Before Spencer Pratt, increasingly popular candidate for mayor of LA, there was Spencer Pratt, the reality star. The pugilistic campaigner has gone viral this week with a video comparing the mansion of the current mayor, Karen Bass, with the burned-out plot of land where his home used to be. But he became famous 20 years ago, as the villain of the unscripted series The Hills, about four young women trying to make a life for themselves in the City of Stars.
This week, on my pod (subscribe here), I spoke to one of the producers of that show, Sophia Rivka Rossi. “He makes whatever he wants happen,” Rossi, who is undecided on the mayoral race for now, told me. “Every day someone else says to me, ‘I think I’m gonna vote for Spencer.’ ”
On The Hills, which debuted in 2006, Pratt did things like start a rumor that the star of the show, Lauren Conrad, had made a sex tape, which he later denied. “He knew what would be good TV,” Rossi told me. He later said he cultivated his troublemaking persona to boost ratings. But if you watch his campaign ads, you can tell: He still knows how to make TV. In a piece for The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz called his latest viral campaign ad “resonant and raw,” since, “As he’s done for 20 years now, he grabbed hold of the camera, turned it around, and told viewers an inconvenient truth.”
