When Hoarders first debuted it was something people watched with horrified fascination. Never before had the general public really seen what extreme hoarding looked like and how it affected lives. It was shot documentary style and it offered an unflinching look at what life is like for those who are gripped by a mental disorder that does not allow them to part with anything. It can be difficult to watch, but people did from the moment it went on the air. The debut episode was viewed by 2.5 million people, and at the time became the most-watched show in A&E network history. Entertainment Weekly television critic Ken Tucker called it “Exploitive, educational, gross, insightful, voyeuristic, and sometimes quite moving, Hoarders is the kind of TV that’s difficult not to watch once you’ve started an episode.”
There was one audience for whom the show meant more than even the producers could have imagined: adults who had lived in hoarding situations as children. This was the case for a pretty thirty-something mother named Nancy* who recalls the first time she saw the program. “I first realized that I was a child of a hoarder, my sister and I were talking and my sister was like, ‘Hey did you see this TV show? These people are hoarders—and their house looks like ours did!’ I said, ‘No, I’ll have to check it out.’ I watched it. It was such a breakthrough. It was like freedom in a way . . . because you had a word to put with what was going on. It led to my research about COH.”
Children of Hoarders (COH) is an advocacy group helping those who have suffered through a parent’s extreme hoarding situation. Many of these adults, now in their forties and fifties, had no idea how to identify or contextualize how they grew up or that anyone else lived like they did. “The television show opened the door,” is how a COH member named Tammy* described it. “Hearing the language saved my life. Knowing you aren’t alone.” She saw a Hoarders marathon that mentioned something about an online support group. She signed up. “It was normalizing. I find out it’s not just me.” The show was the first exposure many people had to what’s called a “level-five hoard,” which is how Tammy grew up. A level-five hoard has some of the following characteristics:
Obvious structural damage, broken walls, disconnected electrical service, no water service, no working sewer or septic system. Standing water indoors, fire hazards and hazardous materials exceed local ordinances. Rodents in sight, mosquito or other insect infestation. Kitchen and bathroom unusable due to clutter. Rotting food and more than 15 aged canned goods with buckled surfaces inside the home.14
“I never want another child to grow up like we did and experience things like we have. It is unnecessary. It doesn’t have to happen.” Tammy likens it to child abuse.
A reed-thin woman with a cropped pixie haircut and perfectly applied makeup, Tammy loves her pristine 750-square-foot apartment and barely sees her mother, who still lives in the same hoarder house. “People are what’s important. Stuff is not. If something is not useful, necessary, and loved, it is gone. I am very focused on what is important, and stuff just is not it.”
To put it in historical context, the first true scientific studies of compulsive hoarding didn’t start until the early 1990s when Dr. Randy Frost and his students at Smith College began working on the subject. If you are now a forty-five-year-old child of a hoarder, there wasn’t any real information about what you were experiencing until you were well into your twenties. While the children of hoarders are often seen on the television program as the people seeking help for their parent, the adult children themselves have been through so much and are in need of assistance as well. While some people say a show that makes entertainment out of misery is deplorable, some COHs will quickly reveal that this very public exposure of hoarding provided a pathway out of isolation.
Nancy, Tammy, and two other adults, Jim* and Liz*, were part of a panel discussion that addressed some of the thorniest and saddest issues surrounding extreme hoarding. You could hear a pin drop as they told their tales.
“I was twenty-three years old before I realized you could throw away those Brillo pads before they rust.” Jim went to an Ivy League school, is a successful blue blazer–wearing professional in his forties, and he grew up in the house of a hoarder. “The first time I realized something was different, that things were very different, [I was] as little as three years old and I could go into the house next door that had kids the same ages as me, but no one was ever allowed in our house.” From that point on, he knew that nothing was normal about the way they lived. He learned that you change your underwear every day from being in the Boy Scouts. When he was little he rationalized what was going on and thought they hid it. As an adult he realized the home’s peeling paint in an otherwise upscale community was a giveaway, and understood why his home was referred to as “the slum house.” He also learned he couldn’t outrun it, outearn it, out-educate himself from the pain and the history of his childhood. He described a shocking reunion with some friends: “Just a few years ago, through Facebook, we got together in a bar. I hadn’t seen these guys in twenty-five years. A guy walks in and has his wife with him and says, ‘There’s the guy whose house we could never go in.’ So twenty-five years later, that’s what he remembers. That’s how he had been describing me to his wife. That was like a punch to the gut.”
