The scene was utter pandemonium backstage at MTV Studios. It
was the height of the boy band era, and the Backstreet Boys
were performing on “Total Request Live.” One lowly production
assistant stood between a mob of teenage girls and America’s
teen heartthrobs. That assistant was Brent Montgomery, and it
was his first day on the job. At first, his assignment was to
manage which fans could access the studio based on a guest
list. The problem was, 14-year-old girls do not usually have a
government ID, and desperate mothers were trying to bribe
their way past him.
“Eventually, the crowd got settled in, and I thought,
‘Alright, we did our job,’” Montgomery remembered. “But then
someone pointed at me and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you go buy a
bunch of water?’ Now, I didn’t have that much money, so I
never bought bottled water. They gave me $100, and I bought as
much as I could carry, about 60 one-liter bottles. Later, I
walked away from the set during a commercial break, and I
heard expletives over my walkie-talkie. ‘What idiot bought
carbonated water?!’ The girls had gone crazy during the
performance, and the set was soaked. I ran around the other
side of the building and hoped the person in charge wouldn’t
remember me.” Thus marked the beginning of Montgomery’s
illustrious production assistant career, during which his
lofty dreams of telling stories on screen took a backseat to
running errands and living at the bottom of the
proverbial totem pole. He knew New York was where he needed to
be, but he was itching to make something he could call his
own. In 2002, he and his business partner, fellow former
student Colby Gaines ’97, established Leftfield Pictures with
the initial goal of pitching and producing unscripted
television shows.
“We like to say we came out of the gate hot,” Montgomery said.
“We didn’t sell a show in our first seven years.” Instead, the
duo took the camera gear they had scrounged for and shot
weddings, bar mitzvahs and infomercials—whatever work they
could do to cover their overhead. “It was just hustle, hustle,
hustle.” In 2008, they finally produced their first greenlit
series, but it was promptly canceled after less than a year on
air.
Ever resilient, the Leftfield Pictures team went to work
developing the series that would dig them out of their hole
for good. They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but
Montgomery and Gaines found a phenomenon in Sin City that
would reach across the world and back.
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