The Apprentice LA - Episode 8

If you asked me a year ago if I thought I’d ever run around in boxing gloves punching guys and hugging a big vitamin bottle in the middle of a soccer field in front of 13,000 people while being filmed by NBC, I probably would have said, “No.” I probably would have said, “No. I don’t think I’ll ever run around in boxing gloves punching guys and hugging a big vitamin bottle in the middle of a soccer field in front of 13,000 people while being filmed by NBC.”

But if I had said that, I would have been wrong.

Yes, this thing keeps getting weirder and weirder, doesn’t it. And now imagine going through it all in the time period we did. In a span of 24 days—just over 3 weeks—I had been a car-washer, bathing suit-designer, tour bus guide, fast food cashier, honey-bottler, honey salesman, mall salesman, Lexus showman, neon pink pants-wearer—I had been serenaded by Andrea Bocelli, I had played the piano on the beach and again with Snoop Dogg, I had taken surf lessons, camped for 15 days, endured 5 boardrooms and over 30 hours of interviews, made friends, started a relationship, lost my suit, dirtied my shoes, and shaved using the reflective house window as a mirror because I knew the Kinetic girls were in the house watching—so when it came time for me to throw on a shiny blue champion’s gown in the middle of the field during halftime, I thought little of it. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary anymore.

Simply said, this was my new life. It didn’t even feel surreal anymore.

And with that, we’ll back up three days to the last night of task 7 (day 21 overall) and dive into the gem that is the GNC task.

The memory of what took place that night for us is not here with me at the moment. From watching the episode, I saw that we had had a family dinner, during which Surya told us how great we all were. I think this was actually a happier team moment than the editing showed. We had won two in a row, and while all the Surya trouble was in the air, I don’t think we were rolling our eyes and glaring at him the way it seemed. In general, the Surya/team dynamic was not as bad as it looked—at least it wasn’t that bad on the surface. On the surface, Frank was a dick and kind of picked on Surya, but the rest of us were always pretty nice to him. It seems from the episode like James and Steph were disrespectful towards Surya as well, but if you watch closely, the two of them trash him in their interviews, but that’s it. Only Frank says anything to Surya’s face, and even he is more prickish than mean. And Nikki and I didn’t hate Surya at all—he annoyed me at times for sure—but so did James and Frank and the others. Here and there I poked fun at Surya in an interview, but never in a disdainful way. It was always lighthearted.

And that’s what’s crazy. Until 9 months later when you’re watching it on TV—you don’t know how other people are in their interviews. Looking at it after 8 episodes, Surya never said anything bad about anyone in an interview, Nikki only said bad things about the one person she openly disliked (Michelle), I poked fun at people here and there, but was rarely venomous. Frank was like Nikki and trashed Michelle and Surya, which wouldn’t have surprised any of us at the time. James and Steph both had a knack for being friendly to your face, but ripping you in an interview. I was shocked to see James interview negatively about the me-Nikki thing during episode 7, since during episode 7, everyone on the team was extremely positive about all that to our face. And he was pretty nice to Surya, but in interviews would say things like, “Surya is like a 55 year old who wants to be one of the kids” or “It’s funny that Surya thinks he’s part of the reason we won that task”. And Steph took it a step further. No one was sweeter to everyone than Steph—if, during the Snoop reward, any of us knew that she went out back and interviewed that “Surya, who claims to be the biggest Snoop fan, is just standing there, like an idiot!” we would have been shocked. During Snoop she was probably smiling at Surya, saying things like, “how fun is this!!”

Now you’re thinking, “He’s on a fucking reality show, what does he expect?”

Good point. People are always duplicitous on reality shows. But still.

Anyway. Surya goes to the boardroom, and comes back and tells us about the double firing. This is great news. Nothing against Derek and Jen, but the high number of people left was discouraging. Even with the double-firing, things didn’t add up:

It was a “14-week job interview”—having watched previous seasons, I knew that the final two episodes were the finale, which meant that there were 13 total tasks. Since the finale would be the final 2 people, it meant that at the end of task 12, there would be 2 people left.

