Star Price, "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" producer: Mr. Media Interview Star Price -- a.k.a., Starling Price -- is the executive producer of the Showtime series, “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” The show, now in its fifth season, chronicles the efforts of confirmed skeptics and pro-science atheists Penn Jillette and Teller to debunk, well, bullshit. Their mission is to expose the truth to an otherwise desperate and gullible public.

Most people have seen Penn & Teller somewhere, usually on a talk show performing incredible feats of magic. On this show, they use all the tricks of their trade, including good old-fashioned hidden cameras, to reveal rip-off artists, scammers, and hoaxsters.

Price is a writer, producer, director who has worked in television since 1978. In recent years, he’s made a career in reality television, including credits on programs such as “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol,” MTV’s “Celebrity Undercover,” TLC’s “How’d They Do That,” and “Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us” for NBC. He’s also recently co-executive-produced the reality series, “Exploring the Unknown” and “Scariest Places on Earth” for the Fox Family Channel, “Amazing Race II” for CBS, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” the pilot for ABC, and “Hotel Hell” for Fox.



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Star, How did you get involved with Penn & Teller?

STAR PRICE: Well, it’s a long story, actually. Mark Wolper, who’s another executive producer of the show, had sold Showtime the concept on doing a show debunking popular myths and beliefs of the day. He just had that kind of one-sentence idea, and he brought in Penn & Teller as a way to kind of comedically do it. But no one had really thought, “How would this work?” And I think as almost a surprise to him, he sold the show, and they ordered 13 episodes. He had never really done a documentary series, so he called me and said, “Can you figure out how to do this?” So I was thrown into it and went out to Las Vegas and met with Penn & Teller. We hit it off, and we kind of developed the show together on very short notice, and it became what it is. It is a fun show to do.

ANDELMAN: At different times, I’ve gotten the sense that Penn would really like to be on TV maybe more regularly than he is but maybe has not found quite the vehicle. This seems to really fit.

PRICE: This fits perfectly for him. This show is a dream come true for him. Both Penn & Teller are incredibly intelligent people and well read and well versed on every political issue and cultural issue of the day, and they are fascinating people. And to have a show where they could just kind of state what they believe about almost anything, I mean, that just doesn’t exist for anybody. For them, it’s just a dream come true, and they love doing it, and we love doing it with them.





ANDELMAN: So Wolper didn’t necessarily have them in mind when he came up with this thing, he just kind of fitted them to the concept.

PRICE: Yeah. His idea was that no one’s going to want to see a show where we just debunk something unless there’s another spin to it. He had the idea -- I think he was on an airplane and was flipping through a magazine when he saw an interview with them. Penn, in the magazine interview, said that he was a big debunker, a big skeptic of a lot of things, and the light bulb went on over Mark’s head: call them. And I believe he called them and mentioned it on the phone; they were like, “We’re in!” It was an unusual marriage. They had never done a documentary series before. They are known for doing magic specials, but they are both avid skeptics, and it fit right up their alley.

The show became a combination of things; we knew that, because they were Penn & Teller, we had to let them do their shtick, too. We had to let them do magic, so if you’ve seen the show, you see that it’s kind of a weird combination of them doing magic and then debunking or looking into a cultural issue of the day. And it works.

I’m not even sure exactly how, but it works. It’s kind of this weird cross between Penn & Teller and my sensibility.

We have come up with this weird show, and we are about to premier our fifth season, and there is no end to it. We have found a way to keep doing stories for it for a long time.





ANDELMAN: What are they like to work with day in and day out?

PRICE: They’re great, they’re great. They’re both fascinating people and so smart, and often times we can get into a conversation where we forget that we are actually making a TV show. We’ll just get into talking about an issue. They are fascinating conversationalists, because they are so well versed on everything, and they come to each topic idea that we do with a very strong point of view. If you bump into them on the street and ask them about anything, they usually have a strong opinion. They are both very Libertarian in their beliefs, so politically, we kind of fall in, I guess you would say, the conservative side when it comes to fiscal things, size of government, and fall on the liberal side when it comes to social issues. But they have a strong opinion on everything, and as a producer, it’s a pleasure to work with, because you know exactly where they stand, and so you know exactly where you need to go.

ANDELMAN: Any time I’ve ever seen them, and of course, you are familiar with what Penn has to say, because Teller doesn’t really say much. Just by coincidence this afternoon, Howard Stern, on Sirius, ran a “Master Tape Theater” repeat from June 1993, on which he had Penn as a guest. Howard was saying something about how Penn & Teller do a show similar to David Copperfield. Penn got very upset with that and was tried to debunk Copperfield’s work -- and this was something that was 14 years old! So he has been consistent in that.

PRICE: Their whole act is kind of a debunking of magic as much as it is a celebration of magic. If you’ve seen their show, they’ll do magic, but part of the fun of it is that they will show you how it’s done and show you how easily you can be fooled. Then they’ll take you a little bit kind of behind the scenes of it all. It’s been their whole approach to it for 30 years, and that’s why we brought that sensibility to the show in that we’ll look at a topic, such as psychics or people who believe in ghosts or whatever, and they’ll walk you through why it’s BS. They’ll do it with their stand-up act to kind of inventively show that there is another reality that you are not seeing, kind of like what they do in their magic tricks. It actually is a natural fit.






ANDELMAN: Star, most of the shows that you’ve worked on have been either reality or documentary oriented, not really star vehicles. Was it difficult to get used to working with bigger than life personalities?

PRICE: Well, they are larger than life. They are larger than life in the room.

ANDELMAN: Are they really?

PRICE: Yeah. Penn’s a big man and booming voice and a strong opinion, and

Teller, even though he doesn’t talk in the act, is very talkative when the camera is not on and is very much a part of the whole process as much as Penn is.

To be honest, it was a little bit of an eye-opener for me because, as I said, they do have such a strong point of view. But it’s also a blessing, becauseI know exactly where they stand, and we get along great.

It’s a hard show to make, although it doesn’t look like it. It looks like a breezy show, but we have a huge staff of researchers and writers and producers putting together what is in fact 10 individual documentaries a season, and each one has to make a strong argument and be convincing in terms of what Penn & Teller believe. So if we go after something like the death penalty, we can’t just make jokes about it and do magic tricks, we have to back it up with serious facts and interviews. That’s hard enough, but to go in knowing exactly where the hosts stand, it makes it easier, actually.






© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Amazing Race, Mark Wolper, Penn Teller, Penn Teller: Bullshit, Star Price

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