Videos: 'The Hills Cast' At The Finale

~Kelli at Hills Freak

Over the Hills: Adam DiVello on the MTV Phenomenon

Adam DiVello has plenty of dirt on Lauren Conrad, Whitney Port, Audrina Patridge, Kristin Cavallari and Heidi Montag and her bizarre relationship with Spencer Pratt, but the creator and executive producer of MTV’s hit reality shows “The Hills” and “The City” isn’t about to spill the beans.
He maintains that what you see is really what you get on reality television, and the series finale of “The Hills” Tuesday night closed a significant chapter for the gaggle of Los Angeles youngsters whose lives DiVello has followed for the past five years, ending with Cavallari moving on from longtime love interest Brody Jenner and leaving for Europe.
But he is already moving on to the next reality project, although he’s mum on specifics.
“People enjoy watching other people’s lives unfold,” DiVello says. “For ‘The Hills,’ there was an aspirational element, but at the core of it, any teenager who is still in high school or college and is wondering what their future will be like can relate.” DiVello started his career at MTV in 1997 as a personal assistant in the network’s video tape library. He quickly worked his way up, eventually producing shows such as “Spring Break” and developing “Room Raiders” and “Say What? Karaoke,” among other programs.
When Liz Gateley, his boss at the time, suggested a reality show centered around a California high school — a sort of “Beverly Hills, 90210” for the reality TV generation— DiVello jumped at the chance. The show, “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” followed the lives of a group of suntanned and spoiled frenemies, turning Conrad and Cavallari into tabloid mainstays. DiVello eventually started his own production company, and pitched the network “The Hills.”
“I wanted to take Lauren and follow her to Los Angeles,” DiVello recalls. “She wants to be a fashion designer, and I thought it was so aspirational, this little girl from Laguna Beach who always wanted the boy but always lost him to the bad girl. She was kind of every girl.”
And the rest is reality TV history. “The pieces all came together perfectly,” DiVello says. “Lauren had met Heidi at fashion school in San Francisco, and Heidi was looking to move to L.A. I had found Audrina by the pool in their complex. Whitney Port was an intern at WWD, and had applied for an internship at Teen Vogue.”
After shooting the pilot, MTV gave a green light to the project, and Anna Wintour agreed to allow the camera crews in Teen Vogue’s Los Angeles offices, where both Conrad and Port were interns. “Before you knew it,” says DiVello, “Jason Wahler came back into the picture, and a season later, Spencer came into the picture, and their lives just started to unfold in front of our eyes.”
Nevertheless, “We were surprised that it became such a pop cultural phenomenon,” he says. “You never expect to you will be landing covers of Us Weekly every week, or the cover of Rolling Stone. Luckily, Lauren was a character America knew, and she was magic. Everything that she felt was on her face. We didn’t need the confessionals. You really knew what she was thinking by looking at her.”
DiVello claims Conrad’s emotions were real and raw, not scripted. “It is all based in reality and it is their reality,” he says. “We don’t come up with characters. We have a story team that works on the show, and they talk to the kids constantly, and they are always BBMing and texting with them. They always know what’s going on in their lives, and we choose what we do and don’t want to follow.
“If someone is getting their wisdom teeth out that week, it’s probably not something we want to follow,” he says. “But if she is having her wisdom teeth taken out, and has some huge event she has to go to that same night and has to miss it, then it becomes a story...People ask me all the time if we write it, and my answer is always that we write it in the edits.”
As for the made-for-primetime boyfriends — Brody, Justin-Bobby and, most toxic of all, Spencer — they naturally and quite fortuitously came into the picture.
“We would never tell [the girls] whom to date, and whom not to date,” DiVello says. “This is all them, and in the situation with Audrina and Justin, it was such a great, relatable storyline. There is always the one girl who is in love with the bad boy. It was fun watching her grappling with whether she should be with him or not.”
As for the train wreck behavior of Heidi and Spencer, which ranged from her Barbie doll transformation to his newfound faith in New Age crystals, DiVello underscored that their actions were always their decision. “People ask me a lot if what they are doing is real, and how much of it we are in the loop,” he says. “I say, ‘We show up and shoot.’ We never know what’s really going on. We were lucky enough to get Heidi and Spencer’s wedding on tape and we watched the evolution of that relationship...[Heidi and Spencer]...have probably been through the most media wise, and that changes people. They were living their lives on the show and in the media. I don’t think you can come out of that unchanged.”
But when it comes to the (slightly) more grounded members of the cast, Lauren and Whitney remain the break out stars. “Lauren is a very smart girl,” DiVello says. “I think that one day she will be a great producer herself. She gets it and has a good handle on the business. She has been very successful with her books and her clothing line. Whitney was a fan favorite, because she was there every listening to Lauren and giving her advice. When she fell down in Hilary Swank’s Oscar dress, everyone fell in love with her.”
Looking ahead, DiVello has been talking with studios about a new scripted concept. He’s started pre-production on the next season of “The City,” and the team is honing in on new locations and cast members. “We end the season with a big cliffhanger for Whitney, which will change her relationship with Kelly Cutrone.”
Speaking of the People’s Revolution chief, she has played a key role in both “The Hills” and “The City,” and her presence has done much to spice up the sometimes mundane world of these twentysomethings. “Who doesn’t love Kelly Cutrone?” DiVello says. “She is definitely unguarded and says exactly what she is thinking. She brings with her this wisdom. She has been in business for a long time. She is the ultimate fairy godmother for these kids. When she sees BS, she calls it.”
After five years, DiVello already knows he is going to miss the cast and crew of “The Hills.”
“The only thing we write are those ‘Previously on’ scenes at the beginning of each episode, and they always end with something like ‘I was about to discover that everything is about to change.,’” DiVello said. “[At the wrap-up party], I made a shoutout, and I said that this time it’s for real. Everything is about to change for everybody.”

