Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  Look at the characters of Cheers, Lorre said. “Society would judge them to be losers, but they created a family with each other. That was the hope of the series.” A lot of sitcoms are, in fact, darker than you realize. At its core, Two and a Half Men is about loneliness. The Big Bang Theory is about alienation. Mike and Molly is about self-hatred. You would never know it from the shows themselves, but you do, sometimes, feel it while watching them. To laugh at these things with our mental families may allow us to cope with out own loneliness and alienation and self-hatred. It may be that the sitcom’s consistent avoidance of any final, dramatic catharsis is its accidental strength. If so, that would make this least lifelike form of entertainment the most comfortingly similar to real life.

  I arrived at the Mike and Molly taping, a few days after the network run-through, to learn from a smiling Lorre that the live audience had loved the show’s pilot. There was always a risk, Lorre said, in showing something new to an audience. “These are brand new faces, and they really responded.”

  Early in the taping the audience laughed hard at things that were not even intended to be funny. I wondered what might have happened if the bowling-ball gag had survived into the live shooting and asked Lorre if an audience can ever be wrong. “Sure, they can be wrong,” he said. “We need to ask if the experience will translate to a person sitting alone on their couch. And that’s a judgment call.”

  Lorre’s attention was soon consumed by another editorial legacy of the run-through, namely when Standards and Practices refused to allow Molly to call Mike a “dick.” Molly’s line had now become: “You big knob!” It got a laugh from Lorre during the camera run-through earlier in the day, but, hearing it now, he seemed frustrated. Nothing about it worked, he decided, because Molly’s motivation did not line up with her reaction. “She’s been charming,” Lorre said of Molly. “It’s his problem; he’s an asshole. But CBS won’t let us call him an asshole.”

  “Or a dick,” one of the writers said.

  After several minutes of fretting, Lorre looked up. Why doesn’t Molly insult Mike’s bowling ability? That, he said, was a convincingly nasty thing for her to zero in on. Mike hurt her; she is now going to hurt Mike. A line, Lorre’s, was rushed out to Melissa McCarthy: “You bowl like a girl!” What made the line so funny came from the explosively vicious way McCarthy delivered it. She seemed surprised by her anger, which was exactly what Lorre had intended.

  The evening’s most interesting dilemma surfaced when Mike retreats to his friend Carl’s house after his date with Molly While Mike and Carl chat, Carl’s grandmother, played as an aging sexpot by Cleo King, comes downstairs, has a seat, tells Mike that he was threatened by Molly’s intelligence, and advises him to go back to her, since there is “nothing sexier” than a man being honest. At the end of this lesson, a male voice calls Granny back upstairs. She smiles and crosses the set. “That man is as honest as the day is long,” the script has her say of her upstairs lover. “And vice versa.”

  The joke utterly died in performance, which stunned Lorre and his writers. “I would have bet the mortgage on that one working,” Lorre said. “But it’s a thinker. There’s too many steps.” I suggested that the joke’s problem was internal: the payoff laugh after the audience’s initial, instinctive laugh never came because the implicit comparisons between “day” “long,” “honest,” and “man” did not find each other in the mentally swimmy period during which the joke was processed. The real joke was about an old lady going upstairs for a shafting. My cogitation on this matter was of approximately no interest to the writers, who all stared looked blankly at the floor.

  Suddenly, one of them, Don Foster, began nodding. He had something. This was what he had: “That man is as honest as the day is long, and if he wasn’t honest I never would have found out he was long.”

  It was, I thought, a terrible line: clunky, wordy, and marred by a rhythmically meretricious repetition of “long.” About the only thing going for it was its grammatically correct failure to use the subjunctive. But when King delivered the line, with a slight backwards look and little kick to her rump on that second “long,” the audience exploded. It was a good line, after all. Lorre stared contentedly at his monitor. For once, he did not laugh.

