How real are reality shows? MTV’s “Why Can’t I Be You?” seems more like fantasy.

Last summer, Amy Laslett, ’04, appeared on the show and experienced the deception first hand.

It all started one day when Laslett and her friends were sitting in their cafeteria at Occidental College. A casting director approached them and asked if they would like to be on a reality show.

They said no at first, but Laslett and her friend Maddie Knaup reconsidered when the casting director told them about the $1000 each would receive.

The premise of “Why Can’t I Be You?” is this: one person chooses someone else that they want to be like. In theory, these people don’t know each other. The host then approaches that person on camera, tells them about their admirer and offers them $1,000 to let the admirer follow them around for 48 hours.

Laslett and Knaup decided that Knaup was going to pretend to be shy and look up to Laslett as someone who is more outgoing.

“She’s really not shy at all.” Laslett said, “She’s one of my best friends at school. We’re in the same sorority and on student government together. But the whole time I had to pretend to not know her.”

When they went to the studio to audition, the casting director was the only one who knew they were actually friends. “We basically had to act the whole time,” Laslett said.

The producers interviewed both separately for two hours. They asked Laslett whether she had a boyfriend, what her friends were like, what she did on campus, and how she talks to boys.

Knaup told them she wanted to learn to organize events, dress better, and talk to boys.

The producers asked Laslett how she would teach Knaup these things; her answers became the basis for the episode’s plot.

“They made us sign like 20 contracts that said not to talk about the show—which obviously I’m not doing—and there was a bunch of stuff about money, which neither of us read,” Laslett said.

Afterwards they both had to meet with a psychiatrist for an hour “just to make sure we weren’t crazy or anything,” Laslett said.

The majority of the show was filmed in two 12-hour shoots on a Friday and Saturday. They then had a weeklong break, and another six-hour day the following Friday.

“During the break they looked us up on like Facebook and MySpace and found out that we really knew each other,” Laslett said, “but they didn’t really care.”

Before shooting, the set designer and director looked at Laslett’s dorm and took a lot of her things to where they would be shooting—a hostel in Santa Monica set up to look like Laslett’s dorm room.

Shooting at Occidental was too expensive for the show’s low budget; instead, all the campus shots were of Santa Monica City College—“California College” on the show. All indoor shots were at the hostel.

Most of the people on the show—except Laslett and about five of her friends—were people staying at the hostel during filming.

At the beginning of the show, host Nick Zano tells the audience “There’s no experts, no stylists, no professionals.” He also repeatedly uses the phrase “in just 48 hours.”

While most of what they did and said wasn’t actually written down (except for a few of Knaup’s lines in the beginning), there was definitely a lot of direction.

“Mostly they would just tell us what needed to happen in the scene,” Laslett said. “But with each take they got more and more specific, until they just told us what to say.”

Each 30-second scene had to be shot about six times. “It wasn’t like they just followed us around with cameras for two days,” Laslett said.

Scenes were shot out of sequence, so Laslett, Knaup, and all extras had three outfits for each of the two days.

“It’s really more like a TV show than a reality show,” Laslett said.

One aspect of the show was Laslett teaching Knaup how to plan events, so Knaup helped her with an auction she was organizing. At the auction, the producers told Laslett to invite Knaup up to the front and auction off a date with her.

“It was supposed to be this surprise thing, but everyone knew about it,” Laslett said.

At the end is a “reveal” segment, where the host talks to Knaup about what she learned and (supposedly) has Laslett dress Knaup. This was filmed on the second Friday. While it took six hours to do everything, only two hours were spent filming. The rest were spent in hair styling, make-up and wardrobe—exactly what they claim they don’t do in the show’s opening.

Instead of having Laslett dress Knaup, a stylist bought them outfits.

Since appearing on the show, Laslett says she has been recognized a couple times around Los Angeles.

“It was so funny, just because everything was so ridiculous,” Laslett said. “I actually would have done it without the money, just because it was such a crazy experience.”