by Amy Kaufman
By comparison, most episodes of The Bachelor are now two hours long. There were eleven installments of Nick Viall’s season, plus the “Women Tell All” and “After the Final Rose” specials. Viall spent eight weeks shooting; Michel had only six weeks with his ladies. During the first season, each episode cost just $800,000 or so to produce; now, that budget has risen to roughly $2 million.
But The Bachelor only really started to take shape after Lisa Levenson was hired as its co-executive producer. Levenson—a thin, beautiful brunette who often toted around a Louis Vuitton bag—came from the melodramatic world of soap operas. And after her arrival at The Bachelor, she quickly began to stir up some drama of her own.
Why I’m a Fan
AMY SCHUMER
I started watching during Trista’s season. I was really into her and Ryan. A firefighter who would write poetry? I was like, “Oh my God, a hot, sensitive guy who will kill a spider? Life is gonna be OK!” He was really sweet, and it was really fun to watch. The vibe wasn’t “Let’s see what these lab rats will do. We’re going to put up mirrors on all the walls.”
Because of the reality of the house that I grew up in and my parents’ relationship, I’m more of a realist about relationships, and I’m not really interested in the artifice. But it’s still fun to see. And we still do hope for that for ourselves. You still do want to be like, “I’m married to my best friend.” You want what they’re pretending to have. And I do think it’s possible. I know it’s possible. But I don’t like the show because of the possibility of love. It’s really just a behavioral study. What will these people do? They cast these women who are very confused and unstable. I like awkward moments. I like Curb Your Enthusiasm. I like watching Vince Vaughn in Swingers. I like the shows on Bravo. I think it just also makes you feel better. Like: “I’m not crazy, and I’m not delusional.”
The producers did talk to me about becoming the Bachelorette. I never really considered it, and there was never a lawyer call or official offer. But I think everyone daydreams about what it would be like to be on there. Because first of all, every girl has the exact same body, and that’s weird to me. Why don’t they ever mix it up with body type? Just that alone would be really fun to see—if my body type were on that show. The other girls at the pool and me. “Hi! Cellulite! We all deserve love, guys!”
I do think that is problematic. I don’t think that’s the most problematic thing on that show, but I do think it’s up there. I know it’s a TV show and whatever, but would it hurt ratings that bad to have a woman whose thighs touch? Would they lose an advertiser? Suck my dick. Some guys don’t want to hold onto the thinnest arm that’s ever been photographed. “Can’t wait to bend that skeleton over!” What if you were afraid of shattering her?
I think the show is bad for women, because it creates gunning for a ring for competitive reasons. You want to get these things not because you’ll be happy in life but because you want to show other people you got these things. So you can put it on Facebook. “I got a man and he put a ring on it and you were all wrong and I’m great forever.” And I think that’s bad for women to see.
The most interesting thing I’ve seen on the show in a long time was Corinne saying, “Nick listens to me. Guys don’t usually listen to me.” I remember feeling that way growing up. All through middle school, high school, college—guys weren’t like, “I want your thoughts on this.” It’s like, everyone is drunk and they just want to hook up, and it’s so painful that that’s all they want from you that you have to trick yourself into thinking that’s what you want too. You’re just gunning for these moments of intimacy. Some people luck out, and they meet a great person in high school or college. I didn’t. I was part of that pattern.
It’s kind of awful to watch the show. And it’s the thing I most look forward to every week. It’s fucked up.
—Amy Schumer, comedian (Inside Amy Schumer, Trainwreck, Snatched)
CHAPTER 2
The Reality of Creating the Fantasy
The stretch limousines. The roses. The bubbly.
So many of the key romantic elements we now associate with The Bachelor would never have existed had it not been for Lisa Levenson.
“I have to give her credit for a lot of the romance and the magic of it—the fantasy,” explained Scott Jeffress, the show’s supervising producer. “The limousines, the candles, the Champagne—that’s all Lisa Levenson right there.”
