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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
That the show skewed negative should not have been a tremendous shock to any of the participants. After all, one of the great American myths is the ridiculous notion that everyone loves a bride. Sure, everyone loves Jennifer Lopez or Julia Roberts, whose crazy-ass nuptial spectacles can be enjoyed from a distance, through paparazzi telephoto-lens shots in Us Weekly. And who doesn't enjoy the chance encounter with a bride coming out of a church in a pretty dress on a sunny weekend morning? But no one really loves the brides they actually know. At least while they're being brides, that is. The all-absorbing logistics of planning and paying for nuptials -- big or small -- often create brides who are at best boring and at worst psychotic.
Add to that the fact that the 10 couples who agreed to have their lives taped for "Manhattan Brides" were a self-selected bunch of basket cases. Silver's major diva moment is limited to the wedding dress agida, in which she decided a week before the big day to scrap the multilayered silk gown for a double-sided satin floor-length. She also talks a lot about her therapy regimen, at one point offering that her shrink told her she should come in twice a week during the wedding planning, but that it would only make her schedule more impossible. She comes off far better than, say, Miho, who refuses to let her new husband, Joe, touch her, much less kiss her, at the wedding for fear that he will crunch her dress or muss her maquillage. Vanessa persuades her fiancé to spend the money they were going to use for a house on a big wedding. "I think we both wanted something really special," she says, as Dan makes a face at the camera that seems to suggest that he actually thought the house might be special too. Vanessa also provides one of the cringiest moments of the show when, while jewelry shopping, she tries on a $15,000 diamond necklace and tells Dan, "But I love it so." She gets it at her rehearsal dinner. And then there's fashion publicist Karen, whose dress tailors cannot hide their disgust during her fifth refitting. Karen also distinguishes herself by burning at least 10 minutes of her own special day by berating the caterers at the W Hotel for not serving enough food.
And yet ... this is the kind of behavior that the media encourages by pumping pages and airwaves full of bridal industry hot air, fostering the national obsession with the price tags and accoutrements of marriage. So it seems a low blow to record the resulting fits about inadequacy and brand the women throwing them as fire-breathing reptiles.
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!"
"I was so proud to be the low-maintenance one. Once again, I was distinguishing myself as the anti-bride," writes Silver.
The wedding, she says, went off beautifully at the funky Angel Orensanz Synagogue-cum-arts center on New York's Lower East Side. Far from the privileged climes of the Upper East Side, where many of the other couples were getting married, Silver felt she had an offbeat, realistic life to show off. She and Matt share a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. Her maid of honor was her hairdresser, Rick. "I never went to a wedding that was so much fun -- and it was our wedding!" she writes in the script.
Soon after the wedding, Silver received the good news that the eight-part show was getting a warm reception with European broadcasters and that Fox had purchased the show from September Films and wanted to air a condensed version. The bad news was that it was going to call the show "Bridezillas," which, according to a letter Cynthia received from September Films, it called "a more attention-grabbing title." "It's a light hearted, tongue in cheek title which illustrates what strong ideas and characters all our brides have," read the letter. And nowhere was that lighthearted tongue-in-cheek spirit more poignantly illustrated than in the way Fox sold the show. In one promotional segment, the women were called "sugary sweethearts who mutate into matrimonial monsters [and] stars of their own horror movie."
In October 2003, it was reported that another of the Manhattan Brides, Julia Swinton-Williamson, filed suit against September Films and Fox for $136 million, claiming that they lied to her about the show. Calls to London-based September Films were not returned in time for publication. Silver says she has not made September aware of her one-woman show. A spokeswoman for WE said that the controversy has not tainted the network's desire to promote "Bridezillas." In fact, according to a WE press release, next week 10 angry "brides" in green makeup will appear at New York's City Hall. The release explains -- somewhat alarmingly -- that the bridal beasts will be "vaulting out of their limousines onto the pavement" (ouch!) to plug the show by warning "real brides" about stress, and passing out a hot-line number for potential zillas. The release defines a Bridezilla as "a poisonous green-faced wedding-dress-adorned expletive-spewing fist-waving bride out of control."
