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Raising the Idoldome

Sunday afternoon, with 48 hours until the first-ever Top 13 sing here, the cavernous “American Idol” soundstage more closely resembled a demolition zone than the glitzy home of the nation’s leading entertainment powerhouse. Next to the half-finished judges’ table, a Hertz rental crane hoisted a cherry picker basket above the set for a technician to adjust some lights. Some 60 crew members moved about with unhurried focus, installing video monitors, placing a drum kit on the set’s second-floor bandstand, testing the sound system and setting up platforms.

Andy Walmsley, “Idol’s” impish set designer since its second season, seemed slightly unnerved by how smoothly it was going. “We’re half a day ahead now and no one knows why, it’s so bizarre. At lunch time yesterday we were looking at each other and saying, ‘How did this happen?’ ”

Surveying his work, Walmsley obsessively looked for flaws. He fixated on the arched “rainbow wall” on the second floor. “That should really be four feet higher than that,” he sighed. “But because of the lighting and a lot of boring technical reasons, it’s four feet lower than it should be … No one would ever know except me but there’s always something like that that drives me nuts.”

It is this kind of hyper-focus on the show’s myriad details that make it, season after season, stand on another plane, production-wise, from its peers. In the days after the show goes from semifinals to the finals –- this year, Season 8, 13 out of 36 singers survived the brutal whittling –- the stage from the previous season is taken out of storage. And so the Idoldome is rebuilt and reimagined for each new group of contestants.

'American Idol' diary: A behind-the-scenes look at finale week

Wednesday night’s “American Idol” finale, in which David Cook was crowned as the winner of Season 7, was a TV entertainment spectacle comparable in scale only to the Oscars. Yet unlike that event, the “American Idol” crew has just one week to pull it together. Richard Rushfield -- the first journalist ever allowed to observe rehearsal’s for the show’s finale -- recorded this diary of the week leading up to the show.

SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD, HOLLYWOOD. FRIDAY, 5 P.M.

If every "American Idol" show starts with the music, then this humble white bungalow on a lot off Santa Monica Boulevard is the top of the assembly line -- where the basic pieces are put in place that will become in four days’ time the biggest television spectacle of the season.

Inside, the bungalow’s current tenant, "American Idol" music director Rickey Minor, is conferring with his staff over rights clearances and arrangements, pouring over song lists and supervising his three backup vocalists, who are in the studio to lay down their tracks for the medleys of George Michael and Donna Summer songs that will be performed in Wednesday night’s results show.

“I’ve got three things to do now and 10 minutes have gone out of my life already,” Minor gently but firmly reprimands his crew after the conversation takes a detour into something not completely relevant to the task at hand.

Just 48 hours earlier, David Archuleta and David Cook became the two finalists in the last of its weekly extravaganzas set at the Idoldome, the show’s home studio in Burbank. But now the clock is ticking toward the finale, and Minor has to oversee the clearances, arrangements, productions and performances of, he estimates, 35 songs between the two nights (including 12 in medleys).

“It doesn’t make sense to start working on this show early. Everything just ends up getting changed,” says Matt Brodie, the show’s assistant music director, as the three backup singers clustered around his laptop in the bungalow’s central mixing room, listening to and quietly singing along with their parts in Summer’s anthem “She Works Hard for the Money.”

Each takes notes on sheets of paper, marking off their parts and accents. And after a few listenings, they head back into the adjoining room that has been turned into a recording booth.

Bill Smith, the engineer, cues them to begin, and the three launch into a beautifully harmonized rendition of the backing vocals. "She works hard for the money. So hard for it, honey. She works hard for the money, so you better treat her right."

As they record, Minor explains that these tracks will actually play under the live singing at Wednesday night’s show. “The problem is that in a huge place like that, the mikes pick up all kinds of room sound, it sounds like you are in a Tidybowl box. So you need this base there to give it that power. ... It's like you have 12 voices singing. Otherwise, when you want more vocals, they tell you to turn up the mikes on the girls, but all you are doing is picking up more room noise and making it muddier.”

When the singers finish their second shot at the song, Minor presses a button to address them on the intercom between the two rooms. “Remember guys, we’re actually live now so you need to do it with a little more attitude. You sound like you’re doing a record.”

“Its like a chihuahua trying to be a lion,” singer Sharlotte Gibson quips, quoting judge Simon Cowell's dismissal of Archuleta’s performance that week.