Dispatches From The 7th Circle of Hollywood #2

Troy Hauschild

#2-Which Reality is Real? -Really?!

A lot of the work I’ve done in LA is in Reality TV. So I thought I could do a primer on how Reality works, what it’s like to be on the crew, some of the fun and pitfalls..

Most of the shows I worked on weren’t hits. Here’s some highlights: I was Associate Producer on a show called ‘Playing It Straight,’ a contest-dating show with one girl and fifteen guys, half of which are gay, on a dude ranch in Nevada. (I think FOX aired 2 episodes before cancelling it..) I was a Camera Assistant on ‘Strange Love,’ a documentary-style show about the strange romance between rap star Flava Flav, and Rocky IV actress Brigitte Nielsen. I also AC’d a pair of shows about billionaires- ‘The Benefactor’ with tech-entrepeneur Mark Cuban, and ‘The Rebel Billionaire,’ with Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson.

So what are your first thoughts about Reality TV? Maybe you love it- Maybe you think it’s fake-er than the breasts at White Lotus on a Friday night. The thing that people don’t understand about Reality shows is that most of them are game shows -complete with rules that govern them, (-Congress has even spoken on the subject. Ever see the movie Quiz Show?) What that means is that as fake as shows may seem, they’re not ‘rigged.’ The producers can’t outright ‘rig’ them because they’d open themselves to huge lawsuits, and maybe even criminal prosecution.

So how do producers make a show more interesting? Creative casting. How boring would it be if all the girls on “Flavor of Love” got along just fine? From day one, producers look for people who are going to fight with each other, compete for Flav’s attention and if they’re lucky, one will spit on another by the end of the show. They’ll also change the challenges inside the show to make the competition more exciting- like changing an individual game to a group game- to force contestants to work together. But again, if there’s a chance that the contestants could have a lawsuit from the changes because the game has become unfair, the answer from the EPs or the network is always “no.”

What does that mean for the guys working on the shows? Well first off, we have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, that say we won’t ruin the surprises or let anybody know how the show ends -or pay a penalty. When I first started, those NDAs were for one or two million dollars. Everybody signs them. But as I moved on and the shows got bigger, those numbers changed to five, six, and even ten million. It became fun to guess what the number of each show would be -as if that implied how cool the network thought the series was, or what kind of adventures we might be on. They’d also include a new clause every time. (One said that we wouldn’t gamble on the outcome of the show -I understand some execs at a network went to Vegas to bet on a winner.. I think they’re doing jail-time now..)

It also meant that as crew members, we weren’t supposed to become friendly, or sometimes even communicate with the cast members, because it could seem like we were giving one preferential treatment over another. Even if they would ask us to hand something to them, we were instructed to let them get it themselves. -and shoot whatever happens. (Maybe they’ll drop it on their foot!) Of course, it didn’t always turn out that way. One of my crew buddies slept with a cast member on a show, a very sexy model. And it either helped or really hurt his career, depending on who you ask. (Everybody was either proud of him, or jealous..)

Life on the road could be long and tough- and you build amazing relationships with the people you’re with. Probably a whole article could be devoted to the “Showmance.” When you’re on the road with the same group of people, hook-ups eventually happen. For “The Rebel Billionaire,” we were in a different country every week, but saw the same thirty faces on the crew every day. We were experiencing all these amazing places, and working our asses off. -So it just makes sense that a few people fell into bed together. I didn’t find out until the end of the show, that the girl I was interested in was fooling around with my buddy for two months, under everybody’s nose. (If a showmance gets serious on the road, we call that a “Locationship.”) They were a great couple actually, but when they got back to LA, situations changed and they fell apart, -like most showmances do.

I wouldn’t say I made great money working on Reality shows, either as a Producer or Camera Assistant. But I got to travel to some amazing places, and see things that I never would have had a chance to otherwise. For “Strange Love” on VH-1, I went to Milan, New York and Las Vegas, shot backstage with Public Enemy, and had Brigitte Nielsen scream ‘CIGARETTE!’ at me repeatedly. (Fetching smokes is not part of my job description, by the way..) On “The Benefactor,” I was on the ice at the Dallas Stars’ hockey rink. And I watched bums having sex outside “The Next Great Champ”‘s boxing arena. For “Playing It Straight,” I was used as a guinea pig to see what we could put the contestants through. (-the idea being: “If Troy isn’t killed, they probably won’t be.”) So I was taught to lasso an 800 lb. steer, then actually wrestled it!

There are a lot of changes in how Reality’s shot these days. The “Laguna Beach” trend is to shoot entire scenes on tripods and long lenses. The end product is really fantastic looking, but blurs the line into scripted work if you ask me. Instead of cameras following the subjects, the subjects have to be asked where they’re going to be and what they’ll be doing, so the cameras can set up in time and cover the scenes correctly. -And if the cast blows a shot by getting up in the middle of a scene, the producers might ask them to do the scene over again. Is that Reality?

I worked on a show last Christmas that’s coming out in a few weeks. It was called “The Great American Christmas” and follows several families as they experience the holidays. Our story was about a kid who moved from New York to LA to be with the girl he loves. From the time we started shooting, to the time we finished (Christmas Eve,) we went through every stage of loving, hating, being interested in, and sick of each other as a crew. I worked as camera assistant covering two cameras and managing all the tech gear. I probably averaged 4 hours of sleep a night.

There was a gorgeous girl on our crew that all the guys tried to get the attention of. In the beginning, she seemed interested in me. Then later she seemed into my buddy. After a week of sleep deprivation, I lost any ‘game’ or sense of humor, and I think all the guys finally gave up on her. That seems to be a theme, at least for me- not hooking up, but getting close to hooking up, or close to something, then it just falls apart. (If she were reading this now, I’d tell her I was sorry about how our last few conversations went.)

When I think about my time in LA, I think a lot about my adventures on Reality shows. The travel, the amazing people, and the possibilites around every corner. If there was an argument for why I suffer through hard times here, it would invariably center on those stories. Like getting stuck in a hurricane off Richard Branson’s private island, or getting in a fist-fight in Marakech. And when I go to the bar back in Kansas, nobody says “Fight in Marakech?! That happened to me too!!”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.