But what the hell?

After the double-firing, there were 10 people left, and 7 tasks done. So if my predictions were right, we’d have to go from 10 people to 2 people in 5 tasks. Uh oh. I remember thinking, “Something’s not right here—something weird’s gonna happen.”

I wasn’t the only one trying to figure this out—we’d all discuss it. Then the producer would snap and yell, “DON’T TALK ABOUT THE SHOW ON THE SHOW” since they obviously can’t use any of the footage of us talking about how many people have to get fired by when.

And so we just went on, with this ominous fact in our minds.

The next morning (day 1 of task 8, day 22 overall) we awoke at 4:30am and found ourselves heading up to echo park for the task announcement. I remember sitting in the van on lockdown at the announcement location for over an hour while we waited for Trump. Which would have been fine, except I had to piss. It was one of those situations where it was to the level that I was willing to make a fuss in order to do something about it. The producer finally consented to me going into the empty van and pissing in an empty water bottle (since there were no public bathrooms anywhere and apparently public urination wasn’t considered “okay” by the production staff). But the water bottle wasn’t big enough. So I pulled the hideous “break in the action” and found another bottle. At the end I put the two bottles in an empty cereal box, and presented it to the producer, who as upset to be holding that box as you are to be hearing about it. Why did I share that story with all of you? Because I can.

So Trump finally gets there, and he’s with Bill Rancic and a man who seems to be about 17 years old. Trump tells us that the 17-year-old is an executive from the company GNC, and that we’ll be putting on a halftime show at the LA Galaxy soccer game. We’ll be evaluated by the executive, on three criteria: entertainment, originality, and brand integration. Sounds fun, but also mammoth.

He finishes, and after heading to the GNC store for a brief meeting with the 17-year-old executive, we make our way to our war room. We start brainstorming, and I come up with the boxing idea. Everyone was into it. The episode showed a humorous scene of Surya instructing us all to brainstorm for 5 minutes and Frank completely making fun of him. On one hand, Surya’s intentions—to force us all to think through some more ideas since mine was the first one presented—were good. But on the other hand, you gotta have an eye for a natural flow of group energy and work with it, not against it.

Either way, we dissected the idea plenty later on, and when we got to the war room, we began to figure out what props we’d need. The prop guys started building our boxing ring, and we brainstormed further the details of our show (which we’d have exactly 6 minutes to put on, including set up and take down).

The basic idea was this: Average Joe has his head down and is moping around, low on energy and just feeling “down”—specifically, the script would read, he’s feeling “fatigue, lethargy, and 2 other things I forget”, and these 4 things would be represented by 4 guys in the ring pushing him around. Then the narrator would say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, do you know what Joe needs???” and he’d get the crowd to start chanting “JOE! NEEDS! GNC! JOE! NEEDS! GNC!” (with the help of team members on the sidelines with blow horns). Then the GNC bottle would triumphantly appear, and come over and slap Joe five, and give him a champion’s robe, and Joe would suddenly feel great and punch out his “problems.”

The idea was based on our meeting with the executive, who told us that GNC products help you fight 4 main things: “fatigue, lethargy…” and the other two that I forget now. And the end result, he said, was that GNC would help you feel stronger, happier, and more in charge of your life.

Say what you want about the outcome—but I think the boxing idea is a fine way to capture that message, and satisfy the three grading criteria.

Anyway, there a few points of debate within the group:

1) Should the four “goons” in the ring be holding up big signs that labeled them as “fatigue,” “lethargy,” etc.? Or is that too cumbersome and would people not be able to read them anyway? (we decided no labels)

2) Should the goons be wearing masks, or is that stupid? (we decided yes, and Surya sent me and James to get the costumes)

3) Who should narrate? (the original thought was that I would do it, and then Frank did an imitation of how he would do it and we all liked his energy and we decided he should do it. Incidentally, in the boardroom, Trump said Frank shouldn’t have done it because of his heavy accent. Oops.)

