Reality moves up to the big time

For years, Hollywood has treated screenwriters like dirt, but here’s the ultimate indignity: Now they’re making movies without using a writer at all. On the other hand, after seeing “The Real Cancun,” the first reality-TV-inspired spring break teen comedy, I have to admit the movie’s dialogue is a cut above anything I heard in “Tomcats” or “Stealing Harvard.”

This may come as a shock, but the R-rated “The Real Cancun,” which opens Friday, is full of sex, wet T-shirt contests, girls making out with one another, tons of talk about sex, a teeny bit of snorkeling, Jell-O shots (if you don’t know what that is, they may actually card you for being too old to see the film) and -- did I mention sex already?

Produced by the creative team behind MTV’s “The Real World,” the film focuses on 16 kids culled from auditions at college campuses who spend their spring break carousing in Mexico. Their every action was recorded by a 100-person crew that included teams of cameramen, soundmen, story coordinators, film editors, audio experts and helicopter pilots, all under the supervision of “The Real World’s” Jonathan Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, who have such street cred that they get a big “produced by” plug in the film’s advertising material.

If the movie hits box office pay dirt, it could cause a seismic shift in the ways teen movies are made, just as the runaway success of “American Idol” and “Survivor” has revolutionized the look -- and economics -- of network television. In a business in which a project can languish for years while studios spend millions on script rewrites and development costs, “The Real Cancun” was shot in eight days last month, was edited in 2 1/2 weeks and will be in 2,000 theaters this weekend, less than five weeks after it finished filming. The film cost $7.5 million, with nary a penny to any actor, screenwriter or personal publicist. The kids do it for the exposure or, as Murray dryly put it: “We remind them that they are essentially exploiting themselves.”

And there’s more to come: Universal Pictures has a rival project called “Quest,” produced by Mike Fleiss, who created the unscripted series “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” for Fox, that features six guys from the University of Colorado who drag one of their buddies to Cabo San Lucas on spring break to lose his virginity. Filmed in nine days last month, the film was originally scheduled for release May 9. When New Line moved its movie up to this weekend, Universal decided to hold “Quest” until later this year.

Twentieth Century Fox also has its own reality-TV-inspired film, “From Justin to Kelly,” which stars “American Idol” favorites Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini in a scripted musical romantic comedy set -- hey, at spring break! -- in Miami. These movies are the latest evidence that we wallow in a confessional culture. If every generation has its own aesthetic, the dominant one today is exhibitionism. Daytime TV, from Jerry Springer on down, is full of people pathetically seeking a threadbare sliver of notoriety. The writers who once used their loony families or wartime horrors as raw material for a novel are now penning memoirs, including everything from “The Liar’s Club” to “Jarhead.” One of the hot films at Sundance in January was “Capturing the Friedmans,” a documentary about a family whose father is arrested on child pornography charges.

Reality TV has simply taken the trend to a new high or low, depending on your degree of fascination with people’s tawdry fantasies and aspirations. In fact, reality TV’s very ubiquity has skeptics wondering if it can cross over to the big screen. MTV’s “Jackass the Movie” was a hit last fall, but the jury is still out on whether young moviegoers will pay $9.50 to see something in a theater they can get at home for free. Or as Sam Goldwyn memorably put it, when asked to analyze Hollywood’s early 1950s box-office slump: “Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad TV for nothing?”

Frank sexuality

Reality TV producers insist their movies have plenty of frank sexuality and female nudity that you can’t experience on television. “The Real Cancun” even got an endorsement of sorts from the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which gave it an R for, among other things, “partying.”

A popular episode of “Joe Millionaire” featured a couple having sex off-screen, with their sounds approximated by the use of tongue-in-cheek subtitles. The new reality-inspired movies aren’t so coy. “The idea of a guy losing his virginity was something I knew the networks wouldn’t ever let me do, even Fox, which will let me do just about anything,” says “Quest’s” Fleiss. “Plus, we’ve got dwarfs -- you wouldn’t go to spring break without dwarfs, would you? Our dwarfs, Alex and Josh, wear their caps turned backward and are totally cool. They’re the kings of Cabo and are just like the other college guys, except they’re 3 1/2 feet tall.”

