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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Fox and WE turned her into a creature from the reality-TV lagoon. Now she's getting even.
Jun 18, 2004 | Three years ago, according to actress Cynthia Silver's in-progress one-woman show, "Bridezilla Strikes Back," its heroine had only two dreams: "To be a fairy-tale bride and a revered television star ... the kind that's invited to cuddle up on the couch with Oprah."
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."
On the one hand, says Silver by phone, "I was very nervous about telling another wedding story. Who's going to give a rat's ass about another girl telling her bridal woes?" But after the first reading of her show, she got such varied response -- from people wondering who would sign up for a show called "Bridezillas" to others who wanted to commiserate about wedding dress tsoris -- that she realized she had hit an intersection of hot topics: marriage and reality television. "Reality TV mocks the people on the show," says Silver, "but it is also mocking its audience for even watching it in the first place."
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.
