One Year of Reality and How It Nearly Killed Me: My Life Behind the Scenes (16 page)

That was a great last conversation, and I felt that my job had ended on a good note.

I was wrong.

I said goodbye to the two or three people who were in the office, telling them that I’d see them the next time around, including the assistant. It turned
out that no one knew I was leaving. I hadn’t made an announcement about it, but I had an out date, so it was no big deal. When a job ends, you just go. That’s the way of things in a freelancer’s world. However, after I left, some phone calls must’ve been made that ended up reaching Bert, because it turned out he had no idea I was leaving the show. Terry had never spoken to him about it. And I had thought that my last conversation with Bert was a farewell conversation! How could it have gone so wrong?

That afternoon Terry left me a voicemail insisting that I return to work, as if he didn’t know that I had another job. I was furious. I left him message telling him as much. But I did go back to the office to talk to Bert. I don’t remember why, but it was probably to help smooth out whatever Terry was going through.

I returned to the scene of the crime and sat down in Bert’s office. We talked about the fact that he’d had no idea I was leaving. I told him that Terry and I had settled on my out date a very long time ago, and I hadn’t thought I needed to run it by him. I also let him know where my next job was and what I would be doing. I remember Bert complimenting me by saying that I was his production cornerstone, and he couldn’t do without me. I didn’t hold back. I told him
that if I was his cornerstone, he wouldn’t be paying me a third less than the other production manager. And I said that I’d stay if he matched what the other show was giving me. Of course he back-peddled, telling me he couldn’t do that given money constraints. So I wasn’t a cornerstone, after all… He was just upset that I had left without his royal blessing.

After the conversation, I went to my old office to pick up a couple of things I’d left behind, and then his assistant needed to put in her two cents. “You’re a traitor,” she told me. “He gave you a second chance, and this is how you treat him.” I’m thinking,
What? Second chance? What does that mean?
He never told me anything about second chances. All he said was that I was his cornerstone. Talk about mixed messages. Apparently, he still didn’t like me, and she was loyal to him, so I was the one who was abandoning Bert… and it was personal. That was crap. I was going to another job in order to support myself.

Well, after she berated me, the accountant (the guy who wouldn’t advance me any money while I was away) told me that I should have left another way, that I didn’t do it right, and how dare I treat the production this way. All I could think about was that I could care less about what he had to say, and I wanted to leave this god-forsaken place at once. But,
hindsight being 20/20, I should have gone directly to Bert and not Terry in the first place. It was a good lesson to learn for Terry, and I figured that I had severed my relationship with him forever. But I didn’t care. I did it the way normal people do; I had an out date, I asked to leave early, I got permission, and I left. If the execs can’t get together and talk, it’s not my fault.

In a way, it was a compliment. This jealous behavior from Bert seemed to indicate that on some level he needed me—not enough to pay me more or advance me—but he felt he needed me nonetheless. I left, figuring that I wouldn’t be back for the second season, and was moving on to bigger and better things. And I found out they ended up hiring at least three other people to do the job that I had done. So in the end, it cost them more money anyway.

But the whole episode wasn’t at an end yet.

I was incredibly excited about my new job. I was hired to be an associate producer on
The Mole
, which was essentially doing what I had been doing on
Amazing Race
, except to my mind, it was a title up since the word “producer” was now in my title. The Mole was an international game show in which the contestants completed tasks together that earned
money into a pot that only one of them would win. The Mole was to sabotage the tasks to keep the money low. After each day, there would be a test to determine who would know who “the mole” was. The person who had the worst results of the test was eliminated..

It was great to be working on a different show. What I enjoy most about new jobs and why I like the freelance lifestyle is the excitement of constantly being able to meet and work with new people. It helps you increase the breadth and depth of your experience and also exposes you to different perspectives regarding work. I like making friends and was eager to work with a whole bunch of new people.

