were doing. While she was talking, James started cleaning up the table, and throwing away the mess from lunch. Steph, who was not done yet, stopped mid-sentence while talking to Ivanka and said to James, “Don’t throw the guacamole away,” and then continued her sentence. In typical Ivanka form, she chuckled at the time, and then viciously attacked Steph for this in the boardroom two days later (same thing she did with Martin with his “I’m exhausted” comment).

Anyway, Ivanka bolts after about 10 minutes, and shortly after, the evil executives walk in. In our meeting, they stressed a few things:

-SmartMouth is the only mouthwash that leaves you waking up with no morning breath after taking it the night before, and lasts all day long afterward.
-The demographic of SmartMouth is “everyone.”
-SmartMouth is closer to a prescription drug than a mouthwash, by actually working at the molecular level, removing sulfuric acid from the food particles that attach to your mouth after eating.
-Like all mouthwash companies, SmartMouth is evil, creating an entire thriving business off instilling a fear of bad breath in the general public.

They left, and we began brainstorming. Here’s what the episode’s editing showed:

Frank comes up with an idea about a couple in bed, and then I cut him off and frantically explain my idea about people holding their hands to their faces in a white room. Then James interviews that I know I’m on the hot seat if we lose and I’m reacting by being frantic, which is overbearing for the rest of the team.

Here’s what happened:

I come up with the idea of a couple in bed. Frank comes up with a variation of that idea. I suggest that the whole couple in bed idea is bad because the audience is too narrow. More ideas get tossed around. I come up with the idea to have a group of all different shapes, colors, and ages of people to represent “everyone” and they’re all self-conscious about their bad breath and then at the end of the supplement they’re all “cured” and smiling. All three of them love the idea, and we decide to go with it. I’m as enthusiastic during this session as I’ve been during the last 5 tasks’ brainstorming sessions, no more and no less. Then, two days later, after we’ve learned that we lost and James is preparing his attack of me in the boardroom, he interviews that I was overbearing during the task.

I swear—I’m not bitter.

So the next step is to actually go and get the props (pajamas, etc.) and recruit 10 or so tourists for our photo shoot. We allot $2,500 of our seed money for the recruiting, figuring that if we offer $250/tourist to appear in a “real Hollywood photo shoot for the LA times!” it would be no problem to get people.

Two of us would stay back and plan out the details of the supplement and the accompanying text, and two of us would go get the props/people. Frank says, “James I’ll stay here with you,” and James replies, “No, I think Tim should stay back and work on the supplement with me—you and Stephanie should go.”

Quick fact check: James sends Frank to help Stephanie with her errand, and insists that I stay with him to create the actual supplement. Two days later in the boardroom, Frank is a crucial asset to the team, and I am mainly a distraction.

I swear—not bitter in the least.

So, I lay out the supplement’s contents—beginning picture of “everyone” with bad breath, middle pages with a classic delicious-looking “two yummy liquids mixing into one” picture, a scientific explanation, and an end picture of the same “everyone,” now smiling and without bad breath. James liked it, and I began working with the photographer on creating the “two liquids pouring together” photo.

This photo took about 6 total hours or work, because you can’t actually pour them together—you need to take 837 shots of each liquid pouring and splashing, and then work with the graphic designer to splice a ton of these photos together into the final picture. Plus, the actual mouthwash colors weren’t delicious-looking enough, so I used food coloring and water to create the perfect colors.

Now, say what you want about our supplement—but that pouring graphic was intensely delicious. I want a 12-foot blowup of it on my wall (with “Listerine” or another competitor labels pasted over the “SmartMouth” labels, of course). I may tattoo the graphic on my chest.

Anyway, Steph and Frank returned with the people and the pajamas. It was a hilarious crowd of boisterous tourists, thrilled to tell their friends that they had basically made it big in Hollywood. (It’s also funny to picture what occurred for them this past Sunday. They had no idea while it was happening in June that it was for The Apprentice—so I imagine their phones were ringing off the hook Sunday night with people they know asking them why they were in Arrow’s supplement on The Apprentice. Then they probably said, “I’m in what?” and then put the pieces together and realized what that weird photo shoot they did on their summer trip 9 months ago really was. Reality TV is weird.)

So we all got in our pajamas and got set up for the shoot. Frank, realizing he hadn’t contributed much so far, decided that he would direct the photo shoot. Which began with Frank trying to figure out what I had in mind, and ended with me directing the photo shoot. This took an upsettingly long time, as the tourists kept laughing and ruining the shots. And, as I stood there, in my pajamas, surrounded by tourists, holding my hand up to my mouth and yelling out directions to the tourists, I could only think to myself, “You’ve made a series of decisions in the past few months, and you’ve ended up here.”

