by Amy Kaufman
The show has made me feel really ugly, because I assume that the women they cast are based on their perception of what a man would want—and all the women look the same to me on the show. They always have the same kind of long barrel curls and they’re all skinny. There’s no one that looks like me.
And honestly, I think the reason a lot of us enjoy watching it is because it makes us feel superior. I feel bad admitting that, but it is fun to sit on my lofty perch and be like, “Oh my God, look at this blonde babbling about how she loves kids.” I sometimes watch it because it’s fun to watch stupid people mate. I feel real bad about that. And I also feel bad about the fact that I have found myself laughing at people’s pain so many times. I remember on Kaitlyn’s season, there was a guy everyone called Cupcake. She dumped him and there was this long, lingering shot of him sobbing hysterically on a hill. I laughed so hard.
—Diablo Cody, screenwriter (Juno, Young Adult)
CHAPTER 7
Method to the Madness
I can make you say some fucked-up shit.”
I was sitting across the table from Michael Carroll at a restaurant a few blocks from his house in northeast L.A. when he suddenly threw out that tease. I’d been asking him about how ITMs worked. If you’re on the Bach, you have to do as many as five ITMs a day—at the mansion, in the middle of a date, from the back seat of a limo. . . .
“In-the-moment” interviews, conducted by producers, are key to the show’s narrative. They provide running commentary for viewers throughout each episode, giving us insight into house dynamics or just how head-over-heels a contestant is for the Bachelor. So the sound bites need to be succinct, revealing, and emotional.
Which brings me back to Carroll. He was trained in the art of upping the ante and thought he could trick me into making some out-of-character remarks, just as he did as a producer on the show. So we decided to role-play, pretending I was on an imaginary date with the Bachelor and Carroll had pulled me aside for a quick ITM.
“Oh my God, so are you guys having an amazing time?” Carroll began.
“It’s OK,” I responded, shrugging.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, like, it’s fine. It’s just a fine date.”
“You’re on a one-on-one right now,” he said, his voice growing more stern. “Do you know all the girls back there want to be on a one-on-one right now? Like, what is it about him that you’re not jiving with?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s hard for me to open up.”
“Do you want to go home?” he said, as if it was a threat.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then fucking why are you really into him?”
“Do you think he’s going to send me home?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Well, he might if you don’t really try or show him you’re interested,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘try’? What should I do?”
“Try to be fun,” he said, disgusted. “Try to be interesting! I was watching you from the control room and you look like you couldn’t give a fuck. Do you want him to think you couldn’t give a fuck? Really? That’s how you want to do it?”
I was silent.
“Watching you and him is like watching fucking paint dry,” he continued. “I want to kill myself. You are boring me to death, and I know you’re way more fun. If you’re not into it, you can go home tomorrow if you want. You don’t have to be here. Do you want to go home? No? Well, great. Why don’t you show us that you’re having a good time?”
Well, damn. That was aggressive. Suddenly, it was easy for me to imagine how you might say some “fucked-up shit” on the show, no matter how sober, equanimeous, or impenetrable you’d thought yourself to be. The power of suggestion is real, especially when someone is berating you and making you feel like a disappointment.
And, ladies, just imagine that in that moment, you were also on your period. That’s right, the producers have been known to keep track of when the women in the house are menstruating—which often occurs simultaneously, because that’s what happens when women live together—so that they can schedule ITMs accordingly.
“When women cycled together in the house, it created a completely different vibe,” producer Ben Hatta told me. “The more dominant woman would basically set it off, and then another would come and say, ‘I had my period three days before I came in the house and now I’m having it again, what the fuck is wrong with me?’
“So a girl’s now crying mid-interview about nothing, or being reactionary to things that are super small,” he continued. “It helped the producers, because now you’ve got someone who is emotional—and all you want is emotion. If a girl’s feeling the butterflies for a guy already, when she gets into that state, her feelings just become more powerful, so she’s probably more willing to tell that guy she loves him. And maybe one of the producers knew she was in that emotional state and was like, ‘You know what? Now’s a better time than ever. You should do it, you should do it, you should do it!’”
In other words, when you see a contestant bawling on The Bachelor, they’re often upset about something other than the Bachelor. Hatta explained it this way: Say he was talking to a girl about how she hasn’t been on a date in two years. She starts reflecting on her love life, wondering if there’s something wrong with her. Now she’s tearing up. So then he would pivot the conversation toward the Bachelor, getting her talking about how much falling in love would mean to her after so many years of singledom.
“And all of a sudden,” he said, “she’s the desperate woman.”
It’s a tactic that bothered many former contestants I spoke to, including Brooks Forester, who referred to the practice as “emotional leveraging.” “They’d try to get me to talk about something from my childhood, for example, or something really personal about a family member,” he recalled. “Evoke this emotion out of you and then try to attach that to what’s happening to the world of The Bachelor.”
