He's always been great at playing the Hollywood game.
By Eliza Thompson
Jun 2, 2016
A lot of cast members from The Hills have been giving interviews this week in honor of the show's 10th anniversary, but none of them have done it with as much gusto as Spencer Pratt. Since joining Snapchat, he's become an enthusiastic critic of pop culture, flipping through issues of Us Weekly while offering his opinions on what's real and what's fake. In a new interview with the blog Pop Culture Died in 2009, Spencer went in-depth about how he and Heidi used to arrange those clearly staged paparazzi photos that were everywhere circa 2009. You know the ones: (...)
According to Spencer, these were the result of a deal he made with Pacific Coast News, with a contact he'd known since he sold them a photo of Mary-Kate Olsen. "We were known as 'fame whores,' but that was just because [the photographer] James was having us do these cheesy over-the-top shots that the British audience loved for their 'rags' — as they call them over there, I call them beautiful magazines here," Spencer explained. "We had a 50/50 partnership with [PCN] and we were making over a million dollars selling our paparazzi photos, so you start doing a lot of them and you're like, 'This is the best gig ever!'"
During this time, they also encountered "real" paparazzi in more celebrity-heavy areas, but they preferred to use the photographer they had a relationship with so they could get paid. He said he got the idea from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, after a magazine editor friend told him that their supposedly candid beach photos were actually planned. "I was like, 'Uh, why don't I copy the most famous superstars in the world that are rich and doing this?'" Spencer said. He also claims that most famous people know when they're being followed by paparazzi and tip them off when they want to be photographed. "I think that everyone is game, and playing the game as hard as they can," Spencer continued. "Maybe like, Sean Penn is trying to lose some photographers to go to dinner with a cartel leader, but even then, they got the paparazzi shots of him at the airport in Mexico!"
The full interview is lengthy, but it's absolutely worth reading the whole thing because it's full of gems, both about The Hills and fame in general. For example, remember the season-two episode of The Hills when Heidi's coworker Max tells her that her outfit is work-inappropriate, and she and Spencer later encounter him at lunch? Spencer says that whole thing was planned by producers, and Max didn't even work at Bolthouse. So there you go!
