Good Golly Miss Molly! SithBorg reviews the hired audiences that fill the seats of your favorite games shows, and shouts out to the intrepid Little Richard from the audience of The Singing Bee...

mOOn platOOn

7 regular features updated on odd days

The Bottom Line: This is a blog about mOOn platOOn, by Steve Games. Working in Hollywood but outside the bounds of studio controls, it’s a dream to create a movie – a TV series – a video game, books, interactive website and toys, and this is the beginning.

The Architect of Rock Says “Shut up!” Behind The Scenes Of The Singing Bee

A Guest Review By SithBorg

Few of you asswipes, so contentedly planted in your mite-ridden girth cushions before the mass-minded media screens, realize that the half-hour of merriment you so willingly bundle to your brain takes about four hours to make once weeks of preparation are done and they finally get down to making it.

Additionally, more than half of the audience for such programs as Deal Or No Deal (which should be ticketed for milking “suspense”), Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (without really trying) and Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? (answer: no) are paid  $7.50 an hour by a contracted company called Standing Room Only – or others like it - to sit there doing audience reaction shots over and over and over.

The contestants whom you so admire for their cool are sometimes cooler than you think. (SPOILER WARNING: this pertains to the upcoming episode) Alicia lost her third attempt at winning The Singing Bee – which would have broken a record – then had to come back out to record a promo for the show pretending like she was getting ready to go in for the fight not knowing the outcome. Obviously doing the promos at the end of three and a half hours in the studio when everyone is exhausted, sweaty and faking excitement is a superior plan to doing them at the beginning of that marathon, when everyone is actually excited and doesn’t have to pee.

God forbid you have to excuse yourself for excremental activity. Just like at the Academy Awards, if Kiefer Sutherland has to get up and run out to the car for a drink, someone is immediately sent to your seat to replace you. And there isn’t much chance you’re going to get back on the set, much less into the same seat.

Welcome to the only job in the world where it’s still okay to ask the potential worker “What’s your ethnicity?” and “How old are you?” and then openly discriminate against that worker with impunity. The hired audience. About three to five per cent of them are composed of “cleaned up” homeless folk able to groom well enough to pass and collect their cash-out at the end of the night.

These audience-migrants are paid in cash each night after standing in long, alphabetically organized lines. There is no tax record and no taxes paid. Since many of these programs tape multiple episodes in a matter of days – maybe 4 or 5 episodes in an 18-hour work day – anyone able to sit it out can take home (or to the park) around $100 at the end of it all. But it’s seasonal work, done by extras, out-of-work actors, students and others needing quick, same-day cash.

Have fun watching the audience behind the players. You will see strange things happen. Couples changing partners. Someone falling asleep. People disappearing, reappearing and vanishing again.

Behold! That mustachioed fat woman has been in the audience of every game show made since 1997. And that bulbous-nosed guy had a beard and glasses on One Versus 100, but was clean-shaven and glassless while groovin’ with that talentless MTV graduate student who comes on after Conan O’Brien and whose name I can never remember. Oh yes, Carson Weakly.

Packed shoulder-to-shoulder under hot lights without refreshments or paid breaks, these are the jolly folk who are technologically amped up to represent the squealing, cheering mobs that you can only imagine have been waiting for years outside the studio and around the block to get in. Not. Within minutes of being seated, even the most naïve tourist realizes that the audience is there to help “make TV.”

Even smart people assume that Jeopardy! has a live audience. Trust me on this one, any program that troubles with a live audience has paid for it and is going to show the audience. Sure there’s a lot of clapping, but when is the last time you saw the Jeopardy! audience?

Now down to Little Richard.

Rumored to be suffering from sciatic nerves, Little Richard was helped to the stage on crutches and seated at a piano before the show started. Bantering playfully with the 300 (audience Spartans) he told us several times to “Shut up” with that mischievous Little Richard gleam in his eye, each time evoking laughter. By this time ¾ of the audience had sat through three previous episode tapings that day. Some were falling asleep, but LR’s presence woke them up. Paid to see Little Richard. Interesting concept.

Speaking only for myself, I enjoyed rocking out through “Good Golly Miss Molly” each of the three times it was taped. I am almost certain that there will be several action shots of myself and the young lady bogeying next to me featured on that episode.

If you never imagined finding SithBorg on TV rocking out to Little Richard, tune in to that episode – the cameras wisely kept coming back to me again and again.

And that’s the reality of your fantasy. Have a SithBorgian day.

It Came From Out Of The Script

mOOn platOOn the screenplay suggests that Richard Nixon was the architect of a secret U.S. military moon base starting with the very first Apollo missions. This scene explains why...

CUT TO INT. News conference based on news footage of the actual event with Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return from the Moon.

NIXON

…This is the greatest week in the history of the Earth since Creation.

We circle around Nixon’s head during the following voice over. The background changes to Capitol Hill, 20 years earlier. Nixon’s face grows younger and clothes regress appropriately. He listens to Mao Tse-Tung as the Communists overrun China. Then he hears the hammering of his old nemesis Nikita Khrushchev as he threatens to bury the United States. The background continues to transform as we orbit Nixon again and now we are in the Oval Office in 1969. Nixon morphs into his presidential age and attire.

NIXON [V.O.]

Why? Because just 20 years before, as a young Congressman, I had watched as one-quarter of the world was taken over by a Communist named Mao Tse-Tung. And another Communist power, run by bullies like Stalin and Khrushchev, held a nuclear knife at the throat of the United States. I was…

INT. The White House, Oval Office, 1969. Present are younger versions of Lt. Munoz, Brigadier General Homer Boushey, Major John Hamilton and Joe McVey, all dressed to meet with the President.

SUPER:August 1969

NIXON

…Convinced that a military base on the Moon will allow deployment of our missiles in a way that will be unbeatable, as well as establish an attack platform for ourselves which, itself, is beyond attack. In the event of nuclear war, the U.S. will be assured of final strike capability. I am also convinced that the Soviets are set on claiming the Moon for themselves. Rather than deal with the public relations details for now – mainly because they’ll beat the hell out of us for breaking some sort of anti-nukes-in-space treaty – I’m authorizing the formation of a covert, elite Space Command team which I’m codenaming Lunar Platoon. When it comes to the security of this nation, Dick Nixon isn’t dicking around.

If I Were Casting Now

The part of Richard M. Nixon, 37th President of the United States: Joe Montegna (Godfather III, The Simpsons (Fat Tony)

mOOn platOOn Byproducts

The mOOn platOOn Base - a toy involving the buildings and tunnels making up the secret base inhabited by 37 action figures!!! Spread in out in the family room!

mOOn platOOn Issues

In mOOn platOOn the TV series, SithBorg offers a theory of gay birth rates based upon where conception takes place.

Considering homosexuality as a congenital state, SithBorg proposes that the biological "logic" behind it is a response to over-population. When a growing population, whether it be a tribe, a township or a metropolis, perceives itself as too crowded, people begin to give birth to more homosexuals.

This would imply that more homosexuals would likely be born in densely populated cities than in the countryside and perhaps in larger poor families than in smaller poor families where resources are stretched.

Is homosexuality nature's answer to over-population? If you are gay, where were you conceived and under what family size and economic conditions?

Is SithBorg right?

Other Projects By Steve Games

This is a scene from the Open Stage Association's music video Dry Tears featuring the author as rock wizard Thespus of Estonia.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1339/1444617980_ece16985c6_o.jpg

The Cast In Hollywood

Warming up again...the heat is on for Indian Summer...

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