MzWings
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The FIRST Reality Series.......
« on: Feb 1st, 2004, 9:23pm » |
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I've mentioned this before but was never able to find much on the web to back it up. The first reality series....
http://www.thelouds.com/
In 1971, The Loud family was living in Santa Barbara, California when producer Craig Gilbert asked them to participate in a documentary study of American family life for PBS.
At that time, the documentary was intended to focus on a cross-section of American families: one from the West Coast, one from the Mid-West, one from the South, and one from the East Coast. The Louds agreed to appear as the West Coast family and to a four week filming schedule.
It was only after project was well underway that the Louds were advised that the entire focus would be on them. This placed the Loud parents on the horns of dilemma. They had committed to doing the documentary and felt responsible to the project which would eventually take one-and-a- half years to film and edit at a cost of over $1.2 million. However, from the outset, Bill and Pat Loud had determined not to expose the problems in their own marriage, nor did they wish to subject their gay son Lance to the anger that a scrutiny of his lifestyle might provoke.
They needn’t have worried; Lance took care of his parents' concerns himself uproariously in Episode 2 of An American Family, in which he came out of the closet so explosively that he ended up in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York City. As for the Louds' marriage, the prolonged filming exposed problems that never would have been revealed in the shorter version for which the Louds had originally signed up.
As Pat Loud remembers: "Originally, Craig Gilbert was looking for a family who had teenagers graduating from high school. We had none that age but what we did have was a lot of beautiful teenagers who had tons of friends that spent a lot of time at our house. The whole set up was, I guess one would say, photogenic. Craig Gilbert certainly thought so because he wanted to sign us up immediately."
At the outset of the project, Pat Loud continues, "I thought I might get away with just saying, These are my children and my kitchen and my pool and my horses, over and out. What media naifs we were! I must say in our own defense that we had no precedents to guide us. And, since we erroneously believed the 12-part series would be a simply interminable home movie that no one in their right mind would watch for more than five minutes, we failed to seek proper legal guidance. We have lived to regret that. It seemed that entire series was all about Lance being homosexual and my husband and I divorcing. The upshot was a media frenzy fed by sensationalistic publicity that included some of the most rabid, retro anti-gay diatribes ever written...
My other four children and their friends seemed to be of no real interest to the editors, yet the sponsors actually ended up owning the story of all of our lives up until then."
"The Family received no compensation for their participation in the film," Pat explains. "The only money we got was a check for $400 to repair the kitchen where the gaffer’s tape had pulled off the paint from the walls. The family was to have received all the outtakes from their 400 hours on camera, but, unfortunately, that film was inadvertently destroyed before receipt. Nothing remains of the series except the edited version that aired on PBS in 1973."
Lance weathered the media storm of being the first publicly gay icon in the first reality television series, turning his notoriety into a 28-year career as a rock performer, actor, and prolific journalist and author. He died December 22, 2001, just six months after his 50th birthday. A collection of his writing will appear in Say It Loud!, a forthcoming by book from Baked Goods Press. To read excerpts, click here. For information and to place a pre-publication order, click here.
http://www.thelouds.com/lance_excerpts.htm
Bill and Pat Loud have both retired and each now lives in Los Angeles. Kevin Loud lives in Paradise Valley, Arizona, with his wife, Judi and children, Kristin, Kevin, Jr. and Kailey. Grant and his wife, Michele Silverman, as well as Delilah and her husband, Wes, and Michele Loud all live in Los Angeles and are doing just fine....
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