It’s not easy to be the new kid on a reality show, especially if that show is Netflix’s Selling Sunset, a hit so big that it’s spawned spin-offs like Selling the OC, Selling Tampa, and Selling the City in five short years (and seven long seasons). The formula is as foolproof as it is fruitful: glamorous glass real estate sold by glamorous plastic real estate agents who all defame one another in drunken, catty spectacles between closing multimillion-dollar deals. Of course, I don’t watch these shows—I watch only this one, which is all of them.
This essay was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
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So when Selling Sunset season 8 (!) dropped on Friday, September 6, and new cast member Alanna Gold strutted into the Sunset Boulevard office of the Oppenheim Group, where Selling Sunset’s agents work (or, at any rate, have desks), we—the old cast members and I—looked her up and down and deemed her a viable threat.
Gold was a mystery: She was taller and thinner and appeared younger than previous seasons’ castmates. And she has a name that sounds suspiciously like a character on a soap opera, which, I guess, she is.
She also seemed oddly demure, especially since the other agents on Selling Sunset dress as though they run sex clubs in video games, but Gold strode into work in a brown suit. We’d never seen this done before—the be-decked, be-jeweled, be-dazzled, be-clawed, be-horned old cast members and I. We’d be watching her.
As her colleagues at Oppenheim—and the audience on our couches—began to learn more about Gold (including that she thinks open-toed stilettos are appropriate footwear for walking through a poorly landscaped worksite), she let drop a piece of information. “I own a little western town out in the desert,” Gold claimed. “It’s called Pioneertown.” Then she mimed the doffing of a cowboy hat and exclaimed, “I’m the sheriff of a town! Yeehaw!”
I was shocked—stunned. I heard a loud reality show–style record scratch in my brain.
Someone with the name Alanna Gold owns Pioneertown, the little unincorporated community about 125 miles east of Los Angeles that Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Bud Abbott, and a few other showbiz folk founded in 1946? I know all about Pioneertown because for the past two years, I lived just outside it, and for the past seven months of those two years, I’d immersed myself in everything Pioneertown to write an article called “Will Success Spoil Pioneertown?” for Alta Journal Issue 27.
The impetus for that piece was a proposed zoning change that threatened to destroy the town’s character by opening the area up to chain stores and developers. Not once in the hours and hours of interviews I conducted with many prominent Pioneertown residents and what people insist on calling “stakeholders” did anyone mention that the town had an owner, much less that it was a 32-year-old woman in open-toed stilettos with the really fake-seeming name Alanna Gold.
I ran to the internet, which was ablaze with articles from reliable news outlets about Gold, the Canadian former veterinary student turned real estate agent who owned a town. How did I not know that the place I’d spent years living beside and months reporting on was owned by some woman on a reality show? I didn’t know what it even meant to own a town. Did it mean that she owned everyone’s land and houses? It had to be some reality-show nonsense or some kind of technicality.
To hear Selling Sunset’s other cast members tell it, Pioneertown was “an old movie set that [Gold] and her husband bought and turned into kind of, like, a tourist attraction.” How did I miss this major story?
I slept badly that night but returned to the series the next evening to force myself to watch “Once Alanna Time in the West,” the episode where Gold takes her castmates on a forced girls’ trip to show them around “her” town. They’d rented the place that readers of my Pioneertown piece will recognize as the doomed cluster of shipping containers previously known as the AWE Ranch. I couldn’t bear to watch the ladies get a private line dancing lesson, so I opened Instagram, Selling Sunset being a show you can easily watch while doing other things. There, I found a DM from Ben Loescher, one of my Pioneertown sources, who was heading up the effort to keep Pioneertown free of Targets and Starbucks and things. He’d forwarded me a post from the Pioneertown Gazette demanding an apology from Gold.
“To the extent that Alanna appears to own anything,” Loescher told me via email, “it’s as part of the Pioneertown Land Company, which is an LLC.” (A technicality! I knew it!) He explained to me that the Golds own a minority stake in the Pioneertown Land Company, which owns 6 or 7 parcels of the 35 that make up the Historic District, which amounts to 7 or 8 percent of the Historic District by area.
“That’s less than 1 percent of the square mile that many people think of as Pioneertown, and even less if you are talking about what the post office thinks is Pioneertown,” Loescher explained.
Furthermore, Loescher told me, the only time he’d ever seen Gold, who he assumes only became a participant in her husband’s share when they got married, was when they attended a sit-down over pizza during which the proposed zoning changes were discussed. “They were irked by the limits on large-scale development and chain stores, as well as prohibitions on festivals and events larger than 500 people,” he told me, adding that the Pioneertown home the Golds claim to own on Instagram is owned by someone else. “I don’t think there’s any property owned in Pioneertown by them as individuals.”
I next contacted Susan Burnett, a.k.a. Sue B., whom readers of my Pioneertown piece and watchers of Alta Live will know as the closest thing Pioneertown has to an actual sheriff.
I asked Burnett how everyone over there felt when they heard someone on a reality show claim to own their town. “I think people were certainly concerned with the lie itself and the misrepresentation that Pioneertown is deserted and needed saving,” she told me. As Loescher pointed out, it was rather insulting to the town’s residents, who worked for years to build and maintain the place. And the alacrity with which the media accepted and propagated this lie was shocking. Perhaps everyone’s been watching too much Schitt’s Creek.
By the next day, Gold had apologized. The same news outlets that had spread the story had replaced it with the news that she was “deeply sorry for the confusion” she’d caused and her explanation that she loves Pioneertown so much that she “simply got too excited talking about it.” Perhaps it’s true what the internet says Mark Twain once said: a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its open-toed stilettos.
I asked Burnett how this might affect Gold’s standing in the town she claimed to love so much that she got confused about owning it. “Nobody knows her,” Burnett said, “and people just think she’s stupid.”
Besides, it’s just a reality show. Pioneertown might forgive, but it probably won’t forget. “The desert has its own way of protecting itself,” Burnett told me. “It will chew you up and spit you out.”•
Stacey Grenrock Woods is a regular contributor to Esquire and a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She writes and consults on various TV shows, and has a recurring role as Tricia Thoon on Fox’s Arrested Development. Her first book is I, California.