credit - Marc Karimzaheh @ WWD.com
~Kelli at Hills Freak

Olivia Palermo & Johannes Huebl: Porto Cervo Lovers

Living the good life overseas, Olivia Palermo and boyfriend Johannes Huebl enjoyed a relaxing holiday in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, Italy earlier this week.
Spending a little time on friend Valentino Garavani’s yacht, the "City" beauty donned a cute swimsuit as her man dutifully hosed her down following a dip in the refreshing waters.

Johannes looks amazing but Olivia could use a new swimsuit, this one isn't doing her any favors!

credit - celebrity-gossip.net /
~Kelli at Hills Freak

Josh Hansen reaches top of "The Hills"

If you're like 2.5 million other viewers, on Tuesday you tuned in to watch the final episode of the MTV series "The Hills." In that final episode, two-time defending X Games Super X champion Josh Hansen appeared due to his relationship with Stephanie Pratt, one of the stars of the wildly popular reality TV show. The two met after the final season of the show had started production, and their relationship became significant enough that Hansen figured prominently at the end.
Hansen's story is well known among supercross fans. The 26-year-old from Colorado was a rising star with several national amateur titles before going pro at 17. He accrued six regional supercross podiums between 2004 and 2005 before he lost his focus. Between a hard-partying lifestyle and a revolving door of sponsors, Hansen was on his way to being written off by the racing community as another story of lost potential.
But the past year has seen Hansen do more than just raise his profile through reality TV. He was tapped by one of the godfathers of the supercross industry, Pro Circuit's Mitch Payton, before last summer's X Games to ride a Pro Circuit Kawasaki -- a decision that paid dividends for both parties.
In April, Hansen returned to the supercross podium at Salt Lake City, winning the 250cc Lites and re-establishing himself as a threat well beyond the one-off arena of X Games. As he gears up for his shot at an X Games three-peat, it's tough not to root for Hansen. And now, thanks to "The Hills," that's exactly what millions of casual X Games fans who don't know a two-stroke from a four-stroke will be doing.
"A lot of people follow that show," he said when we asked him what it was like to be a part of "The Hills." "It's kind of crazy because I've never followed the show. I didn't know people were so pumped and hyped on it. However, I just want to be Josh the Dirt Bike Guy."
ESPN.com: Josh, how did you wind up meeting Stephanie Pratt and becoming a part of "The Hills" TV show?
Josh Hansen: Dingo [Luke "The Dingo" Trembath, star of the TV show "The Adventures of Danny & The Dingo"]. Dingo introduced me to her and got us set up right before the Vegas supercross. So I did my thing out in Vegas and came back and went on a date with her and then started hanging out with her.
Did you know who she was or anything?
Well, I kind of knew about "The Hills," like the show. Dingo explained it to me. But I didn't know her personally or anything, so it was just kind of like whatever. I just kind of went into it like, "Whatever happens, happens." She ended up being cool, and I've been hanging out with her and she's been fun. And then it just carried on and MTV got a hold of me. I wasn't really interested at first, but I did a few shows. At the ending of the show, Stephanie and I talked, and it was just a good closing to the show for her and her finding, I guess, love. It was a good ending for both of us.