When Levenson arrived at The Bachelor, she came with an impressive résumé. She’d spent five years as a producer on General Hospital before moving into the reality-television space, helping to shape CBS’s Big Brother. Her very first job in the business, however, was on Jerry Springer, and it was formative. “You have to produce stuff to happen in two seconds on that show,” explained Michael Carroll, who worked as Levenson’s assistant on The Bachelor.
“She’s just a savant,” he continued. “She would walk up to the chicks and look very impressive. She’s gorgeous, and she wears Prada. She looks the part, so chicks would listen.”
If you watch Lifetime’s UnREAL—the fictional show about a reality dating show that seems a hell of a lot like The Bachelor—Constance Zimmer’s character, Quinn, is supposedly based on Levenson.
“Lisa’s from Scottsdale, Arizona,” said Evan Majors, who later took over for Carroll as Levenson’s assistant. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Scottsdale, Arizona, but they call it a baby Beverly Hills. All the girls there look a certain way. And Lisa just liked nice things. She liked fine wine. She liked nice restaurants. She liked great tequila. She liked to look good, always. I think she was trying to set a precedent and elevate the look and feel of the show.”
On-set, she was referred to as the office mom, while Fleiss—who was almost always camped out at his desk with a guitar and a joint—was the low-key dad. Nearly everyone I spoke to who worked on the first season of The Bachelor credited Levenson as the brains behind the show’s creative direction. (She did not respond to my request for an interview.)
While Jeffress focused on the story elements of The Bachelor—How does a guy go about meeting twenty-five women? How will everything be shot and lit?—Levenson focused on what she liked to call the “zhuzh.” So if she dictated that every camera shot needed to include candles and flowers, Jeffress figured out how to show off the soft, romantic ambiance through lighting and set dressing. Candles, they both agreed, set the appropriate tone for the show—warming the scene and evoking the intimacy of a dark, romantic dinner.
“But we took it to a level that was way out there. We would have thousands of candles ready to go,” said Jeffress. “When it was like, ‘OK, candle time!’ we’d get everybody on the set—cameras, PAs, me, Lisa—pulling up the layout board to protect the flooring, sweeping and putting candles on the stairs. Lighters would be handed out. And then we’d light them all.”
There were so many candles during the first season of The Bachelorette, Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter’s proposal scene almost went up in flames. A stage had been built over a pool for the special moment, and there were dozens of candles floating in the water. One of the candles drifted toward a plant that was flowing into the pool, “and the thing started torching,” Jeffress said with a laugh. A few fire extinguishers later, everything was back on track.
Besides loading up on roses and tea lights, there was other prep work to be done. Together, the producers identified the two women they thought Michel would take all the way to the finale. (“We were almost always right,” Jeffress boasted.) The team would make sure that Michel was prepped with tidbits about certain women, and then made sure to bring those ladies over to him for one-on-one time during the initial cocktail hour. When it came time for him to whittle the group down to fifteen, Michel could eliminate whomever he wanted—save for a couple of women. “We would say, ‘We’d like you to keep this one because she’s good for TV, and this other one we’d like you to get to know bette
r,’” explained Jeffress. “When it got tough was when it got down to the final five or so. That’s when there would be a little bit of back-and-forth. But they’d work with us.”
On-set—while the action was still contained to the mansion—Jeffress held court in the control room, a space in the house filled with monitors and an audio mixing setup. Photographs of every contestant were taped above the monitors for reference, and crew members in the field had booklets of those same headshots laminated to loop through a belt. Inside the control room, at least three separate producers were posted at story stations, which were equipped with computers that allowed them to view various camera angles and track numerous conversations. Overhead, audio of whichever conversation Michel was engaged in would be pumped through the speakers to the whole room.
