Chapter 3
In one episode of the show, Jason is sitting on the couch in the sunken living room when a squelching slap against the glass patio door interrupts his television viewing.
After a close-up of his furrowed brow, the camera zooms in on the smudge on the glass, a fairly innocuous mark, even through the eye of an expensive TV camera.
Because Jason is aware that he is on television—and more importantly that Maggie is quickly becoming our primary catalyst for action—he does what any enterprising cast member would do and gets up to investigate this mystery.
He does not necessarily want to get up from whatever sport is on TV.
What the viewer does not see on-screen is Lauren or Dan or maybe even me asking him what that sound was.
What they do not see is Lauren or Dan or maybe even me popping out onto the patio, discovering its source, and firmly suggesting that Jason get out there.
A bird has flown into the window at such an angle that it now lies twitching on the terra-cotta tile.
The camera captures its futile flutters, but this will be screened out in edits.
For all our metaphors about nature documentaries, we are not that kind of show.
What the audience will see is Jason standing over the bird, frowning, sighing, scooping it up with rubber kitchen gloves.
The camera follows him as he removes it from the property and, as he does, zooms out to reveal more birds just around the corner, a trail of dazed birds circling the house, a trail that Jason doesn’t see.
I quickly learned that the most exciting aspects of Honeymoon Stage came in postproduction, when the hours of nothing were tossed out, the wheat rescued from the chaff.
In later years producers would shoot Reality television specifically for story, but as pioneers of the genre, we had no clear trail.
Maggie’s and Jason’s teams would tell us where they needed to be that day for their other gigs and whether or not cameras were permitted on location.
Then we’d follow them around. Much of my job entailed printing out releases and chasing down the regular people who happened onto a shoot, cajoling them into signing away their anonymity or else plastering the shooting area with legal-approved fliers informing the general public that walking into this space meant giving us their consent to be filmed.
I also set up lots of crates, then took them down at the end of the shoot.
When our supervisors were out of earshot, I’d crack jokes with Rahul, who was quickly becoming my favorite of the cameramen, or listen to absurd Hollywood gossip from Sally Ann, who did Maggie’s makeup and had dated a paparazzo and thus claimed to know all the hip Beverly Hills spots.
Vinnie liked to show me wallet-sized photos of his kids, and would offer me fatherly advice about biding my time and rolling with punches until they promoted me.
The crew on set felt like a family, one that I was gradually becoming a part of.
I liked being indispensable, even if it was only because no one else remembered which shirt Maggie had been wearing when we’d filmed the day before, or how to fix the DVD player.
I liked preempting Dan’s requests by already knowing he’d want the lights set up just so.
We weren’t about to win an Emmy, but I was contributing.
Every day was a new challenge, and even though some afternoons could be boring, life on set was never dull.
I was also the resident gofer, which meant I got to take myself on field trips.
My second week on set I drove to the KFC in Thousand Oaks and picked up lunch for the whole crew.
By the time I arrived back at the Calabasas house, all the food was room temperature, and my car had absorbed what I knew would be a semipermanent fug.
Adrian—if my memory serves correctly and he had not, in fact, already been replaced with another camera assistant—helped me distribute the meals.
“Oh, that one’s mine.” Maggie came up behind me.
We hadn’t interacted much at that point.
Lauren had told me to keep away from the talent.
Maybe she thought I’d pump Maggie for a juicy story I could sell to Star magazine or force Jason to sign my bra.
Just ease into it, she’d said, like I was taking my first hit of weed.
Because of this, I still wasn’t sure if Maggie remembered me.
Maggie was on tiptoe, leaning over my shoulder toward a two-piece meal.
She smelled like shampoo. It seemed impossible that she would have freely chosen Kentucky Fried Chicken over whatever carb-free, taste-free, sugar-free concoction she had stocked from her dietitian.
Then again, I hadn’t taken the order, and I didn’t see why she would lie to me.
At the time, everyone was on some fad diet.
You couldn’t be young in Southern California and not at least be doing Weight Watchers or Atkins.
Eli was a vegan. Sally Ann was gluten- and sugar- and fat- and nut-free.
