‘Rock of Love With Bret Michaels’: How Confessionals Worked on the Show
Rock of Love With Bret Michaels pitted 20-some women against each other for a chance to date the Poison frontman. As any good reality television show is wont to do, the footage of the women competing for Michaels’s heart was spliced together with confessionals. These individual interviews gave producers plenty of content to make Rock of Love as exciting a show as possible.
Many Rock of Love fans wonder what went on behind the scenes filming those confessionals. Lacey Sculls (née Conner) and Heather Chadwell, two of the women from Rock of Love Season 1, tell all.
‘Rock of Love With Bret Michaels’ featured two types of confessionals
During an early episode of the Talk of Love podcast, Chadwell and Sculls answered fan-submitted questions. One fan asked how the confessionals worked on Rock of Love, noting how all the women had the same outfits and hairstyles during those interviews.
“There’s basically two types of confessionals,” Sculls explained. “There’s the one where it’s always the same background—”
“The garage was set up as a little set on Rock of Love,” Chadwell interjected. “The other [type of confessional] is called ‘On the Fly.'”
“The other ones when we were outside, or if we were at the venue of wherever that episode was, those are called ‘On the Fly’ [interviews],” Sculls added. “We never knew when we were doing those. We would just be doing our thing, and all of a sudden they would pull you aside.”
“But the [regular] confessionals, you would go in way later down the road,” Chadwell said. “I had to go back in and do five episodes [at once].”
Producers manufactured the ‘Rock of Love’ confessionals
Because it was sometimes difficult for the women to remember how events transpired, Sculls said producers would read a recap of what happened so they could get commentary.
“The strangest part for me was that we always had to speak in the present tense,” Sculls said. Even if an argument between the women had come and gone, it always had to be discussed in present-tense to preserve the show’s integrity.
Chadwell added how someone with a laptop was always following the camera around while filming. That’s so they could make note of anything and everything the women were saying. These notes are what they referred back to when filming the confessionals for Rock of Love.
Was ‘Rock of Love With Bret Michaels’ scripted?
Many reality television fans struggle to believe the shows they watch are unscripted. During the podcast, Sculls addressed the fans who doubted whether or not Rock of Love was scripted.
“A lot of times, people ask if these shows are scripted, to which I say ‘no,'” Sculls started. “However, if there is going to be a time where they’re going to feed you a line, it would be [in the confessionals]. And it’s not always, but you can tell [when the producers are] really proud of themselves for whatever they came up with.”
Those were usually the moments that incited the most drama within the house — the moments that reality TV fans live for.
Most of the confessionals weren’t even used in ‘Rock of Love’
According to Sculls and Chadwell, the hours they put in to filming confessionals were cut down to seconds. The producers only needed a few lines from each of the women to fill in the gaps and tell the story for any given episode. But both Sculls and Chadwell recall the exhausting number of hours it took to get those confessionals filmed.
