Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,55

old-fashioned) in this regard. “I want my finalists alive at the end of the season, dammit!” I once overheard him screaming at Nigel Crowther through a closed office door. “How can they sell any records for us if they keep hanging themselves from your balcony?”

Crowther had laughed for a long time at this. “C’mon, Sven, old boy,” he crooned. “How many of them”—he had to cough and blow his nose—“sell any records?”

Two Svens named two ex-contestants whose albums had been certified platinum. This only made Crowther even laugh harder. “Two people!” he squealed. “Two people in the history of this show! What about the other others, eh? There are fifteen finalists every season, you daft old Swede, and we’ve been doing this for twelve years.”

“Some are very successful.”

“Yeah—in the cruise ship and wedding industries.”

“No, you fat-nippled arsehole, on Broadway.”

“They make us more money in the tabloids than on Broadway! Think, man. Reality deals. Advertweets. Doctor-sponsored cosmetic implants. Those kids could be out there getting photographed without their underwear, or spending time in celebrity rehab. They could be productive. Instead, what? Forty-second Street? Oh, please.”

That was when the office door had opened, prompting me to dive for cover as Two Svens emerged, still in a fury. Crowther was gone from the show a few weeks later—he’d signed his deal for The Talent Machine. I remember wondering if he’d actually tell any of his future contestants what he had planned for them.

Maybe they wouldn’t care.

17

Lion’s Den

January

LAS VEGAS WEEK WAS a relatively new thing for Project Icon. Until season ten, the Final Fifteen had always been selected at Greenlit Studios in Los Angeles, a week before the live shows began. And then… well, Len had bought a house in Las Vegas. Or rather, he’d bought a sixteen-bedroom mansion with its own golf course, moat, drawbridge, and private volcano, ten minutes from the Strip. I have no idea how much he paid for the place, but it hardly mattered: Four months later, the Great Recession began, and the market for dictator-grade real estate featuring simulated lava eruptions became somewhat less attractive. For a few difficult weeks, Len spent a lot of time on the phone, using phrases like “negative amortization” and “complete fucking obliteration.” And that’s when Vegas Week was born—with Len declaring his extraordinary foresight in purchasing a residence near the chosen location, large enough to accommodate both himself and “key members of the staff” (i.e., Len’s Lovelies), while also allowing him to exploit the considerable advantages of a business-use tax write-off.

I could hardly believe he’d pulled it off—until I found out that Sir Harold Killoch, Two Svens, and Ed Rossitto also owned properties in the same bankrupt development.

The cost of Las Vegas Week to Rabbit must have been immense: a hundred and twenty airfares and hotel rooms for the contestants alone, plus food and other transportation, not including those very same costs for the crew, and on top of all that the rental charge for the venue—a hangar-like conference facility at the back of the Bikini Atoll Resort & Casino (known for detonating a “replica fifteen-megaton hydrogen bomb” in its glass-domed, hyperoxygenated lobby at fortyminute intervals throughout the day, as waiters dressed as Pacific Islanders handed out Chain Reaction Martinis from the Crater Lagoon Bar & Grill).

Expenses aside, however, our annual trip to Las Vegas marked a crucial point in the season. The circus was over. The real competition had begun. Take the set, for example: The contestants performed on an actual stage, with the judges’ table placed on a dais behind the orchestra pit—just like the arrangement at Greenlit Studios (only without the studio audience). In addition, there was a separate location—known officially as The Decision Room—into which each contestant was ushered on the last day of filming and informed whether or not they’d made it through to the live shows in Hollywood. This obviously didn’t end well for most them: With only fifteen places available, the success rate was barely twelve percent—a fact Wayne Shoreline took great pleasure in repeating at every opportunity, especially when a contestant seemed close to breaking down.

The Decision Room was actually nothing of the sort: It was a giant steel cage, borrowed from the Paradise Bros. Circus—they used it for transporting lions—suspended via hooks from the ceiling. The only way to get inside was via a custom-made staircase, barely visible through the green-tinted fog that billowed from a rack of theatrical smoke machines. (Len had wanted the set to look “futuristic, like something from one