The Apprentice LA - Episode 3

For months I knew it was coming. The tour bus episode.

The day I’d relive the worst day of my life. Okay, maybe, possibly, not the worst day of my life, but definitely the worst hour and a half of my life.

As usual, the episode is up on Yahoo, here:
apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week3_videos.html#1643381

And if you enjoyed my complete and utter misery and would like to see more, this is a webisode further exploring the happenings of our horrible mini-team. It also touches on Frank and Michelle clashing, a completely hilarious dynamic which the episode didn’t have time to capture:

apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week3_videos.html#1643359

Alright, so backing up to the morning of day 1 of task 3 (day 7 overall)—

We were woken up at 4:30am and headed to the Loews hotel, where we saw the other team. None of us knew what the hell was going on—we all vaguely remembered Trump saying something about the winning team having a task off, but none of us was sure we heard him right, and when we saw Kinetic there we thought that maybe we had misunderstood. Then, Trump tells Kinetic to enjoy a day of luxury and pampering at the hotel and sends them off. Lovely.

So while we go the next 40 hours working our asses off without sleeping, and then endure a day of interviews and stress followed by a boardroom, they get a day of pampering and THREE full days to relax and catch up on their sleep. Why the producers decided to give a team a task off, I still don’t know.

So the other team leaves, and Trump asks us who wants to be project managers. Unlike the last task, I was tempted here, but I refrained. As I mentioned, my pre-show strategy was to step up as PM for the first time either task 4 or 5. By then I’d know my team well, and wanted a few tasks under my belt before I took the lead. But I didn’t want to wait until task 6 or later either.

Aaron volunteers, and Trump asks Michelle if she would like to step up—she agrees, although she expressed to me later that she was very upset about this—which is reasonable. She had a bad clash with the team on the last task, and could have used this task to be hard-working and pleasant and show the team she wasn’t a nightmare to work with after all—leadership wasn’t what she needed at this moment, at all. So Aaron and Michelle pick teams, and when Michelle chooses me with the first pick, and the camera shows me scowling.

This brings me to a side note. The producers have 72 hours of footage (times 2 teams) to work with each task, to create a 40 minute episode, and in those 40 minutes they have to create a clear-cut, black and white story. They don’t have time to make the people or the story multi-dimensional. The result for me is that sometimes I’ll be on the right side of that story (i.e. Episode 1), and sometimes I’ll be on the wrong side (Frank, for example, was really on the wrong side Episode 1—yeah, he was bad, but he wasn’t that bad). And in either case, they’ll twist your character a bit for the sake of the story. Hence, I’m apparently being a guy that hates Michelle and talks shit to her face, and hates her behind her back. When in reality, yes, Michelle weirded me out, and I wasn’t ecstatic to be led by her, but she and I got along fine, and at most I found her mildly annoying and oddly icy.

So I wasn’t surprised when I was her first pick, and I certainly wasn’t rolling my eyes and scowling, but the camera showed cuts of me doing that at the right times, for their story, “Tim, Nicole and Frank hate Michelle and they’re all on a team together with Michelle as the leader.” Hell, I don’t blame them—I’d watch that. (I’m not trying to exonerate myself here—this was not my best task—but things weren’t as bad as they looked.)

So I head over to Michelle’s side. Aaron picks James. At that point Michelle made the mistake of conferring with me before her next pick. I suggested that she pick Nicole, and so she did (if I hadn’t said that, she would have picked Stefani, who was one of her few friends on the team). Which, as we know, didn’t turn out too well for Michelle. Yikes.

Then Aaron picks Stef and we get Frank, accompanied by his large, fat head.

I’ll be honest—at that time, I thought we had the better team. [cut]

So we headed to our “war room” (the assigned place we have access to that day for brainstorming). One of the 3 things we’d be rated on by the tourists was “Theme Originality”, so we thought hard about our theme. This was a long brainstorming session, and Michelle adopted the “I will poo poo every idea any of you have, but I will also be petrified to put out any of my own ideas” leadership style—not ideal. I was all up on my “LA scavenger hunt” idea—in retrospect, it would have been stupid. The one positive would have been that we could make any route with any series of interesting stops and we could have made it work for a scavenger hunt. Everything’s so spread out in LA that fitting themed stops into a 90 minute driving route is difficult. But “A day in the life of the rich and famous”—in reality, Nicole’s idea, although they showed it being Michelle’s—seemed to all of us like a winner at the time.

I came up with the idea for “Red Light Trivia”—since there would be so many stoplights along the tour, this seemed like a good way to deal with that. We’d have prizes, and there is endless Hollywood trivia we could use. Michelle and I were in charge of the route (I’ve lived in LA for 2 years, and Michelle was born and raised there), and Nicole and Frank would get the trivia together. This would be fun and make the tourists laugh and get them involved. Everyone on the team agreed this was a good idea.

