KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Let the excitement begin!
“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” is moving to FOX4, beginning September 10th. Tuesday morning, hopeful millionaires lined up to try and make it on the show.
The game show’s casting call spent Tuesday testing potential contestants here in KC.
It’s not as easy as it looks on TV. Just ask the crowd of people who gathered at the Westin Hotel on Tuesday morning, as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” held its latest set of contestant auditions. Around 150 people showed up hoping to make the show.
The line of people outside the hotel began to form and grow around 7 a.m. as hopeful contestants crowded into a hotel ballroom to take the show’s written test and audition for the show’s production team. The ballroom resembled a giant classroom, with the would-be contestants filling out Scantron sheets with test answers, much the way they might on a college entrance exam.
“It’s nerve-racking,” Liz Fritz, a potential contestant from Shawnee, said.
Fritz was one of many who said the test was unexpectedly tough, but waiting for her audition while others took their turn was excruciating. Fritz, who is originally from Spring Hill, Kan., says it’s a goal of hers to appear on “Millionaire.”
“It will also be terrifying,” Fritz said. “I will immediately start cramming. I think and try to figure out who I’m going to take out there as a plus-one.”
The crowd of hopeful contestants dispersed by 10 a.m., and only a handful of contestants representing those whose numbers were called by “Millionaire’s” producers remained. They reached that point by impressing the show’s casting call workers with their performance on the written exam.
“I’ve always wanted to be on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,'” Jim Breed, a hopeful contestant from Overland Park, told FOX4 News.
Breed said a friend from his days as a college student encouraged him to tryout, and the test was tough.
“There’s lots of general knowledge questions about art, history, all sorts of obscure questions. I don’t believe you can study for anything other than reading a lot and having a wide variety of interests,” Breed said on Tuesday morning.
Although the test is given in Kansas City, not every test-taker is from the metro. Such is the case for Greg Vinton, an attorney from North Platte, Neb.
Vinton said he drove seven hours to reach the “Millionaire” auditions at the Westin Crown Center.
“I’ll be here today and I’ll be back for work tomorrow. It’s basically one full day and some driving,” Vinton said. “There were easy questions. There’s hard questions. There’s questions that are in the middle. I think I got enough of the easy and medium questions. I’m sure I missed the hard ones, but it seemed to be enough.”
And now, the real wait is underway. Members of the show’s production says these contestants won’t know who made the cut until sometime in August.
The rest of us can mark our calendars for September 10th, when “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” moves to FOX4. You’ll see it every day at 2 p.m.
