Is MTV’s Buckwild Fake: Cast Told What to Say, Fake Fights, Filmed Out of Sequence, Re-Shoots

December 8, 2012 by Hollywoodite

Billed as a replacement for MTV’s Jersey Shore and a panacea until TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo season two rolls around, MTV’s Buckwild season one will premiere January 3, 2013 after which regional spin-offs in Texas and Alabama may follow (producers registered Buckwild domain names for those areas too). Watch a preview of Buckwild season one.

The main concept though seems to be a derivative reality show version of a documentary, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.

The reality show is causing consternation with locals who fear Buckwild will forever sully its environs as did Jersey Shore its local area. So much so that local officials are publicly pleading that the show never make it to air.

It’s all free publicity though, and the show’s coming in less than a month in all its (allegedly) completely fake glory if this account from a neighbour at one of the locations, Beechwood Drive, is to be believed. The woman’s account appears to be credible, as it sounds completely in line with what we already know about how reality shows are filmed: they’re shot out of sequence, producers feed lines, confrontations are staged, and when that fails producers edit together stories and edit dialog into situations that never happened.

The neighbor says these things took place over six-weeks in the spring and she’s across the street from where the girls in the cast were living in a rented house. All while production disrupted the street and the cast caused noise disturbances that required police intervention.

The show, when it comes out next year, is going to be as contrived as TLC’s Breaking Amish from the sounds of it. Since the young, middle-class cast is from other areas of the state, and the auxiliary cast isn’t local either. The neighbor says she watched a visitor from out-of-town being fed lines and repeatedly staging a confrontation with the cast all while pretending to be a disgruntled resident.

“The first few weeks we didn’t hear too much from [the cast who moved in across the street],” she said. And then, one day, half-a-dozen black SUVs with out-of-state plates showed up and that’s when things got weird.

For the next month, Whitman said the MTV camera crew’s vehicles choked the narrow street and blocked the entrances to people’s homes at different hours. She said they frequently shot in the middle of the night, bathed the area in light and seemed not to care whether they interfered with the lives of people in the neighborhood.

Whitman said [the production crew] were obnoxious and inconsiderate… and then there were the show’s stars.

“I want to say that it all has to do with being young,” she said. “Someone tells you they can make you famous and give you some money, and you think sure, but if I’d behaved like those kids did when I was their age, my father would have hung me upside down until I came to my senses.”

The show’s production was chaotic and noisy, but Whitman said the worst thing was the language, which often turned profane. ”It got so bad, I’d leave the house and have to put my hands over my 5-year-old’s ears.”

Whitman said the neighborhood has a lot of young children. Nobody was happy about the disturbances, but there seemed to be little anyone could do about it. “The police were up here,” she said. “They came up a couple of times to tell them to quiet it down, but the second the cops were gone, they went right back to it.”

That the cast and crew could continue shooting where they left off might underscore something Whitman noticed. For a reality show, a lot of Buckwild looked faked. “Of course, it was made up,” she said. “All of this was coaxed, coerced, scripted or whatever.”

Whitman said she watched them re-shoot and tweak scenes. She said, “The big moving-in scene was shot two weeks after the girls were already living there. They shot the scene with the kid throwing trash into the back of the garbage truck at the end of the street. The old people who live there have no idea what they were doing outside of their house.”

Some of the confrontations, she said, are also staged. In the show’s promotional trailer, a black woman with dark red hair is seen confronting the cast. Whitman said it was completely manufactured. “She doesn’t live here,” Whitman said. “She was visiting some people next door. The director got her to come over. He told her what to say. They must have shot that scene six times.”

The girls moved out in the middle of May. Members of the film crew took over the house as a place to stay, except for when it was needed for re-shoots. ”We didn’t have much trouble from the camera guys,” she said.

Whitman remembers wistfully when MTV used to play music videos. Buckwild seems so far from that, and the show bothers her. It bothers her that Buckwild appears to be about a group of mostly middle-class kids, some of whom went to school in South Hills, doing their best to make the state look awful. And she hates that they did this in her neighborhood, across the street from her house. – via The Charlseton Gazette.