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♥♥♥ TAR14: Mel & Michael White - Father & Son

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slayton:
‘The Amazing Race’ 14: goodbye to nice guys Mike and Mel

The nicest, sweetest and most fun-filled team to grace “The Amazing Race” 14 — the father-son team of clergyman Mel White, 68, and “School of Rock” screenwriter Mike White, 38 — were eliminated last night in the seventh lap of the series.

They had problems finding a taxi at the Phuket, Thailand, airport, and then their cabbie took them to the wrong location. They never recovered from the misdirection.

On the morning after the elimination, the two talked about their experiences and how they have remained friends with the rest of the contestants.



Q: You were the sweetest, nicest couple. I was so sorry to see you go. Can you guys adopt me?

Mel: Yes, give us a couple of days to work it out! It’s surprising to see how many people watching would comment: “We are tired of the angry people and really glad for you to have fun.” I think most reality shows think the angry people are the good people, they bring in the audience. But, man, people really liked the fun times we had.

Q: You have such a warm and wonderful relationship. Have you always had a really strong bond?

Mike: It’s all for the cameras!

Mel: From the beginning, Michael was smarter than I was, so from the time he was 8 and 9, he was making movies and I was watching them. We had a lot of conversations over the years that segued into this.

Q: Did you both do a lot of training before the race?

Mike: We both did. We knew it was going to be physically strenuous, but that was fun. The truth was we were late to the party: We only knew we were going a couple of weeks before we left, so we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare but it was fun — I felt like I was “Rocky.” There was a montage of me doing push-ups and running sprints on the treadmills.

Mel: I got a trainer at the Y to work with me every day so that really helped.

Q: Did you have a favorite location?

Mike: I hadn’t been to any of the places except for Switzerland, and I must say India was so cool. It was a memorable leg for us and it was so unreal. I loved Jaipur; I would go back there in a second.

Q: You had transportation problems last night, which put you behind.

Mike: Yeah. I was hoping there would be more sort of self-driving because the legs we got to drive ourselves we did a lot better. There is always an element of luck and we had really good luck with cab drivers, but this time you live by the sword and die by the sword.

Q: Were you close with the rest of the teams?

Mike: You spend a lot of time with the teams.

Mel: We liked them all — are you going to talk about the reunion?.

Mike: We had a big viewing party about two weeks ago where all the teams flew out. I hired a company to do a race for us. It was like five hours where we raced around L.A. Steve and Linda, the couple from West Virginia, won. I teamed with former winners B.J. and Tyler, the hippies that won one of the seasons.

– Susan King, Los Angeles Times staff writer

http://travel.latimes.com/daily-deal-blog/index.php/the-amazing-race-14--4312/

apskip:

--- Quote from: TARAsia Fan on March 30, 2009, 07:55:39 PM ---Very true. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. :lol:


--- End quote ---

Ken, some of us know what you look like. It would not be possible.

Snooky:
Goofy expectations
SUNDAY, APRIL 5, 2009
ARTICLE OPTIONS
A A A 

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Even before this season of CBS's "The Amazing Race" got under way, viewers could see that the team of Mel and Mike White would be a little different.

In the show's quietly hilarious promo clip, father and son were introduced simply as "writers" and shown pecking away at side-by-side laptops, doing tandem yoga and tooling around on Segway PTs.

Mike White admits he stage-managed the commercial to temper people's expectations. But it seems like he also couldn't resist imposing some small measure of his comedic worldview on the show.

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090405/CURR04/304059948

Snooky:
Fashion disasters, weight gain, drunken debauchery - was the reality TV scene a little more train-wreckish than usual this week, or is it just me?

SUNDAY

The Amazing Race

It's a shame to see Mel and Mike White go. The openly gay father-son duo was one of the most endearing teams to ever go on the Race, even if they didn't need the cash (Mel's a famed clergyman and author; Mike wrote and starred in School of Rock). It was all over when they got wrong directions to the Phuket Zoo on this week's Thailand leg. By the time they'd posed with tigers and let elephants squat over their backs, three other teams had sweated past the finish line.

http://www.winnipegsun.com/entertainment/tv/2009/04/04/9000741-sun.html

TARAsia Fan:
Interview with Mel in AfterElton:


--- Quote ---Just Because Mel White of "The Amazing Race" is Paranoid Doesn’t Mean People Don’t Want to Kill Him
by Brent Hartinger

April 16, 2009

How do I know Mel White is a busy guy? Five minutes into our interview to talk about his recent participation on the reality show The Amazing Race with his son, actor/screenwriter Mike White, he’s interrupted by Anderson Cooper’s producer who wants to confirm an appearance on CNN later that day. The day before, White had been on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

How do I know Mel White is a nice guy? He couldn’t be more apologetic about CNN’s interruption. And he couldn’t be more gracious and unhurried in our conversation, which touched on everything from  how he wished The Amazing Race’s had been more “gay,” to how their battery of psychological tests found him to be their most a “paranoid” participant ever – but for good reason!

