One Year of Reality and How It Nearly Killed Me: My Life Behind the Scenes (20 page)

Well, since I had “shattered” my ankle before, the doctor thought it would be a good idea to put my leg in a cast up to my knee and keep it on for six weeks to make sure that everything healed properly, and I didn’t have more problems with my ankle. The silver lining was that I was able to pick the color of the cast. And once I had my beautiful blue cast on, I went back to work and told everyone I had been walking on a broken leg for the last three days. It sure made me sound tough. At least the pain went away once I was in the cast. The problem was that it was my right leg that was incapacitated. My doctor gave me
a temporary handicap permit so that I could park close to things, but I don’t remember him saying that I shouldn’t be driving.

What an idiot.

I was driving. I used my cast leg to accelerate. It seemed fine. In hindsight it was idiotic because I couldn’t hit the break fast enough, especially since I wasn’t trained to drive using both legs. I drove like a blind grandmother for the next couple of months. I was a bit nervous to be wearing the cast when I got a call for an interview. I didn’t think I would be hired because of my cast, but I needed the gig, so I drove myself to the interview.

I met with Louise, the line producer for
Fear Factor
. I wasn’t familiar with the show, so I called my friend Laura, who told me her kids loved the show. It was a stunt show that had three separate events, with the second event being a strange food challenge. She said it was great and I would like it, which I did. I still had the cast on when I went to my interview, but at least I could park right next to the building because I had that temporary handicap permit. Louise was a woman who was very knowledgeable and strong, and I really liked her. She is what I call an East Coaster, meaning that she was very smart, articulate, and
no b.s. I would say that she was a young Katherine Hepburn. She reminded me of Mark from
Wild Things
, and it was refreshing change to work for a woman. We hit it off and I ended up getting the job. I was excited that I wouldn’t have any down time between gigs, and could go straight from
The Mole
to
Fear Factor
. The other thing I liked about
Fear Factor
was that it was in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t need to do more chaotic traveling anytime soon. I finished out my wrap week and everything was fine.

It was ironic that I would be starting my job on a stunt show in a cast. But at this point, I was feeling good about my career, my life, and my finances. It was all going so well.

I had no complaints, but there were a couple of big shocks in store for me.

CHAPTER 10

THE BEST SHOW I EVER
WORKED ON

A
s careers go, mine was progressing just fine. A bit slowly if I compared myself to my younger colleagues, but it was nice to be moving up and not laterally. I finished my work on
The Mole
on a Thursday and would be starting on
Fear Factor
the following Monday.

But for about half a second, I thought that I might have to back out of the job.

I got an unusual call from one of my mother’s friends. This was unusual because I never heard from my mom’s friends. But I knew Liz. She was
a nurse, and she and my mom had been close for many years. She called to tell me that everything was fine, but my mom was in the hospital for a minor heart condition. My mom’s heartbeat had gotten really rapid and wasn’t settling down, so she’d needed to go to the emergency room and spend the night at the hospital. She was probably going to be released the next day, so Liz told me there was no need to worry.

As if that were possible! In all the years I’d known my mom, she had only been to the hospital once and that was in the 1970s. She had never had a parking ticket or a traffic violation either. She was like Mary Poppins: “Practically Perfect In Every Way.” So I was a little panicked. And it was the first time it wasn’t one of my friends calling her and saying, “Everything’s fine, but…”

So many things whizzed through my head while Liz and I were on the phone. I didn’t totally believe her, for one thing. My mom is great at understating—I learned from the master—so who knew how bad the problem really was. And then there was the fact that I was about to start a job. I don’t have the kind of job where I could leave for a couple of days and come back or take vacation days. Those kinds of days needed to happen in between jobs. So if
I needed to do anything, now would be the time. I would have to quit my job if my mother’s health problem was serious.

So I hopped on a plane the very next day. It wasn’t that easy to hop with a leg cast, but I got some help. Liz picked me up and took me to the hospital, where they were still running tests on my mom. So I hung out in her room for a while until she came back. She was surprised to see me. I told her, “What are you trying to do, show me up? I break my leg; you have to one-up me with a heart condition? Come on!!!”

Well, we spent a couple of days together and I explained to her that if anything else happened, it would have to happen after my job ended in five months. Though that may sound selfish, my mom understood that I wouldn’t be able to come back. It turned out that some medication and rest was what she needed, and she would be fine. But I was at the age when I needed to start thinking about my parents aging. Well, just my mom. My dad had died of a heart attack before he was sixty, so my mom was the only worry. To my knowledge, her family had no history of heart conditions, but I had to start thinking about how I would someday take care of my mom, and what role my brother would play. I flew back to Los Angeles, feeling a little conflicted about leaving.

But all of that took a back seat as I went to my first day of work on a brand new show with brand new people. It was very exciting, and everyone was pleasant and on their best behavior. My cast was a point of a discussion, but it certainly didn’t hinder me. I did feel like it put me in a weaker leadership position. After all, it was a stunt show. I wasn’t doing any stunts myself, of course, but the cast did limit me in terms of what I could do and where I could go on set.

One of the fun things about my job was that I’d be working with location scouts for the first time. Before the show even began shooting, we would check out various locations to see if they’d work for particular stunts. We would be doing this throughout the show, as stunts changed and locations fell through. We had to make sure it would be affordable and safe to set up stunts at the location, and that there would be a place for crew parking and the trucks that were needed to help set up the shoot (everyone drove to location, which would be around fifty to seventy people). The field producers on
Amazing Race
had been the ones who got to go all over the world and check out locations. My task had been to follow up with obtaining the permission to film in the places that were chosen. And on
The Mole
, the facilitators in each country did most of the
ground work for the location shooting. I had a lot of fun helping scope out locations.

