Thursday, November 18, 2010
Local chefs: Gordon Ramsay wants to yell at you
Posted by Lauren LaBorde on Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 5:28 PM
For chefs interested in getting their egos broken like a poorly-executed homemade mayonnaise, FOX is holding auditions Saturday, Nov. 20 for the second season of its competitive reality cooking show MasterChef (not to be confused with Top Chef, Top Chef Masters, Top Chef: Just Desserts, Iron Chef America or The Next Iron Chef), hosted and produced by the notoriously mean Gordon Ramsay (seriously, don't even think about making mediocre bouillabaisse around this guy). The show, based on the BBC series of the same name, is targeted to home cooks who want to exchange their "desk job(s) for an exciting life in the kitchen." You could win a cash prize and the title of MasterChef (which I'm sure carries prestige in some circles)! The auditions are at The Foundry (333 St. Joseph St.) from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. All the details are at www.masterchefcasting.com.
This isn't the first time Ramsay and crew have picked New Orleans for a casting call — it scouted failed restaurants for Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares in July. In general, as the linked blog post mentions, this year has been a prolific one for reality TV in New Orleans. The city has seen its second season of The Real World, casting calls for What Not to Wear, American Idol, Big Brother and a billion other nonexistent-as-of-yet shows I'm alerted to via email. If you're interested in working in the respectable industry of reality television, this is the city to be in! However, it's not enough to be a normal, non-actor person with talents or an interesting personality to be on a reality TV show anymore. With so many regular people, along with washed-up child actors and former vice presidential candidates, clamoring for reality TV show jobs, it's become quite a competitive industry. Want to stand out as the most delusional, most narcissistic, most ruthlessly competitive of the bunch? Maybe you should consider reality TV school.
The New York Reality TV School — yes, this is a real thing — exists to, according to the school's website, "train and develop non-actors, and actors, through the spectrum of experiences a reality TV contestant will face: from the audition, to the many interviews you'll go through and the actual show," and it helps students in "finding and hi-lighting [sic] what makes you unique, building your confidence and examining how you package yourself so you can best get cast on the show of your choosing." It's funny, because reality TV started as a way to showcase real, relatable people, but now it's a genre that requires training classes and a specific skill set.
Starting at the tuition price of $179 for a one-time intensive workshop (the school also offers private training and five-week workshops), students can participate in on-set training, "master classes" with former cast members of reality shows including I Love New York and A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, and media training and press conference workshops. I'm sure this reality TV school is just fantastic but, as an avid reality TV watcher, I would like to suggest the following courses be added to future course catalogs:
• I'm Not Here to Make Friends: Throwing People Under the Bus, and Other Ways to Win Cash Prizes and Meaningless Titles on Competition-Based Reality Shows
• Delusion 101: How to be Wealthy, Happy and Healthy Without Actually Being Any of Those Things. The session includes a panel discussion featuring cast members of Bravo!'s The Real Housewives series.
• Personal Woes as Public Entertainment: Using Your Struggles With Addiction, Abuse and Low Self-Esteem as Ways to be an Entertaining Reality TV Cast Member. Jemmye from The Real World: New Orleans presents the program.
• Basic Fighting: Bitch-Slapping, Weave-Pulling and Other Reality TV Defense Mechanisms
• Starvation Techniques: Effective Methods for Resisting Hunger to Use on Survivor and America's Next Top Model
There's a new industry in town, New Orleans, so it's time to adapt and get educated. Because the one thing this state needs is more televised embarrassments.
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