In The News-Jason Dussault-Docusoaps, competitions, medical dramas all play to TV Reality Thirst
Jason Dussault’s life could have been made for television.
The brawny businessman dresses rock stars, models and bad boys in hyper-masculine clothing lines Dussault Apparel and, in a collaboration, Gene Simmons’ Moneybags.
He’s husband to Mashiah Vaughn, the owner of bath and beauty company Open Sundaes; he’s dad to a toddler, stepdad to a teen, and, in a telegenic twist, best buds with the eldest boy’s biological father, Jesse.
Rock stars, bikini models, world travel, family love and economic woe: to Vancouver-based Paperny Productions, which captures Dussault’s life in the reality-based docusoap Dussault, Inc. next year, it’s all sexy manna from the TV gods.
Or that’s what the production company is betting on.
Dussault, no shrinking violet, is pretty confident as well.
“My job in fashion from the outset is surrounded by beautiful people, late night and parties and rock stars that go with that. But I’m also the father of two boys trying to make a go of it in the recession.”
Even in laid back, polite Canada, reality-based TV audiences thirst for drama that reflects the complications in their own lives. Since the first episode of Survivor in 2000, the genre has boomed. But whatever the format — fly-on-the-wall docusoaps, competition shows or medical dramas — the vital ingredient is character.
In this milieu, even those type-A personalities with dramatic lives and a laid-back approach toward having a lens in their face find they have to adjust to the demands of the camera. They’re exposed to the possibilities of great personal embarrassment, relationship breakdowns and public censure.
When handled well, the opportunity could be well worth the risk. David Paperny, co-president of Vancouver-based Paperny Productions, says he won’t divulge how much he pays the subjects of reality-based television. They don’t do it for the money, he says.
“A lot of these people are ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And frankly, a lot of the people we like to work with are exhibitionists.”
Paperny approached Dussault about doing a series on his life last summer. A week after the cameras started rolling, Dussault opened a showroom in Vancouver, flew to his New York manufacturing headquarters, went backstage at a New York Nickelback show to visit his pal, drummer Mike Kroeger.
In the meantime, Mashiha was closing a deal with Bear Mountain resorts that would place her bath products in nearly 500 rooms.
Then his stepson Ayden, 15, tried to convince his folks to let him change summer schools, provoking tension between the couple.
Add footage of a kickboxing championship, a photo shoot with a 19-year-old bikini model that put Dussault in the doghouse with an embarrassed Mashiah, and you’ve got the makings of good reality-based TV docusoap drama.
The full-on exposure took some getting used to.
“The day before [Paperny Productions] started shooting, they installed lights all over the house. There were these huge lights in our bedroom when we trying to sleep, and we just looked at each other and said, “what have we gotten ourselves into?”
The next morning marked the first day of shooting. For the first few hours, it was awkward.
“At first you go, ‘what do you say, are you supposed to say something?’ the director wouldn’t even talk to us. He just said, ‘just do what you do.’”
Eventually, the family continued with their usual lives; it became more comfortable, and the cameras seemed to drift into the background.
But even with the bustle of family and business life, they did have to help engineer some razzle-dazzle for the lens, he says.
The more dramatic moments of his personal and business life are designed to fit into the production company’s schedule and vice versa.
“So many reality shows come off scripted, it was important to me that this wouldn’t be a scripted show,” he says.
“It’s not scripted, but it is scheduled.” And it’s all real.
“I’d rather be embarrassed about something that was real than with something that was fake.”
White Rock mom Chela Davison’s life may be worlds away from Dussault’s, but they have much in common.
Davison fits the personality type that TV producers love. She’s an extrovert and she doesn’t embarrass easily.
Davison heard about casting calls for reality-based weight-loss challenge show The Last 10 Pounds Bootcamp, produced by local production company The Eyes. An e-mail and an audition later, she got the call: she’d be sweating and dieting with the help of the Bootcamp trainer Tommy Europe and nutritionist Nadine Bowman.
“I was really stoked about it.”
And she was armed, psychologically. She knew she’d be getting some good training and nutritional support. She knew what she had to give in return.
“I do intense well and I do ‘outgoing’ well. I’m really outgoing and I watch the show so I understand what makes good TV. In one scene I’m grabbing the fat on my belly and squishing it together, and that’s not something everyone would want to do.”
Despite her character, she found she was somewhat inhibited at first.
“I felt like I couldn’t fully be me. I was doing exercises and there was pain in my wrist and I didn’t say anything.”
Once she opened up, the crew let her rest, and they developed a mutual trust.
It didn’t hurt that Davison is media-savvy enough to let go of her pride.
“I noticed the camera guy’s angle, looking up at my thunderous thighs, but I had to go with it, because the intention is to make you look as bad as possible and that makes for good TV.”
On camera, trainer Tommy Europe fitted her with a baby sling filled with a kettle ball, bound her feet and forced her to push a stroller bogged down with weights. It made for fun television.
But off camera, the kettle balls were gone, replaced by routine, and much less entertaining exercise sessions. “No one saw me driving my ass to the gym every morning,” says Davison.
In the end, she lost 14 pounds. She felt in control throughout the taping, she said.
“I thought I would be embarrassed and horrified by the fatness of it all, but it was weird to watch my mannerisms. But after all of it, I didn’t feel it was fudged or there was an agenda I wasn’t aware of.”
Though it’s fun to capture the off-guard, real moments, a producer has to balance those with the ethics of exposure nearly every day.
Paperny recalls a memorable episode of Crash Test Mommy, one of his company’s several documentary productions.
A young Lower Mainland mother struggled to raise two toddlers on her own, while her estranged husband, from whom she was separated, played in Kelowna. When he wasn’t reeling from the shock of caring for his own children for the show, Paperny’s cameras followed his life as it usually was: he spent weekends racing in a motorboat with his single guy friends, not a toddler in sight.
The response to his actions — all negative — came pouring in from the mostly female audience members from across the country
“We didn’t invent this guy,” says Paperny.
“We didn’t ask him to look like a jerk. Sure, we edited in the scenes of this guy in the boat with his friends, but it wasn’t scripted.”
When the man saw the show, it changed him.
“He saw himself, and he was embarrassed, ashamed. He saw himself in the light that his wife saw him, something he could never have seen otherwise.”
Both Paperny and Blair Reekie, president of The Eyes Production company, say their producers have found themselves stopping the cameras when they see that someone may be on the cusp of causing damage to themselves.
Paperny recalls one unforgettable episode of The Week The Women Went, a small-town Newfoundland woman started to confess an affair.
“We warned her that maybe she shouldn’t talk about this. It turned into a very difficult and careful series of conversations on and off camera. We told her if she talks about it on camera we’re likely to use it.”
In the end, she spilled the beans, a confession that helped her mend her relationships.
“For some people, me saying that a great [reality-based] TV show can be cathartic. It sounds like I’m a producer trying to justify his job, but it can happen.”
The benefits flow both ways, says Dussault. He is, after all, a businessman first: “This is big exposure to get our brands out there on a natural level.
“I’m on my game for sure. I don’t ever get embarrassed and I don’t give a s— what people think about me. I have high self esteem. I’m a wonderful person and I go out of my way to be a wonderful person.
“If I had anything to hide, I wouldn’t do this.”
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