  —2010

  INVISIBLE GIRL

  Jennifer Hale, the Queen of Video-game Voice-over

  If you are waiting for an actor to arrive at Technicolor Digital Productions in Burbank, California, there is a strong possibility that you will not hear him or her coming. In the past few years, the voice work for hundreds of video games and animated features has been recorded within Technicolor’s mix rooms, and the first thing any voice-over performer learns is not to wear noisy clothing. On a recent morning, actors signed in at the Technicolor reception desk and silently flitted away toward their assigned mix rooms while I sat in the lobby anticipating the arrival of Jennifer Hale, whose performances in more than a hundred and twenty videogames have led her colleagues and many ordinary gamers to regard her as a kind of Meryl Streep of the form. Hale turned up wearing a long-sleeved, cotton shirt and black jeans. “If you’re wearing nylon, forget it,” she told me. “You’re naked in five minutes.”

  To actors, accustomed to the vagaries of a fundamentally insecure profession, the burgeoning and profitable world of video games represents a welcome growth area. But the peculiarities of the work extend well beyond the need for silent attire. Most acting, from Ibsen to the thirty-second skin-cream ad, is linear. Video games—in which the variable fortunes of any given player can necessitate a script that is a maze of branching possibilities—often aren’t. Most actors are happiest when they understand their character’s “motivation” and “arc.” Video-game actors become skilled at working with little or no context, and at providing varying inflections for any line on demand—a practice discouraged by many standard acting texts. (Stanford Meisner’s classic, On Acting, insists that “the foundation of acting is the reality of doing,” and that “making readings in order to create variety” is fraudulent.) Strangest of all, perhaps, for a profession in which one’s face is an important source of one’s fortune, video-game actors work in conditions of near anonymity. Hale told me that when she drives around Los Angeles and sees billboards for games she has worked on, she sometimes feels like “the invisible girl,” but she understands that this is a necessary corollary of voice-over work. “My job,” she said, “is to not exist.”

  Hale is in her late thirties, with long, thick dark-brown hair that has faint almond highlights, and dimples that colonize her face when she smiles. In Technicolor’s corporate Day-Glo precincts, she cut an incongruous figure, projecting a pleasant, outdoorsy affect that stopped just short of hippie. She loves hiking, rock climbing, and riding horses. She openly deplored my consumption of diet soda, and eventually persuaded me to quit for a month and to report my findings. I soon found that Hale had never played any video games herself. “I have so little free time,” she said with a shrug, explaining that she preferred to spend what free time she did have outdoors, in the “dirt.”

  Hale was at Technicolor to record dialogue for Bio Ware’s Mass Effect 3, a sprawling science-fiction game whose first two installments sold more that five million copies. In the new game, which will be released in the spring of 2012, Hale reprises the role of Commander Shepard. Shepard is the character the player controls, and quite a bit of dialogue is assigned to her. This was Hale’s second recording session for Mass Effect 3, and it was to last four hours and cover several sections of the game. During the next few months, she had at least twenty further Mass Effect 3 sessions to look forward to.

  The Mass Effect games are, by and large, written before they are animated—an unusual sequence in game development but the norm at BioWare. The script’s emphasis on dialogue and decision gives the game experience an unusual narrative richness; writing for The New Yorker, Nicholson Baker praised Mass Effect 2 for its “novelistic” quality. The script for the first Mass Effect ran to
three hundred thousand words; the second to three hundred and seventy thousand. (By comparison, a typical English translation of War and Peace has around half a million words.)

  We walked past the doors of several mix rooms. In one, an audio engineer was sitting at a brightly lit soundboard while an actor performed on the other side of a large window, urgently gesticulating but inaudible. In another, Hale introduced me to Caroline Livingston, Mass Effect 3’s voice-over producer and director; Mac Walters, its lead writer; and David Walsh, a Technicolor audio engineer. Livingston asked Hale if she wanted anything to drink. Hale requested a glass of water—if possible, not in a plastic glass. “I’m nursing,” she said. “I may not have a clean system, but I’d like to give one to my son.”

