Putting the dread in ‘Fear Factor’

Scott Larsen

“Gross producer” on NBC’s stunt reality series, “Fear Factor.”

“My official title is producer, but I do all the gross stuff. I am the king of all things weird on the show.”

The setup: “When we go into preproduction for the season, my job is to come up with the stunts. I come up with physical stunts, gross stunts, weird stunts. I have been doing this for four seasons, and the biggest challenge is outdoing your last stunt. You want them to be getting bigger and better all the time, which I think we’ve accomplished.

“We have actually changed completely how our stunts work. Our contestants have become more resilient, and a little more hardened from watching the show. In Season 1, we could have fed someone three night crawlers and they would freak and choke and throw up. That wouldn’t faze anybody anymore. Now we would have to get a huge vat of 20,000 worms and have them squash them with their feet to make a glass of warm wine. We have actually done that. Actually, we probably had 100,000 night crawlers. I got the idea from the ‘I Love Lucy’ skit where she was stomping on grapes. It was awful, but not the most gross [stunt].”

Going for gross-out: “One of the ones that people had a hard time doing was when we made a blended maggot shake and it was filled with live flies and they had to drink that down. They had a really hard time with that. While I’ll taste stuff a little bit every now and then, that’s what our interns are for [to taste test]. They do it for 100 bucks, but I think they do it for the bragging rights.”

Coming up with the menu: “First we figure out what we can or can’t get. We find out what kind of quantities we can get and then do research to find out if someone eats them somewhere. We actually take the worms and send them to a food lab and they test them and give us a full report on it so we know exactly what we are feeding the contestants. Most of the time, what we are feeding them is what we had for lunch. Insects are full of protein and very low in fat.”

Taste and timing: “We have gotten [insects] out of Egypt -- camel spiders. We had cockroaches and cave-dwelling spiders from Madagascar. I have a bunch of different wranglers and connections and importers and exporters.

“In Egypt, you can export for only so many months out of the year. There is always a game of getting our bugs and keeping them alive and using them before they pass away. When I do a stunt with a bunch of flies, if I am going to have 100,000 flies, you have to time it just right because they only live for four or five days. A lot of times I’ll get them and all of these flies will be little eggs. Over the course of a couple of days we’ll keep them warm and they’ll start hatching. All of a sudden you’ll have 100,000 flies.

“A lot of the stuff we eat is actually a delicacy somewhere. A lot of the stuff I buy I can buy here in Los Angeles in the Asian market.”

Dreams. Gross, difficult dreams: “I don’t ever sit and try to come up with physical stunts and gross stunts at the same time. I literally sit in bed with a little notepad and a pen and a little light and every night I just lay there for hours just dreaming up silly stuff.

“When it comes to physical stunts, we have a whole stunt department and they take it and we pick the stunt apart and try to figure out how we can make it work.”

Background: “I grew up in San Diego, and I am a very action-oriented person. I started riding motorcycles when I was 7 years old in the desert, and I’m still riding today. In fact, I am just recovering from a broken shoulder and ribs, crashing my motorcycle in the desert a month ago.

“I owned a swimming pool company, and I was running that to the point where I was bored. I had a friend up here in L.A. I came up and started working in the casting department on ‘Fear Factor.’ The stunts on the show are what got me excited, so I was constantly throwing stunt ideas at the producers. Then they hired me over on ‘Dog Eat Dog’ for its second season. It was also a stunt show, but it was an in-studio show. When Season 4 of ‘Fear Factor’ started, they took me back there.”

Age: 35

Resides: Valencia

Union or guild: “Not for me.”

Problem solving: “It is all about problem solving because everything we have done has never been done before. Physical stunts are usually pretty set, but with the gross stunts, it throws you for a twitch because you never know what’s going to happen. You come up with a crazy idea and it all sounds good and fun on paper, but until you build it and test it, you don’t know exactly how it’s going to work.”

-- Susan King