The Klan activity in Tennessee was not the only one with fabricated elements; sources knowledgeable of what transpired among all four featured Klan groups where TIJAT shot described similar circumstances.
In Kentucky, which unlike the other three areas is not depicted in the first four episodes of the series provided to TV critics, TIJAT producers weren’t above turning its documentary subjects into fictional characters.
“They told me to find someone who was family that was against my beliefs,” said Dan Elmquist, the Imperial Wizard of the Kentucky-based Nordic Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who reports getting $500 a day to participate. “They were trying to get my wife and me to say that my wife didn’t like me involved in Klan stuff, but my wife is a member of the Klan. So we filmed with my Nighthawk’s wife saying she was my cousin and acting as the ‘anti-Klan’ person. A&E knew she wasn’t my cousin or against the Klan.”
The “Nighthawk”–which is KKK terminology for a clan’s chief of security—for the Nordic Order Knights who confirmed Elmquist’s account in an interview is Chris Brasher of Bowling Green, Ken. (When Elmquist and Brasher refers to “A&E,” they are not referring to the network, but producers from TIJAT. )
“A&E would give me an order of what to say–it was scripted,” said Brasher, who also reported getting $500 per day. “My wife isn’t a member of the Klan. A&E was telling her to say to me ‘If you don’t leave the Klan I am going to leave you. I don’t want to leave my husband, but if he doesn’t leave the Klan I will.’ “It was a joke, really. My wife and I get along fine. She was never going to leave me because I am in the Klan. A&E made that all up and told us what to say.”
But sources close to the production say that whatever interviews Brasher sat for were not intended for the documentary’s first season, and that it could have been for a demo reel for another season.
A&E’s payment policies for unscripted series have already created other problems for the network. Citing “Escaping the KKK” earlier this week, an attorney representing the Church of Scientology accused A&E of hypocrisy by alleging that two of the participants in the docuseries “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath” were paid to appear on camera. The network hasn’t responded to the Church’s charge.
On the Tennessee shooting location of the KKK documentary, Nichols and Hutt describe being paid by a man with a blue, rectangular bank money bag, which he would unzip and hand out $50 or $100 bills.
Of the leaders of the four Ku Klux Klan groups featured on the TV series, only one denied receiving payments for his participation. “I was never paid a dime but I wished they did,” said Steve Howard, Imperial Wizard for the North Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, on Dec. 24.
But on Dec. 26, Howard lashed out on his Facebook account demanding $100,000 payments from A&E and the film production company for money he said was promised and owed him. “Tomorrow by 11 I start singing. So someone better take care of it. I want lost wages,” wrote Howard. “They can buy me out or I start singing.”
Howard took down his Facebook posts less than 24 hours later.
What is still unclear is which entities had foreknowledge of the fabrications. While it is conceivable A&E could have learned what was going on via communication between the network and production during the shoot, it is also possible that the network was kept in the dark. Even the principals of the production company itself may not have had complete knowledge of how individual producers were conducting themselves on the ground at shoots.
But the documentary raises troubling questions as to how much responsibility and oversight a network should have over the content of programming it licenses to air.
In addition, the series exposes the often blurry line in TV programming between the traditional documentary, in which filmmakers typically take a fly-on-the-wall approach minimizing interference in the action unfolding in front of their cameras, with so-called reality TV like A&E’s own hit “Duck Dynasty,” which may appear to be cinema verite to unsophisticated viewers but is almost as controlled by producers as scripted dramas or comedies, with real people essentially functioning as paid actors.
The lure of easy money certainly has its allure to KKK members and their families living in some of the poorest regions of the country. Hutt, a 22-year-old high-school dropout who lives with his mother, readily admits that getting paid by producers was his motivation for helping distort the truth.
“Hey, I loved the money. Don’t get me wrong; I wanted them to come back,” he confessed. “Now I don’t want anything to do with them.”
Nate Thayer is a freelance journalist based in Washington D.C.
Article Appeared @http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/kkk-leaders-allege-producers-paid-them-to-fake-scenes-in-canceled-ae-documentary-exclusive-1201950078/