Jeffress, meanwhile, was outfitted with a headset so he could walkie-talkie producers inside the mansion when needed. He urged his team to ask the women certain questions or press harder for juicy follow-ups. If Michel himself needed a push, a house producer pulled him aside—maybe pretending his microphone had malfunctioned—and whispered something into his ear before he reentered the scene with a fresh intention.
To motivate the producing team, Jeffress offered cash incentives. He kept a wad of crisp $100 bills in his pocket and promised one to anyone who delivered strong drama. The first producer to get tears? A hundred bucks! You get Michel to make out with the right girl? A hundred bucks! Catch a chick puking on-camera? A hundred bucks!
“All that shit,” Jeffress said. “When you’re producing a show, you think in acts. After act one, you need something big to happen so you can cliff-hang. I need to bring people back from commercial.”
And if the underlings couldn’t get what Jeffress needed, he bought in the big guns: Levenson. Say there’s a woman who has just been rejected by Michel. She’s doing her exit interview, but she’s not that upset—or she’s holding in all her emotion. Levenson knew how to crack that veneer.
“She was the most amazing interviewer I’ve ever seen,” Jeffress recalled. “If we needed tears, she would get them. First, she’d walk out there and just give them a big hug. Then she’d give them a shot of tequila. If they wanted a cigarette, they’d smoke a cigarette. Maybe one more shot of tequila. Then they’d start talking, and Lisa would go, ‘Oh, honey, I know, I know,’ and hug her again. And the girl just breaks. It happened hundreds of times.”
So it was all bullshit? Levenson was only doing it for the show—she never truly related at all to these heartbroken women?
“I mean, she’s a producer,” Jeffress said, shocked by my question. “It was all bullshit. Are you kidding me? She’d come back in and say, ‘Are you happy now?’”
Almost everyone who worked with Levenson—who stayed with the franchise until 2007 and is now the senior vice president of alternative programming at Fox Broadcasting—told me they viewed her with a mix of respect and fear. Even Meredith Phillips, who starred as the second-ever Bachelorette, knew it was dangerous to be alone in a room with the co-EP.
One night, Phillips said, her main producer was off-set, so Levenson had to step in to ask the star some questions. It was during that interview that Phillips cried for the first time during her season.
“I ended up crying, and it was an ugly cry,” remembered Phillips, who became the leading lady in 2004. “And my producer was so pissed off. He was like, ‘What the fuck? I knew it. I knew I should not have taken the night off. I knew she was going to do that to you. That’s just the way she is.’
“She was definitely raw and shady,” continued Phillips, whom I met with in Portland, Oregon, where she’s now a chef. “She’d just get right down to it, and then she’d eventually get what she wanted. So you could never really trust her. I was surprised that I cried, but I think it was mostly because I was exhausted. I was like, ‘I want this to be over with, so sure.’ And then the tears came. And she was like, ‘OK. Done. Got it.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t care. She got it. She got what she fucking wanted.’”
Sometimes, Levenson would even cry herself.
“But then she’d come back into the control room and wipe the tear away and send the next bitch in,” said Sandi Johnson, who worked as a producer on the show for the first five seasons. “In another life, she would have been an actress—an A-list movie star who can go in and give emotion, put it on the table, and then just get back to her life.”
Back then, Levenson was making roughly $10,000 a week, and she liked to show off her wealth. She was liberal with her spending, often showering her coworkers with gifts. Majors, one of her former assistants, said she sometimes used fancy presents as a way to make up for her moody on-set behavior.
“It was kind of an abusive relationship, because she would get mad at me for something and yell at me, and then she would come in with a $200 robe that she bought me,” he explained.
Fleiss worked differently. He never carried a wallet with him, and his wife would often give him a stipend—like an allowance.
“I had to carry his money for him,” said Hatta, who assisted Fleiss during season one. “His wife would be like, ‘Hey, do you know what happened to that money? I gave him $400 last week.’ And I would go in his desk and there was this pile of money in his drawer. He would just hoard it. He was super weird like that.”
