Finally got my wife to join me in one of my extras gigs. We were part of the audience in a new daytime TV show, THE REVOLUTION. Got to the Chelsea Studios in the early morning and waited in the studio's driveway with all the other audience guests for an hour or so to be let in.While we were waiting, I let one of the PAs know that we were part of "Christine's people"!
-"O.K. -Come with me, and stand against the other wall" and soon all the other people, standing against the original wall were ushered in first!? Oh boy... did I do something wrong? Were we just cannon fodder now?
As it turned out, there were other "Christine people" joining us and we too were soon allowed to pass through the "metal detecting" security check to the basement holding area. Here we "decompressed" from our long wait and were entertained by the funny "warm up guy". And soon the entire crowd was taken to a huge service elevator which crawled up a few flights and eventually opened to let us file out in orderly fashion to the studio set.
More warm-up funny stuff and eventually the show started. There were four people who made up a pannel of "tipsters": house-builder Ty Pennington, fashion runway expert Tim Gunn, ob-gyn physician Jennifer Ashton, advice expert Tiffanie Davis and personal trainer to celebrities Harley Pasternak. They started the show with some gross discussion about "buggers", eventually transitioning to interviewing a celebrity, Monica Potter, and finally concluding with providing support to an obese mother.
Our direction was to clap enthusiastically on cue with "happy-happy-joy-joy-having-fun" expressions. Extra shoots of these clapping/smiling sessions were needed after the show ended, and suddenly my wife realized how staged all the audience reactions must be for other shows as well. She now enjoys these shows with a new understanding (i.e. you never know what the audience is really reacting to... real situations or fake prompts).
Ahhh... education about media-manipulation; it's soooo refreshing to see it dawn on others.
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