Shannon Bobillo, Contestant coordinator “Wheel of Fortune”
“Selecting a person to be on ‘Wheel of Fortune’ could potentially change their lives,” says Shannon Bobillo, contestant coordinator for the 20-years-running game show. “They could win all this money. It could get them out of debt or a better place to live, or it could just get a new start in life.”
That also leads to the only negative in what this 27-year-old, who advanced from receptionist, considers a dream job. “Obviously we can’t pick everybody, so we have to make a decision to cut some people, and that’s difficult.”
Luckily, she never has to tell anybody to his or her face that a long-cherished dream of being on TV, meeting Pat and Vanna and taking home tens of thousands of dollars in cash and prizes is kaput.
“At the end of the audition, we say, ‘If you’re selected, you’ll receive a letter, probably within two weeks,’ ” she explains. “ ‘If you don’t receive anything, then it probably didn’t work out for you.’ ”
After these cushiony words comes the final cut in a process that Bobillo and her co-coordinators play out in about 20 cities every year. Of the tens of thousands who might apply for any given audition, about 200 are selected randomly to play a practice game.
“We’ve seen people show up with these T-shirts, ‘Wheel of Fortune Forever’ and ‘We love Pat and Vanna.’ They have signs taped to the back of their shirts and funky-looking hats with little cutouts of Pat and Vanna, but it really doesn’t help,” she says.
What constitutes a great contestant is as difficult to fathom as the enduring popularity of the show itself, which neither promises to make anyone a millionaire (well, any contestant, anyway) nor confers the intellectual prestige of the venerable “Jeopardy!”
“We look for people when they play, they play with a lot of energy and enthusiasm,” Bobillo says. “And they have a big voice.”
Naturally, skill matters. “We want smart players,” she says. “Do they know that you pick consonants and buy vowels? Are they forgetting about buying vowels?”