Although the film did manage to capture the emotional coaster ride that is working in film and television, compared to the real thing, those kids had it easy. I've interviewed Joey Buttafuoco! Now that's scary!

Like Heather Donahue and her trusty crew pursuing their elusive witch, I ran around Long Island chasing the overfed, oversexed auto mechanic and his wife -- as they craftily avoided me. (They were under contract to "A Current Affair," and my show, the competition, was considered the enemy.) The story led me to a gym, where I wore a hidden microphone to try to interview a grotesquely muscular guy who'd supposedly been involved with Amy and then dumped her. As soon as the guy "made me" (i.e. discovered that I was a reporter wearing a microphone with a camera crew filming me from the street), he summoned a bunch of other weight lifters to physically shove me out the door, kick me in the behind as I ran away and push my cameraman to the ground. To risk your life for a tabloid TV show is to know the true meaning of terror and shame. If it taught me anything, it's that a pile of rocks outside your tent is nowhere near as scary as a bunch of guys who are dumber than a pile of rocks.

Elusive and reluctant subjects can inflict a great deal of pain, but the havoc wreaked by miscommunication between crew members can't be underestimated. I was in Mexia, Texas, interviewing the hometown ex-boyfriend of model Anna Nicole Smith for a syndicated tabloid show. My mission was to cajole this young man into telling me -- on camera, of course -- that Anna Nicole Smith had surgically enhanced her breasts. "I'm not gonna tell you if she had a boob job or not," he drawled, "unless you shut off that camera." I turned my head and told the cameraman to cut, and then secretly, over-dramatically lip-synched to him: "Keep it rolling." (In tabloid TV, anything goes; if you don't come home with the story, as they say, don't bother coming home.) The boyfriend proceeded to go into agonizing detail about the procedure, in spite of having been sternly warned by Smith to keep it a secret.

In the crew van after the interview, proud of my coup, I asked the cameraman to cue up the great moment for me. "What do you mean?" he asked. "You told me to cut." "Are you kidding me?" I shouted in disbelief. "I lip-synched to you after I told you to stop rolling, to keep it rolling! You mean you really cut? Are you out of your mind?" The cameraman, a pot-bellied TV veteran, felt stupid. There we were, in the hot, mid-summer Mexia sun, having our very own "Blair Witch" moment. Afterwards, I felt guilty for making him feel stupid, angry at myself for engaging in sleazy tabloid practices, and sick -- because I was surely going to lose my job. (I didn't.)

Infighting, also a problem. I was producing a story about how, in the liberal climate of Denmark, fathers supply their 12-year-old boys with condoms in case they get lucky, and seventh-grade teachers take their classes on field trips to the Sex Museum. Ordinarily, this would be a pretty fun piece to produce. But the "talent," an on-camera reporter whose right-wing attitudes were what my crew and I called "a major buzzkill," didn't agree.

For one segment, we went on a location scout for Christiania -- a hippie commune where Danes walk around barefoot, filthy and stoned -- without a camera. I felt that these would be powerful images for our story, but the talent didn't see it that way. After half an hour, we found ourselves back at the van. "I think it's pretty cool," I told him. "You have these hippies smoking hash right in front of their kids. People selling dope and not even trying to hide it. If you're looking to shock people in Peoria, I don't think we can do much better." Morally offended by everything he'd seen, he refused to consider it. "Never gonna sell," he said. "It's a waste of time."

"What do you mean, it's not gonna sell?" I asked, stupefied. His reply: "These people are filthy. They're disgusting."

Next page | The cameraman quietly slinked away. It got uglier