Even I wanted to have my body achieve its maximum potential.
I’d come of age in the ’90s, when between the hours of eight a.m. and dinner, I watched as my mother regularly ingested only a glass of white wine, half a SlimFast, and two hard-boiled eggs.
That afternoon I, for myself, had inexplicably ordered only a medium fries.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Maggie said to me.
She and Jason waited until the crew had finished eating to sit down to their own cold chicken and saturated fat.
Maggie instructed the cameras to close in on the takeout bag, flimsy with grease.
Eli rolled his eyes when Dan okayed her impromptu direction.
While Vinnie set up the sound, I stood around the corner, close enough to hear what Maggie and Jason had gone out of their way to keep private.
“You don’t have to be eating,” Jason said to Maggie softly. “We can scrap the idea. It’s so weird to have people watch you eating.”
“No, it’s fine,” Maggie replied. “It’s easier to just give them what they want.”
I wasn’t sure if “them” was the crew, or our audience, or Maggie’s team trying to rebrand her as “an everygirl.” Rahul and Eli got behind their cameras, and Vinnie gave the okay.
Maggie ate her chicken as if it was not several hours old and was a meal she consumed regularly.
Jason called her gross for dousing everything in ranch.
“What even is ranch? And why is it called that?” Maggie asked, licking the sauce from a finger.
Jason rolled his eyes. “It’s a salad dressing, babe. So, like, mayonnaise and spices.”
“Yeah, but why do they call it ranch? Because of horses? They like carrots, right?”
“I don’t think horses are dipping their carrots in ranch dressing.” Jason made eyes at the camera, his signature deadpan can-you-believe.
“You should have some.” Maggie wiggled her paper plate toward him.
“I’m not gonna eat that stuff.”
A twinkle in her eye as she nodded in mock seriousness and said, “Because you’re an athlete.”
“Nah, just common sense, once you’ve dipped that dirty little finger in it.”
Maggie’s mouth was full. She sputtered, smacking him on the forearm. “Jay-son.”
They had this same interaction—his playful dig and her faux offense—at least twice a day, and I had already noticed it was most likely to occur in direct view of a camera.
They finished their food in a comfortable silence, and then Maggie excused herself to the bathroom while Jason cleared the table.
Contractually, the cameras couldn’t follow the cast into bathrooms or bedrooms, with the exception of, say, a segment discussing interior design.
There was nothing to stop the crew from camping out and filming the closed door while the sound engineer strove to pick up whatever retching or bumping or crying was happening inside—nothing, that is, but common decency.
Lauren would roll her eyes when Maggie begged privacy.
“People have seen her full ass cheeks on the magazine rack at the airport. I don’t know what she thinks she’s hiding,” Lauren said to me on more than one occasion. This seemed unfair. There was a difference between posing and being caught in an unwanted candid.
Long before any microphones were wired and my contract was signed, Maggie’s team had set the boundaries for what she was comfortable divulging.
Although one of the goals of the show, from their angle, was to portray teen sex symbol Maggie McKee as a regular girl and thereby grow her female audience, she didn’t want to be too regular.
The show would still be her real life, they’d argued, just not every aspect of it.
She had an image to build as America’s sweetheart, and to capture her with zit cream would ruin it.
“How is it reality to be up first thing in the morning with perfectly blown-out hair and three coats of mascara?” Lauren grumbled.
“Cut her a break,” Dan would say. “She’s laying bare her few functioning brain cells. We don’t also need to see her take a shit.”
On a Reality show with regular talent, production didn’t care if the cast was uncomfortable.
The goal was to make them uncomfortable: Discomfort made for good TV.
Nothing played better than a riled-up cast member threatening to quit and stalking off into a previously undisclosed corner of set to be coddled by producers while he—it was almost always a he—swore he was finished with all of them.
Here, we were balancing more carefully. Maggie and Jason were both producers and product, and alienating or upsetting them risked disrupting the entire ecosystem.
Still, we had a job to do, and Maggie hiding out in one of the off-limits spaces made it harder for us to do it.