3 Things Can Turn Ugly

So you've got the college kids who are there to party, but then you've got the lifelong fans for whom this is a religious pilgrimage. The problem is that it's not like buying a ticket to a movie. Nothing guarantees you a seat. They may give out 700 tickets -- they're free -- but the studio only holds 325 people. The ones who don't make it in, well, they don't always take it well.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

"People would line up at 4 a.m. or camp out the night before and make it their entire day, and those who came at 7 or 8 we would have to turn away." Some of these people planned their entire vacations around it. Too bad! A real fan would know to get up while it's still dark out and immediately start getting hammered while standing in line.

At one point, they actually had an employee whose job it was to talk down distraught/enraged fans. He hated it. "I think there was a family from American Samoa once. I mean, how do you tell them that despite flying halfway around the world, you got too late into the line?"

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Now imagine you've got a whole crowd of people made up of the zealous and/or drunk, only to have to turn all of them away. "One Monday it was a three-day weekend due to a holiday, but over 500 people showed up to be on the show. Since it wasn't taping, people began yelling and huddling around the pages, and finally every employee ran into the ticket office and locked the door, with people running behind them and banging on the door. Security was called out, and when THAT wasn't enough, the LAPD had to come in ... I literally remember one woman screaming, 'I flew all the way from Oklahoma City to be here!' right before a cop swung her around and did a sort of walking push with her back to the crowd."