Published: January 02, 2009 11:22 pm      

ENTERTAINMENT: Western New York native ready for his close up

Craig Scime has always been a prankster.

“I love to prank people. I like to joke with people — that’s kind of always the way I’ve been,” the 32-year-old Town of Tonawanda native said this week while visiting for the holidays.

Scime’s personality and pranking prowess will be on display in front a national audience when he appears tonight on the premiere of the CBS reality show “Game Show In My Head.”

The hidden camera game show is produced by Ashton Kutcher, of “Punk’d” and “That 70s Show” fame, and Jason Goldberg, who did “Beauty and the Geek,” and is hosted by former “Fear Factor” host Joe Rogan. The show premieres at 8 p.m., with Scime’s half-hour segment running from 8:30 to 9.

Scime’s parents, Vinny and Mary Jane, flew to Los Angeles in April to attend the taping of the show. “It was very exciting to be involved in the whole aspect of the show,” Mary Jane Scime said. Craig’s parents and his wife Krystal all sat in the front row, and Rogan talks to them briefly during the segment.

Here’s the premise of the show: Contestants wear an earpiece as they go about daily life in Los Angeles and are instructed by Rogan to get strangers on the street to perform outrageous tasks. Contestants try their hand at five challenges, with the chance to win $5,000 for each successfully completed task.

But if they fail one challenge, they lose all the money they earned. If, after completing all five, show participants can double their earnings and win $50,000 by completing a sixth task.

Scime learned about the show through an ad announcing that auditions were going to be held at a particular place and time. “I didn’t know anything about the show,” he said. But it turns out that Scime already had plenty of experience with this sort of thing.

While running errands around LA, Scime said he’d often be talking on the phone with a friend who would ask him to introduce an odd word — like underwear — into the context of a routine conversation.

“Game Show” is the perfect opportunity, Scime (pronounced SHA-may) said. “It’s really a cool piece that showcases my personality. I can make up lies and stories, whatever it takes to get people to complete my task,” he said.

“He’s been a character all his life,” Scime’s mom said. “You could never be mad at him because he would always just turn around and make you laugh. He’s been that way all his life.”

One of his assignments involves posing as a television news reporter trying to interview “witnesses” to a bizarre event. “You are a news reporter who needs to get people to testify on camera about an event that never happened,” the host instructs Scime.

“They must declare that they witnessed a UFO sighting this morning on that very spot. Then they must admit to being abducted and probed by those aliens.”

“Probed?” Scime replies before heading off to complete the challenge within five minutes. You can see a sneak peak of Scime’s segment on YouTube by going to www.youtube.com/

watch?v=O_mcjAatuiM.

Scime is hopeful that a solid 20-plus minutes of face time on national television will boost his acting career. “The only person competing is me,” he said. “For that whole half hour, it’s Craig in primetime, and that’s what’s so exciting.”

Scime and his wife moved to Los Angeles two years ago so he could pursue his acting career. It was a difficult, but necessary, decision. “We miss being in Buffalo,” he said.