From there, we headed to the bus, which had “Topless Tour Bus” written across it (because it has no roof). Michelle insisted we cover up the word “Topless”—for this reason, Frank and Nicole spent the rest of the day making and manufacturing a huge sign to cover the bus. (They also got fruit, candy, and water for the tourists—but since the editors’ story was, “Michelle’s team does everything wrong and Aaron’s team does everything right”, this didn’t make the cut, so it would seem like the other team thought to get water and we didn’t—that said, we did not think to put one of our team members on an actual tour, and Aaron’s team did, and this was a good idea by them.)

While Nicole and Frank were on their mission to make a pointless banner, Michelle and I embarked on the worst 6 hours of my life (the tour itself would eclipse this as the new worst moment of my life the following day). We initially decided on Beverly Hills, since that’s where the rich and famous actually spend their day. And we thought it would be a different kind of tour—we’d stop on Rodeo Drive and let the tourists walk around, we’d let them check out a super-fancy salon, we’d take them by the huge mansions and point out stars’ homes—it seemed like a good idea. So we head there and after a 45 minute drive, the producer gets word on his little earpiece that we’re not allowed to stop the bus anywhere in Beverly Hills (which means we can’t start or stop the tour there, or let anyone walk around)—and without the planned 30-40 minutes of stops, it wouldn’t work. So we headed for 40 minutes through traffic to Hollywood and decided that even though the rich and famous don’t spend their day there, we’d make do (we decided we’d twist it by putting our tour into the second person, saying things like, “Around 6pm you’d head over to the Hollywood bowl, where you’d have a box seat” as we passed the Hollywood bowl, etc.).

So we got to Hollywood and drove around, charting out our stops and our route. This is when things went downhill. After an hour there, and me declaring that “Hollywood is kind of a dump,” Michelle decides that Beverly hills would be better after all—that we’d get crushed on the survey for our theme being irrelevant to our route. I argued. She insisted. So we headed back to Beverly hills. 40 minutes, through traffic. We got there, and made a route around and without being able to stop the bus, it looked pretty bleak—as we had already figured out, 3 hours earlier. But that’s where we were, and that’s where the tour would be. Then we find out from the producer that we’re not allowed to drive on Rodeo Drive, or any residential area with the bus. So basically, we’d be seeing—nothing. So we went back to Hollywood. 25 minutes (rush hour had passed). We finished charting out the route where we left off the last time we were there. The whole van ride took six hours.

Now, one thing I didn’t mention was that we also decided to have a comedian on the bus, to do a 10 minute standup routine during a drive between two widely-spaced stops. Frank had found a comedian and we all decided to meet at the bus in the parking lot at 11pm and have the comedian meet the four of us there, to test the waters with him and make sure he was both appropriate and funny.

But when we arrived at the lot, Nicole and Frank were still out doing their thing, and when the comedian arrived, it was just the two of us there to greet him.

So Michelle and I—who were in no mood to chat—explained the situation to the comedian (we had to tell him we were filming a documentary, and could never mention The Apprentice), and asked him to be funny for us, to test him out.

Now I want you to envision this scene: it’s 11pm, Michelle and I are incredibly tired and cranky from a hideous day, we’re standing in a parking lot with a random comic, and there are 4 cameras surrounding us (which are undoubtedly freaking the comic out). All you can hear are the crickets chirping. And we ask him to be funny.

So we all stand there in silence, staring at each other hideously, and finally, he says something along the lines of, “so I’m Irish, and you know what that means…it means I never drink.”

Silence.

The three of us stand there, staring into each other’s eyes, all simultaneously enduring the most awkward moment of our lives, as the crickets chirp in the distance.

After dismissing the comic, Michelle and I divide up the research. Frank and Nicole are both boisterous and funny, and we wanted them involved in the tour. So we allotted 4 or 5 stops to me and 4 or 5 to Michelle, and 2 or 3 stops to each Frank and Nicole. The plan was to head back to the campsite, and each research our respective stops and prepare to tell the tourists about them, and Frank and Nicole would collect the trivia together, since they had fewer stops to learn about.

So Nicole and Frank finally arrived, with the signs and the rest of their stuff. We left the bus and arrived at the campsite around 12:30pm. When we got there, Aaron’s team had just arrived as well.

This was terrible. Let me explain. After spending a full week, 24/7, with 7 people, you get pretty close. And after two losing tasks, you bond as a team with the “we hate the other team and we’re better than they are and we’re gonna win the next one” mentality. Every time a task’s winner is announced and you see the other team for the first time in a few days, it’s very intense—you’re looking for any signal whether they’re happy or not about how things went, and you don’t even want to make eye contact with them because it’s such a competitive environment. Suddenly, Aaron, James, and Steph were that other team, and it was just weird, and awkward.

