Anne Martyn had a taste of show business when she graduated from college, scoring a job as a page at Paramount Pictures.
But eventually she settled into the pleasant life of a suburban high school teacher at Los Gatos High (she’s Class of ’87 herself), encouraging students through some of literature’s classic passages—and never missing the annual Children’s Christmas/Holidays Parade.
It’s been 27 years now that’s she’s been teaching English.
But for years she’d dreamed of getting the opportunity to be a contestant on “Jeopardy!”
She tried signing up for fun and made it pretty far in the running, in 2018. Back then she did an online test, followed by a written one in a ballroom in San Francisco.
Then, she joined two other people for a mock competition.
“They’re just looking to see how you act under pressure and your sportsmanship,” she explained, over her cell phone while sitting on a bench on the LGHS front lawn in December. “It was always just kind of a lark.”
Her husband Craig, who grew up watching “Jeopardy!” regularly with his family, had made it that far, too, although in his case he paid to fly down to Los Angeles for an audition.
Last spring, Martyn decided to apply again.
Now, in the post-Covid world, she didn’t have to travel for the various stages of the process. The third test, this time, was held through videoconference technology (and was placed into a break room with about 20 other people at one point).
Then, you have to wait.
On Sept. 18, she got a call from Sony Pictures TV. Because she was in her class and had her phone on silent, she missed the call.
After the final bell of the day, she called back, and the voice on the other end of the line asked if she could make it down to Culver City for Sept. 18, to begin filming an episode.
Martyn was told to keep the whole thing hush-hush, though she was allowed to tell her immediate family and her employer (she couldn’t just play hooky for three days).
That’s when she got down to business.
“You’re studying for a test where you do not know the subject matter,” she said of the unique challenge that lay before her. “There could be anything on it.”
In order to pack her brain with as much arcane knowledge as possible, she decided to focus on a different topic each day—national parks, major wars and treaties, first ladies and presidential pets.
She remembers one time when her student came into her classroom and was like, What are you doing?
“Oh, you know,” she replied, coyly. “I’m just studying.”
And while she dug into the “Jeopardy!” archives, she knew that they’ll never ask the same question twice. Some people will even buy a replica signal-sender to practice buzzing-in.
Game Day
There were about 15 contestants present when Martyn arrived at the Sony lot in Culver City at 7:15am. One was returning champion Harrison Whitaker, 27, a brainiac who had dominated across multiple episodes.
That meant everyone else realized their chances of success had just dropped through the floor. Oddly enough, Martyn said, that sort of took the pressure off, allowing them to relax and just have fun.
“And he’s an amazing guy—so nice,” she recalled. “It was a really collegial atmosphere right off of the bat.”
But Whitaker was defeated. He was taken out (after 14 games)—in the very episode before Martyn took the stage—by Libby Jones, a recruiter from Florida, who answered a question (er, questioned an answer?—in “Jeopardy!” you famously respond to an answer in the form of a question) about infrastructure depicted on a stamp correctly.
Martyn and Jones were joined by Eli Selzer, who works nearby for HBO in post-production, in the following episode that would be televised Dec. 2.
“I just said, ‘Let’s go get ‘em!’”, Martyn recalled. “Then, we went out there and gave it our all.”
The following moments went by altogether too fast, she says.
“I had so much adrenaline pumping through me,” she said, adding she thinks she was reading the “answers” faster than normal. “I was definitely buzzing-in too soon.”
Martyn had worked on her click-technique with a ballpoint pen.
“The actual buzzer was much harder to yield,” she said. “You just try to adjust.”
Martyn was trailing her competition. But, she knew she about remaining calm under pressure. After all, her father competed at three different Olympics, and even carried the flag for the USA in LA in 1984.
“I was a little more cautious,” she said. “That was my judgement call. Maybe it wasn’t the right one.”
Going into the Final Jeopardy round, she was in last place at $2,200. But she doesn’t focus on the fact that she was $20,800 behind Selzer, but rather how cool it was that Jones was $2,200 ahead of him. A nice symmetry. Martyn decided not to bet anything.
Her husband and two sons were there in the audience, looking on.
And based on Jones’ gambit of wagering $20,801, had that opponent gotten it wrong, Martyn would’ve bested Jones (though, in that scenario, Selzer would’ve won, since he only wagered $2,201).
The category was “Celebrities.” And the answer to which they had to come up with a question? “An Ivy League grad, actress and author. She was Vogue’s youngest cover girl at 14 and was called the face of the 1980s.”
They all knew it: Brooke Shields.
“It took me all of a second,” she said.
While much of that day is a blur in her mind, she recently got to experience it as a viewer.
“It was kind of just such a joyful moment,” she said, describing what it was like to see herself on the show. “I’m having a ball.”
Unlike what you hear about the behind-the-scenes horrors of some Hollywood productions, making “Jeopardy!” was pure bliss, she says.
Like a perfect dream that she can revisit in her mind, any time she likes.
And, since her episode came out, she’s been getting plenty of positive comments from Los Gatans, too.
“I just felt that love of the community supporting me and saying, ‘Good job!’” she said. “Everyone has been so kind.”