Once, Hatta said, he and Fleiss went out to dinner, and he watched his boss order $150 worth of barbecue. Suddenly, the producer realized he didn’t have his wallet on him. “Yeah, you’re gonna have to get that for me, man, and I’ll pay you back,” Fleiss, who was buying dinner for his family, told Hatta. But he was never paid back by his boss, who was known for parking his luxury car directly in front of the doors of the Bachelor mansion.
He was more generous with his weed. In the early years of The Bachelor, Fleiss was constantly stoned.
“If you had to go into his office or you were brought in for a meeting, you were probably going to smoke,” said Brad Isenberg, who worked as a production coordinator on The Bachelor. “Obviously, you could say no and it would be no big deal. But his office was smoked out like you would not believe. Like, smoke coming out under his door.”
Fleiss had no qualms about getting high in front of his colleagues—or even his bosses. While filming Trista and Ryan’s wedding special in St. Maarten, Fleiss stood in the corner of a resort conference room smoking a joint during a meeting with ABC brass. “He had no problem blazing in front of network executives,” said Hatta, who was in the room. “Nobody said anything about it. It was insane to me.”
“Mike’s the kind of guy who likes to have fun and sometimes doesn’t really care about repercussions because he wasn’t going to have any,” added Isenberg, who was also on the Caribbean trip. “He had a lot of leeway. And I think for good reason, because he brought a lot of money and ratings to ABC, so they probably let him act the way he wanted to act because he was pretty successful.”
Almost from the inception of The Bachelor, Fleiss’s affinity for partying infiltrated the work environment. During the first couple of seasons, the on-set control room was stocked with a full bar. One of the supervising producers kept a mini-fridge in his office labeled with different strains of pot. Cocktail hour usually kicked off at six p.m., and if you wanted to fit in, you took part in the drinking.
“It was like, everyone was drinking. It was just the norm, and I didn’t want to be someone who said no, because you don’t want to look like some kind of square,” explained Carroll, who started as Levenson’s assistant but later became a producer. “I was like, ‘Sure. Great. Give me a drink.’”
“We were pretty notorious for what happened on our sets,” acknowledged Jeffress. “Partying and getting crazy. It was a shitshow. A lot of alcohol. Pot. It was out of control. And it was a blast. We were doing something we loved and making a great show, so we partied. We’d go back to the hotel at three in the morning and drink until five, get
up at six, and go again. We had adrenaline for days.”
Some of the younger staffers—or employees who lived far from Malibu—just crashed at the “Bachelor pad” when the nights got too late. After a woman was eliminated from the show, her empty mattress was put in a walk-in closet—and that’s where the crew sometimes slept. As the season rolled along, the mattresses would pile up, “Princess and the Pea”–style, and producers just climbed on top of the stack to get some shut-eye.
Carroll, who is openly gay, often just slept in the same room as the remaining ladies.
“If it was night six and there were only fifteen chicks left, I’d be like, ‘I’m going to sleep in the room with them because there’s an empty bed,’” he said. “They’d wake up and I’d be like, ‘Hi!’ I didn’t know any different.”
Not everyone was cool with the lax work environment, however. In 2005, a handful of Bachelor employees were part of a lawsuit filed against four reality TV production companies (including Fleiss’s Next Entertainment) and four TV networks (including ABC) that claimed the employers withheld overtime wages. Eventually, the case became a class-action suit that resulted in a $1.1 million settlement split among more than two dozen plaintiffs.
“It’s super dangerous to work with no sleep like that and then get behind the wheel every night and drive home,” said a former staffer who participated in the lawsuit. “Yeah, there’s a crash room on-site. But the hell I was going to sleep in a crash room. I’m sorry. I have a certain expectation of how people should be treated.”
By the time the lawsuit was settled, the raucous work environment had already cooled off. One night, sometime around the fourth season, a drunk crew member was driving down the mansion’s windy driveway and hit another car. Some network executives witnessed the accident and put the kibosh on the partying.