An Unscripted Life
If you ask an Angeleno about a trying moment, they might describe nightmarish freeway traffic, a bad smog day, or some daunting waves at Zuma Beach. Bill Pruitt ’80, who calls Los Angeles his home, has much better horror stories.
Here’s one: “We were on a 104-foot crab boat so far north in the Bering Sea off Alaska we were practically in Russia. The seas were freezing cold in a windswept storm that stirred some of the waves up to 40 feet or more when one of the engines stopped working and the boat was pitched sideways, threatening to capsize. We were ten hours from any rescue and seconds away from having to don our survival suits and abandon ship when the engineer managed to restart the engine and steer safely into the waves.”
Next, he might tell you about tagging along with Rwandan military forces along the Congo border while they flushed out members of a Hutu paramilitary organization thought to have carried out many of the attacks during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, bungee jumping off the 827-foot-high Danube Tower in Vienna, Austria, or joining the marijuana eradication team of the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department in remote Northern California forests and hanging – exposed – from the bottom of loud helicopters, not knowing if the illegal pot growers were just below with rifles aimed directly at them.
The freeway should be sounding positively tame at this point.
As a reality television producer and director, Pruitt doesn’t actually spend much time in L.A. Living there keeps him close to the production companies that hire for him for shows like “The Amazing Race,” “Deadliest Catch,” “The Apprentice,” “Swamp People,” “IRT Deadliest Roads,” and “Weed County,” among others, but the real work is done around the country and the globe. Since 2002, he has traveled on assignment to more than 52 countries as remote as Burkina Faso, Kazakhstan, Oman, Mongolia, Kuwait, and Mozambique. The northernmost locale was Finland, and in the other direction, Tierra del Fuego. Closer to home he’s tracked a lighthouse keeper in New London, Connecticut and a night watchman at an amusement park in West Virginia for an upcoming National Geographic Show called “The Watch.” A personal favorite, and living out a childhood dream, was taking a lap in a racecar around the track in France made famous in the Steve McQueen film Le Mans. “That was a rare and unexpected opportunity,” he confides.
If you’re adventurous, love telling stories on film, and your working life syncs up nicely with an exploding market in reality television, it’s hard to do something else, explains Pruitt – though he readily admits he didn’t exactly plan the arc of his career.
Which started, of course, at Cate – in assembly.
After a 1979 spring break of surfing (in Maui) and skiing (in his home state of Utah) captured on his father’s Super-8 camera, Pruitt set to editing. “This vacation-on-film turned into a mini-documentary sports film, if you will, that I put together in kind of a rough, editorial way, with tape and glue and the old-school methods.” He added a musical track by folk crooner Dan Fogelberg. When it appeared on the Hitchcock Theatre screen, his classmates cheered and clapped wildly. “I thought, ‘My God, people get paid to do this?’” recounts Pruitt. “I started earnestly pursuing any opportunity to A, travel, and B, film, whenever I could, and that’s what I’ve been able to do pretty much ever since then.”
With a father who wanted him to be a lawyer, Pruitt dutifully studied international relations at Lewis and Clark College, though staying active in theatre (where he met his wife Susan, in acting class) and current on film. Serendipitously, actor and director Robert Redford started the Sundance Institute in Pruitt’s hometown in 1982, which led to summer jobs as a driver and eventually the opportunity to help program the Sundance Film Festival in its early years.
Itching to begin making films himself, Pruitt headed to Columbia University, where he earned his MFA in Fine Arts in 1992, funded by a fellowship by Paramount and Sundance. After film school, his first foray into screenwriting, “a tiny love story about people wanting to have children,” resulted in a “long and circuitous” path to production. The movie was never released, and because the final result was so far from his original concept, Pruitt calls that a “favor from the gods.”
The next favor came in the form of timing. Just as the reality of paying bills was pushing Pruitt toward work in television – somewhat of a departure from original filmmaking plans – the “unscripted television” genre took off. The Writers Guild strike of 2001 had TV executives scrambling for new ways to create content. Pruitt paraphrases their rationale: “Goodness, we’ve had this wrong the whole time. We don’t have to pay actors, we don’t have to pay unions. Let’s go and get ‘real people’ to do this stuff and the whole thing sort of takes off...right?”
Pruitt, who says his love of and knack for storytelling first took firm hold in Jim Durham’s English class on the Mesa, leaned on some advice he had received at film school, where he was told to pursue either money or story – not both. “That sort of stuck with me, and intentionally or not, I gravitated toward the story and the experience of it. As a result, I don’t really do a good job coming up with these shows, but when I’m handed the reins to one and told to tell the story, I do fairly well and enjoy it.”
