MTV's
Make
Jenny
A
Star
Viacom New Media; CD-ROM; $69.95
Probably the most anticipated killer app
to hit the computer world since Visicalc will be MTV's "Make Jenny a
Star", starring, of course, supervixen and fantasy du jour Jenny
McCarthy. A young starlet appearing in a comupter game? It hardly
seems newsworthy. But two things are turning heads about this product:
McCarthy's reported $2.3 million salary (nothing by Hollywood
standards, but literally eye-popping for a computer game), and the
unique nature of the game, sure to cause billions of dollars in carpet
damage from the collective drool of a million nerds waiting for their
6x CD-ROM drives to get up to speed.
This is a game about making a movie: an
erotic thriller called "Jacked" (a computer nerd version of "Basic
Instinct"), which is to be the vehicle for Ms. McCarthy's inevitable
rise to A-list film bimbo. You play the director. You are handed the
script, and Ms. McCarthy in the starring role. The rest is up to you.
The first step is a meeting with
Jenny. She immediately tries to seduce you. If she suceeds (I don't
think she'll have too much trouble with most players) you get to enjoy
a computerized sampling of the ample pleasures of the flesh that
Ms. McCarthy has to offer. You are living the dream of millions: you
are fucking Jenny McCarthy. However, nothing is free. Jenny has very
strong ideas about how the movie should be made, and she won't
hesitate to use her newfound 'leverage' to influence you.
Given that caveat, you run the show. You
read the script. Ms. McCarthy stars as an bright young District
Attorney, prosecuting a hacker accused of embezzling money from an
off-shore bank. Of course, the hacker is not exactly what he seems,
and Ms. McCarthy's character sinks deeper into a morass of intrigue
fueled by the mob, money-laundering, and corruption in Federal Law
Enforcement. Oh -- and of course, there's sex. Lots of sex. Sex on
planes, in cars, on conference tables, on desks. Ms. McCarthy seems to
be scripted for an inordinate amount of amarous activity with three
different partners -- all of whom may or may not be the bad guy. But,
within limits, it's all up to you now. You can send the script back
for revisions, instructing the writers what to emphasize. You can
bring in high-priced script doctors. Do you tell them to rewrite the
oral sex scene, as Jenny so gently suggests, whispering into your ear
after dinner? Do you play up the action sequences? Do you de-emphasize
the sex? Most of it is pretty weakly justified in plot terms; cutting
some of it would definitely make a better movie. Somehow I don't think
most players will bother.
Then, it's on to casting. An endless
parade of actors streams by, the sorts of actors you recognize from
countless supporting roles in movies, maybe the lead in an obscure
straight to video hit. The men are square-jawed and the women
pouty. As director, you have enormous power -- the game allows you to
play the casting couch card to enjoy the favours of many a desperate
aspiring actress. But be aware that Jenny might find out; and Jenny's
wrath is not to be discounted -- it wreaks havoc both on the movie
production and your personal life.
For the male lead, the wily and paranoid
hacker, I brought Michael Biehn, Harry Hamlin, and even Ed Begley
Jr. back for interviews before settling on Bruce Boxleitner to save a
little money (he was in _Tron_, after all). I figured no one would
care who the male lead was, so long as Jenny delivered the goods. The
role of the banking executive I gave to Judd Nelson, casting both
against type and good taste. The role of the best friend and potential
lesbian love interest went to Jill Hennessey (late of TV's _Law and
Order_) and I brought in the journeyman B movie veteran Lance
Henriksen to play the chief Treasury Investigator. It really seems
like all these actors (and many more) posed for head shots and a few
body-tracking sessions, enough to allow their likenesses to be grafted
on top of the generic male and female bodies the game uses as
templates.
After a few more preparations, it's on to
the actual shoot. The game doesn't cover the whole movie, only about
15 minutes worth of key scenes. You shoot the scenes, choosing between
various options for technical aspects of the film like lighting and
camera work. You can even direct the actors, explaining their
motivation or telling them to speak from 'an angry place' if you
want. You reshoot scenes if you're not happy with the
performances. But be warned -- making Jenny redo the sex scenes over
and over again is the surest way to make her pitch a fit and leave the
set.
