The Apprentice LA - Episode 9

Let’s add acting in a soap opera and grabbing lunch with Arnold Schwarzenegger and his massive head to my June, 2006 list. Some kind of month that was.

And as has become routine for us, let’s back up three days to the last day of task 8 (day 24 overall).

Surya’s fired, and James and I stand outside and watch him get into the Dead Man’s Lexus. Though we were supposed to go on lockdown (by the way, if you’re confused by terms I used like lockdown, formal interviews, OTF’s, dossiers, etc., scroll down to the episode 1 and 2 recaps where I explain all of this), James and I talked about what was going to happen now.

As I mentioned in my task 6 recap, I had wanted the role of project manager back then. So you can imagine, I really wanted it now. It was getting to the end, and with this season’s “Winning PM stays PM” rule, chances to take the leader role were very limited. Further, I knew the other four on my team extremely well by this point, got along very well with all four of them, and knew that with Surya gone, this team was very, very strong, and had the potential for another winning streak.

So I told James that I wanted to be PM. Not surprisingly, James said that he wanted to be PM too.

I suggested to James that we take a team vote. He said that we should flip a coin. This made sense, since we both assumed that Nicole and Frank would vote for me and Steph would vote for him.

And while we’re here, I’ll digress, and write a bit about each of my four teammates, what I thought of them at the time, and what the team dynamic was like at that moment—

Nicole and I were an obvious alliance. Stephanie and James were also an alliance, and had been ever since task 3 (when Arrow was divided in half). Task 3 had long-lasting effects. While the team was certainly one unit, and we all got along well with each other, Steph and James had a loyalty to each other ever since that task, and Nicole, Frank and I were a little subgroup as well, to the point that people referred to the three of us as “the three musketeers.”

There was a slight tension between Nicole and Steph as well, which added into this underlying division. Frank was the main X-factor. James and Frank had both had problems with Surya, and the two of them had bonded over that topic over the past 5 tasks, and Frank may have felt a bit on the outside of the “three musketeers” alliance, for obvious reasons. So for those reasons, it wasn’t entirely clear where Frank’s loyalty lay.

This stuff was all underlying—on the surface, everyone got along with everyone, and there was shockingly little tension in this group. It was a great team. But the underlying loyalty is incredibly important in this game, since as we’ve seen throughout the season, Trump bases most of his firings on what team members say in the boardroom, and that is the one place—when push comes to shove—where these loyalties would ever come out in the open (Heidi had played to both Muna and Kristine, but when it came down to it, her true loyalty was with Kristine, and Muna was fired for this reason).

And a bit about each team member:

Nicole: She was great on the Lexus task, but had completely flown under the radar on the GNC task, so I was happy to see her take the lead in Soft Scrub. She was looking strong in that Trump loved her and that she had me as an automatic ally, but also a bit vulnerable in that the two least strong relationships within the team both involved her: hers with Steph and hers with James. I was still sufficiently smitten, but increasingly wary that mixing a relationship into a process that involved words like “team” and “loyalty” and “job interview” and “smell blood” could end up exploding in both our faces.

Frank: Frank had found a niche—he built things, he went out and got things, and he decorated. He had been valuable on four tasks so far (and had done very little on the others): El Pollo Loco (he made all the banners and signs—his role here was not shown enough in the episode), Honey (he made a big stand for the honey that attracted attention in the supermarket, and sold the honey effectively), Lexus (he and Steph had gotten all the food, and had created the event’s décor), and GNC (he had worked with the props guys to design the boxing ring). Were these contributions valuable to the team? Yes. Could someone else have taken over this role just fine in his absence? Probably. But he was a good workhorse, and he got things done quickly—and there’s value in that. His most worthwhile contribution to the team was his silliness—he was a huge part of why Arrow was a fun team. And he and I were good friends by this point.