So we finished, and our jolly group of friends exited the premises, and we all went upstairs to work with the graphic designer (who was a massive bitch). I continued work on the heavenly pouring shot, while Steph worked on the presentation, James sketched out the scientific insert, and Frank existed.

Anyway, we all plugged away, and it was around this time that Frank started second-guessing everything and panicking that our supplement wouldn’t be clear. Sure, this may have been a valid concern, but we all knew that our idea was a risk, and we had decided to take this risk, and it was way too late to realistically start another photo shoot—so the only end-result was that he made the team more nervous. Two days later in the boardroom, Frank would proudly explain that he had been against our idea. I may not have played this game perfectly, but I never once pulled shit like this.

So anyway, we continued working. I was exhausted, and after a couple hours working with the graphic designer, I got off my chair to lay on the ground, and continued to give directions from down there. Bad move. In the subsequent boardroom, Stephanie attacked me for this, saying it was unprofessional and disrespectful to do that. I was positive this would make the episode—pleasantly, the editors spared me this.

At 1am our deadline at that studio and with that graphic designer hit, so we packed up. We went from there to Kinkos, to have those big signs made up that we used during the presentation. This took awhile, and by the time we finished it was almost 3am. We would definitely be needing to use the “emergency” copy shop the next morning to finish the supplement and print out final copies. Since the dossier specified that we could not begin work at the copy shop until 5am, and that only one team could use it at a time, and because we knew that the other team would most likely need it as well, and that it would be first come first serve, we decided to go straight to the studio and sleep in the parking lot until 5am and get in there first.

I gotta say, heading to the copy studio to sleep for an hour in a van before waking up to finish working on a newspaper supplement, I believe I was a bit sick of these tasks. This type of gross situation had become incredibly commonplace—yet in the real world, it would be almost inconceivably nightmarish.

And of course, we woke up at 5:25am and the other team was already in the copy shop. Hideous. So we sat there, in the parking lot, waiting for 3 hours until the other team emerged (the producers gave them a time limit since otherwise they could have stayed there till the end and blocked us from getting in).

We went in, and saw the three enemy girls coming out (we tried to get a peek at their supplement, to no avail), and we got to work. James and I worked on the science insert, and created it from scratch, and worked on it until it looked as professional as one of those diagrams in Time Magazine.

Since our presentation was at 2pm, around 11am, Steph and Frank headed back to the house to shower and change and we planned to follow them as soon as we finished. But of course, we didn’t finish until 12:30, and had no choice but to go straight to the site of the presentation, since it would have been a monumental catastrophe to miss our presentation.

You saw the whole fiasco with my suit. The reason I didn’t have it was that we had completely intended on coming back to the house to sleep the night before, or if not, certainly in the morning before the presentation. We never considered that we might not ever make it back. This would have been fine, since Steph could bring my suit for me from the house—except we had no phones and had no way to communicate, and they didn’t know I didn’t have my suit.

So James and I went to the presentation site, James in his suit (which he still had on from the morning before), and me in my pajamas from the photo shoot. When we got there we saw the executives standing outside, and had to wait 20 minutes for them to finally go inside before we got out of the van, so that they wouldn’t see me in my idiot pajamas. We finally went in, and had no idea if Steph and Frank were still waiting at the house for us, or if they were on the way, or whether they had thought to bring a suit for me.

Stressful times.

I was preparing myself to give the presentation in pajamas, and pretend that we had done this intentionally, as if I was portraying the morning breath person—we were actually planning a ridiculous emergency skit as a backup plan.

And then they came in, with the suit. Exhale.

We had about thirty minutes to wait before our presentation. In the meantime, we sat around and collectively admired our supplement—we were sure we had won. It was beautiful, and effective. Frank was holding up the pouring liquids graphic and saying, “Dis is da best ting I evah saw! Yah brilliant!” and petting me on the head excitedly. We were talking about winning 3 in a row and 5 out of 6 and how awesome we were in general.

The episode made it appear that Team Arrow was at odds throughout the task, but we were not. Sitting in this room, we all loved each other, and were thrilled with our work. Sure, there were the underlying issues, but I wasn’t at all thinking about them.

So 2pm rolls around, and we present. Steph presents well, the exec’s seem pleased, and we went back into our little assigned room, and were even (more) happier than we had been before. We looked at our supplement—it was gorgeous.

After some time we were called back out. Both supplements were on the table. And then I saw their supplement. I had the same reaction you did when I saw that theirs was shaped like the actual bottles—“Uh oh.”

They had gone a whole further step outside the box.

Kinetic wins.