“We were kind of the nasty family on the road.” Nancy was well aware of the problems in her home. She made excuses by telling people there was always construction at the house. One day a clergy member tried to intervene. “I remember a preacher wanted to know, Is everything OK at home? My mom got very angry when someone wanted to question what went on inside.” Nancy only bought her first suitcase in 2011. She was married and had a child by this time. “I never learned how to pack. And then I was scared to pack too much.”
Many COHs worry about hoarding being inherited and fear one day it will kick in. Of the four speakers that day, three had siblings who began to hoard. Tammy had a half sister who had been given up for adoption who she met as an adult. That sister hoarded. Some science suggests there may be a genetic marker that leads some to collecting behaviors. The science suggests there is a predisposition to it in certain families and that modeling the behavior can be just as significant as genetics.15
Psychologist Dr. David Tolin, an expert in hoarding issues, says the genetic element is complex. “[What] we know definitively about genetics is one, there is a genetic link. Now, you know, genetics—they can never explain everything. And so when you have a genetic predisposition, that does not mean you’re going to develop a disorder. And similarly, lots of people can develop a disorder without a genetic predisposition.” He uses alcoholism as an example. “You can be genetically predisposed to alcoholism. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be an alcoholic. And similarly, there are lots of people who become alcoholics despite the fact that their genes are perfectly fine. So, the genes are just one of many potential vulnerability factors. It’s things like when we look at the genetic linkage across relatives, the thing that seems to be inherent is—it doesn’t seem to be hoarding itself, although the behavior can certainly be elevated in relatives of hoarders. It seems like the best candidate for what’s being inherited is a general difficulty with decision-making.”
The COH support group helps adults who struggle with the heredity concerns, the issue of anger toward parents, the feeling that they should have been removed from the home, and in some cases estrangement from the parent. But one thing keeps coming up again and again during this emotional, riveting, and frank discussion—the television show Hoarders. After nearly eighty minutes of addressing the gathering, Jim says, unprompted, “I want to make a really quick shout out. I know sometimes the TV shows get some criticism for sensationalizing things, but people like Matt Paxton . . . seem to recognize that there are other people in the environment.”
Paxton is a recognizable face to those in the hoarding community. He wrote The Secret Life of Hoarders, owns www.Cluttercleaner.com, and has cleaned out thousands of hoarders’ homes. “I was proud of that group. They are th
e lowest on the totem pole. No one thinks about them—the adult children. They were born into this. It was thrown in their lap. I was proud to hear them verbally express their pain and then to find each other.” He has become a fan favorite for his tough, no-nonsense approach on Hoarders, but he always tries to be compassionate. “I struggle with the fact that I am on a show that uses mental disability as entertainment, and that is what it is. It’s hard. Am I doing good? Am I not? But we have helped people by finding out they are not alone. We definitely have made a difference.”
The day we spoke, Paxton was preparing to head out to film a whole new season of a reincarnated version of the show. In 2013 A&E cancelled the program after six seasons. But after a special earned high ratings on its sister network, Lifetime, that network revived the series to relaunch in 2016. Fans on his Facebook page are thrilled to see the return of the show, and people often approach him on the street like an old friend. “The masses, 80 percent say, ‘Man, I watch and [it] makes me clean. I clean my house so much.’ It is the same thing, I watch Biggest Loser. I literally sit at home eating a bag of popcorn watching Biggest Loser and I think, Maybe I’ll go work out today. That’s 80 percent. The other 20 percent are hoarders. They say, Man, they say, You let me know I’m not alone. You gave me hope. You let me know I wasn’t crazy.”