Apparently viewers were also enjoying reality television at that point, driving up ratings and prompting the development of countless shows and channels devoted to the medium. Pruitt stayed with the “Amazing Race” for eight seasons, and then headed indoors for “The Apprentice,” which made real estate magnate’s Donald Trump’s trademark utterance “you’re fired” part of the national lexicon. Next came a foray into reality documentaries for an NBC show, “The Wanted,” that tracked down unprosecuted war criminals living in Rwanda, Norway, and Germany. Capturing real-life drama on the high seas and dangerous roads was the next challenge with the shows “Deadliest Catch” and “IRT: Deadliest Roads.” “If it had ‘deadliest’ or ‘dangerous’ in the title, I was there,” jokes Pruitt.
During his Cate days, says Pruitt, he envisioned himself setting up crane shots on the fourth installment of an Indiana Jones movie. “Instead, there I was setting up crane shots in Morocco, for an audience of 12 million people. It’s all about the telling and the sharing. And as long as they’re there and they watch and they receive and digest your story, then that’s a great gift.”
He’s more than willing to tackle a discussion about the less vaunted reputation of reality television – sometimes referred to as the “Kentucky Fried Chicken of television,” and pitches a plausible counterargument. “This whole enterprise can become a big change agent in the world. If that many people are watching and paying attention…by putting forward good people overcoming huge odds, you could then conceivably do something to make the world a better place. I know that sounds outrageous when we’re talking about the KFC of entertainment, but I feel it can exist, and I’ve tried to do something along those lines in every show.”
Case in point: on an “Amazing Race” shoot in Burkina Faso, Pruitt engineered a way for the show’s contestants to feature a tiny but particularly successful village school, drawing attention to its superlative educational program. “So before you dismiss these viewers,” he admonishes, “inspire them to think about what can be done in these faraway places if we put our minds to it.”
The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences appears to have agreed with that logic: it gave its blessing to the creativity and value of unscripted programming in 2001 by adding prize categories to its roster of awards; Pruitt earned four primetime Emmy’s for his work and was nominated for an additional two. He was also nominated three times as “Non-Fiction Producer of the Year” by the Producer’s Guild of America.
And while awards, adventures in exotic places, directing camera crews, and jumping on boats and small planes may inspire envy among those with regular desk jobs, Pruitt well understands the downside. Back in L.A. his wife Susan was raising two growing boys, Will and Jack ’16, who endured his long stints away from home – though both Pruitt and Susan choose to focus on the benefits. Their family has often gathered on location, traveling to and experiencing many countries Americans can’t identify on a map, much less visit. This summer, Will plans to travel with him to Tanzania to track wildebeests for National Geographic. Afterward, they’ll head to London for post-production work.
Perhaps it will provide the time and space for Pruitt to recount some of the highlights of his highly unusual work history to his son. There are far too many to tally, he says, but he’s game to try.
On most beautiful: “Being on the island nation of Mauritius, which is way out in the Indian Ocean and far from civilization and has almost zero light pollution. It was like someone punched bright holes into a black velvet cloth hung over the planet. I have never seen the stars so bright.”
Maybe the rarest: “A cricket match with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, for the History Channel’s show ‘IRT: Deadliest Roads.’”
The one that got his blood pumping was also on a precipitous road: “Driving and filming on the one-lane roads high up in the Sangla Valley in the Northern India Himalayas with local truckers who would have to navigate around oncoming buses with 2,000-foot drop-offs on one side and crumbling cliffs on the other.”
And for evocative and memorable: “Sailing a native dhow over to Zanzibar from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, under a full moon.”
A career in storytelling has prompted Pruitt to engage in some keen observation and reflection about life, particularly his own. Often, reminders of the different kind of filmmaker he might have been crop up. In 2006, Pruitt participated in a Cate career panel in Los Angeles along with fellow entertainment business travelers including, among others, Lex Passaris ’75, Billy Steinberg ’68, and Terry Sanders ’49, a two-time Oscar winner. When it was over, Pruitt assumed that the attendees would choose to hobnob with the feature film types, yet remembers how they lined up to talk with him. “They proceeded to shackle me for the better part of an hour, talking about the shows they loved, because they were watching. That was really gratifying.”
Still deeply rooted in the literature that inspired him at Cate, Pruitt invokes author Samuel Beckett, who wrote that one of his mistakes was “to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.”
“I think,” Pruitt offers, “what he meant by that was we’re all so earnestly setting out in certain directions toward the goals we think await us if we work hard enough, but it’s so surprising what real life has to offer.”
This article ran in the Spring 2015 issue of the Cate School Bulletin. Photo courtesy of the subject.
