Reply #43: No, I saw an interview with the brides--they said they were conned [View All]

[MADem]

from start to finish, and were contemplating a lawsuit. (The show was called BRIDEZILLAS, a take off on Godzilla, I imagine.)

This happened some time back--not all that recent, fwiw. It was supposed to be called MANHATTAN BRIDES. One gal took revenge, thusly: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/06/18/bridezilla/index_np.html

...About that same time, Silver, then 30, got engaged to her stage manager boyfriend, Matt, and two months before their wedding the couple was approached to be part of an eight-part documentary television series called "Manhattan Brides." Produced by September Films, the project was to chronicle the pre-wedding lives of couples living in high-priced, high-octane, high-strung New York City. Silver, an actress hungry for a break, sold herself to producers in a speech reenacted in her script: "I'm perfect for your show. I'm the downtown bride, the antithesis to the Plaza Hotel bride. I'm artsy, I'm cutting edge, I'm chic, I'm a theater actress running the production department of an off-Broadway acting school ... You need me." And when a dubious Matt expressed his reservations about participating, Silver writes that she cooed back to him, "Hon, listen ... this is not that cheesy TLC wedding story crap. It's not going to be corny, it's going to be real ... It's a documentary ... We'll have every wedding memory forever. We can show it to our kids." Their whole misty-eyed family will no doubt enjoy the segment titled "Life's a Bitch and Then You Marry One" for years to come.

You may remember "Bridezillas," the hourlong reality TV special shown on Fox last January. If you don't -- or if you do and have been aching ever since to see more tulle-draped women shrieking hysterically at passersby -- the WE (Women's Entertainment) network is currently airing the full, eight-part series, also called "Bridezillas," on Monday nights at 10. "Bridezillas" is the retitled result of what was supposed to have been "Manhattan Brides." Cynthia Silver has now been married for almost two years, and, given that WE repeats "Bridezillas" episodes every Sunday, that the series was in rotation on local New York cable stations last year, as well as in Australia, England and Hong Kong, she has actually appeared on television a lot. Of course, since much of Silver's screen time involves the last-minute rejection of her $3,000 wedding dress and a lot of sobbing on the sidewalk, she hasn't become revered or cuddly with Oprah so much as she's been reduced to a caricature of spoiled urban femininity. But these days, while she is being featured nationally as a bridal harridan who has her designer hack away at the neckline of her dress with shears while she's wearing it, Silver is also putting finishing touches on her one-woman performance piece "Bridezilla Strikes Back."

...Silver's script isn't as much of an attack as its title would imply. It's a look at how easily she was seduced by the instant fame factory of reality television, and how some admittedly out-of-control event-planning moments got skillfully trimmed into something monstrous, just as easily as the show business bait-and-switch that transformed some Manhattan brides into stars of horror television.

...In "Bridezilla Strikes Back," Silver recounts just how she got nailed. She writes of the two British documentarians, Matt and Juliet, who followed her to every fitting, tasting and hair appointment. She had cameras at her facialist and eyebrow-styling appointments. She and Matt became friends and drinking buddies with the two-person crew, and she recounts in her show how Juliet gushed after her first fitting, "That was the fastest fitting we've been to. Usually they take hours! You're the easiest bride I've ever seen!" ...

They said the production team worked closely with them and the stated goal of the show was to show the details of putting together upscale weddings for career women, time management, details, or some such crap. But the focus of the show was almost exclusively on their temper tantrums...I suspect if they were routinely that awful, they wouldn't be marrying anyone other than a masochist. But hey, I don't know them; ya never know...