9
TV JUNK
Q&A WITH BRENT MONTGOMERY,
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF PAWN STARS
* * *
IN 2008 TELEVISION PRODUCER Brent Montgomery did what a lot of guys in their thirties do: he went to Vegas for a bachelor party. And if you go to Sin City, you will see a pawnshop or two because gamblers need cash fast.
Pawnshops are essentially moneylenders. A person brings in an item in exchange for a collateral loan with interest. The loan amount is made based on the value of the item. So let’s say you want to play another round of blackjack and you are tapped out. You might head to a pawnshop and hand over your watch so you can get a little more dough to put down at a table at Caesar’s Palace. Upon taking in the Vegas pawn scene (as a spectator, not a loan seeker), Brent’s producer radar went up. He knew that the pawnshop culture would make good television.
He was right. A year later Pawn Stars debuted on the History Channel. It features three generations of the Harrison family, who have run the twenty-four-hour Gold & Silver Pawn Shop since 1988. The concoction of people who bring in weird things to pawn, Rick Harrison’s no-nonsense encyclopedic knowledge about random items, plus the behind-the-scenes family dynamic is reality show gold. The average audience at its height was 4.9 million viewers.
In a short amount of time, a lot of things changed for the Harrisons and for Brent. The business is now swamped with tourists. The wait can be a reported three hours to get inside, even though the store is open around the clock. In an effort to revitalize the area around the store and to accommodate his fans, Rick Harrison is investing $2 million of his own money to create a shopping and recreational center on the strip where his store is located called Pawn Plaza. In the spring of 2015 the first eateries open were Rick’s Rollin Smoke Barbeque & Tavern, Rita’s Italian Ice, and Smoke’s Poutinerie.
Another thing that has changed: Rick Harrison has $2 million to put into a project like this. He and his family have done quite well as a result of Pawn Stars. So has Brent Montgomery, who is not only the executive producer of the show but also the owner and CEO of the company that produces it, Leftfield Pictures. In 2012 he was named one of the top fifty most-important people in reality TV by the Hollywood Reporter. The following year Leftfield acquired another company and became Leftfield Entertainment. The year after that, British network ITV bought 80 percent of Leftfield Entertainment for $360 million cash upfront, and Brent retained his position as CEO.
In 2014 Leftfield Entertainment had twenty-six series in production and thirty-one projects in development. Not bad for a Texas boy who came to New York City to work as a production assistant in 1997. In his glass-and-brick loft office, Brent was happy to talk about the appeal of “trash to treasure” TV and the success of Pawn Stars. It all started with the task of finding that perfect Vegas pawn store back in 2008.
Brent Montgomery: My sister-in-law calls every pawnshop in Las Vegas and comes back, and there’s only two [pawnshops] that were family run, which was surprising.
Q: Oh, that’s interesting.
Montgomery: Yeah. I was shocked. One was a Greek mother and daughter, and we had the idea that this would be more relatable to our audience if it were just old-fashioned American guys. It was the Harrisons and the patriarch, Richard, who we would call “The Old Man,” his son, Rick, and his son and Richard’s grandson, Corey. When we started talking to them we realized that every item had a story behind it. Some of the items have amazing stories, which don’t create any value other than to the people who have experienced the story behind them, where others carry tremendous value. One of the hardest things they have to do is talk people off of sort of a ridiculous high amount because they have a personal attachment to an item. Other times, people might not have any personal attachment to it, and they’re sitting on something that was unbelievably valuable. Walking around that shop before we ever started rolling, there were Picassos, Rembrandts, Super Bowl rings, gold medals. There were Olympic medals and then all kinds of other cool stuff. Where I sort of thought maybe there was a show here was when our main character, Rick, started telling me about this thing called the “Death Clock.” That was sort of its street name.
