A MESSAGE FROM STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD, HOST AND CHIEF MAGISTRATE OF THE GAMING HOUR

By STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD

The premiere episode of The Gaming Hour was my first time performing on camera in years. I was rusty, to say the least, and also withdrawn. I become more outgoing in front of a camera than I am in real life, but it normally takes a couple of days of filming for that effect to kick in and episodes of The Gaming Hour are filmed in a day.

I also had to contend with another problem I had never faced in Hollywood. When I was given scripts written by others, from my perspective they might as well have sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus, perfect and inviolate. All I had to do was memorize the lines and I was golden. Reciting a script I’ve written myself isn’t like that at all because what I mostly memorize, without even trying, is all the failed, aborted prose from all the earlier, flawed, unacceptable drafts. Every time I try to recite a line, about fifteen of the fuckers pop into my head, and only one of them is the right one. In the time it takes to sort that one out from the other fourteen, I generally freeze and wreck the take. Whoops!

For this episode we cheated and just printed the script out in large type and held it next to the camera lens. I’m sure y’all already figured that out just by watching my eyeballs. (Brief digression: I am not from the American South, but I love the word “y’all.” English has lacked a good second-person plural noun since we dropped “thou” as the exclusive second-person-singular and shanghaied “you,” formerly the second-person plural, into double duty. Nowadays when someone says “you,” it’s not immediately apparent whether they mean you-one-person or you-lots-of-people. “Y’all” is a great second-person plural noun because it’s unambiguous and monosyllabic. People should use it more.)

In any case, hiccups aside, filming The Gaming Hour was a great experience. My first effort was really damn raw, but I love the end product, flaws and all. Our cameraman Jason is a big help. He expedites the process of me “opening up,” and was the one who talked me into doing the karate moves that got used in the promo but sadly cut from the episode itself.

Which brings us to the second episode of The Gaming Hour, which this rambling composition introduces. As much fun as I had doing the first episode, the second episode was a thousand times better. Jason amped up the prodding he uses to make me more outgoing. There were not only karate punches but also somersaults and even a couple ventures off-script. And speaking of the script, we figured out how to make it less obvious that the whole script is taped to the side of the camera, so hopefully none of you will be able to suss out the fact that we had to do it again. Provided I didn’t just now give it away.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed having a hand in creating it. (This is a long intro for like a five minute segment, isn’t it?)

For more on TGH’s winsome host, here’s an interview we did with him for Vice’s analogous video-game review column.

By STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD 2 years ago

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