Looking back, this was a fair verdict. Ours looked beautiful, and polished, and it could have been done by a professional advertising company. Theirs looked cheap and low-budget—but they hit the mark better with the 24-hour thing (even if we captured the idea of “everyone” better). And theirs was shaped like those damn bottles—which is much more compelling for a random LA Times reader skimming through the paper.

The judges also didn’t like our scientific insert. Our thinking behind this was not that people would carefully study the diagram (although I, as a nerd, probably would have). Our thought was that the diagram would give the impression that this was much more than a minty mouthwash—it was a hardcore medicine, and a hardcore solution for bad breath.

So back to the room we go, and we’re put on lockdown, and we’re all dejected and looking down, and I’m thinking, “Fuck.”

We went back to the house and moved outside to the campsite, and Frank was sitting there chomping his chips (phenomenal comedic job by the editors on this scene), and it was just awkward. The last time we lost we had Surya—this time the four of us were all good friends.

And as we sat there, we heard a scream coming from the house. A few minutes later, 6 people came over to the hedge, and called me and Frank over.

Their family members were there. Completely shocking. And it took about 5 seconds for me to realize that of course, this meant that our family members had been there too, and that we could have seen them if we had won.

So upsetting. After a month in this surreal world, it would have been amazingly fun to see a family member. I introduced myself to the two moms and Kristine’s dreamy husband, and could not have been more unhappy to have to deal with this—I was exhausted, I had lost, I was about to get fired, and I have to smile and be pleasant and introduce myself to Nikki’s mom. Seriously, think about this. This is an awkward moment for a guy in any situation, but here it was utterly miserable.

We learn from the three family members that apparently, they had been altogether with the four of our family members in the LA airport, all waiting for the verdict, and after a few hours it was announced to them that Kinetic had won, and the four of our people had been sent right back on a plane home.

Painful.

I asked them who had been there for me. My mom, they told me. For those of you that know Robin Urban, well—that would have been fun for all of you (less fun for me, perhaps). Just a shame overall.

They told us it would have been Frank’s dad, James’ wife, and Stephanie’s mom as well. The four of us were incredibly unhappy about this news (Frank was the most upset).

A couple hours later, Nikki called me over to tell me that she was telling her mom the story about her leaving the team to see what she would say. The editing here was a bit off. They showed me coming back from that looking upset, and James interviewing, “Give me a break! Doesn’t Tim realize that this girl is killing him?!”

What happened was—this was a 30 second interaction between me and her mom, and it was mostly in jest, and I came back from that and Frank and I joked around about it, and James said something like, “Uh! Women!!” and that was that. They showed clips of James and Frank looking annoyed, and with James’ interview on top, it seemed like this was a lot more tense and awkward than it actually was.

That night I was still angry that I was gonna get fired mainly because of Nikki’s reaction to everything over the past few days, and I wanted her to know that, but I did not want to get into it in front of the cameras all over again, so I wrote it down and figured I’d hand it to her on paper. The camera kept trying to film what I was writing over my shoulder, so I held the paper in the dark so they couldn’t see it. Before I went to bed, I handed it to her, completing our cycle of acting like we’re in middle school, and I went to sleep.

The next morning I went on my long interview, while presumably, back at the campsite, the team solidified their plan to go after me. I came back and only Frank was there. Usually he and I would have talked and had a beer. Not today—we both knew what was coming, and it was awkward. A few hours later when the other two returned from their interviews, I brought up the boardroom, and suggested that we at least address the task so that there were no surprises in the boardroom. None of them wanted to talk about it.

So when we headed up to the boardroom, I was well aware of what was coming. And I was okay with it. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t the type that just had to have this job—I thought of it as a game, and accepted that I had made it far, and was probably toast, and to be honest I was excited to be in a “nothing to lose” boardroom where I would either survive or go down swinging.

Bring it the fuck on.

So I went in, and got stabbed from every possible angle (you only saw about a third of the attacks), while I tried to fight them off. But the problem was, it was such an ambush, that every time I started to respond to an attack, I’d be cut off with a different attack, either from my teammates, Ivanka (who was fully gunning for me in this one—I still don’t really know why), and Trump. I wanted to get all these arguments out, so I ended up with a queue in my head of things I needed to rebut, and felt like I wasn’t able to finish a coherent rebuttal. The frustration mounted, and led to me cutting off Ivanka.

Boardroom 101: Don’t do that.

So we continued—my initial plan of attack had been to go after James, with the argument that I had basically been the PM for the last 3 tasks as much as James had, and that I had come up with most of the winning ideas on the previous two.

But then Trump declared that “James had been a great leader,” and that he wasn’t going to fire James or Stephanie. So I did a U-turn and went after Frank.

