Comedy Central Actor, game show host and Yale Law School
alumnus Ben Stein will be taping "Win Ben Stein’s
Money" at UCLA beginning on Sept. 10.
By Suneal Kolluri
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Attention, broke college students: actor Ben Stein is coming to
UCLA to give away his money.
Sadly, however, only five students will get a chance to win Ben
Stein’s own version of a college scholarship as the
successful game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money” will
tape 10 shows this week in front of Royce Hall.
The show is leaving its normal shooting location in Hollywood
for these three days to tape its two-week long “Back to
School Challenge,” which will air on Comedy Central beginning
Sept. 10.
The tapings will take place Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and UCLA students are welcome to watch the game
show for free as it is being filmed.
“We’re having it at UCLA so the students at UCLA can
come win, watch, cheer, scream and yell,” said Stein, the
show’s host. “And we hope that they will.”
UCLA Campus Events helped organized the taping and is planning
for a large group of students to come watch the show.
 Comedy Central UCLA students will be able to compete for
big money and fabulous prizes on the "Win Ben Stein’s Money" game
show. “There are no tickets, it’s in Royce Quad. If
they want to watch, they drop by and watch,” said UCLA campus
events director Jack Raab.
“I think seating is about two hundred, but students are
welcome to sit on the grass.”
“Win Ben Stein’s Money” is a game show that
pits contestants against one another in a game of trivia as each
correct answer wins them a little of Stein’s money. Halfway
through the show, the contestant with the least money leaves and
Stein enters the game to defend his loot.
“I’m the host, but I’m also a
contestant,” Stein said in a phone interview from Los
Angeles. “That’s the point of the show.”
According to Stein, both UCLA’s reputation and the beauty
of its campus contributed to its selection as a filming
location.
“UCLA is one of the two most distinguished schools in Los
Angeles, and we wanted to have it at a place that was beautiful and
had a big spacious plaza and that was UCLA,” Stein added.
In the 10 shows to be filmed on-campus, students from all over
the country will take a shot at the $5,000 grand prize.
Some shows will feature certain themes, as Stein will match up
against groups of professors, sorority girls, fraternity guys and
Harvard students.
But will any of them be able match up with the brain power of
Stein and take away his money?
“I’ll be facing a total of thirty contestants
because there are three contestants per game,” Stein said.
“They’ll be very smart young people from all over
America and I expect some of them to beat me … I wouldn’t
be surprised if someone from UCLA was to beat me.”
Though contestants are occasionally able to beat him, it
doesn’t happen very frequently.
“He has been playing this game for a while, so he is used
to it,” said executive producer Andrew Golder. “He
doesn’t get shaken by being in the isolation … it’s a
home court advantage. But I think we’ll see him lose a couple
times out there.”
Another special addition to the shows will be ex-host Jimmy
Kimmel. Kimmel, also the host of Comedy Central’s “The
Man Show,” recently left the show, but is returning just for
this particular series.
“He’s not going to come back to the show
permanently, but he still is well with the show,” Golder
said. “So he’s able to do these two weeks of special
shows shot over the course of three shows. He’s just back for
UCLA.”
In order to be on the show, contestants had to go through a
fairly intensive screening process.
“They basically come to us. We give them a phone test, and
if they pass that, they have to come take a written test. And if
they pass that, we have sort of a mock game to test their
personality. And after that, we put them on the show,” Golder
said.
Jake Heath, a fourth-year political science student at UCLA,
didn’t think the screening process was all that difficult to
get through.
“I don’t think I went through the same selection
process that a regular contestant would go through. Although
similar, I think that because it is for a special taping of the
show, they modified the process a little,” Heath said.
“Basically it involved being interviewed, answering a few
questions, and taking a small test. It wasn’t too difficult
at all.”
Stein believes the success of his show has a lot to do with the
college-aged audience.
“I love college kids and they love me,” Stein said.
“And college is an age where kids are bringing a lot of
knowledge into their heads and regurgitating it for exams, and we
give them a very short exam.”