Toledoan tries for big bucks

Chad Justen taped his appearance in September.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

That's an easy one: Who doesn't?

The questions will be a lot harder Thursday and Friday when a Point Place man appears as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The show airs at 12:30 p.m. on WTVG, Channel 13, in Toledo.

"I'm not allowed to tell anybody how I did," Chad Justen, 33, said yesterday. The show was taped in New York City on Sept. 4, a year after he and his wife, Adrienne, 32, went to Chicago so he could audition.

Justen, an installer for Clearview Tinting and the father of 3-year-old twins Joseph and Ava, said he's been a fan of the show, now in its sixth season. "I would sit and scream at the television because I knew the answers. It always looked so easy," he said.

Turns out it's not.

"When you watch at home, you don't have the pressure," Justen said. You can blurt out an answer with nothing to lose if you're wrong. When you're actually playing the game, "every single question is worth that chance to win a million dollars. I would second and third-guess myself."

And the questions are cleverly worded in such a way that they don't point to one answer, Justen continued. "I didn't really notice that till I was on the hot seat with Meredith [Vieira, the game show host]."

As nerve-wracking as it was for him, Justen thinks it was probably worse for his wife, who was watching in the audience.

But he says he'd do it again. "The whole experience, everyone at the show, was terrific. It was a lot of fun."

The board of directors of the Directors Guild of America has voted unanimously to recommend ratification of a deal with Hollywood studios.

The three-year collective bargaining agreement reached Jan. 17 establishes key provisions involving compensation for programs offered on the Internet.

"We achieved our three primary goals: jurisdiction in new media, which was absolutely essential; compensation for the use and reuse of our work in new media; and significant gains on issues of real importance for our work in traditional media," DGA President Michael Apted said in a statement Sunday.

The ballot will now go to the DGA's 13,500 members for ratification.

The issue of compensation for internet distribution has also been a key sticking point between striking writers and the studios, which broke off talks on Dec. 7.

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page said yesterday he was ready to take the iconic band on a world tour after burning up the stage at last month's reunion concert in London. But it probably won't be before September.

"[Singer] Robert Plant has a parallel project and he is busy with that until September," Page said. Others in the band are bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham, son of the late John Bonham, the original Zeppelin drummer.