[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had, not only had, but have a very interesting life history. There’s one thing in there that I had question marks about and I really don’t know the answer to. Off tape I phrased it wrongly that I thought you had studied or memorized The World Almanac.
Rick Rosner: No. So, I made it on to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and I made it into the hot seat and I think I made it up to the eight thousand dollar question but then ran out of time. And then there was a holiday or a hiatus. Normally on a quiz show if you run out of time you come back in the next episode. It maybe even filmed that same but it was maybe the Fourth of July holiday where it was going to be two weeks before I finished my time in the hot seat and in that two weeks we were going to, I think Disney World, and I took an Almanac with me just to continue trying to amass trivia for the next set of questions I was going to get, to see whether I could make it up to the high value questions, which having watched every episode of the show I thought I had a pretty good chance at.
I couldn’t carry an Almanac with me through Disneyland. So I tore the almanac into five parts and I’d take a little part with me when we went out with my wife and myself and our kid to just have something to look at for any pertinent information while we were standing in line. And I got back on the show and at 16,000 dollars I got a shitty question; what capital city is located at the highest altitude above sea level and there were several problems with the questions written for millionaire. One is the problem with questions written for any quiz show which is you can always make a mistake. And the fact checking process where you write a question you provide your source for the answer and then you send it to the fact checking department and they double triple check your answer. It should be a good question in terms of being well phrased and having a single answer and being factually correct and so they’ve the fact checking department. Somebody’s in charge of picking what questions would be good to ask on a show and that’s somewhat separate from the fact checking which is making sure that there are no problems with the question but even given that, bad questions sneak through.
If a bad question sneaks onto Jeopardy, it doesn’t necessarily destroy the whole game. Somebody answers and Trebek or now Ken Jennings or whoever’s the host, says right or wrong and maybe the person on Jeopardy who knows shit ton will say that’s wrong and then at break, the person says instead of that’s wrong I think you’re wrong or somebody else. Somehow somebody fig during the making of that episode comes back from break and say “We took another look at that question over the break and Lindsay was right and so we’re giving her credit for getting it right,” and they adjust it and they move on.
Or the question is caught later either before or after broadcast but a bad question on Jeopardy is one of 60 Questions, 61 if they make it through every single question and doesn’t necessarily affect the outcome of the game. Jeopardy’s pretty competent; they’ve been in the Jeopardy business for 40 years. A game of Jeopardy can survive a bad question but if you get a bad question on Millionaire, it’s just you answering a series of questions and if you get a question that’s fucked up and you’re not lucky enough to guess the correct wrong answer; the answer they think is correct, then you’re knocked out of the game and your time on the game is wrecked. So that’s problem one is just due to the structure of the game. It’s less forgiving of mistakes made by the show.
Thing two is, Regis Philbin was host at the time I was on and he had a show out of New York, so they did millionaire out of New York and all the experienced game show quiz show writers and fact checkers were in LA. So they had to hire a bunch of rookies and that meant they might make more mistakes and they did. They made a shit ton of mistakes and the question that knocked me off the show, they got their facts wrong. Coincidentally, the bad information in the question was taken from a very bad little list of about 30 world cities purported altitudes in the World Almanac; little thing that occupied the bottom one vertical inch of a page, a little teeny list. I happen to not have seen when I was studying the Almanac because that page was very close to the end of the chunk of Almanac as I torn it apart.
An Almanac is about a 1000 pages and I had 200 page chunks so I could keep in my pocket one at a time while we went on rides. Say, a chunk of Almanac ended at page 420. Well that stupid list was maybe on page 416 and I just didn’t get to it. Had I gotten to it maybe I would have remembered the bad information on the bad list which didn’t contain the actual city that they were looking for which is La Paz Bolivia and I didn’t know the correct answer and Millionaire didn’t know the correct answer and I eventually sued him because you shouldn’t be able to get away with asking a multiple choice question without the correct answer to that question among the choices. I lost my suit because I’d signed a release pretty much giving him permission to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The judge I got didn’t consider that a contract, I think they call it a contract of adhesion, which is a fancy term and probably the wrong term, it’s been a while, that happened back 20 years ago. Contract of adhesion is a contract that’s inherently unfair. You can’t force somebody to sign a completely unfair contract.
You can’t sign force somebody to sign a contract that says if I fail to make three loan payments, you can cut off my toes or I don’t know what else, but it’s just an obviously unfair contract where the person is compelled to sign it by a power differential. There’s no negotiating a contract to be on a quiz show. You either agree to everything that they want you to sign or you’re not going to be on the show. You have no power and you want to be on the show because you have a chance to win a million dollars. So I think that’s the deal with contractive adhesion; if one party has all the power and the other party doesn’t have any power to negotiate away obviously unfair aspects of the contract, that’s not supposed to be allowed under the law but the judge didn’t see it that way.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 