I attended a second-season Pyramid taping in 2003. Celebrities were Leeza Gibbons and Richard Jeni. Things I learned from attending said taping...
-- It takes about 2 hours to complete a three-episode morning taping session of J! (which I attended that morning at the same studio -- Sony). It took 2 1/2 hours to complete the one episode of Pyramid I witnessed
-- I was the only person in the audience for that taping who was not being paid to sit and watch. There was a warm-up guy, and he spent most of the time asking audience members how their commercial auditions went.
As for as stopdowns went, there were several. Among them...
-- After the first round of questions were asked for game one, Donny did his "chat time" with the celebs. What the show did was record two segments with each celeb, with producers deciding later which one was more "air worthy." For Leeza, Donny asked about her website, then recorded another segment on scrapbooking. Richard apparently wanted none of this, going blue during his second segment (Donny chiding him into a stand-up riff on online dating). Tape was stopped, with producers asking Richard to re-do the bit, but to keep the language clean. Richard told the producers, in no kind term, to buzz off. Crew debated for 5-10 minutes on what to do, before opting to move on with the game.
-- For game two, there was a segment during the second season where a home viewer played along with a team to win a prize. Tape was stopped down for 10-15 minutes due to phone connection issues, as well as Donny's inability to pronounce "Boynton Beach."
-- Richard and his civilian partner won the first game, and were escorted to the Winners Circle. Taping stopped, and Richard went to the back (didn't realize until Mr. Lemon mentioned it a few years back that producers prepped Richard and other celebs for the bonus game by giving them the categories ahead of time, as well as 1-2 clues for each category). That took 10-15 minutes. WC starts, and the first category is "British cities." Contestant gets it in about 2-3 seconds but, rather than the "victory bell," the "Family Feud" buzzer goes off. Contestant goes into hysterics, Richard tries to calm her down, and crew members ran around the set, wondering what the heck just happened.
-- This took about 40 minutes to resolve, as crew members argued in the control room over "who hit the wrong button," Richard argued with the producers on set over leaving an upset contestant (Richard adamantly told the producers that he would not go to the back until he was sure that the contestant was calm and OK), and producers debated what to do. Finally, they opted to throw out the WC questions stack, prep Richard with a fresh stack and play the new stack. Contestant ended up winning $10,000 with Richard and another $15,000 with Leeza.
-- Time was also wasted on a filming a brief (15-second) commercial with Donny, Leeza and Richard in the Winners Circle promoting the episode to affiliates. Took 5-6 takes to do that, as Leeza flubbed her lines several times, and one of them corrected a grammatical error in the script.
JD
