E! Online’s Ask the Answer B!tch has the lowdown on The Apprentice:
The B!tch suspects … that plenty of what goes down on reality-TV shows involves some sort of doctoring–deceptive editing, sinister voice-over work or other such studio magic.
How accurate is my hunch? Consider the latest quasi-real sensation The Apprentice. Bowie Hogg, the jolly Texas contestant, dished me up some lowdown on the show. That feller loves ever-body, but he ain’t afraid o’ spillin’ the chili beans about what really went on at Trump Tower.
Here are just a few facts:
• The boardroom and the suite both lie on the fourth floor, not on separate floors, as all those elevator rides suggest. Contestants rode up and down the elevators to give the behind-the-scenes folks time to move equipment between shoots, which allowed them to use fewer camera crews. “It was just [producer Mark] Burnett trying to save some money,” Hogg says.
• Fired Apprentices never crawled straight from the boardroom to a taxi waiting on the street. Instead, at the beginning of the contest, producers filmed each contestant walking out to the street and into a taxi. That way, the pesky press couldn’t camp outside Trump Tower every day and see who was getting axed.
• Some contestants never actually heard the scathing criticisms Trump seemed to spit at them in the boardroom.
For instance, in the episode where Trump fires Hogg, the Combover Mogul blasts the young cowhand for failing at the black, black art of marketing. When Trump delivers that sting, the camera captures not Trump’s lips but Hogg’s reaction. The reason: Trump actually delivered the critical bitch-slap later–in a sound booth.
Apprentice to American Idol, our Reality Checkpoint is the place for tales of true TV Hogg says that during his actual firing, no one explained why he was booted, and he hasn’t had a chance to ask Mr. Trump about it since.
Okay, halt. Before you dash off that indignant letter to NBC honcho Jeff Zucker about his wanton diddling with the time-space continuum, know that pretty much all reality-TV shows pull similar stunts:
The Answer B!tch continues about other reality shows.