Who is Christopher LaVoie? Man behind ‘4 Days’ reality shows has history of run-ins with police, dubious business ventures and is currently on probation
Christopher LaVoie is a man who’d rather walk into the eye of a hurricane than stay in an elevator.
“I’m not a guy who likes to be around the spotlight much. And I hate being on TV. I don’t like it,” he says. “I’m kind of anti-TV or anti-celebrities. I find it boring.”
He’s talking now, but LaVoie is no more anti-celebrities than he is anti-reality TV. He’s the man behind four reality shows that have gone viral in the past several years, all of them about the lives of a group of reality television stars, the “4 Days” reality show, “The Choice” and its spin-offs, “The Housewives” and “The Real Housewives,” and more recently, “Project Runway.”
But it’s when he talks about a TV show he’s created called “Downtown,” which is a sort of “Inside Edition for reality stars”—specifically, a reality show that follows a group of women who live in Los Angeles’s Chinatown and work in Hollywood at a real-estate development firm that’s in the middle of a divorce.
“It’s kind of like an insider’s look at their lives,” he says. “I’ve got a whole TV show. I’m actually making these very small money for myself as a filmmaker. And I’m doing it on my own time.”
Lavoie, who describes himself as an “artist,” says he started that process by going back to high school, where he worked as a DJ, to shoot “The Choice”-style videos on a Sony H