In many ways, cast members ultimately fall in love not in a helicopter or Fantasy Suite but in the interview rooms. Think about it this way. You’ve come on a show hoping to fall in love—well, maybe hoping for $1,000 a week from SugarBearHair, but let’s keep the intentions pure for the sake of this example. You’re opening up about your hopes and dreams, describing your ultimate marriage partner. And there’s this producer, telling you that the Bachelor embodies all the characteristics you’re seeking in a man. That very producer is also starting to become someone you consider a close friend. Sure, they’re there to do a job, but it really seems like they understand what you’re going through.
Relatability is one of the key attributes successful Bachelor producers possess. I spoke to one former segment producer who’d gotten married young, when she was just twenty-one. By the time she started working on the show, she’d had a husband for years—meaning she embodied so much of what the young women on the show aspired to.
“So I would allow them to talk, but I would make sure that I mentioned my husband in some way,” she told me. “I would take something that was their problem and put it on myself. There would be twenty minutes of me talking about myself—all unusable stuff—but then all of a sudden I’d go, ‘I just want that for you, because I know how special you are, and I know you deserve this.’”
The endgame, she said, is getting a contestant to open up. To do that, the contestant must feel like they can trust you. And they’re more likely to trust you if you’re open with them about your own life—even though the details of your life, as a producer, will never be broadcast on national television.
Not that every contestant bonds with their producer. On the contrary, things can often get testy between the two parties—especially when a producer is looking for a sound bite that a contestant is unwilling to give. During ITMs, producers will ask a question—let’s say, “How important was thi
s day for you?”—and a contestant is supposed to answer by using the question in a complete sentence: “This day was really important for me because it was the first day I could really see the Bachelor being my husband.”
“But sometimes you don’t want to complete the question they’re asking,” explained Forester. “So I’d be like, ‘What are you trying to get at?’ They tell me, and I say, ‘Cool, this is my own version of that sentiment.’ They’d always just continue to ask the same question formatted different ways, and it’s like, ‘I just told you I don’t want to say that. You just reshaped the sentence and moved words around.’”
Sharleen Joynt, from Juan Pablo Galavis’s season, became so resistant to what she felt were leading, obvious questions that a handful of producers were brought in to try to work with her. After her first one-on-one date in Seoul, she sat down for an ITM that should have lasted twenty minutes but ended up taking an hour. The problem? The producers wanted her to say she was falling in love with Galavis, and she wasn’t biting.
“The producer was asking ‘Have you ever felt this way so soon?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah,’” she said with a shrug. “I pretty much didn’t give the answer they wanted at every turn, and the gist was definitely that I was not effusive enough. It became a big issue. . . . Eventually I was like, ‘I don’t know what you want me to say. It was a nice date. It was fine. I’m interested. It’s been one real date. I’m not falling in love with him.’ I pretty much shut it down.”
In Seoul, she still had some fight left in her. But down the line, Joynt said, she found herself so tired of the long ITMs that sometimes she’d kowtow to the producers’ requests just so she could get out of the interview room. Chris Bukowski did the same thing.
“I was saying lines verbatim from producers because I’d been sitting in a stupid room for an hour and just wanted to go,” said the five-time franchise vet. “You would say something you totally didn’t even believe or want to say, but they just keep asking you and asking you and asking you—just like you’re being interrogated. You see people who go to prison because the interrogation is so good that they’re finally like, ‘All right. I fucking did it.’ I mean, they put you in a room with no air conditioning, nothing to drink, and just ask you the same questions over and over. By the end of the day you’re like, ‘Shit. Maybe I did do it.’ And then you’re in prison for the rest of your life.”
Which, yes, sounds like hyperbole. But after thinking about it for a while—and maybe watching a little too much of Netflix’s Making a Murderer—I realized Bukowski was on to something. So I went out and bought Police Interrogation and American Justice, the 2008 book by Richard A. Leo that explains the tried-and-true methods officers use to obtain confessions from potential criminals. And what I found, frankly, was kind of disturbing, because the similarities between a police interrogation and a Bachelor interview are rather striking.
Let’s start here:
“Before any accusation or confrontation, police seek to increase the suspect’s anxiety by removing him from any social setting in which others could provide psychological support,” Leo writes.
Check. Bachelor contestants are always sequestered during their ITMs.
“Or,” he continues, “interrogators may try to make the suspect perceive that the interrogation will go on much longer, if not indefinitely, if he does not comply with their wishes.”
Sound familiar? If you don’t say you’re falling for Juan Pablo, Sharleen, you might have to stay in this damn room all night.
“For suspects who are already sleep deprived, fatigued, distressed, or suffering from physical discomfort,” Leo writes, “interrogation exacerbates these conditions. . . . The need to escape may become so overwhelming that it overpowers any rational considerations about the effects of confessing.”
Yep. Bachelor contestants are often coming into ITMs already tired, intoxicated, or upset. So why not just say what the producer wants and end the interview already?