Stephanie: On tasks, Steph had a way of being very valuable without ever putting herself at risk. She was the accountant for almost every task (I was accountant once, and Nicole did it three times, Steph every other time), which is a hard and thankless job. She almost always did the introduction speech in front of the executives. Having lived in LA for 32 years, she knew the city better than anyone by a mile, she had a knack for sales because she had a mother-like quality that customers trusted, and was just very competent in general. If I did this process again, and I were a captain, she would be one of my first two picks. All that said, there are two major strikes against her in my book: 1) she rarely came up with ideas (which are largely what wins and loses tasks, and what can lead to a firing), and 2) with nine tasks completed, she had expressed zero interest in being the project manager and had stayed silent during all project manager discussions.

On a personal level, I got along well with her. She was stiff as a board, but immediately fell into the mother role. I’d constantly lose shoes and ties and such, and my immediate reaction would be to ask Steph where they were, and she usually knew. She had a very serious boyfriend, who she was on the phone with every chance she got (i.e. during interview days when we were in the house).

James: James was a bit like Steph in that he was always doing something during tasks but often not something he could really be held accountable for. Other than that, James was a nice guy, and pretty harmless.

As for me, I was probably the biggest risk-taker of the group. Maybe this is partially because a job with Trump was less of a life dream for me than some of the others, and maybe it’s because of my natural competitiveness—but my focus was almost usually on winning the task and outperforming Kinetic, and rarely on winning the show and outperforming my teammates for boardroom purposes. As a result, my ass was constantly on the line during tasks. On the carwash task I was the “sales PM” and I came up with the idea for the GNC task, and in both ended up in the final boardroom. I would have been in the final boardroom for the tour bus task if Michelle hadn’t quit. If we hadn’t made that bulk sale on the El Pollo Loco task, we would have lost and I would have been in the final boardroom. I was in charge of product knowledge on the Lexus task, our giveaway scheme on the Priceline task was my idea, and James would have taken me and Nikki to the boardroom on Soft Scrub, since we did almost everything. Only on the bathing suit and honey tasks was I safe. The way I saw it was that this way of doing things could certainly get me fired, but it could also lead to me winning the whole thing. And it was a lot more fun than laying low for strategic purposes.

So anyway. James and I both want to be the next PM. So we sit down with the group, and as a group we decide to take a vote, and that the vote would be based purely on who the team thought would be the better leader. Nicole votes for me and Steph votes for James, to no one’s surprise. Frank thinks about it for over 5 minutes, and then says that since James just had his back against the wall, he’d vote for him. This was unfortunate. I reminded him that we had just decided we would be voting for who we thought would be the better PM, not who had their back against the wall. So he took it back and told us to flip a coin.

Nice going, Frank. Thanks a bunch.

To this day, I have no idea what was really going on in Frank’s head. I could talk about all different kinds of potential motivation he might have had, but I’ll spare you.

So we flip a coin, and James wins.

They neglected to air any of this, just showing Frank saying that when someone had their back against the wall they typically stepped up as PM and James interviewing that this was his big moment.

So it is what it is—I accept it and move on, though it’s frustrating. James gives a speech about how he wants to maximize all of our strengths, we’re all excited for the next task, and we go to sleep.

The next morning (day 1 of task 9, day 25 overall) we head to meet Trump at the set of Passions, which as you saw, excited Nicole greatly. Yes, I’m dating a girl who loves soap operas.

We’re told that we’ll be creating, acting in, and editing a 45 second “webisode” for Dial’s product “SoftScrub” (I hate the term “webisode”).

Each team is given a model home to use as a set. We head over to ours and walk through it and start brainstorming. Nicole comes up with the idea of a guy and his brother having to clean the guy’s bathroom before his girlfriend arrives, because he’s going to “pop the question.” Everyone likes it, and we start sketching out the scenes. The team immediately decides on me for the guy, Frank for the brother, and Nicole for the girlfriend. There really wasn’t any other option here.

The camera crew arrived, and since the first scene involved only me and Frank, Nicole and Stephanie left to get props (rose petals, champagne, the ring, etc…sigh) and we began filming.

One note: the whole criticism of Kristine leaving during the filming of Kinetic’s disaster first scene was not fair. They needed to get props, just like we did, and the teams can only split into groups of two or more, and neither Heidi nor Muna could go since they were acting. But Kristine wasn’t able to defend herself, because we can’t bring shit like that up in the boardroom. Sucks.

