SHOWCASE SHOWDOWN
Game show doc a ‘love story’
Vancouver filmmaker CJ Wallis likes a good story, and the story at the heart of his new documentary Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much is a good story.
The new documentary looks at super fan Ted Slauson’s relationship to his favourite game show, The Price is Right.
That relationship spanned decades and saw him help others take home prizes.
Wallis first heard about Slauson through a 2010 Esquire magazine article that profiled Terry Kniess, the big winner who Slauson said he had fed the final Showcase price to; a price, by the way, that was exact.
“The whole thing gives Terry endless credit, then at the bottom it says, and there’s this guy Ted who was maybe helping him out,” said Wallis about the article written by Chris Jones. “I just looked into it because I always have my radar up because I am a movie writer. So I am ‘oh well, this is a movie.’ So I researched it and got obsessed about it and the more I looked into it, I realized Terry was a bit of a goofball and Ted deserved all the credit in the world. And I started talking to Ted and I realized he is a really good guy.”
The film was recently named best documentary at the Orlando Film Festival and will have further distribution in the near future. It will be shown in Vancouver on Nov. 4 at Pyatt Hall at the VSO School of Music.
To get to the end of the story you have to go to the beginning, when Slauson was a seven-yearold kid. It was 1972, and according to Wallis there was only one TV in Slauson’s Northern California home. What to watch came down to the majority rules and the majority ruled that a new game show called The Price is Right was what the family was going to watch. By the time the final credits rolled, it was clear Slauson was hooked.
Fast-forward to his mid-teens and Slauson had figured out that the show repeated prizes. A fridge here, a lounger chair there. He saw a pattern and began to make notes and lists and crammed prices into his head.
“He designed his own game that had all the prizes at the time and he would play along,” said Wallis. “Later on he made a picture database.”
Slauson took his show on the road and attended tapings at the famed CBS Television City in Los Angeles. In 1992, at his 24th show, he heard those magic words, “come on down” directed at him.
“As soon as Bob (Barker) comes out and sees Ted he says: ‘Theodore, you made it. Theodore you’ve been a loyal friend and true; how many times have you been here?’ He says: ‘Twenty-four,’ and all the audience loses their mind,” said Wallis about Slauson’s trip to the stage.
Slauson moved through a couple of games, but luck wasn’t with him at the Big Wheel and he lost to another contestant and was out.
The rules are you can’t come back for another decade. So in 2002 Slauson returned to the show and continued to record prices.
Over 37 tapings of the show Slauson says he helped many people win many prizes. And then on Sept. 22, 2008 he helped Kniess win big by telling him, from the audience, the actual price of the final Showcase: US$23,743. The exact bid won him his Showcase and the other contestant’s as well. The two Showcases were valued at around US$54,000 in prizes.
Kniess disputes Slauson’s story. He said he wasn’t looking at Slauson but rather at his wife, who was next to Slauson in the audience, and that he came up with that number on his own.
The story goes on with more intrigue and, according to Wallis, Slauson was banned from future tapings.
According to Wallis, there has been plenty of back and forth with Freemantle, the producer of the Price is Right. In the end, he was allowed to use some footage from the show and Barker and Bob Dobkowitz, a 36-year producer on the show, both took part.
“It’s been an interesting battle and a stressful couple of months,” said Wallis, who had to cut and recut the film.
After more than a year working on the film, Wallis chooses to see this story as much more than a guy full of game-show gravitas who never quite wins.
“It seems like a tragic story to me, a tragic love story where you fall in love with someone and it doesn’t pay off,” said Wallis, who will begin shooting a new movie in early 2018.
“He spent all this time memorizing these products and then when he finally got on the show it didn’t necessarily go that awesome for him, and then his big crescendo was someone else got credit for it. He kind of got the short end of the stick.”
Or the parting gift, if you will.