'He’s Kind of an Evil Genius'

IN HIS CAMPAIGN ADVERTISEMENTS, mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt portrays Los Angeles as a tent-strewn hellscape.

It’s a far cry from the sparkling city MTV viewers saw depicted on The Hills, the reality show that made Pratt famous in the mid-aughts. Nearly every episode began with a panning B-roll shot of jewel box homes teetering on Hollywood hillsides. Pratt and the show’s other twentysomething stars spent their days tanning by the pool at their Mediterranean-style apartment villa or shopping at Fred Segal, the ivy-covered boutique on Melrose. The velvet-rope-lined nightclubs they frequented — Les Deux, Area, Hyde — became so popular that millennial tourists outside of California began planning trips to L.A. just to visit the same hotspots. 

Though “The Hills” ostensibly starred Lauren Conrad — the wide-eyed beach blonde who cameras followed from her high school days on “Laguna Beach” to the big city — Pratt quickly became one of the series’ fixtures. He started dating Conrad’s best friend, Heidi Montag; Conrad loathed him, and the romance drove a wedge between her and Montag. Over the show’s six seasons, Pratt would go on to display all sorts of unsavory behavior: spreading a rumor about the existence of a Conrad sex tape, threatening physical violence against castmates, calling his sister a “crazy bitch.” 

Pratt — who has been married to Montag since 2009 — has since claimed that many of his most vitriolic moments on the show were staged in the hopes of attracting high ratings. But were we here at L.A. Material going to take his word for it? Of course not. We reached out to dozens of cast and crew who worked on The Hills during its four-year run to get their thoughts on the parallels between the Spencer from reality television and the Spencer running for mayor. The picture his former colleagues painted is of an uber-focused — at times obsessive — Pacific Palisades native who was unafraid of ruffling feathers and remains exceptionally skilled at controlling media narratives.