So we decided to split the internet capabilities, 2 hours for each team. This is something we hadn’t thought about, and at the end of our two hours (we went first), we weren’t done with what we needed to do. We spent the time printing out the facts about our tour’s landmarks, planning a route, and printing out trivia, but we never finished. So around 3am we were sitting around the tent and that’s when the whole Nicole/Michelle sleeping fight happened (which amused me mightily at the time). No one ended up sleeping. At 5am when the other team’s time was up, we headed back in. We still needed to do all the trivia, so we decided to cut Nicole and Frank out of the tour guiding, and it would just be me and Michelle talking. A little later, Michelle, nervous about our theme being completely irrelevant to the tour, decided it made the most sense for her to introduce each stop by saying the whole “2nd person” thing about your life as a celebrity, and I’d give the typical tour-guide speech about the stop. So suddenly, I’m in charge of researching all the stops. So I print out as much info on all of them as possible, grab a highlighter, and start highlighting stuff. Around 6am we left for the bus (we still had to put the signs up and set everything up and take a dry run before the tourists arrived at 11am).

We got there, Frank and Michelle bickered about how to put the signs up, and then we went on a dry run (during which we did not test the microphone, may I mention).

Right away, we noticed a roadblock over much of our route for some reason. Michelle stood next to the driver and worked on making a new route, while I tried to both see where the hell these sights were along our new route (some I had never heard of), and frantically read through the printouts to learn about the sights.

We finished this dry run around 10:30am. 30 minutes until the tour began. We’re not remotely ready. Panic begins to set in.

Frank and Nicole set up strawberries and other food on the side of the bus, and roll out a “red carpet” down the aisle of the bus (since the tourists were “celebrities” for the day under our idiotic theme). They put on tuxes and hand one to me, and I put sunglasses on after seeing my eyes and seeing how tired I looked and realizing I would terrify the tourists. I’m sitting there with my stack of printouts, highlighting like a madman, trying to figure out where these stops would occur on the route and in which order. 10 minutes till 11. Don Jr. arrives. We have to go over and say hi (these moments are always stressful—as you saw week 1, Martin saying the wrong thing to Ivanka (“I’m exhausted”) got him fired).

Junior asks how it’s going. We smile and say great, and I die a little on the inside. He asks about the red carpet and explains that it looks more like a red tablecloth (which it was). Frank and I don’t skip a beat, whisk it up, and throw it away. I feel nauseous. Michelle keeps asking me questions. I keep thinking, I need to study these printouts or I’m not going to know what to say about anything. And then the producers pull me for an OTF (“on the fly” interview)—they always come at the worst possible times. I’m standing there in front of the camera, thinking, “I need to study these printouts, I can’t fucking believe I’m in an interview.” The producer asks me, “So, are you just going to wing it?” I answer, yes. He asks, “So, if you can’t wing this, you’ll probably lose this task, right?” They do this to a) get the stressed out quotes, and b) to stress us out further. Stress is good TV. It finishes, and I run back over to the bus.

11 hits-- the tourists start piling in. We all emerge from our panic, force on smiles and I go to get my notes, and I can’t find them. Complete panic. Someone had moved them while I was on the OTF. Inside, I’m freaking out. On the outside, I’m smiling and saying hi to everyone. Don Jr. is watching me, and there is a camera following me around. That’s the worst part—in a moment of true panic and dread, cameras are following you, capturing the whole thing, and reminding you that this is all happening on national TV.

Finally I look in a storage bin and find them—Frank’s massive head had put them there. At this point the bus is rolling—Michelle is doing an introduction. I tell frank that I’m going to hand him the microphone during down times and he has to just be ready with trivia. He gets his trivia out and looks at it, and says, “oh no.”

He had only printed out the trivia questions, not the answers.

Nightmare. So now I had to basically talk for the whole time, save the moments when Michelle was doing her “2nd person” bits.

Michelle announces that Tim will be the tour guide for the day, and hands me the mic. My plan is to say hi to the people upstairs and downstairs, and then move somewhere in the middle, on the stairs, out of site, so I can read from my notes.

And then, the microphone screeching begins. It was loud. People were covering their ears. I asked the driver if he knew what we could do—he said he didn’t know.

It calmed for a bit, and I announced our first stop, and told all the children about John Belushi’s overdose. I have one small defense here—in the dossier, it said the tour would consist of only people 18 and older (same reason we wanted a comedian), so I hadn’t struck this info from the notes in the first place. That said, it was completely idiotic. (I must say, watching this I was laughing uncontrollably, but at the time I found it extremely unfunny.) If you’d like to watch this hideous moment again, here it is:

http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week3_videos.html#1643392

So we head to our second stop, and the mic begins to screech louder—it was unbearable. So I did the only thing I could do—I put the mic down and started yelling. Two problems with this—1) Now Michelle wouldn’t be able to do the second person thing because she wasn’t loud enough to scream to the whole bus, so I’d be doing all the talking, for 90 minutes straight, and 2) I couldn’t read from my notes, since I’d be standing up on the roof with all the people.

