The first thing that strikes you is that you are entering a real movie studio lot—the grand palm-tree lined entrance, the guard shack, the whole nine yards – and your name is on the list! That magic list that gets people in! The Culver City lot, after all, used to be the famed MGM lot. What a feeling of privilege. They even give you, printed on your pass, a map of the entire lot. Each sound stage is outlined, the various departments are shown – it’s all there. An oval symbol indicates which sound stages have water tanks, and little casting couch indicates producer’s offices. There’s even a tiny little ideogram of abandoned dreams to show where the writer’s cages are.
The tryouts are held on the actual set of Jeop… the J-show. Everybody has the same reaction – “It’s so small!” but you have to remember that it’s built to the scale of the emcee, who is only eight inches high. Forced perspective tricks are used to make him appear the same size as contestants, like the hobbit tricks in Lord of The Rings. Or maybe they saw the legs off contestants – that part wasn’t clear, but I do note that contestants are no longer seen walking to the podiums at the beginning of the show, and we signed a lot of forms we didn’t have time to read.
The staff explained the rules, and then a special guest came out – Jimmy, the Clue Crew guy! Boy, was he enthusiastic! He talked about how great it was to work for “My Lord and Master, Alex the Magnificent,” and Jeo… the J-SHow. He was so full of energy he was literally blinking. Good thing for him he didn’t know morse code, because he’d be so embarrassed if he knew he was blinking out “TORTURE TORTURE PLEASE HELP” all through the presentation.
The actual test is fifty questions drawn from fifty J-show categories – both old ones like “State Capitals” and new ones like “Bowel disorders” and “Torture or Abuse” – in that one they show you a prisoner, and you have to decide if he’s being tortured or just abused. It’s a pretty easy category, actually, because if you can see any Americans, it means it’s “abuse.” Some others are hard – who the heck was the first president? But you only need 2 out of fifty right to pass, under the new federal “Don’t Make the President Look Dumb Act.”
After you pass the test (with the help of your cell phone and a team of colleagues armed with internet access, People Magazine back files and a copy of the Torah), you play a simulated game, with buzzers and all. It’s a lot like being in Abu Ghraib prisoner—they take your picture, then force you to perform humiliating acts to soften you up for the questioning. Maybe the problem in Iraq is that the Iraqis weren’t answering in the form of a question. Anyway, they eventually let us put our clothes back on, took off the canvass hoods, and let us practice with the buzzers, before asking a lot of questions about WMD stockpiles and our links to al-Qaeda. We weren’t playing for real money of course, but the intense shocks to the genitals for wrong responses were real.
The staff clearly use this experience to filter out people who aren’t perky or photogenic enough to be on TV. One woman, when asked to speak up, started sobbing through clenched teeth, and had to be escorted out after she started to tap-dance to show her perkiness, but kept getting the steps wrong. They end by asking you a few questions about yourself, such as what you would do if you won a large sum of money on the show. Answers ranged from “buy a nicer refrigerator carton to live in” to “finally have this gangrenous foot amputated,”
Anyway, if you are perky enough, or if, like me, you can threaten sufficient bad publicity to overcome the bar on morose, disheveled, trivia nerds, then you get put on a list of potential contestants. As you leave, you can gawk at the sound stages, but remember to pay attention – it’s easy to get lost in the maze of tall buildings. I got turned around and wound up playing the wisecracking neighbor in a sitcom pilot about a whacky Defense Secretary played by John Mahoney.
Eventually studio security found me and escorted me off the lot, but not before asking to read a script they were working on about two whacky security guards on a movie lot.
If you are lucky enough to get called to be on the show, it becomes fodder for another column.
Remember, Kids, the part in bold is actual 100% news-flavored media product.
The rest is the fakey part.
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