I went over to Pro Circuit to see Mitch Payton at the time all of this started. He had just heard that you had been spending time in Hollywood and wasn't too into the concept of you being around that scene and hanging out with "Hollywood people."
Yeah, I think Mitch was pissed, but it wasn't like I was just up there partying every night and not doing [anything], you know? Yeah, I went up there and was doing the show and was hanging out with Stephanie, and then I would come back. I was riding and doing my stuff. After he saw that, he was fine. He just wanted to make sure I was on top of my stuff. That's what I was doing and that's what I'm doing now.
As far as the show, did they write you into it or just kind of drop in on what you and Stephanie were doing?
I don't know. ... They didn't really have to write in anything. It was all natural, you know? It was what we were working with and it just fit so good for the show. It made Stephanie happy, and I was good. I figured if it was time to go ahead and do the show, it was probably better to do it toward the ending -- like the last two final episodes -- because then it was done forever.
The show ran for six years, and you ended up being a big part of the final episode. Leading up to it, Mitch started following the show and knew the storylines and everything. I kind of sensed he was into the whole thing and you riding at the test track as the curtain came down on the show.
I think everybody just thought the worst about the whole thing right off the bat. Like, "Oh, Hansen is done racing" or "Hansen is already screwing up and going back to the old Hansen." It wasn't really like that. I think everybody was looking at it from the outside looking on in. I'm a racer, and I feel like I'm a good racer and I feel like I have the personality to do some stuff outside the sport. Nobody else really does it. I'm not going to just stick in my own little world of racing. It comes natural to me. This is what I do. This is how I want to be. People either support it or they don't. This is the way I want to live my life.

Click here to read the article in it's entirety

credit - Eric Johnson @ ESPN
~Kelli at Hills Freak

Lauren Conrad to Pen "Darker" Novel Series

Lauren Conrad is going rogue.
The L.A. Candy author says that for her next work of literary mastery, she's planning a darker spinoff of sorts featuring one of her current characters.
"I'm going to take Madison from the book and do a darker series," she said at The Hills finale party. "I already wrote a little bit and it was really fun."
L.A. Candy focuses on Jane Roberts, a young woman who moves to Hollywood, gets a job with an event planner and eventually lands a reality show.
That all sounds vaguely familiar ...
Like LC, Jane isn't always happy with her fame and the attention it brings, while her friend Madison takes the opposite approach and just eats it up.
Again, feels like we've heard this somewhere.
"I think it would be really fun to do it the other way, with someone who loves it," Conrad said. "Someone who loves fame and plays the game well."
She certainly has enough real-life material to draw on.
Lauren is still working on the third book in the Candy series, but we're already looking forward to reading the exploits of crazy Heidi Montag ... er, Madison.

credit - thehollywoodgossip.com, thanks for the heads up Sara! : )
~Kelli at Hills Freak