If “Quest” were a typical Hollywood movie, Fleiss would probably be inundated by notes from anxious studio execs asking, can we lose the dwarfs? But it’s hard to meddle when a movie is in the theaters soon after it was shot. One of Hollywood’s biggest problems in chasing youth-culture dollars has been the sheer molasses-like slowness of making movies. In the glory days of Sam Arkoff’s American International Pictures, a movie like “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” was shot in two weeks and playing at a drive-in two months later. But even a quickie teen comedy today has a yearlong gestation.

The skateboard documentary “Dogtown and Z Boys” was a hit at Sundance last year but, despite enormous teen interest in the sport, the first studio skateboard movie, “Grind,” featuring such pro boarders as Bam Margera, Chad Fernandez and Bucky Lasek, won’t reach theaters until August.

“With ‘Cancun,’ by Day 3 of the shoot, we could’ve sent all the kids home. I knew we had the movie,” says Richard Brener, the New Line production executive who developed the project. “We’d be watching in the control room, rooting them on, going, ‘Come on, Dave, make your move!’ When he did something, we’d all jump up and cheer.”

The reality TV pros say the secret to success is having a strong concept and casting people the audience can relate to. It’s hardly a coincidence that the kid who emerges as a star in both “Cancun” and “Quest” isn’t a party monster but a guy who’s a virgin. In “Cancun,” it’s Alan, a shy 18-year-old from a small town in Texas who’s never had a drink, much less a woman, at least until he spends a week in Cancun.

The producers also use casting to create story twists or potential conflicts. “If you take a kid who’s never drank and put him in a place where everyone is drinking all the time, you’re going to have something, whether he ends up drinking or not,” says Brener. “Or you find a guy who likes girls who are already in relationships and put him with a girl who’s in a relationship but is beginning to question it. Well, imagine the possibilities.”

Bunim and Murray bring a team of editors who cut footage together each day. They also rely on a squad of story coordinators in the field with their camera crews, turning in notes about which relationships have the most intriguing story potential. “It gives our crew a focus on where to be the next day, knowing that Alan may turn out to be a key character but that Brittany may not,” says Murray. “It’s why we chose 16 kids. We knew from our experience with ‘The Real World’ that some kids would become the stars, while others would be supporting players.”

If “The Real Cancun” is a hit, it will be because reality is disarming. We react differently to drama when it’s real -- or at least appears to be. I found myself being far more forgiving of the “Cancun” cast’s dumb antics and hapless philosophizing because, by its very ungainly appearance, I knew the movie hadn’t been scripted by a hack screenwriter or homogenized by middle-brow studio notes.

“Reality-based shows or movies are a lot like a sporting event, “ says Fleiss. “You’re always going, ‘Arwgh! He fumbled!’ Or, ‘Yes! He scored!’ There’s an unpredictability that you can’t get with scripted material.”

It’s a fascinating commentary on our culture that today’s younger, media-saturated audiences are so wary of having their emotions manipulated by cynical advertising or entertainment that they view reality, no matter how banal or vulgar, as having an authenticity that more polished storytelling can’t match. In its own way, “The Real Cancun” is a genuinely post-modern teen sex comedy, because the kids on the screen know how kids act in teen sex comedies so well that they can re-create it on their own, without a script. It pushes the movie into an odd irony-free zone, where the cliches, played earnestly straight, lose their staleness.

“You’ve seen this movie 100 times before, but only through the eyes of a 35-year-old screenwriter,” says Brener. “Even though we followed all the same formulas, when it plays out as reality, it feels new. Strange, isn’t it?”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.