4) Is the message positive enough? (we were worried that Joe “knocking out” people—even if they represent life’s problems—was a bit harsh. So we had each of the goons wearing a GNC shirt underneath their goon shirt, and at the end they’d get up off the ground, reveal their GNC shirts, and celebrate with Joe.)

So, in light of #2, James and I left to get all the costumes. We got to the costume store, and bought Joe’s robe and boxing gloves, and for the goons we had a few options: we could go with simple, phantom of the opera-type masks, but they had a lot of other masks there. And then we noticed, on the top shelf, these huge, terrifying, Halloween masks. I glanced at James. James glanced at me. What if…? What if the goons wore these huge, goblin masks? It would pound the idea home! Joe’s battling his demons! GNC solves problems that are as horrible as those masks!!

We were thrilled. We purchased the costumes (each of the big masks cost us $100), and went back to the war room. Very excited, James and I proudly revealed the huge, terrifying monster masks to the team.

Upon seeing what we had bought, the team had the same face on that Frank and I had when we first saw Carey’s bathing suit. Some middle ground between shock and disgust. Looking back, I can’t really remember why James and I thosught that these huge, horrifying masks would be a good idea. But we had spent $400 on them. Like Frank with the phone charger, if we had run short on money on this task, these masks would have been a huge issue in the boardroom. Luckily for us, money didn’t prove to be a problem.

Anyway, we all spent the next few hours working on the props—gluing huge GNC posters onto boards, painting the four posts of the boxing ring, making the “ropes” of the ring, etc. This was a lot of work. Around that time I brought up the idea of getting music to go along with our show. The team liked this idea, but the problem was that the dossier prevented us from using any pre-written music. So I threw out the idea of me finding somewhere I could write and record a little GNC theme that would start playing right as the GNC bottle triumphantly appeared. It was a long shot, but I started calling music stores to find employees who might know a friend who could help (for obvious reasons, I was restricted from calling anyone I knew outside the show or using any resources I had ever used prior to the show). I ended up talking to a guy at Guitar Center. I told him that I needed to use a home studio that night and that I’d pay the person $200 to let me use it. He thought about it, and put me on the phone with a fellow employee, who said he finished work at 10pm and that I could do it at his house. I shrugged—it was worth a try.

I had to be accompanied by someone, so Stephanie, who has some singing ability, came along. We got to the house around 10:30pm, and walked into to one of the shadiest situations I’ve ever witnessed. It felt like a scene in Pulp Fiction. There was the guy I talked to, and his long-haired friend—combined, they had about 10 rings on their collective face. There was also a girl, who was one of the most cracked-out people I’ve ever seen. Luckily, I had recently gone into “nothing seems out of the ordinary anymore” mode, so I thought little of the scene.

I started messing around with his keyboard and his sounds—not exactly state-of-the-art equipment. It was going to be tough to make something decent-sounding. As I was tinkering around, I’d glance over to the couch, and see the two jewelry heads, the crack head, and Stephanie, all sitting there, saying nothing, all looking at me. In some deep, internal place, I chuckled.

The rest of the team called and said they were taking a break with the props to come meet us at the house. They arrived, and as they walked into the Pulp Fiction house, they all had the same face on that Frank and I had when we first saw Carey’s bathing suit (I’m pretty sure this was a fresh version of the face for most of them, but a couple of them may have just not moved their face since seeing the masks).

So I continued working, and I remember glancing over at one point, and seeing the two ring-masters, the crack head, and Stephanie, along with James, Nicole, Frank, Surya, the producer, the camera guys, and the sound guys—all 13 of them sitting there silently, all staring blankly at me.

This was an odd scene.

So I finally finished—the theme had a heavy drumbeat, and electric guitars, and sounded something like “Wild Thing” without the singer (of course, all you could hear in the episode when the bottle ran out was the show’s ominous “you’re watching the losing team” music. I’m glad we spent all that time and energy at the crackhouse).