My new boss was cool. His name was Tim. He was young, smart, and a real go-getter, and he reminded me of Mark on
Wild Things
. He didn’t have reality TV experience, but he had done a lot of other things and the coordinator had experience in commercials. So we all came from different backgrounds. I felt quite lucky to be there.

As I was getting settled into my job, I was to come into a meeting. I figured it was going to be one of those “getting to know you” meetings that producers
do at the beginning of every show to welcome people aboard.

I was wrong.

It was a party of sorts, or at least there were a lot of people. There was the producer, the business affairs people for the production company, and an attorney I had met on
Amazing Race
who worked with both ABC and the production company that produced
Amazing Race
. Apparently Bert was accusing the production company of stealing me or doing something illicit to procure my services. I can’t imagine what. So I had to go into an account of how I had gotten the job. Simple: I had sent in a resume. That was it. Nobody had solicited me specifically; I had answered an ad on a website. And then the producer said that they’d hired me because of my international experience and my good reputation.

This was similar to what Bert had done to the production manager of
Wild Things
, with one key difference. My contract. Thankfully, the fact that I hadn’t signed my contract put the attorney in a difficult position. I told him flat out that
Amazing Race
had no ties to me, that I had given the company an opportunity to hire me (which I had), and they hadn’t acted upon it.

While I put a good spin on my situation, and kept a smile on my face, inside I was enraged. I wanted nothing more than to put Bert in his place. I was tired of the crap he kept doling out to me, and this was the last straw. The meeting ended on a positive note, in that I wasn’t fired, but I didn’t feel confident that the issue was dead and buried. I knew how persistent Bert had been in the past, so when the meeting wrapped up, I called my attorney.

“Line them up.” I told him. “If I get fired today, I plan on suing everyone involved in
Amazing Race
and taking all of them down except the production company of
The Mole
. I would never sue them, they’re a good company.” I was ready to take everyone down with me.

Luckily for Bert, I was not fired, and I did not sue. My career would take a nosedive all by itself. A lawsuit wasn’t necessary for that.

CHAPTER 8

WEAR UNDERWEAR
TO BED

M
y anger finally dissipated because no one, at least for the moment, was angling to have me fired. I was busy setting up for the next show, and I didn’t have to waste much time thinking about what Bert might ultimately do. But I did have a sort of mental dilemma.

I was really nervous.

Working for Bert was easy, regardless of the drama I went through with him. I knew what to do and how to do things. On this show I was hired as an associate producer, and I figured that my duties would
be basically the same as they’d been on
Amazing Race
. But I wanted to figure out the difference between what I had done as a production manager and what I’d be doing as an associate producer. I figured it would emerge as I went along. It’s a process I go through with each and every job I do. My friend Laura thinks I’m insane to wallow in doubts because I can do whatever task I’m given, but I always think the worst, telling myself, “Well, if this doesn’t work out, I can work at McDonald’s.” That’s right, instead of shooting for the stars, I shoot for my foot. It’s a mental battle that eventually goes away. But since the title and salary were a step up, I needed to be better than I had been as a production manager.

But my multitasking ways of the past were going to change. All of the things I did on other shows— getting visas, securing locations, dealing with contestants, dealing with vendors—I didn’t have to do on this show. It seemed like such a void. There were other people assigned to many of the tasks I had done in the past. So I was really trying to figure out how to fill my days. And since
The Mole
had already had a first season, many elements were already in place that I might otherwise have needed to figure out myself, like vendors, equipment, and staffing crew. I was actually worried about being busy. Slowing down was not my thing.

The first few days at my new job, I just sort of sat at my desk and tried to create tasks for myself. I didn’t understand why they’d wanted me to leave
Amazing Race
early if there wasn’t much for me to do at the beginning. But I did get to know my coworkers, and I tried to find ways to help them. One of the most interesting times I had at the production office was listening in on conversations that the line producer was having. The walls were thin. I wasn’t trying to listen, I didn’t have a glass to my ear against the wall, but I could occasionally hear some intense conversations. It never seemed to be going well on his side of the wall.

