Controversy showcase
Film examines Texas ‘Price Is Right’ superfan
A California kid in the 1960s and ’70s, Ted Slauson was a “The Price Is Right” savant. He watched the popular daytime TV game show obsessively, tracked and memorized prices of hundreds of product prizes and dreamed of one day being a contestant — a dream that eventually came true.
Today Slauson is a San Antonio resident best known among rabid “Price” fans as the guy who, in 2008, made game-show history when he helped another contestant make the first-ever perfect Showcase bid — and for how that triggered a controversy that almost destroyed TV’s longest-running game show.
Slauson’s “Price” obsession, the 37 shows he attended and the conspiracy theories that arose after the infamous Showcase are all part of the recently released award-winning documentary “Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much.”
Slauson began watching “The Price Is Right” when he was about 6 years old. The youngest of six kids growing up in Sacramento, he had little choice. The family had only one TV, and that’s what his siblings wanted to watch. So he watched, too, albeit grudgingly.
Soon, he was hooked. “Every show is different,” said Slauson, now 52, explaining the attraction. “They play different games each show, and there’s lots of different prizes — cars, trips, RVs. And Bob Barker was a really good host.”
Slauson’s childhood neighbor Dee Gavaldon remembers his obsession well.
“Teddy and his brother Dan would use Fisher-Price play-set figures to put on a whole show, with contestants, prizes, the whole thing,” she said. “They were real ‘Price Is Right’ nerds.”
At some point, Slauson noticed that the show cycled through the same product prizes again and again and that the prices rarely changed. The Emperor grandfather clock was always $1,000, the Golden West billiard table was always $2,800, and the Amana side-by-side refrigerator/freezer was always $789.
So he started tracking prices, first on paper and later on his first computer, a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Eventually, his spreadsheet reached almost 2,000 individual items, and Slauson memorized them all.
In 1984, soon after he turned 18, Slauson and Gavaldon got in a car and headed for Southern California and Studio 33 in CBS Television City, where “The Price Is Right” was (and still is) taped. They spent the entire drive reviewing prices.
Sitting in the audience, they watched as the show’s first prize, an above-ground swimming pool, was revealed. The price Slauson shouted out — $1,499 — was spot on.
Sitting next to him, Gavaldon looked over in surprise.
“What?” he responded. “You spent the whole drive quizzing me on prices.”
“It’s one thing to know prices in the car, but it’s another with the noise and the people and the excitement,” Gavaldon said. “He was cool and collected.”
Despite his enthusiasm, Slauson wasn’t chosen to “come on down” to Contestants’ Row to play One Bid, the show’s first pricing game.
He returned the next year, but again he wasn’t chosen. So he went the next year. And the next. And the next. Sometimes he went with friends, sometimes by himself. Eventually, he became so well known that the producers learned his name and greeted him like an old friend.
Even when he wasn’t chosen, he enjoyed using his talent for memorizing prices to help others win. Many contestants, realizing he knew his stuff, would turn to him for help. If the studio got too loud for them to hear him, he’d signal with his fingers — 1, 2, 9 and 9, for example, to tell someone to bid $1,299.
The producers encouraged audience members to shout out bids, and though they wouldn’t allow you to bring in lists of prices, they couldn’t stop you from memorizing them.
Slauson’s knowledge was so unerring that Barker once acknowledged him from the stage.
It came after Slauson, sitting in the audience, was the first to shout a price of $1,250 for a home gym. Barker quipped from the stage, “Now, there’s the first bid of ‘The Price Is Right.’ ” After explaining the rules, he then pointed directly at Slauson, adding, “And you, sir, have no chance of winning.”
The camera even focused on Slauson, in a blue polo shirt and with a bristly mustache. When the $1,250 price was revealed, Barker had Slauson stand up and take a proverbial bow.
Excerpts from “The Price Is Right” in “Perfect Bid” show this and other events happening exactly as Slauson remembers them. Though he dismisses suggestions that he has a photographic memory, his ability to recall details — prices, prizes, contestant names and their bids — is impressively accurate.
“When we interviewed him, he sat down and, without any notes, remembered everything about probably a dozen different times he was in the studio audience,” “Perfect Bid” director C.J. Wallis said.
Slauson was always good with numbers.
“I tease him and call him ‘Rain Man,’ ” said Slauson’s brother Dan, who works for the University of California school system. “If you want to know what something costs over time, he’ll know right away, like, ‘It’s X dollars a month.’ ”
For his part, Slauson said he enjoyed the documentary, though Wallis had to trim 13 minutes of show footage from an early version when FreemantleMedia, which owns “The Price Is Right,” put a seven-minute limit on how much it would license to the project.
“(Wallis) did an excellent job telling my story despite the limitations,” Slauson said.
He’s not the only person who thinks so. “Perfect Bid” was named best documentary at the 2017 Orlando Film Festival.