After getting the hell out of there, we went back to the war room—we needed to paint a huge “GNC” on the carpet of the boxing ring and would have to lay down multiple coats throughout the night. We got there, and the whole team got their hands and knees and painted. When we finished we all slept on the ground for a half hour while it dried. Then we woke up and painted another coat, then slept on the ground for a half hour, and then woke up and painted again. I remember it being about 5am and kneeling there with my paintbrush, between naps, completely delirious. It was kind of fun.

We spent the morning finishing all the props, and then we headed to the stadium. Each team had a tennis court to store all the props, and we brought the boxing ring, the giant bottle, the signs, mats, etc. onto our court. While we were doing this, Kinetic showed up and started unloading their props. This is an intense moment—after spending 24 hours wondering what the other team is doing for their show, we get a glimpse. I saw those weird big bones they had made, and immediately assumed they were doing something with dogs. “Crap,” I remember thinking. “They got us—why the hell didn’t we think to get dogs.” As I explained earlier, I was on very little sleep.

Each team had a set rehearsal time—as far as Apprentice task rehearsals go, ours went fine. Then we went back to our stadium war room and threw together the final details. This whole scene was a bit chaotic, but since this week’s story is, “Arrow is a disaster and Kinetic is not,” they made this scene appear to be utter mayhem by literally splicing together a bunch of sentences of Arrow members in a 45 second montage that looked like real time.

And it’s gametime.

The episode showed Kinetic’s skit first, but in reality we went first. It went basically as planned. I moped around in my mesh shorts (not a flattering look as it turns out), got my GNC, and beat up the actors. I felt alright at the end of ours—not great, not terrible. This could go either way.

Then Kinetic did their show.

Now I’m going to try to remain objective here, but from where we were watching, Kinetic’s made no sense, and you couldn’t understand Angela on the microphone. We all looked at each other and smiled—we had ‘em.

Then, after they were done, the announcer had the fans hold up a card, with a different color on each side—one color to vote for us, the other to vote for them. About 1/3 of the fans voted, and it was in our favor. Now, we were sure we won, which is why you saw Surya in that interview, saying something like, “I stuck by our idea, and now I’m so happy I did—it feels so good to know that we did the right thing.” This makes him look like a jackass in light of the result, but I would have said the same exact thing at the time—never was I more sure of an outcome.

Since the outcome was what it was, they used Kristine’s interview to narrate what was happening during Kinetic’s show, to make it seem clear, but I was watching and I had no idea what was going on.

(And I’m not the only one—these are two accounts from people who were at the game:
http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/archives/the_apprentice_6/2006_Jun_26_galaxy_halftime_show
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6350832.html?display=Breaking+News)

So we were understandably shocked to hear the outcome from the 17-year-old’s mouth (this is my 5th loss, and this is the first time I was surprised when we found out that we lost).

I’m not gonna complain too much about this—it was a subjective task, and he liked theirs more. End of story. But it’s easy for me to move on—I didn’t get fired because of it. Surya’s been dwelling over this outcome since it happened.

Anyway, we’re all pretty dejected, and we get in the van to head back to the house and move our stuff outside.

At the time, I’m thinking that I’m not in good shape boardroom-wise—it was solely my idea. Watching the episode, it seems obvious that since everyone was bad-mouthing Surya so much, he was going to get fired. But the Surya antagonism wasn’t as obvious at the time, and Trump’s always been big on firing the person whose idea it was that lost.

So I was working on my argument—mainly that even though my ideas lost this task, my ideas also were a huge part of our wins in tasks 4 and 6, and that at least I had the guts to put out big ideas task after task, and that if you do that you can’t expect to be right every time, etc. While I was thinking about this, Surya came up to me and brought me aside, and we talked about the boardroom. You can see this conversation here (it was one of the deleted scenes):

http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week8_videos.html#1643653

Rather than me writing three paragraphs explaining my reasons for saying Surya should be fired in that boardroom, and why I was torn between him and James, and why even though I said Surya I also voiced my opinion on James, just watch the clip. Further, I say the word “pooing” in the clip. I have the whole English language at my disposal, and from tens of thousands of words I for some reason select “pooing” to articulate my point.

