Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,71

their being “nonmonetizable.” Still, you could take the largest venue in America—Michigan Stadium, with its 109,901 capacity—build nine identical replicas, put them side by side out in the Nevada desert, and you still wouldn’t have a seat for every person about to watch the first live episode of Project Icon’s thirteenth season. And this in spite of its being the least-watched season in the show’s history.

The pressure didn’t seem to affect Wayne. Up there on stage, he was focused, yes, but calm. That’s the thing with Wayne—his unshakable calm. Some take it as niceness. Professionalism, even. These people have got it all wrong.

Wayne is a functioning psychopath.

Watching him from my position in the wings, I marveled at his unbreakable confidence. Over the course of the next hour—not a second more, not a second less—he would conduct the cruel ballet of Project Icon with inhuman precision.

Not a bead of sweat. Not a syllable misspoken.

I’ve often wondered if the rise of the show in the early days was really more about Wayne’s ability to make a live broadcast seem edited—while retaining just the right amount of unpredictability—than Nigel Crowther’s “Mr. Horrible” routine. Or perhaps it was the obvious hatred between Wayne and Crowther that gave Project Icon its edge: Crowther the archmanipulator, Wayne the unmanipulatable.

A crazy fact: Before the show launched, Wayne auditioned for Crowther’s job. He was twenty-two at the time, a warm-up guy for Guess the Price. He’d lost a lot of weight since leaving his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, where he’d dropped out of high school. He’d gotten his eyes fixed, too—dispensing with the goldfish-bowl spectacles that had caused him so much grief at school. The audition was his big chance. His moment to break out. But he was a terrible, lifeless judge. He felt nothing for anyone—not even contempt—and it showed. So Len tried him out as host and couldn’t believe what he saw. Wayne read from the teleprompter with such control, he could time his sentences to within a sixteenth of a second. He could play the thing like a musical instrument. What’s more: It was impossible to tell when his scripted lines ended and his ad-libs began. And his ad-libs—well, they were something else. Breathtakingly mean, and yet delivered with a bland pseudofriendliness that somehow made them seem okay. “Hey buddy, come here, gimme a hug. Good job. Now, your mom’s in the hospital, right? Very sick. And do you worry that if you get voted off the show tonight, she might take a turn for the worse? You could actually be singing for her life, right? Tell everyone how you feel about that.”

Like I said: Functioning psychopath. In another era, Wayne would have emceed hangings and public disembowelments. “Hey buddy, come here, gimme a hug. Now, tell me what’s going through your mind as this masked butcher behind me sharpens his knives?”

Another thing about Wayne: He’s always moonlighting. Red-carpet shows. Charity specials. Afternoon drive time on Megahitz FM. Which means he’s on the clock, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. He works so hard, he doesn’t even have a chair in his office—if he wants to sit down, he uses an exercise bicycle. I saw him in there once, pedaling away while reading his e-mails and eating with chopsticks from some kind of prepackaged meal. I was struck by the bareness of the place. No plants. No photographs. Nothing. Just an enormous poster of Nigel Crowther, on which he had drawn crosshairs in red marker pen…

Another fuzzy tone over the monitors.

“Stand by, New York,” I said.

A few seconds passed. Then a red light above the camera, flashing in sequence.

I began counting down.

“Ten… nine… eight… seven…”

The light was flashing quicker now, like a bomb ready to detonate.

“… six… five… four…”

Wayne’s expression changed. He looked poised and deadly: a killer with cornered prey.

“… three… two…”

“THEY SAID WE’D NEVER MAKE IT,” began Wayne, his face still in almost total darkness. “They said it was… impossible. Well, they say a lot of things, don’t they? And sometimes they’re wrong. Very wrong. Because here we are, back again for our thirteenth year of live broadcasts from Greenlit Studios, right here in Hollywood—with some of the most outstanding talent not just in the history of our show… but in an ENTIRE GENERATION. Mia Pelosi. Jimmy Nugget. Cassie Turner. These are already household names, folks. But who knows if any of them will make it over the weeks and months to come. We are in uncharted territory, my friends—in oh-so-many