The miscellaneous problems that plague a
shoot, both large and small, are legion. Logistical dilemmas
continually pop up -- do you film everything in LA or move some of the
production to Vancouver? Do you cut back the expensive corporate
headquarters scene with the expensive set? The financial backers (one
of whom looks strangerly like Phil Gramm) must be kept happy. They
show up periodically to check on things and stare and Ms. McCarthy in
her bizarrely low cut power suits. But occasionally dilemmas of a more
personal nature crop up. In one game, Jenny went on a one-week eating
binge and put on ten pounds. Do you reshoot old scenes to avoid
inconsistencies or crack down on Jenny to lose the weight, even if you
know it might lead her to bulimia? In another game Jenny showed up
with a surprise nose job over the weekend, rendering three weeks'
shooting useless. Do you just throw the film away? What would you do?
Tough choices.
The most amazing part of this all is
Ms. McCarthy, who plays herself with no apparent sense of irony as a
back-biting, tempermental starlet, one moment vamping around like a
cross between Marilyn Monroe and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun, the next
bitching and screaming like a heroin-withdrawing Joan Crawford. I'm
not clear if that reflects very poorly on Ms. McCarthy -- or very
highly. She approaches the sex scenes, licking, sucking, and
caressing, with technical mastery and a gusto that has to be seen to
be believed. I have visions of this leading to arguments across the
world as men ask their lovers why they can't be 'more like Jenny'.
One wonders what Ms. McCarthy's motivation
is in all of this. Given the televangelical fervor of the mass
hysteria of publicity surrounding her right now (does _Newsweek_
really have nothing better to spend half a page on?), one would think
she could wait for her fifteen minutes to end in any one of a number
of lucrative television deals. Both MTV and major networks have been
showering her with attension. One wonders why she's spending her time
helping nerdy adolescent boys get more of the anatomical details right
in their nightly fantasies of her. Maybe the money was right. Maybe
they got her under contract before Jenny-mania was still only a little
funnel cloud off in the horizon. Maybe she thinks that this sort of
thing is 'cutting edge', both conceptually and technologically. In any
case, you can be sure the presumably FBI-registered fingerprints of
her agent cum boyfriend Ray Manzara are all over this. Who better to
trust? After all, look what he did for Suzanne Sommers.
Its other virtues aside, I found "Make
Jenny a Star" to be a pretty good game. I am neither a hormone
saturated male nor an avid computer game player, but I found myself
sucked in. I was already familiar with the technical intricacies of
directing, and the game does a good job of presenting them and making
them feel like challenging decisions instead of exam questions. I was
absorbed by the more personal challenges of maintaining a balance
between the elements of production: keeping Jenny happy while
maintaining the integrity of the production, keeping costs down an the
studio suits happy while making a movie I could be proud of (well, as
proud as I could be of an erotic thriller). I got caught up in the
game. I really did find myself flush with excitement, walking into
Mann's Chinese Theatre, Jenny on my arm, for the premiere. I even
yelled at some arbitrary Miramax peon named Dan just to get in the
mood.
Luckily for the producivity of programmers
everywhere, the game is still months away from shipping and looks to
be pushed back even farther; I looked at an early alpha testing copy,
acquired somehow (I don't think I want to know) by a crack SurReview
black ops team. Given MTV's tradition of innovative and relentless
marketing I am almost dreading the full land, air, and sea media
attack this game promises to generate. I give it a good review. It's
sure been popular around the office. One editor who shall remain
nameless (Ok, it's Joel) seems to be obsessed. In the long run, I'm
sure any review of this game will be irrelevant: most who will buy it
haven't made it this far in the review, stopping to clean up the drool
the second paragraph generated; those who won't buy it stopped reading
about the same time, out of disgust. The few men who have made it this
far probably will still buy it, but only when their girlfriends aren't
looking.
