- cross-posted to:
- goodlongread
- cross-posted to:
- goodlongread
Bill Pruitt, a former producer for The Apprentice whose NDA just expired after 20 years, writes in Slate that Donald Trump used the n-word during the production of the show — and there are tapes of him doing it.
So ridiculous that an NDA would cover something like this.
I mean… I regularly work under NDAs in tv and they are usually pretty mild but I did one season of… Something that came out inside the past 10 years…and the entire thing was mad brained including the NDA. Production wise these sleazy reality tv things are grifts. If the core reality of them is questioned then it hurts the “integrity” of the brand and ultimately the production company’s bottom dollar. If you don’t buy into the reality aspects those shows lose most of their appeal.
I can’t even begin to say how weird it was to be crew. There’s like this whole fast-track culture where if you’re a little competent they will invite you onto the next project with basically the same responsibilities but a jacked up important sounding title. From a technical standpoint I’ve seen more discipline and good practice on film student projects. They are their own little worlds inside film and if they don’t work more reality tv they don’t have recognized transferable skills that easily ports to other positions in the industry, so if they want to switch you become a person who has a bunch of entrenched bad habits you have to be trained out of and rehumbled before you can reliably get jobs. The people who get sucked into that world basically live in golden handcuffs.
I can’t believe anyone thinks any “reality tv” show is real. The majority of them are all bullshit. Oh, sure, there may be some genuine moments in there, but those are scattered among the scripted and edited garbage.
My ides for a reality.show.is kind of like.a game show. You give people a bunch of cocaine and then send then to work in some sort of quarry breaking rocks. Whoever does the best gets a bunch more cocaine, while the loser just gets a little bit of.cocaine. They’ll work in the quarry for 8 hours a day with their off time spent however they’d like in a group living situation. Probably doing their cocaine. At the end of every week the person with the least amount of cocaine is disqualified. The prize for winning is a shit load of cocaine.
That’s it. That’s the show. It would be important to select.people that would actually do the cocaine. No teetotalers. Also: open bar.
But that’s the thing isn’t it. People cling to the idea that in that trash heap is a sparkle of the genuine even as the recognize the garbageness of the garbage pile. There’s layers to the onion. As long as there’s something that reads convincingly as genuine people will clap themselves on the back for spotting the contrivance while still at some minute level still buying into the perceived core aspect of the show.
Also let’s not forget that Hugh Laurie receives tons of letters from fans in desperate undiagnosed medical situations on a regular basis. Just because you aren’t fooled doesn’t mean that’s a universal.