This is the second part of a two-part interview with Bill Bryan, author of Keep It Real.
In the first part we talked about his career. For this part I focused more on questions related to this book.
He also threw me a curve ball near the end which I had to address. Dang TV writers giving me more work to do. Grr...:)
The book’s acknowledgement starts with this comment:
I would like to express my deep gratitude to those people who gave me the inside dope on Reality TV, but unfortunately they are all terrified of being sued and screwed if I mention their names.Can you elaborate on your acknowledgement? Reality TV people would dish to you but not with their names attached? Was that paranoia or justified fear?
It was completely justified. As I mentioned before, CBS and the producers of Kid Nation just bared their over-whitened teeth to remind everyone to keep their mouths shut about what transpired on the set. Google “Mark Burnett” and “lawsuit” and then stand back in case your computer starts throwing off sparks. One mid-level reality producer who has done the hiring for many shows told me that she was shown a blacklist of untouchables - employees who had been heard criticizing reality, or revealing things about the way it is made.
In LA, there is and always will be an inexhaustible supply of eager young beavers willing to work long hours for low pay in order to occupy some tiny corner of the entertainment business. The genius of reality – from a business perspective – is that you can produce an entire series using only such people – no need for expensive, temperamental actors, nor for drama or comedy writers, whose talents are annoyingly rare and therefore difficult to replace. No need for unions, either – the networks have created separate divisions to buy and produce their reality shows, and of course those divisions have no union contracts. Since reality shows are so much cheaper to produce, they have proliferated like crabs at Woodstock. So if you’re relying on show biz to pay your rent, you’d better be willing to work in reality. And if you want to work in reality, you better be willing to shut your pie hole.
On page 264 you describe reality television as being 50 percent coaxed confessions? Is that really the case? Can you elaborate on how they do this?
I must have been in a charitable mood to pick a number so low. The backbone of every reality show is made up of interviews with the contestants, and those are conducted by field producers who understand better than anyone that they are in the turning-water-into-wine business. I heard lots of stories about coaxed confessions, but here’s something I like even better: On the show High School Reunion, the producers basically held two contestants hostage at an isolated location and poured drinks down them until they had sex. What made this a great storyline was that the two had formerly been high school sweethearts; what made it sort of naughty is that the woman was at the time engaged to someone else – who presumably owned a TV.
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