So we start filming the first scene. Now I’m not going to suggest for a second that Nicole and I can act in the slightest.

But I will say this with conviction: Frank Lombardi is not a good actor.

I’ve done a lot of challenging things in my day, but rarely have I attempted something as difficult as watching Frank say his first line without bursting out laughing. Imagine standing there, while James yells, “Action!” and Frank walks in the room and says, “Brian! I can’t believe yah poppin da question!!” (In the original scene we were Brian and Patrick, since the two producers with us on that task were Brian and Patrick, but my line calling him Patrick got cut out, so now I was just Brian, which was just kind of weird). I had to use every ounce of strength I could muster not to laugh every time he said this line.

So after a few tries, we nail the first scene. One problem—it took 50 seconds, and the whole webisode was allowed to be no more than 45 seconds. So we cut it way down and got it to 30 seconds. Still not good enough—we needed to fit a cleaning scene and the proposal scene into this. So we cut almost everything out, and got it down to 18 seconds.

We needed the girls and their props to do anything further, and they took a long time to get back. We had a strict deadline of 9pm, and the wait was getting a bit stressful. In the meantime, the producers OTF’d me about how it “wasn’t good that the girls weren’t back yet,” just in case it ended up being an important part of the episode.

And Frank and I were both starving. So when the girls finally arrived with buckets of KFC, it was the happiest moment of my life. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been happier to be eating anything. In fact, Frank just called me this Monday just to talk about how good the chicken was.

So we filmed the cleaning scene, which took awhile, because we wanted to get a sufficient number of satisfying-looking cleaning swipes, and we had to manufacture shower wall grease out of syrup and coffee grinds.

Then we had to rush to film the proposal scene. I interviewed about how awkward it was to propose to a girl who I was kind of starting to kind of be dating. What the producers really wanted was for me to answer this question: “So is it great to finally bring what you and Nicole have into an actual task?” No fucking way are you getting that quote, I told them, and gave them the “massively awkward” quote instead. I’m telling you, if I had answered the producers’ questions like they wanted me to throughout the season, I wouldn’t be able to show my face in public right now.

Anyway, yet again, the thing that was especially hard for me was making the “devastated” face I made at the end of the webisode while looking at Nicole, without laughing. I’m telling you, keeping a straight face while watching Nicole and Frank act is a feat. And to make things harder, James kept yelling, “Quiet on the set!” and “Action!” and “Cut!”, trying to be a real director. You try not laughing.

Incidentally, if I ever put rose petals on the ground for anyone, run me over with a tractor immediately.

We went straight to the editing studio, and met with our editor. This was a really nice, competent, patient guy. Thank god. That can’t be taken for granted—more than once we had had bitchy people for this kind of thing, and you’re stuck with them the whole task, and you’re never allowed to complain about them to the cameras.

So we watched all the footage in real time, as it digitized from the camera to the computer. Fun times. A lot of really funny outtakes. I wish I had this tape now.

We only had one shot of the first scene with me and Frank, since Nicole was the only one who realized we had to take multiple shots of scenes to make it look professional, and she was gone at the time. She edited down the proposal scene like a pro, and then I took on the cleaning scene, since I was going to choreograph the shots of us cleaning to the music.

They showed this part out of order to make it seem more dramatic than it was—they showed me finishing and playing it for everyone and everyone yelling that they loved it, and then me insisting on perfecting it for hundreds of hours.

In reality, I perfected it for hundreds of hours first, and when I finally played it for everyone, I was completely finished.

And yes, they had the “This could get Tim fired” music on while I was being extra nit-picky, mainly because this team got along so well during this task that that was the best they could do for someone on Arrow being a potential firee. In fact, I knew that I could be as detailed as I wanted with it because A) we had no time pressure—we had the editing studio and editor until 5am, and it was about 1am at the time, and there was nothing left to do once we finished, and B) I knew how well it would come out with the music and how much the team would like it when I finished. And as you saw, when I did finish and finally played them the finished product, they were all very excited.