  Talk quickly turned to the earthquake-spawned tsunami that had, the day before, devastated northern Japan. “I’ll be surprised if L.A. doesn’t have a quake in the next two months,” Hale said, and proceeded to speak knowledgeably about the tectonic interrelatedness of New Zealand, Japan, and California. She then described coming home one night some years ago in Los Angeles, and how “the smell of skunk was so pervasive it actually burned my nose going into my house.” Once inside, she said, “I just got the willies; I couldn’t get comfortable.” A few hours later, the 1994 earthquake hit. She had been able to sense the quake, she believed, because she had been in “a place of stillness. I think animals feel earthquakes because they’re so quiet. They’re connected to the earth and not bombarded by the Internet.” Hearing a prominent video-game actor share these thoughts moments before a recording session was rather like watching the College of Cardinals debate the merits of atheism while electing a new pope.

  Walters told Hale that he wanted to show her a recently completed cinematic from Mass Effect 3, the dialogue for which Hale had recorded only a few weeks before. Also known as “cut scenes,” cinematics are potted narrative segments that contain little, if any, gameplay. In the cinematic, Shepard was shown speaking to the representatives of some interstellar admiralty. The music that would underlay the scene was not yet in place and the game’s lightning system was still not functioning, one result of which was a pronounced dramatic sterility. Hale’s performance as Shepard, however, was taut and forceful. “Is this a big, pivotal moment?” Hale asked, concerned by the seeming disconnect.

  Walters explained to her what she was not seeing. “It’s rough,” he admitted, “but it’s good to see it.”

  “It’s great to see it,” Hale said. “It really helps.”

  Hale left for the recording booth, a ten-by-ten room, with gray carpet and gray ceiling and gray sound-absorbent padding on the walls. BioWare records its game dialogue in Los Angeles, Edmonton, and London, but every word of dialogue used in its games is recorded in the same conditions and with the same peerlessly sensitive equipment. When Hale drank from her ceramic cup of water, her front tooth struck the cup’s rim with a resonant ching. Hale readied herself, the booth’s track lighting lending her face a glossy ivory glow. A microphone anchored in a shock mount was arranged to hang just below her eye level. The two most important technical considerations when working with such a microphone are to maintain one’s “mike distance” and try to keep from “popping” one’s consonants. Shielding the mic was circular and darkly translucent windscreen, which minimized any plosive miscalculations.

  A few minutes into the session, Hale was asked to vocalize the noises the player would hear when he or she pressed a button to make Shepard sprint. While making these noises, Hale had to avoid moving and keep her mike distance. I had heard versions of this sound probably hundreds of times while playing Mass Effect. Hale, standing perfectly still, softly huffed and puffed into the microphone. When I closed my eyes, I could see Shepard running.

  At the beginning of Mass Effect, the player must choose a gender for Shepard. If one opts for a female Shepard (FemShep, to the game’s fans), Hale performs her. If one opts for a male Shepard (BroShep), Mark Meer, a Canadian actor, performs him. Accord—ing to Bio Ware, eighty percent of players select BrosShep, a statistic that is regarded as something of a tragedy by the gaming intelligentsia. Kirk Hamilton, the games editor for the magazine Paste, told me, “It’s always been hard for me to communicate to people just how much Hale’s performance improves the experience of Mass Effect. She works at a slow burn; each pause and inflection accumulates over time until you can’t help but care for the character she’s playing.”

  “It’s certainly very frustrating to hear Shepard spoken of primarily as a man,” Hale told me. She attributed the situation to how society perceives women in leadership positions. It probably hasn’t helped that all the Mass Effect promotional material thus far, including the game box, has featured images of a male Shepard—a thoroughly generic space-marine lunkhead. At one point in Mass Effect 2, BioWare hints at an admission that FemShep has been grossly shortchanged: a teammate mentions that Shepard was used as a poster girl for military recruitment, but she did not test well among focus groups and was replaced with a composite figure.