Come on down …
After graduating from California State University, Sacramento, Slauson started teaching middle school math in 1988. He later taught high school and moved to San Antonio in 2005, where he works as a mathematics assessment specialist for an educational testing company.
As a teacher, he continued using summers and school holidays to try to get on the show.
Finally, in 1992, during his 24th time in the “Price Is Right” audience, announcer Rod Roddy called Slauson’s name.
He concedes that, even after all those years, being a contestant was disorienting.
“You get up there, and you’re just kind of like, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ ” he said in the documentary. “It’s very exciting.”
After missing on a patiofurniture set (there were three in his database and he guessed wrong), he made a perfect bid on a Berkline recliner ($599), earning a $100 bonus.
His pricing game was Punch-A-Bunch, an oversized punch board with 50 papercovered holes, each containing dollar prizes. The top prize is $10,000, but when he got $1,000 on his first punch, he decided to call it quits and take his winnings. (The next three punches, Barker revealed, were for $500, $250 and $50. So, good decision.)
Ultimately, he got knocked out on the Big Wheel, in which contestants spin a vertical roulette wheel containing the numbers zero through $1 in 5-cent increments. The object is to spin a maximum of two times and get the highest total number without going over $1.
Slauson spun for 55 cents, but a young soldier named Thomas spun for 70 and continued on to the Showcase.
“So I’m off to the side watching, and it dawns on me that my time on ‘The Price Is Right’ is over.” But “The Price Is Right” wasn’t done with him.
Numbers game
Cut to Sept. 22, 2008, not long after longtime host Bob Barker had retired and been replaced by comedian Drew Carey.
Slauson had returned to the renamed Bob Barker Studio and was sitting next to Terry and Linda Kniess. Terry, 60 at the time and a former Las Vegas weatherman and casino-surveillance expert, was chosen to play and eventually made it to the Showcase, the show’s final pricing game.
The Showcase that Kniess had to price included a karaoke machine, a pool table and a 17-foot camper. And this is where Slauson’s and Kniess’ recollections diverge.
Doing the math in his head, Slauson came up with a total of $23,743, which he told to Linda Kniess. Then he did the calculations a second time to be sure. It again added up to $23,743.
Terry Kniess, on the other hand, said he got the first two digits from his wife and that the last three — 743 — weren’t a guess.
“It’s a number we used all the time because Linda and I were married on the seventh of April, so that’s the seven and the four,” he said from his home in Henderson, Nev. “And she was born in March, so that’s the three.”
Kniess said they used the number when they played the lottery, on their luggage locks and as their ATM PIN, adding a zero at the end to make it four digits.
“When people questioned me, and I told them where the numbers came from, we had to spend the next 10 days changing all our passwords,” he said.
After Kniess’ curiously exact bid, the show cut to commercial, during which, Slauson recalls, confusion reigned. There’s a long history of TV-game-show scandals and, in an interview on Kevin Pollak’s “Chat Show,” Carey conceded he was worried. “Is this possible?” he said he asked himself. “How could this even happen? I think, ‘I’m (expletive).’ I think I’m out of a job. I think they’re shutting down the show.”
Online speculation ran rampant. One theory was that disgruntled crew members, angry that the show’s beloved longtime producer Roger Dobkowitz had been fired shortly after Barker retired, had somehow fed the right price to Kniess, either to embarrass the show or take the whole thing down.
Slauson rejects the notion that he was involved in such skulduggery.
“I think I’ve proven that I know my prices and that it’s not unusual for me to help people win.”
Kniess, too, claims that he didn’t cheat, but he also insists he didn’t get the price from Slauson.
Both say they were the object of vicious name-calling both online and on podcasts.
“They’d call me ‘that blankety-blank obsessed fan,’ ” Slauson said.
“Oh, the hatred,” Kniess said. “You go online, and it’s 10 pages deep.”
So who is right, Kniess or Slauson? Kniess has his own theory. Call it a cosmic coincidence. “Maybe we’re both right,” he said. “Maybe he called out the price, I guessed correctly and, boom, both of us got the same number.”
Eventually, Kniess received his prizes and none of the conspiracy theories was ever proved. To prevent a repeat, the show tightened its internal controls, changing brands more often and adding and subtracting options, especially on cars, all to make memorizing prices that much more difficult. Over time, the hubbub died down.
The price is wrong
Today, “The Price Is Right” continues rolling along and is pushing toward its 47th season, but without Slauson.
He still has a collection of “Price” memorabilia — including audience name tags, a signed photo of his favorite Barker’s Beauty, Holly Hallstrom, and the dumbbell set he won on that special day long ago when Roddy called him to come on down — but he no longer watches the show.
He said he stopped because he doesn’t like the way Dobkowitz, Hallstrom and other cast members were treated. He doesn’t like how Carey treats the contestants (“He laughs at them, not with them”). And he especially doesn’t like the way it treated him like a criminal or cheater.
After a nearly lifelong love affair with “The Price Is Right,” Slauson’s obsession is officially over. Next prize, please.