Interestingly, despite being perhaps the country’s most well-known gay Christian activist, White was almost an afterthought on the CBS show, stepping in after his son Mike’s first TAR partner bowed out.

White is still not sure the producers of the show are aware that he is perhaps the country’s most well-known gay Christian activist, writing Stranger at the Gate: To be Gay and Christian in America about White’s close dealings with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham, and co-founding (with his husband Gary Nixon) the activist group Soulforce that sponsors “Equality Rides” to college campuses around the country.

AfterElton: First, I wanted to ask how The Amazing Race is different from an Equality Ride.
Mel White: Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve never been on an Equality Ride.

AE: Oh, you haven’t? I saw photos of you! You were just behind the scenes, huh?
MW: Well, I rode a couple days on each ride, but it’s really the students are who do everything about it. In so many ways they are unlike [The Amazing Race] in the sense that they stop so many places along the way and try to make an impact. On The Amazing Race, we slide through every place at such speeds that the only impact we make is on the race itself.

AE: So it’s about the journey on an Equality Ride, but it really is only about the destination on The Amazing Race?
MW: Yeah. That’s very well said. An Equality Ride, yeah, it’s about the journey, and for [The Amazing Race] it’s about the end results of a million dollars.

AE: Who’s idea was it for you and your son Mike to participate? Did the show come to you guys?
MW: No, Mike tried out with director Jon Kasdan. They were accepted for Season 13 and then, lo and behold, Casden got nervous and had what my son calls an emotional nervous breakdown over going, and so they had to drop out.

Then the casting director said to Mike, “We’d like you for season 14 without Kasdan. Who would you like to go with you?” [Then she met me at a party], and she went to Michael and said, “I want your Dad.” So they had me do the psychological exams and physical exams and all that kind of stuff and somehow I squeaked through.

AE: They do psychological testing? That’s interesting.
MW: Oh, yeah. Like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the MMPI. When I finished taking it, the psychiatrist said to me, “You’re the highest on our paranoia scale ever.” And then she started reading the questions that gave it away.

She said, “Do you have people who just don’t like you?” And I said, “Yes.” “Do you have people who really hate you?” Yes. “Do you have people who would like to see you dead?” Yes. “Do ever feel a threat to your life?” Yes. And so my son is sitting there listening to these questions, laughing hysterically, and finally he turns to her and says, “He’s a gay activist! People really are out to get him!”

AE: That’s hilarious. I’m surprised you were sort of the afterthought, because it seems like an obvious pairing. You guys are both celebrities and the father/son thing.
MW: They didn’t know anything about my history, and I don’t think they still do. They never, for example, said Michael wrote School of Rock, and they never said I wrote Stranger at the Gate, they never said anything specific about me. I don’t think they even Googled me. They just took me as a parent and that they liked the parent/son relationship because we do have fun together. And so I was pleased to play second fiddle to my son in terms of all the wonderful things he’s done.

AE: Was Luke Adams out to the other players?
MW: Yeah, pretty much. Once he found out that Mike and I were being billed as gay, he wanted to be billed as gay, too, and I called the producer and they said, “No, we’re establishing you as what we want you to be established. He’s established as deaf. You’re established as gay, so don’t be interrupting what we’re trying to do here.” So they were very clear about not wanting to muddy the waters by bringing in another issue.

AE: But that’s what’s so great about it. There are plenty of deaf gays who don’t see themselves represented on TV and plenty of older gays who don’t see themselves represented.
MW: Well, fortunately it kind of got out. And also Lakisha’s a lesbian, the black sister. And there are rumors about others, which I will not pass on.

AE: What did your husband Gary have to say about your doing this? You didn’t have contact with him during the race, right?
MW: In fact, for almost 40 days I could have no contact with anyone. Twice CBS called him to tell him that we’re all right, but that’s all. They didn’t tell him where we were or what we were doing, so it was really kind of an isolation thing.

AE: So is what we see on TV a pretty accurate sense of what happened?
MW: It’s fairly accurate, but it’s sped up so fast that you miss the real misery. They show you arriving at the destination. They don’t show you running straight up the hill for a mile to get to the destination. But nothing is staged at all. It is just totally, “You’re on your own, kids.” And they favor no one.

They have 2,000 employees for this one season, so when you go into a country, it’s just amazingly organized. Unbelievably organized. And without a hitch, we went through all of those episodes, you know. It was something. Just exactly what you get.

AE: So the fact that you and your son are both gay [Mike is bisexual] seemed like such a non-issue. It was mentioned, but then it didn’t really come up again. Was it ever an issue on the show that we didn’t see?
MW: Well, frankly, I kept wishing they would bring it up more because I’m an activist and I want people to see, for example, they are constantly saying that gay people are a threat to children and all this stuff, so I wanted to show that gay parents are good parents, too. I wanted to represent gay people and they just didn’t go there.

Source - http://www.afterelton.com/people/2009/4/melwhite
--- End quote ---

There's more of the interview, but it does not mention TAR after that.

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