Everybody loves a great game of charades!
Now, you’ll get to witness the fierce competition, frenetic action and impulsive fun when celebrities give their best “over-the-top” performances for a good cause as AMC hosts a star-studded party in its latest original series, Celebrity Charades.
Executive produced by acclaimed actor/director Bob Balaban (A Mighty Wind), Emmy Award-winning actor Chad Lowe and his wife, Academy Award-winner Hilary Swank, the series puts a new spin on the familiar as celebrities get their game on to mime movie titles for their individual charitable causes.
Celebrity Charades‘ five new episodes will air as a special AMC event on five consecutive nights beginning on June 20 at 9 PM ET/PT. During each half-hour episode, games are played, dinner is served and the guests mingle and talk between rounds.
The show invites viewers to a star-studded party held in an intimate New York City loft apartment where Balaban and Lowe welcome their friends, including fellow actors Stanley Tucci, Lorraine Bracco, Julianna Margulies, Sam Rockwell, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Griffin Dunne, Billy Baldwin, Kristen Johnston, Hank Azaria, Rosie Perez, Carson Kressley, designers Cynthia Rowley and Isaac Mizrahi, and singer Vanessa Carlton.
Celebrity Charades employs two teams, with five celebrities on each team. Teams are placed in separate rooms, while a neutral player gives one member of each team the same clue to act out. Each movie title clue is thematically linked to a movie-related topic. The first team to correctly guess all ten charades and their overall theme wins the game. A tiebreaker clue is enacted if both teams are even. On the lower third of the screen viewers will see fun facts and trivia about the current clue and can keep tally of each teams correct answers via a running score card.
Each of the new episodes also offer viewers an inside look at the personal relationships amongst the celebrity friends as the camera captures conversations, antics and inside jokes the group shares with one another over dinner, and continues to reveal throughout the game. The stars also speak about the charity they are playing for and why they support the worthy cause, through individual or group interviews. Some of the charities being represented include Make a Wish Foundation, the LAByrinth Theatre Company, Gilda’s House, Wildlife Conservation Society and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
How to Play Running Charades
WARNING: Playing this can be addictive!
There is to be no gouging, tantrums or cheating aloud. We want a nice clean fight, er, game. And please, no wagering!
The Set Up
1. Make everyone aware of the standard pantomime meanings: “two syllables,” “sounds like,” “little words” etc. etc.
2. Divide guests into two equally matched teams. This can be done along gender lines (for added competition/arguments!) or non-movie channel viewers vs. AMC viewers (though be aware the AMC viewers always win).
3. You’ll need two separate rooms, preferably not in earshot of each other, since each team is competing to answer the same clues. (However, if you live in Manhattan and you can’t afford two rooms you might want to consider moving to the ‘burbs.)
4. Pick one person to be the Charade Master of Clues. This is the person who will hand the same clues to each team and probably should be either the most timid or the best charader of the group.
The Game
The entire group picks a genre for the game (movie titles, TV shows, famous quotes, plays, infamous people, catch phrases, book or song titles… just to name a few!).
Let’s choose movie titles for starters. Each clue should be thematically linked. From the genre: “Movie Titles,” the Master of Clues devises a common theme and five movie titles to support it. For example, the following: First Daughter, Dead Calm, Three Musketeers, Lost in Space, All About My Mother. To begin the game, one player from each team gets the first movie-title clue from the Master of Clues, then returns to their respective team to act it out. When the first title is guessed correctly, another player returns to the Master of Clues for the second movie title to charade and so on, until all five clues are revealed.
The faster the team completes all five clues, the sooner they can gather together to correctly guess the common theme about all five movie titles. In this example, the theme is: Tom Cruise dated and/or married all the leading ladies in each movie: current steady Katie Holmes starred in First Daughter; ex-wife Nicole Kidman starred in Dead Calm; former girlfriend Rebecca DeMornay starred in Three Musketeers; Tom’s first wife Mimi Rogers starred in the 1998 remake Lost in Space; and ex-girlfriend Penelope Cruz starred in All About My Mother. The winning team is the team that not only correctly names all the film titles but who also identifies the theme.
In the event of a tie, the contest may be settled by arm-wrestling, levitation or a tie-breaking clue. If anyone is caught running with scissors they should be sent to bed early without dessert.
Remember, it’s not about winning or losing, but how well you act it out…and for these flamboyant folks, it’s should be a piece of cake!