“Interrogators may also alternate displays of sympathy with displays of hostility, positively reinforcing the suspect with friendliness when he says what they want to hear but negatively reinforcing him with anger when he does not,” the book says.
This also rings true. Yes, producers sometimes go the tough love route, à la Carroll, but on other nights they’re telling you how much they care about you and want you to find a husband just like they did when they were twenty-one.
And yet despite all I’d heard about the captivating powers of Bachelor producers, it wasn’t until I met Elan Gale that I saw it firsthand.
Gale, the show’s thirty-four-year-old executive producer, is somewhat of a celebrity in Bachelor Nation—and even outside of it. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, thanks largely to a comedic hoax he orchestrated called “Diane in 7A.” On Thanksgiving in 2013—back when he had only 30,000 followers—he started tweeting angrily about a woman on his flight who was supposedly being rude to a flight attendant. Fed up with her behavior, he sent alcohol and a stream of notes over to her row, one of which advised her: “Eat my dick.” He also tweeted photographic evidence of the notes the two passed back-and-forth.
The stunt went viral, but days later—just as a rumor began to surface on Storify that Diane in 7A had stage-4 small cell lung cancer—Gale admitted there was no Diane.
No matter: He had already become an Internet celebrity. Since then, he’s befriended a handful of stars, including Chloë Grace Moretz, Kelly Oxford, and director James Gunn, who even gave him a tiny cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. He dated Bachelor contestant Casey Shteamer after she was eliminated from Ben Flajnik’s season, and his current girlfriend—a decade his junior—is former Castle actress Molly Quinn.
He also has an eccentric look. His huge, curly fro is reminiscent of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. He rarely seems to cut his bushy beard. And he loves jewelry, often sporting chunky rings on every finger, beaded bracelets, silver chain necklaces, and tiny hoop earrings.
And sometimes, it seems like there’s nothing he won’t share online—save, of course, for his secrets from the Bachelor franchise, which has employed him since 2009. He’s documented a recent weight-loss journey with shirtless selfies and photos from his scale. He stopped drinking in 2013 and often posts intimate blog posts about sobriety.
“Why did I drink so much?” he mused on his Tumblr, All the Hate Mail!, in 2015. “Because I wanted to feel everything and when I was drunk there was no barrier between me and my highs and lows. There was no filter. I was a corked bottle of emotion . . . crying for no reason and laughing for no reason and raging at the empty sky. Feeling all of it.”
My first interaction with Gale occurred in 2011—not surprisingly, on Twitter. He must have stumbled upon the Bach recaps I was writing for the paper, because he suddenly posted this note: “There’s usually something endearing about ‘Bachelorette’ recaps from @amykinla.”
From there, we struck up a playful rapport. I’d hang out with him at Bachelor events in between interviewing contestants, and he even got Ben Flajnik and Chris Harrison to crash one of my viewing parties, cameras and all. Sure, he’d rib me about my critiques of the show—“You don’t need to be so snarky, you’re smarter than that”—but it always felt like he respected my opinion.
That changed during Flajnik’s season in 2012, when ABC publicity invited me to attend the “Women Tell All” taping. Along with a group of reporters, I sat on a cavernous sound stage watching the production—which was taking place a room over—on a monitor. (No media were allowed to be in the studio audience.)
Flajnik’s season was a rather contentious one, because he ended up proposing to the woman who had been cast as the villain, Courtney Robertson. As the season unfolded, however, it became clear that Flajnik was unaware of just how unkind Robertson had been to the other women competing for his affection. All the negative press about Robertson’s conniving ways was sta
rting to give Flajnik second thoughts about his wife-to-be, and in a last-ditch effort to save the relationship, Robertson showed up at the “Women Tell All” to apologize for her behavior.
During the “Women Tell All,” Robertson was very emotional, crying and asserting how she really is a good person. Then Chris Harrison had to cut to a commercial break. Some other reporters got up to grab some grub from craft services, but I stayed in my seat by the monitor. That’s when I realized that the microphones onstage had accidentally been left on—and that I was now privy to what was meant to be private conversation.
Here’s where Gale came in. He walked over to Robertson, who was dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
“I didn’t play with my hair once. Aren’t you proud?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he replied. “That was good.”
She said she wished she could take a cigarette break, and they started discussing the brand she smokes—American Spirits, apparently. After a few minutes of this kind of banter, her tears had dried.
“I’m not feeling very emotional anymore,” she told Gale. “You made me feel better. I appreciate it. But I don’t know if I can show that emotion again.”
“You have to,” Gale urged. “This is for you. This is for you and Ben.”
Needless to say, after I published what I’d seen—Gale basically coaching Robertson to cry—he was none too pleased. Our relationship was never the same after that, and not long after, I found myself banned from Bachelor events—though I have no idea if Gale was behind that or not.
In the short time I spent with him, however, I was able to get a tiny glimpse of the power he holds over the contestants who go on this show. Multiple cast members I approached said they would be willing to speak to me but were worried about saying anything negative about Gale for fear of losing his friendship.