And if I may say so myself, that cleaning scene was kind of awesome. For those of you who couldn’t get enough SoftScrub, here it is once more:

http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week9_videos.html#1643822

After spending a ton of time cutting it down from 55 seconds to 45 seconds, we finished up and headed back to the campsite. I remember getting in the tent to go to sleep, and Nicole saying to me, “We got this one.” And I nodded. She and I had done this whole thing, and it was very satisfying.

The next morning, we realized that “gametime” for this task was already done—it was simply playing the video. It was the first time yet that day 2 of the task didn’t involve us having to “turn it on” and perform. Which made this the least painstaking task by far. And so we said “what the hell” and we went to brunch with our extra seed money. Looking back, this wasn’t the best idea, because if we had lost, regardless of whether there was nothing else we could have been doing, they would have made us look like over-confident buffoons.

Anyway, the brunch was delightful—James said something along the lines of not wanting to bring any of us to the boardroom because we all did such a good job, and I fully understand his sentiment. We were a really great team—between the five of us, we’d be good at any task that could come our way, and we were about to win our 4th task of the last 6. And we had a lot of fun together. As much as I try to defend Surya, he didn’t mesh with the group and this was a point of tension. But with him gone, there was little but good feelings among the five of us. Of course, we knew that this couldn’t go on forever, and that at some point, we’d lose and have to start attacking each other—but for the moment, we didn’t have to think about that.

Around 1pm, we headed over to the place where we’d show the judges our webisode. We were put in a small room by production, and the five of us sat around excruciatingly and waited for about an hour for all the cameras to get in their places, Trump to arrive, etc. This was painfully nerve-wracking. It was like being down by one in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, a full count, runners on second and third—and having to wait an hour for the final pitch.

Finally, it was our time to go. We walked out, sporting our SoftScrub-colored blue and green ties, and met the judges (there were something like 40 cameras lined up in a huge semi-circle in back of the judges—this makes everything scary and tense, but to the viewer it looks like it’s just us and the judges there). Steph did a good job on her intro, and we played them the video. They used the word “interesting” after watching ours, which is usually a word of death, so that was disheartening. We went back in our room, and sat there for another hour while Kinetic went and Trump got his hair all nice (so that final pitch was fouled off and it’s still a full count and we have to wait another hour before the next pitch).

They finally bring us out, and we lay eyes on the evil Kinetic girls for the first time since the task announcement on the set of Passions the day earlier. As always, we’re staring them down, trying to read them for any signs of happiness or disappointment. The judges announce the verdict. Usually, they announce things black and white—all positives about the winner and all negatives about the loser. But here they gave us some of each. So we had no idea if we won until they said it.

Happy times!

Trump acts shocked that we won. This was a theme. We had won 4 of the last 6 tasks, and Arrow was 4 and 4 vs. Kinetic overall—yet Trump still seemed to think that Kinetic was dominating us. My main theory is that out of the 8 rewards so far, Trump had gone on 3 of them—and all 3 of those had been with Kinetic. So he knew them much better than he knew us, and in spending all that time with them he had grown to really like them. Whatever, I’ll take Snoop.

So Trump announces that we’re flying in a private jet up to Sacramento to have lunch with the Schwarzenegger. Awesome.

We head back to camp and move into the house (moving into the house is a phenomenal feeling), and since this reward was the next morning, we spent the night grilling and drinking and having a grand old time together.

Before we went to bed, the producers sat us down and told us they had something very serious to talk to us about. This was weird. They explained that there were some unquestionably strict rules for the lunch with the Governor. Producers are always stressed out during rewards, since there are so many moving parts, and high-profile people like Phil Jackson, Snoop, and the Governor have tight schedules, and a logistical problem would be a huge disaster. But this was different. They were stressed about this.

They told us that we absolutely, positively, had to stand up the second the Governor walked in the room. And that under absolutely no circumstances were we to make any mention of movies when we were talking to him. They were dead serious. I obviously couldn’t help myself, and kept asking them, “So we can only ask about politics, and Kindergarten Cop, right? No other movies, right?” Needless to say, these comments did not tickle their fancy.

