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photo: JOHN MALVINO (SARA MAST)
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'Reality TV Is my life'
By DENNIS NISHI Sara Mast turned her love of documentary film into a career in reality television. She began by taking a low-paying production job to make ends meet. Now she’s an executive producer for “The Hills,” the MTV reality show that follows the personal lives of a fashion-design student and her friends.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Ms. Mast about what it takes to succeed in Hollywood. Here are excerpts of the interview: WSJ: Did you go to film school? MS. MAST: I went to Mount Holyoke, a woman’s college in South Hadley, Mass. They didn’t have a film program, but I was able to take experimental-film courses at Hampshire College nearby. The funny thing I learned while making these avant-garde films was that I was way more interested in traditional narrative and documentary, things that told a clear story. WSJ: What did you want to do in film and how did you get started? MS. MAST: I decided I wanted to make an impact, and documentary was where I thought I could make a change in the world, so I made a few environmental documentaries. After graduating in 1990, I moved to San Francisco. I started dating a guy at the time who introduced me to somebody that worked under Henry Selick, director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Through that contact I was able to wangle an internship with Disney. I also worked as a picture framer for two shops for $5.75 an hour. WSJ: Is that how most people get into the industry? MS. MAST: People think they’re going to graduate from film school and be a director. It doesn’t work that way unless you’re a rare breakout genius. If you don’t have a lot of contacts, starting at the bottom is one of the few ways to get in. I spent what seemed like years on the edge of a financial abyss. WSJ: How do you distinguish yourself when doing menial tasks like getting coffee or sweeping floors? MS. MAST: It was my eagerness to do whatever was asked without question. I also had an interest in camera and lighting and so I worked for free on some other small productions. So I also apprenticed in the camera department. And I found somebody who mentored me. I kept asking him a lot of questions until he saw that I had a passion for the work, and so did he. That helped my career a lot. WSJ: How long did it take you to get a paying gig? MS. MAST: After a year, I became a production assistant and then soon after a camera assistant in San Francisco, where a lot of cutting-edge special-effects shops were. Over the course of [the job] I got really educated doing camera work for “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach.” I also worked on the Robin Williams film “What Dreams May Come” as well as a few other movie and television shows. I moved to Los Angeles seven years later and went to grad school and got my master’s in screenwriting. I wanted to round out my experience and knowing screenwriting helped me understand story and structure. I continued to make short [films]. My film “Big Issue” went to Sundance in 2002. WSJ: How did you make the jump to reality television? MS. MAST: Despite all of this work, I was still poor and struggling. I had just done a couple of documentaries, including one on taxidermy called “Stuffed.” When reality television broke out, they were in need of people that had done that sort of narrative and documentary work. WSJ: Did you see it as an extension of documentary work? MS. MAST: I saw reality television as this kind of anthropology of modern culture. I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people tick. WSJ: You got your first reality-show job on Craigslist? MS. MAST: Yeah, I kind of fibbed to get into the door. I wrote “reality TV is my life,” on my cover letter, which would later become true. Truth is, I didn’t have much experience in TV, and I needed to pay the bills. The job was for the Learning Channel, and they hired me to work on a show called “Faking It.” WSJ: How did you parlay that to get onto “The Hills?” MS. MAST: I worked on a bunch of different shows over six or seven years, including “Wife Swap,” “Vacation Swap,” “Supernanny” and “Ice-T’s Rap School.” When I finally got an agent, he asked if I wanted to interview for an associate producer job on an MTV reality show. Three or four interviews later, they offered me the job. What clinched it was all of my production experience. I had done every job on the set. WSJ: Critics generally fault reality programming for being overly scripted and set up. What kind of planning goes into “The Hills”? MS. MAST: It’s like pinball. We set up the game and the balls are going to go where they’re going to go. It’s my job to predict where they end up. Things are generally pretty predictable. WSJ: Do you ever worry about crossing a line to achieve an outcome? MS. MAST: There’s certainly some moral ambiguity. And you sometimes ask yourself if what you’re doing is right. At the same time, I have to be able to wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror, so there are limits that I stay within. WSJ: Where do you see yourself going with this? MS. MAST: I’d eventually like my own show. I love working in this genre. It’s sort of a hybrid that’s blurring the fine line between narrative and reality. And though some of the shows I’ve worked on have less societal value than others, I think entertaining people is a positive thing.
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