What the hell happened at Jeopardy

Ok so I get to the tryout with um about 2 minutes to spare. Overall there is a group of about 80 people there. For about ten minutes we all were milling around the bottom of the SONY studios parking garage. You could tell people were kinda nervous, there were a lot of older people there and probably only a handful under thirty.

So the casting director comes up to the group with cameras in tow. They said that they were going to walk us to where we were going to be taking the test. So I figure we are going to go into an office building or something. They lead us through the lot past a ton of studio space (they didn’t have any cool sets set up I looked). Finally we reach a studio and we go inside. Yeah we were going to take the test on the Jeopardy set. So I kind of popped wood and shit myself at the same time… Shiboner…. My new word.

We all go into the audience and we sit down in every other seat. The casting director goes through her whole speech. Basically she said the test is rather hard and that a lot of people that have appeared on the show have taken the test multiple times to get on. Blah, blah… Then she said that getting on is really luck because they change the set of questions that are asked on the test every time. For example there might be a lot of questions that deal with the sciences versus the next time having a lot of questions with literature versus more questions on pop culture versus more on history and geography. At this point I was kind of getting nervous.

So they lay out the test for us it is a fill in test 50 questions, you have 8 seconds to answer each question, oh and by the way these were questions that were mostly 1000 questions on the show. In order to make the show you can get only about 14/15 wrong. We watch the video screen and the test starts… I checked next to the questions that I thought I got right, ones that I knew like right away. I got about 28-30 of those marked, 3 questions I didn’t answer for, 3 I realized I got wrong right after the test after thinking about them, and the rest were guesses. There were a ton of literature questions on the test, Shakespeare quotes, TS Elliot questions, Huxtley questions.. I am sure I didn’t get any of them. I did get Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” right in one question….Which I will take. There were a couple of sports questions, two movie questions (One was about the best song in from the 1961 Oscars… yeah no thanks)… It was pretty much the most diverse and hardest test that I have ever taken in my entire life.

After the test they go away to grade it and we watch a dvd about the question writers and the “clues crew” (the people they send out to do the video clip clues). After the dvd one of the actual “clues crew” people came out and talked to us. Which was cool, he was pretty nice and we learned about what they do. So after that they finally came back to tell us who made it to the next round. 4 people made it…. Out of 80… 4 did… Holy shit…

Then they asked for me and another person to see a different casting director before we left. On my application I put down that I was in college and so did this other person. They told us we did well on the test (they wouldn’t give us our exact number which sucks) and that we should put our application in for the college tournament which will have testing in about 3-4 weeks.

After that everyone shuffled out and back to the real world. So it wasn’t a bad experience at all. I got to actually try it and I was happy with how I did. It was an experience… Looks like I am going to have to be the weird old guy trying out for the college one.