My first location scouting mission was only a day after I started. We were going to check out an oil rig. I was in my leg cast, but you couldn’t see much of it because I had pants on. We took a boat out to the rig, but as soon as I stepped onto it, I was yelled off it by the company supervisors. Because of my cast, I had to stay on the boat while the production team (location manager, producer, director, AD) took a tour of the rig. I didn’t like standing out like that, especially not on my second day. While it wasn’t my fault, I was embarrassed, and I knew I wasn’t earning any brownie points. Soon that humiliating feeling would go away.

I wanted some way of compensating for my temporary disability, and before I knew it, I found an opening. One of the producers would often bring disgusting delicacies to the office in a bag to see if anyone would give them a taste. It was a variety of things, mostly pig parts, uncooked. I usually said, “Sure.” When the producer asked how anything tasted, I told him it just needed some salt and pepper, maybe a little sauce, and then I would say it was gross. Most of the food he brought in actually tasted like the smell of the frogs we’d dissected in high school
biology class. YUCK! I hated it, but by trying it, I felt like I was proving that I was stronger than the cast on my leg. I didn’t think they’d give me anything that would put me in the hospital or cause me to sue them. And I know they made sure that the food was “approved” by someone or some agency.

One time they tried to have the eating of a placenta as part of the B Stunt, which was the second stunt of every show. There would be three stunts, two physical and one food, but the placenta was not approved. I was never involved in how the stunts were structured, but I did taste many of the B Stunts. There were two things I never volunteered for, an insect dinner that was supposed to be spaghetti and meatballs (actually I think it was worms and blood balls) and Balut (almost hatched duck eggs). I knew what Balut was, and thought it was more disgusting than anything I had ever experienced… Still, the
Fear Factor
spaghetti was even grosser. Most of the taste testing for the show was done on a volunteer basis, with the occasional money incentive. It made the office smell really bad at times.

It was a nice distraction to occasionally help the producers by volunteering to eat the food, but I was getting paid to do other things. I did some hiring for the show. Two coordinators were needed, and
the line producer had already hired one. The coordinator was a very self-assured, aggressive, and funny woman. I don’t mean aggressive in a bad way; she was someone who always questioned things and wanted to figure them out, rather than just passively doing her job. She was definitely production manager material, but she may have needed one or two more shows under her belt before getting that promotion. I had one more coordinator to hire, and I hired a guy whom I felt would work well with the other coordinator as the location coordinator, and a friend whom I’d worked with before as the office coordinator. I wanted to have someone in the office I knew and could rely on. I also had to hire a few production assistants. The executive producer of the show had given me the names of one or two people he wanted me to interview for these positions, but he didn’t pressure me into any decisions. I didn’t have any problem hiring whoever the producers wanted, though, since they were entry-level positions. Almost anyone could be a PA if they were responsible, took direction well, and volunteered to assist in unexpected ways. I also believe that if the top executive of the show makes a suggestion, you should take it seriously. Other than the PAs, the additional coordinator, and the office coordinator, I didn’t need to do any hiring. The show was in its second season, and many of the people who had worked on its first
season were back. The line producer was new, as the original line producer was working on a pilot for the same company. The schedule for the show was very simple, it was a six-day work week with three days of shooting, three days of prep, and one day off.

And like every other show I’d worked on as a production manager, the job responsibilities were different. On
Amazing Race
I didn’t hire anyone, on
The Mole
I hired some of the crew, and on
Fear Factor
I hired most of my staff. On
Amazing Race
I worked closely with contestants, on
The Mole
I had little interaction with them besides keeping their luggage, and on
Fear Factor
I didn’t need to deal with contestants at all except when there were celebrities involved and we wanted everything to run smoothly. On
Amazing Race
I didn’t have to deal with day-to-day production issues except when it concerned visas, passports, and sending crew home. On
The Mole
I dealt with issues that couldn’t be handled by segment producers. On
Fear Factor
, I supervised the shoots from a production standpoint. I wasn’t bored exactly, but I had more down time than I’d had on other shows—my days weren’t spent shuttling from one crisis to the next. And I had this weird desire to be totally swamped. Only when I was busy did I feel like I was being successful. I was actually having symptoms of withdrawal from being overworked.

Once we were on the set and shooting, I was enjoying the work and started to feel that familiar rush again. My cast had finally come off before we started shooting, and I was back to normal, although I still volunteered to try the strange food. I spent much of my day in the production trailer taking care of small details, keeping an eye on how things were going, and reporting back to the production office. I enjoyed watching the crew set up the lights and the cameras and seeing everything come together from scratch. It was like the scenes from the movie
The Sting
, when the crew would set up a fake location, and then tear it down in the same day. That’s what this crew would do. Show up in the morning, put the set together, including any artwork or lighting that needed to be arranged, set up the cameras and the rigging, shoot the stunt, and then tear it down. It was a long day, but since we only shot three days in a row, we could get some sleep the other three (a little bit).

Working on
Fear Factor
reminded me of working on feature films and not a reality show. So, for me, this was the best show I’d ever worked on, because it was staged, well lit and rehearsed. I had always wanted to work in feature filmmaking; it just so happened that I was making money in reality television. The closest I had come to working on features was assisting the director for a TV movie. Many of my
production managing colleagues were glad that they hadn’t taken jobs in reality television because of the long hours and poor organization on many of the shows. Features, commercials, and union shows are far more structured and well budgeted than most reality shows. There always seemed to be financial issues with
Fear Factor
, especially in regards to getting additional cameras and crew for the show. I always thought there were way too many cameras, but I wasn’t the director or the line producer, so details like that were out of my hands.