You heard a lot of what happened from here forward. My arguments against Frank were strong (mainly that you could hire any competent person to do what Frank does), but there were two big problems:

1) My ideas had lost us this task: My main argument here was that yes, I had come up with almost this whole supplement, but that I had also come up with our central concepts on 4 of the previous 5 tasks, 3 of which we had won on the strength of my ideas. Unfortunately, Trump was completely uninterested in this, and kept going back to, “You were the reason you lost this task!” Sigh.

2) The Nicole fiasco: I was being attacked by Ivanka for showing loyalty to Nicole when she was on the other team (which she claimed couldn’t coexist with team loyalty—I disagreed, as long as it never affected the task). Simultaneously, I was attacked by Trump for “letting Nicole go” and being loyal to the team over standing up for her. And let’s also remember that Trump has been applauding this relationship since day one, saying things like, “I’m proud of you, Tim,” and “If you can land her, you’ll be my next Apprentice.”

So seriously—what the fuck?

And even when I had good arguments against both of these contradictory attacks, the team was able to pull the, “regardless, just the fact that we’re talking about all this shows that it was a distraction.” To which my response was that it was only a distraction because the team had made a huge deal of it so that it would be a distraction, and that these were just easy, cheap, bullshit attacks so they could get rid of the stronger player. Not to mention that it was only such a big deal in the first place because Trump had continually brought it up.

--Deep breath--

In the end, there were too many reasons on the table to fire me, and not nearly enough time for me to explain why most of them were bullshit.

And so, “Tim, you’re fired.”

I’ll say, that part was kind of fun. It was kind of fun actually being fired.

Surreal and fun.

So we all left, and in the episode it looked like they all stormed away without the slightest goodbye. What actually happened was that we said our goodbyes inside, where they didn’t have a camera. James hugged me and said, “Good man.” Frank hugged me and said, “We’ll see you in three days, buddy.” Stephanie hugged me and gave me a look that said, “I’m so sorry.”

I guess this is the name of the game. I guess. But these three suddenly being back in old form after putting on a different mask in the boardroom really rubbed me the wrong way. But since it’s a reality show, and not the real world, I’ll leave it at that.

And into the Dead Man’s Lexus I went.

We started driving, and stopped around the corner to pick up a camera guy and a lighting guy. They told me to talk for as long as I want. I went on for awhile, about being laid-off, kicked to the curb, and grayed out. I talked about how it was the 4th of July at the time. “Fired on the 4th of July—God bless America!” I explained. I talked about how I had had a good run, and how I went down swinging, and that I had had a lot of fun. As frustrating as that boardroom was, I had expected to be sitting in that Lexus, and I was more amused with my whole life in general than anything else at that moment. Donald Trump had just fired me—I found that just really amusing in general. And, it hit me that I didn’t have to do a task the next day. I can’t possibly express how amazing this fact was. I was free. So I was actually reasonably pleased with things.

Then, after I finished my soliloquy, the lighting guy pulled out a piece of paper that the producers had given him, with a list of questions they wanted me to answer—most of them were something along the lines of, “Was she worth it?”

And then they put the camera away, and I sat there and enjoyed the ride. “Tim, you’re fired.” Ha.

So anyway. Looking back in the following days and weeks, was it a frustrating ending? Yes. Was I taking it that seriously? No. After nine months, have I gotten over it? Definitely. There were moments watching these episodes, where I would see the situation for what it was, and I’d know that I really could have won this thing if things had gone a bit differently, and that was frustrating. But in the end, it’s a reality show—and after having a ton of fun, finding a girlfriend, and getting, for the most part, a fair edit—I look upon the whole thing fondly.

As for James, Steph, and Frank, I had two options as to how to proceed: I could hold a grudge and sever ties with them, or I could say fuck it and act civil and let it go and be friends. I chose the latter—it’s a fucking TV show. Of course, this doesn’t prevent me from making hilarious passive-aggressive bitter remarks here and there (I texted Frank on Sunday morning and told him to “cross your fingers and root for me tonight”—of course he didn’t get the irony and responded lovably with, “Good luck buddie love you it will be ok”. I can't fucking stay mad at that guy). I had the same two options in regards to Nicole—I could make a big deal about getting fired for all that, and probably end things between us, or I could say “fuck it I like this girl it’s a TV show let’s actually give this a try,” and again, I chose the latter.

While my lack of post-firing venom provides little amusement for all of you, sitting in that Lexus I was on my way to the place where all the firees were residing, and upon arriving I quickly learned that not everyone took the same “fuck it” attitude. There was quite some bitterness where I was headed.

And next week, there will be another recap—my experience upon joining the firees in loser-land.

Down, but not out—

Tim

My exit interview: http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week11_videos.html#1643977