Rewind: The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, Week 9
2005-11-30 / 10:53 p.m.
Bizarro: I can *so* count on the fact that anything Leslie says on the solo interviews during the task, or in interactions with the other cast members, is the complete opposite of reality. If she were on one of those fashion makeover shows, she'd be the platinum-haired soccer mom with the Stuck-in-the-80's wardrobe, thick bangs, and baggy sweats, who thinks she looks fine, and not like a complete humiliation to her children who are ashamed of her coming to school functions... I'm not making this up, on "How Do I Look" there was this woman, Lauri (Ep #37, Tacky Homemaker Gets a Makeover), who even after the makeover looked really displeased with the result, even though she looked about 10 years younger and less like a blonde cadaver with metallic pink lip gloss. Get this: she took the elastic out of the pink dress she met her husband in so she could wear it, decades after they met--she would have been better off recycling it into a quilt to go with the pillow they made out of her hideous pink sweater.
But I digress.
Matchstick, which was down to Leslie, Marcela, and Ryan, actually had a decent idea to promote the Buick Lucerne for which they had to build a showroom concept. Ryan had a vision of the car being so nice, you wouldn't just leave it in the parking lot when you took it out for a drive, you'd actually bring it right into the chic Italian restaurant and it would sit with you at the table. His tagline was, "It's that nice." A little corny, but short and to the point. He even had a video made with beauty shots of the car driving up to the restaurant and then arriving at a beautiful dessert, close up so it looks like you're sitting at the table from the point of view of the car. The showroom, too, was to be set up with an elegantly set table, at which the car would be "sitting".
It would have worked had Leslie had the vision to imagine what he imagined. I occasionally think that if someone on the losing team had been a better communicator (can you tell I've worked for Scientologists?) that they would have been able to convey the ideas so well to the rest of the group that the task would be executed just the way it should be. In this case, I got it just from what Ryan had already said in the snippets shown, in fact the MSLO panel agreed that the idea had potential, and Leslie simply failed to bring it out. I think she's just too full of herself to imagine that she could possibly be wrong (which it turns out she almost always is).
She tried to blame the failure of the task on Ryan (lack of creativity and weak idea, which in fact it was not) and Marcela (for doing nothing, which doesn't quite look true, as she ran around town gathering the items they needed for the showroom display), and actually mentions that the execution was great, which Charles completely contradicts in the conference room (dunno about you, but I believe the guy with the big bucks in his pocket and the Cuban cigar constantly dangling from his mouth, over the PR/Marketing specialist who always has to consult another specialist before making a move). Actually she quite botched it herself by rambling during the presentation to the GM execs. Not only was she very nervous, she didn't seem to understand the concept which, by then, she had mangled and manipulated into something with only a passing resemblance to the concept Ryan had come up with. She even threw the showroom display all out of proportion by requesting a bigger table, which looked more like a bed than a fine dining establishment. They would have been fine with the table Ryan originally had.
As for Primarius, they really did great. Bethany came up with an excellent concept, the showroom display was gorgeous and shiny, and the presentation was tight and to the point. Their tagline was "Driven by Elegance," which implies that you, the driver-slash-new-owner-of-a-Lucerne, are not just elegant, but that You Are Elegance. Brilliant. So brilliant that GM decided to replicate the setup in every showroom in America. Thanks to Bethany's creativity (hitting the jackpot not only on concept but also tagline, presentation, and the whole nine), Jim's visual talents (I'm assuming the shiny obsidian dais that the car sits on was his doing, as he was the one sniffing and eyeing the car as a lion would a potential mate), and Dawna's managerial capabilities (which are tremendous, actually--I'd love to work for her myself), they won a dinner with two top MSLO execs at the Four Seasons... which Jim proceeded to make tedious and unpleasant with his crude remarks, having to do with his strategy of killing the strong players and keeping the weak ones so he could have no resistance at the end. Nice.