One other thing. One day I noticed Surya was wearing a rubber band around his wrist, and I asked him about it. He explained that he never took the rubber band off, and that it was a metaphor for his integrity– “you’re always wearing your integrity and if you bend your integrity (and he stretched the rubber band out when he said this, and then let it snap back onto his wrist) it will always snap back at you, and you’re left with the welt.” Say what you want about Surya, but he has integrity—which as we’ve seen should not be taken for granted on this show—and that comes forth well in this clip. The task was my idea, and attacking me would have been his best shot of surviving—and he knew that since the whole team had liked my idea and we had settled on it together, it would have been sneaky and disloyal to then attack me for it. Most people in that position would have gone after me.

At one point James came over to me and said that Surya had told him he was bringing him into the boardroom. James and I talked about it and I told him that I understood Surya’s reasoning for bringing him in, and that I might voice that opinion in the boardroom even though I was going to say that Surya should be fired (because regardless of who I liked or trusted the most, Surya’s relationship with the team was hurting the team as a whole). I had blindsided James in the task 5 boardroom, and I didn’t want to attack him again without him knowing it would happen.

Then, a little later, we were all sitting around the fire waiting for the boardroom—it was pretty tense—and James kept saying under his breath, smugly, “I’m just happy Bill’s gonna be there” as if he knew that Bill would know the real story and that he was protected for that reason (in light of that, it’s kind of funny that Bill was completely anti-James and pro-Surya the whole boardroom).

So we head in. What you didn’t see was that in the first few minutes of the boardroom, I had a serious attack mounted on me from Kristine, and Trump jumped on this, and actually had his firing voice on, before I successfully defended myself, and Trump never bothered me again in that one. If you’re bored at work and would like to watch me thwart Trump’s firing voice, check out this link:

http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week8_videos.html#1643672

Anyway, because of a combination of the team all attacking Surya and not me, Surya deciding to attack James and not me, my thwarting of Trump’s initial attack, and Bill’s defense of me (“Tim was the only one who stepped up”), I was safe. But the fact that all four of these things had to happen to make me safe shows how hard it is to not get fired when you have the losing idea.

Part of the reason for this is that Trump has to focus almost entirely on the task at hand—if he considers previous tasks in his decision, then watching each show is boring because there’s a chance that the mistakes in that episode’s task that you’re watching won’t even come into play, since there are so many previous tasks to talk about as well. This is a little glitch in the system, and because of this, Trump is handcuffed to the current task in boardrooms.

So for that reason, a lot had to go right for me to be as safe as I was by the end of that boardroom. It was also nice for me to hear Frank and Nicole—my two best friends on the team, and two people I had been counting on to be loyal to me in a moment of truth—defend me in that boardroom.

And so, for me this boardroom was a lot like the first boardroom, with Frank and Martin (remember Martin?). I’m there, and I’m called back to be one of the final three—but by the time it was down to the final three, I’m not really in danger.

So I sat there with James and Surya, 90% sure that Surya was getting fired (there was a team consensus, which is almost never overcome), and I had a decision to make: do I side with James on everything and preserve my relationship with James? Or do I side with Surya the times I think he’s right? Tough one, and I ended up going with the latter, partially because the topic James was being attacked for—playing more for the boardroom than for the task—did make me angry. And partially because Surya had been so fair with me that I felt an obligation to be just as fair with him.

And this boardroom was long. If an average one goes on for 45 minutes, this one went on for 75. Surya fought his little tail off—his eyes spent most of the time 3 inches in front of his head—and Trump was torn, I could tell. He really liked Surya. And Bill and I were both siding with Surya in his attacks on James. But Trump’s final reasoning was that “there’s no one else I can realistically fire here” because he didn’t believe that the problems with James were bad enough to fire him over, and he couldn’t fire me for the reasons I listed above.

And so, he sent Surya packing. He said multiple times that he thought Surya would do extremely well in his future. Surya was real upset. It was tough to watch. Surya was one of the few people that actually treated the whole thing like a job interview and not like a reality TV show, so this one hurt.

So that concludes the Surya Era, and we’re on to Episode 9.

And old Timo’s still kickin’.