That Summer I Worked on "The Bachelor."
The behind-the-scenes was just as wild as you'd expect.
Trigger Warning: This post briefly mentions suicide and infant death so if you are sensitive to those things (or if you are member of my family) I would skip this essay.
The other night I was watching a series called The Dark Side of the 2000s on (Vice TV on Hulu) and there was a whole episode dedicated to “The Bachelor.” The documentary series featured a bunch of people who worked on the show talking about how problematic the series was in how it manipulated its cast into acting insane on TV (mostly, alcohol). And as I watched a memory surfaced, “Holy shit I totally worked on this show!” Of course I remembered this, but I hadn’t thought about it in so long.
It was 2010, I was house sitting for my best friend while her family spent the summer in Greece. I’d been living in New York City since 2009, but it hadn’t worked out because every time I landed in the city, some horrible tragedy happened in California that had me flying back. That was the year my nephew died as an infant. That was the year my best friend’s father killed himself. So many dark things happened in the first few months of 2010 that at a certain point I looked around and realized I was voting with my feet - I couldn’t live in New York anymore because I was never there, paying for a room in an apartment I never saw, clinging to a life-long dream to live in the greatest city on earth. It just wasn’t my time to be there.
When I got back to California, I stayed with my parents, who were still living in the house beneath Yosemite Falls where I was raised. I had gotten rid of my car when I moved to New York so if I wanted to go anywhere I had to borrow my mom’s station wagon. My parents were really grief stricken at the death of their first grandchild. I’d graduated from college and grad school. There weren’t any big “things” to be excited about anymore. The collective energy that went into waiting for and loving my nephew, waiting for his birth, was overwhelming and exciting. It was love in its purest form. So when he died less than a week after birth (hypoplastic left heart syndrome) everyone was really, really sad. It’s still something we can’t really talk about as a family - that pain is still really raw and fresh, especially for my brother and his wife.
So I moved back home, leaving my New York City dreams behind and shoving the four Ivy League degrees I’d made my parents frame for me into the back of a closet. I don’t remember a lot of about this time but I do remember applying for a TON of jobs. By this point, I’d been out of school three years and hadn’t had great luck with finding work in New York or Los Angeles. I did have some experience interning on TV and film sets, so I concentrated my work in entry level entertainment jobs.
Finally, after some months of searching, a contact from a previous art department job on a movie put me in contact with a producer for “The Bachelor,” who was staffing up a spin-off of the show called “Bachelor Pad.” I don’t really know what the show was or how it was different from the flagship “Bachelor” show, but it was filmed in the same location with *I think* the same people (maybe a mix from different seasons?). I think they still shoot that show at the same house, it’s somewhere out towards Calabasas off the 101.
While I’d hoped the show on “Bachelor” would be an art department gig (my goal then was to be a production designer), I ended up getting the role of “driver.” For productions like “Bachelor,” set in semi-rural yet still residential areas, setting up parking can be a big task. Basically to avoid pissing off neighbors they have to have all the cast and crew park really far away and get driven to set in passenger vans. So basically the job I got - which I was happy to have because finding work had been such a struggle - was to drive a van in a circle all day long. From the parking lot, to the house, to the parking lot, to the house, for twelve hours, sometimes more.
I think I must have known someone in the art department, because I was able to tour the house multiple times and I think I even filled in as an art department assistant a few times when they were understaffed and no driving was needed (once people got to set there were some hours in the day when a driver wasn’t needed). I didn’t know the show at that time, but it was fun getting a behind-the-scenes tour of a famous TV house nonetheless. Luckily, I had a place to stay because my friend was in Greece and her house was empty. And another friend let me use her car all summer because she was gone.
The first thing that struck me about the “Bachelor” house was how incredibly tacky it was. Stuff that looked good on camera looked like literal garbage in person. For example, the front of the house had vines all over it. In those vines were fake plastic roses affixed haphazardly to make it look like the vine was blooming. The art director showed me what it looked like in the monitor though, and it looked totally fine, pretty even! The art department on that show definitely knows what they’re doing. They design to camera so it looks lush and colorful and rich. But in person it looks beyond trashy. The contrast between how plastic and gross everything looked in person and how soft and romantic it looked in more forgiving soft focus was really jarring.
The property where “The Bachelor” is shot features a large outbuilding, I think it was some sort of barn. And I remember it being huge. That room was where all the different producers had their work stations. They’d sit in there manage their various departments, plan out the schedule for the day, and talk about what the cast was up to.
It was during this time I learned what a complicated word “producer” is. It can mean so many different things, from the person who is financing the whole thing to a person who is just facilitating moving the cast around, arranging them like puzzle pieces to get the most story out of them. I found myself around a lot of the story producers - those are the people who figure out what the narrative of each episode is going to be and strategize how to get the cast to act it out. And I have to say, those were some of the darkest people I’ve ever met in Hollywood.
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