  As the game progresses, players make further decisions about Shepard. Shepard can react to other characters with relative kindness (the “Paragon” option), behave with hard-charging recklessness (“Renegade”), or take a nameless, middle—of—the—road approach. How the player decides what to say and do is governed by what BioWare calls the “paraphrase system,” a clever (and patented) in-game user interface system that presents the player with an array of paraphrastic summaries (“I’m honored,” “This is unexpected,” “This is a terrible idea”). Once the player picks a paraphrase, Shepard speaks accordingly (“I’ll do everything in my power to help you,” “It would have been helpful to know about this earlier,” “I’m not a lawyer!”), and the conversation continues. In most cases, when the player selects a paraphrase, one or more avenues of discussion are closed off in order to maintain conversational consistency. This means that even someone playing as FemShep will require several playthroughs to hear all of Hale’s recorded performance.

  If one of the secrets of successful stage and film acting is seeming to be unwatched—also known, absurdly, as “looking natural”—the secret to Hale’s video-game acting may be disguising the fact that she is reading lines first seen only minutes beforehand and for which she has been given comparatively little context. A film or television actor knows where her character begins and where her character ends up, which allows her to create the illusion of dramatic momentum even if something is filmed out of sequence. Hale actor works off a much narrower store of available information. Frequently, all she has to go on is the copy in front of her and the scene-setting description provided by writers and producers. She works not from a text but from text.

  As she prepared to record one scene, Hale wanted to know whether she could insert into her performance sighs and other off–script inflections. “We can’t do that,” Walters said, “because there’s two of you.” FemShep’s and BroShep’s lines, though separate, have to match because both Shepards share the same interlocutors. Going off script, even slightly, can alter the intended tone of an exchange.

  “I always forget that!” Hale said. “There should only be one!” She laughed, and apologized, and laughed again. She asked how much ambient noise would be added to the scene.

  “Lots,” Livingstone said. “There’s a sandstorm.”

  To manage Mass Effect 3’s script, BioWare was using a new system, called VADA, or Voice and Dialogue Editor and Recorder. (“The acronym doesn’t match for reasons I can’t even begin to get into,” Livingstone told me. My guess: a more easily harvested acronym that VADA would be VADER, a trademark registered by LucasFilm.) The system is paperless and allows for scenes to be called up instantly, by file name. On the master VADA screen, which Hale could not see, all the game’s scenes were listed as file names. Walsh used a trackball to navigate through the scene list, controlling the recording process via his computer keyboard. As Hale spoke, Walsh’s fingers moved as though he were playing a
tiny, silent piano. Meanwhile, in the booth, Hale was reading off a wireless iPad–like tablet. Her lines—attributed to PLAYER: MALE & FEMALE—appeared in clusters, with the line she was supposed to perform enlarged into bold, thirty-point type. There were stage directions, too, or “cinematic comment,” in VADA speak: “This is NOT casual conversation”; “This is a fairly intimate conversation. Normal intensity.” The cinematic comment was there to provide Hale with additional bits of context. Hale later confessed to missing the paper-based dialogue system used during Mass Effect 1 and 2, which allowed her more freedom to “flip ahead and read as much as I can.”

  Livingstone told me that Hale’s “secret” was to do three or four and sometimes five highly variant takes of a single line reading in a row. “Jennifer could do seventeen thousand readings and they’ll all be completely different,” Livingstone said. “And we can use them all. They all could work.” Hale finished and Livingstone gave her verdict: Take Two was an “alt” and Four was a “keeper.” Every alt and keeper was made part of the VADA scene library and could be summoned with a keystroke for playback.

  Michael Abbott, a professor of theater at Wabash College and proprietor of the influential gaming blog brainygamer.com, told me, “You’d expect players to be tired of hearing Jennifer Hale’s voice after dozens of games, but she’s made herself untraceable. She’s played everything from a love-struck English schoolgirl to a stoic battle-tested soldier. She’s a chameleon. It helps that she has a knack for making exposition and technical language sound like dinner conversation.”