Q: What is a Death Clock?
Montgomery: Yeah. I’d have to look up or find out for you that the real name of the clock is because I can’t pronounce it. It starts with an A.
Q: I’ll find it. [It actually stars with an O: an Ormulu clock.]
Montgomery: But it’s a beautiful gold clock, and it has all of this history behind it. He starts telling me, ‘You want to know why they call it the Death Clock?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘Because it was being made with mercury, and the guys who were working on it were dying.’ He said, ‘Do you know where the term ‘Mad Hatter’ comes from?’ I said no and he said, ‘Well, hatters back in the day used mercury in their hats and ended up getting it and going mad, so mad as a hatter.’ So he starts sort of going off on a tangent, which was sort of a really cool and interesting way to absorb history. I think that’s what people in everyday life really enjoy. I think when they’re looking at these items they can either go look on Google and quickly find out on Wikipedia all sorts of stuff about this stuff, or they can hear firsthand from the person who owned it. Sometimes there is not all the information out there on something, which even leaves it sort of—leads it in a more interesting direction because it’s sort of a little bit mix of guesswork and historical value.
Q: Were the Harrisons interested in being part of a television show, or did you have to do a little song and dance?
Montgomery: No, these guys wanted to be on TV more than just about anybody I’d ever met. They had already worked with three “Hollywood producers.” They blamed those producers for not capturing the greatness that was them.
Q: Were they right?
Montgomery: They were. They were right to a degree.
Q: Yeah? What were the people missing? Something wasn’t working.
Montgomery: I think the guys, left to their own devices, would tell the same jokes a hundred thousand times, which is not that uncommon for people or people who want to be on TV. The Harrisons, I think, in fact were right. They just needed somebody who could capture them in a way that didn’t have them doing all the work and having, I think, the idea of really focusing on the items, which was more of a History Channel idea than our company’s idea. It was sort of the missing ingredient. So I think us being able to get the guys to be themselves, the guys being so historically knowledgeable on such a wide variety of topics, specifically items, was also key. But really, the show is made by the cool, fun stuff that comes through the door, and that’s the great thing about a pawnshop—y
ou never know what’s going to come through the door. They’re not limited in what they buy and sell.
Your knowledge, whether it be a pawnshop broker, an estate sales person, or any person that moves and sells stuff, your profitability and your ability to sell a wide variety is based on how wide your knowledge is. So most pawnshops will only sell gold, silver, and electronics because you can basically hire a minimum wage person to weigh something and give the going price for that item. You can hire a minimum wage person to turn on and off a DVD player. You can’t hire somebody for a low wage who can tell a fake painting from another.
Q: So that’s what really made this family different, this business different?
Montgomery: Yeah. They were historians who had also, for three generations, been learning about stuff and passing that knowledge on to each other. And also, they can literally dissect a watch. You know? From top to bottom, and they would tell you, ‘Look, a lot of the fake Rolexes, they’re not twenty-five-dollar fakes. They’ve had $4,000 to $5,000 put into them to sell for $12,000 to $13,000.’
Q: Oh, that’s interesting.
Montgomery: Yeah. And that first $4,000 will fool 99 percent of the people. So there is a real art to what they do, and there is a real knowledge that they’ve passed on from one to another. I think it goes back to—whether it’s a garage sale or a high-end pawnshop like the Harrisons—it comes down to negotiation and how good you are at it and how much leverage you have. I think the reason why our show . . . is so popular was the fact that the economy was in the crapper in ’08 and ’09. The idea that people needed to save money, people were thinking, “Hey. If I lost my job, what is my true worth? What do I have in assets?” It’s probably pretty easy to think about sort of the first-tier stuff that you have in your house, but really the place where most people go would be the garage or the backyard and try to figure out if they have anything that’s valuable. Maybe they’d know and maybe they wouldn’t know.
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