So we woke up bright and early the next morning (day 3 of task 9, day 27 overall), went to the airport and boarded a deliciously luxurious private jet. After sitting down, the pilot came in and introduced himself and said he’d need to see all of our ID’s before taking off. This would have been fine, except that mine and Frank’s were both back at the house.

Chaos.

The executive producer, another producer, and a bunch of crew members scrambled around, freaking out and trying to figure out what to do. Nice work, Tim. Luckily, Frank’s fat head forgot his as well, so it wasn’t just me.

Finally, after about 10 minutes of severe stress, they were able to find ours at the house and fax copies over to the airport.

So, crisis averted, we took off, and were served champagne and wine. Rewards are the best.

We did more collective patting ourselves on the back. Then the conversation turned to baseball, and Nikki started talking about what a huge Cubs fan she was. Great! Call me an asshole, but I’m not really interested in dating a girl who’s a huge baseball fan—it’s just one of those things I like to share with guys.

So when Nikki asks me jovially if I’m going to take her to a Red Sox game, I say, “As long as it’s not the playoffs”, and all hell breaks loose. This turns into an intensely annoying situation, as she gets uppity when she realizes I’m serious, and then I defend myself by digging further and saying that I just don’t like to share baseball with a girlfriend. She starts to get actually angry, and of course the whole team is on her side. Frank is all like, “You don’t deserve huh! You’s an asshole and you’s gonna fuck dis up and you’s nevah gonna find somefin like dis again!” (There was one person on my side-- I remember Brian, one of the producers and a huge Mets, mouthing to me from behind the camera, “I AGREE.”)

Awesomely enough, this topic is still a point of tension between us! [deep, long, melancholy sigh]

Anyway, we landed, and headed to the State House in a limo. We walked in and were escorted to the Governor’s quarters through a hallway lined with pictures of presidents. We sat down around the big table, and waited. Of course, after all the producers’ strict ground rules, we were all terrified to touch any of the food or move or do anything.

And then, the big guy himself walked in.

We all stood up. And shook hands. Then we all sat down.

Let me first mention that his head is one of the biggest objects I’ve ever seen. And his face is made of some unearthly material.

So he gave his little speech about never listening to “it can’t be done” and about how the pain is temporary but the result is permanent.

I’ve gotten several comments about my “fake interested look” while this was going on. But I gotta say, I’m pretty sure the look wasn’t fake—it was genuinely inspirational. It really was.

Then he asked each of us individually what our goals were. Nicole talked about hers, and A-Schwarz asked her about her experience being a woman in the business world, and she explained that it was both a disadvantage and an advantage and that she used it to her advantage all the time, which in turn left me with no choice but to be smitten. Stephanie talked about her goal to be one of Donald Trump’s top people and he rebuked her, saying that her end goal should not be to work for someone else—he said that she should want to build an even bigger building than Trump’s biggest, right next to his so that it cast a shadow on it. Now I was smitten by him too.

Then I said some dumb thing about having a few possible paths and still being undecided about my goals, and he rebuked me too, saying that I had to pick one and focus, and that if I didn’t I would never fully achieve any of them.

If you asked me a year ago if I thought I would ever get career advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger only hours after proposing to my girlfriend in a soap opera on national TV, I’d say, “No.” I’d say, “No. I don’t think I’ll ever get career advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger only hours after proposing to my girlfriend in a soap opera on national TV.” And yet, there I was.

After about 30 minutes, a woman came in and told Ahnold that he had another meeting to go to, and he and his head shook our hands and exited the premises. We were all given gubernatorial pens (almost as awesome as the new set of golf clubs the Kinetic girls got a week earlier), and we were whisked away to the airport, and back to LA.

We spent the afternoon in our long interviews, and that night, James left for the boardroom, while we hung around and waited. I didn’t know this at the time, but sitting there watching the sunset I was enjoying the last moment of the whole experience that anything would be simple.