I was getting sort of claustrophobic from not being bombarded with work like I had been before.

My name is Deborah Wolff and I’m an adrenaline junkie.

I’m addicted to chaos, solving problems, always being in a crushingly tangled moment. Dire circumstances are apparently what I live for, because I was already thinking how bored I was going to be at this new job. Plus I was the outsider. The line producer hired some of his own people, and the show was already staffed, so I didn’t have some sort of say in the process as I had in the past. You could say I was
not one of his “peeps,” and sometimes that can work in your favor, sometimes not. If you aren’t part of a group, then you have a better chance of being hung out to dry. On the other hand, if they really need you because they don’t have the experience you do, they might look to you for enlightenment and advice. I preferred to think the latter was the case on
The Mole
. This line producer had all the qualities I liked in a person and a boss. He was up front, driven, articulate, and a hard worker. Best of all, he had a good sense of humor. I had to slap my mind awake and stay focused on doing a good job, not worrying about the politics of the show.

And even though I had worked on a couple of reality type shows, I was not prepared for this one. It was closer to feature filmmaking than it was to the run and gun shooting I was used to. Oh, it had the usual crews following contestants, but I never had to deal with lighting up locations, decorating them, or putting out props. I had never hired electricians or grips or any other crew members besides cameramen or soundmen. And, unlike with
Amazing Race
, we didn’t run around every day to different countries; instead, we were settled in a few places in two countries. Everything seemed larger about this show, though it was similar in set up to the
Amazing Race
, including the fact that the entire staff would
go overseas and set up one huge production office. And that was the big difference. My hotel room wouldn’t be a production office this time. We would turn a hotel ballroom into a production office that would house everyone and their equipment so that we could all work in one place and everyone would be in the loop. This was a big deal for me. It was like I finally had breathing space.

As such things usually go, I was in my element within a week, and was ready to confront the challenges of my new job. We had already selected the countries where we’d be going, but one of them changed at the last minute since the hotel we were going to stay at was bombed. I was grateful for the change. We needed to hire some crew in each country. The country that was dumped didn’t really have a lot of crew to choose from, so there were many reasons I was grateful we weren’t going there.

When the final countries were settled on, Italy and Switzerland, I went about working with the local facilitators who had been hired by the line producer to find overseas crews. We had a German and French crew for Switzerland, and a German, French, and Italian crew for Italy. Some of the German and French crew members stayed with us throughout the entire shoot, as some of them had worked on
the previous season, and we used German drivers in Switzerland to drive around the crew. The facilitator for Switzerland was German, so his people came from there as well. The French crew seemed like an odd one to have, since we were not filming in France, but they had worked on the previous season of the show, so it made sense to bring them back. I made the crew member’s deals either individually, for department heads, or through the facilitators, for the drivers and production assistants, under the watchful eye of my boss.

Pre-production had started before I arrived on the scene. The segment producers were coming up with ideas for games to make the show intriguing. The contestants were already in the process of being selected, and everyone involved in the show had to wear a badge. The badge was to indicate what level of information you had. My badge meant that I did not know who the mole was. There were only two people who had a badge that said they knew who the mole was, and those were the show’s two producers. The mole was the person who would try to sabotage events and information in such a way that none of the other contestants knew who he or she was. Your badge determined which meetings you went to, what paperwork you got, and where you were able to go on the set.

It was my understanding that the producers preselected someone to be the mole and took him or her into a room with just the two of them to make the arrangements. If the contestant turned down the opportunity, I don’t think he or she would have been on the show. And the mole from the first season was a segment producer or consultant on the second season, which is the one I worked on. There were a couple of games that I had the opportunity to try out, including Blackjack, which is my favorite table game. It was ultimately used on one of the episodes of the show. And if you think of a reality show as a war, we spent the time prior to shooting making battle plans, scheduling shoots, and finalizing ideas. And like every plan or show, it started to look great on paper.