Documented irreverence

Between the recent surge in documentaries designed to reach a broad audience and the concurrent trend of incessantly phony and contrived reality TV shows, one can get rather confused these days as to what is really real.

Enter Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, the writing-directing team behind the mockumentary “Mail Order Wife,” out Friday. Sort of like the Wonder Twins of gonzoid, out-there underground filmmaking, both Gurland and Botko have impressively controversial resumes to their credit.

The pair, who include public access television and professional wrestling among their influences, specialize in faux documentaries in which the line between oddball reality and confrontational comedy becomes obliterated. “Mail Order Wife” comes on the heels of a series of short films the two have made together, including “Gramaglia,” in which Gurland -- who often appears in front of the camera as well -- helps a guy humiliate two women before they do the same to him, and “Broken Condom,” in which Gurland accuses his pregnant wife of conceiving through deceptive means and tricks her into taking a polygraph test.

For their feature debut as a partnership, Gurland again appears under his own name, this time as a documentary filmmaker with questionable ethics making a movie about a sad sack in New York City who becomes involved with a mail-order bride service. Gurland eventually steals the girl away for himself. But when she leaves him, he joins forces with the first dupe and together they plot their revenge. Performances by Adrian Martinez (who plays the would-be groom) and Eugenia Yuan (who plays Lichi, the mail-order bride) go a long way toward selling the increasingly preposterous circumstances.

“You go crazy places in documentaries,” says Botko, 35, by way of explaining his interest in mimicking the form of nonfiction film. “Because it’s supposed to be real, you can twist and turn the story a lot more than a traditional narrative. Anything can happen if it’s real life.”

Controversial film

Between the two of them, Gurland is decidedly more infamous. Having started the New York Underground Film Festival with his then-filmmaking partner Todd Phillips (who has gone on to direct such commercial successes as “Road Trip” and “Old School”), the duo made a documentary for HBO called “Frat House,” an expose of college fraternity hazing rituals that included scenes of the filmmakers themselves being hazed.

That film shared the Grand Jury Prize in Documentary at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival but was never aired by the network following threats of lawsuits and allegations that the filmmakers had coerced behavior from their subjects or even created scenes whole cloth.

With some distance from the flap, Gurland, 33, is now rather philosophical: “Honestly, I don’t regret any of it. From a moral point of view I’m very happy with the movie. HBO knows we did not fake anything. They might have said that to protect themselves, but there is nothing in the film that is staged.”

As for his relationship to his former partner, Phillips, and their divergent careers, the normally freewheeling Gurland is diplomatic.

“Friends, is how I would characterize it. Friendship. Platonic friendship.” Perking back up, Gurland adds, “He’s loaded and I’m broke. That’s how I would characterize our career paths.”

All this would make Botko the presumably staid, holding-it-together half of the duo. Not quite. Botko is himself notorious for a series of short films he made in which he claimed to have served his father, sister and step-relatives desserts that were tainted by various bodily fluids and road kill. Though he does allow that he gets along much better with his family now, and the films served as a great form of therapy for him, he is tight-lipped on whether they were true accounts of his actions.

As he explains, “I don’t really win either way, if I say they’re real or not. If I say they’re real, that disappoints a lot of people, including my family. And if I say they’re not real, that disappoints a whole other round of people.

“Are they? Based on my recent track record you can probably guess.”

Men at play

All of which brings up a basic question -- Why can’t these boys just play nice? -- to which Gurland responds, “Filmmaking is ‘playing.’ In life you’re forced to be nice. When you’re playing, why not play a little dirty?

“It’s not my goal to provoke people,” Gurland continued, “or to disturb people. I guess you could say that’s my sense of humor, and my goal is to make people laugh. I think that kind of stuff is funny and I hope other people think it’s funny. I prefer when people like my work.”

For his part, Botko says, “I always just look at it as extreme storytelling. I want to go as far as I can and still have the audience on board. So wherever that goes, I’m looking for that line. But I don’t think about it as provoking. It’s just what’s the most interesting thing that can happen here now.”

The two filmmakers raised their relatively modest budget for “Mail Order Wife” (Botko estimates it at around $750,000) in part through the intervention of director Doug Liman (“Go,” “The Bourne Identity”), who also assisted in developing the script and is credited as an executive producer.

Describing his attraction to Gurland, Botko and “Mail Order Wife,” Liman says, “I’m not somebody who goes through Hollywood without making enemies. I’m very, very opinionated, I’m not very political and I do what has to be done. And I respond to other filmmakers who leave a similar swath of destruction.”

Perhaps in their best trick of all, it turns out that rather than living their lives as the misanthropic pranksters they seem from their work, both Gurland and Botko describe themselves as dedicated family men.

Gurland acknowledges the seeming disconnect. “What I would argue is that we’re phonies,” he says with his trademark blend of partly serious, partly joking. “We portray ourselves as being rock ‘n’ roll misogynists,” he said, but at the end of the day they dutifully go home to their wives and children.