So there’s your scene: I haven’t slept in 31 hours, I’m standing on a tour bus wearing a tux and sunglasses, I’m screaming info out of my ass about stops I don’t really know anything about to 50 tourists, I have no idea where the bus is going or what stops are coming when, I’m doing all of this on national TV, and there are 86 out of 90 minutes left to go.

None of this is an exaggeration. It was the worst 90 minutes a human can endure.

I filled the 90 minutes with the info I remembered from my highlighting, lies when I didn’t remember the facts, and trivia I thought of off the top of my head.

A couple highlights:

-At one point I had gone about 20 minutes without showing them a relevant site, and knew that the famous Hollywood Sign was coming. I ran downstairs and asked Michelle where the sign was and she said you could see it when you drove up Vine off of Hollywood Blvd. So, I told the driver to take a left on Vine. I proudly announced to the tourists that they should get their cameras out, because in 3 blocks, we’d be peering upon the famous Hollywood Sign! They got their cameras out and poised. The bus turned left on Vine, and straight ahead, everyone saw…nothing! Michelle was wrong.

I was like, “aHAHAHA! Look at that, folks, no Hollywood sign! That’s the thing about Hollywood—you never know!!” It may have been the low moment of my life.

-One of the landmarks on our route was the Magic Castle. I’ve learned since that it’s an exclusive old fraternity where members come and see magic performed. At the time, however, I had no idea what it was, and wasn’t able to look at my notes for help. So I said something along the lines of, “And to your left is the magic castle! Yes, folks, it’s the magic castle! Ne’er will you find a more magic castle in all of this great land!!” True, complete misery.

Anyway, since the mic broke, only the top deck (about 35 of the 50 people) could hear me, so down below, Nikki and Frank desperately tried to entertain the tourists. Luckily, every week there are deleted scenes on Yahoo, and this is one of them. It’s funny:

http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week3_videos.html#1643387

So about 75 minutes into the 90, we get to the one planned stop on the voyage—a stop where you could see the Kodak theatre, the Grauman’s Chinese theatre, and the Hollywood stars.

What we didn’t consider was that since it was close to the end and the tour was so horrible, people wouldn’t necessarily come back. This was a potential disqualification. We realized the error as soon as the people got out, and waited for 20 minutes outside the bus nervously. About 2/3 of the people came back, which didn’t end up disqualifying us, but it was a terrifying moment at the time. You can see this exact moment here:

http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week3_videos.html#1643367

So that’s that. A complete and total debacle.

I remember standing outside the bus after it was over, thanking the people for coming, and seeing a camera about 10 feet away focused on my face. They were getting the “Tim is dejected as he realizes Trump is going to fire all four of them” face. I tried with all my heart to put on a smile and not give them the face they wanted, but I couldn’t muster it.

In the van ride back, the four of us sat there, all dejected (I really did think Trump was firing all of us—we are the losing half of the losing team, and our task was a complete embarrassment—it would make perfect sense), and Michelle wrote me a note (we couldn’t talk because we were on lockdown), saying, “Don’t be too hard on my in the boardroom, I’ll take care of that myself.” I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but when she quit a few hours later, I wasn’t surprised.

We went into the boardroom, and the other team saw our faces and knew right away that they won. (One note: Trump asked Michelle how the team did. On TV, you heard her reply, “My team completely stepped up today. I have no words for how impressed I am”—in reality, she said, “Tim completely stepped up today. I have no words for how impressed I am” but the editors spliced in “My team”. Remember, this week’s story is, “Michelle’s team gets crushed”—there are no heroes on Michelle’s team in that story, and they edited it as such. Whatever. At least you know.)

Michelle quit, we went back to the campsite, I was angry because I thought I was getting fired now because scapegoating Michelle completely was the only chance the other three of us had, Stef yelled at Michelle for quitting, Michelle gave us all awkward hugs, and left.

We went to bed, and the next day (day 3 of the task, day 9 overall), we had interviews all day about the boardroom. All day, I dreaded this boardroom. I’d be going in with Nicole and Frank, both of whom I had become friends with, and to make things worse, Aaron, the other friend of mine on the team, would be sitting across from us, next to Trump. It couldn’t have sounded more horrible.

And so when that call came saying the boardroom was cancelled, this explains our absurd reaction. We were that happy.

And so, task 3 ends—it’s my 9th night in a tent, I’m one of the 3 out of 15 remaining contestants without a win, and the next morning, we’d begin another task. What an odd week.