Back in 2013, Kristin Cavallari told The Chicago Sun-Times' Splash section that producers on The Hills "did everything short of handing us a script." But Whitney Port, who also starred on the reality series, recalls things differently.
"I wouldn’t put it as staged," Port recently explained to Us Weekly. "Sometimes we had to make some situations more dramatic for the sake of making an entertaining TV show. But it’s not like we were ever given scripts."
In the past, both Lauren Conrad and Audrina Patridge have commented on just how much the show's events were manipulated by MTV staff during production. "I think the story they told wasn't a dishonest one," Conrad said in an Allure interview back in 2012. "The way they did it sometimes was. [Cameras] aren't going to be there for everything. Sometimes two of their main characters will get into a fight, and that's important to the story line. The [producers] need that reenacted."
Patridge remembers the series shifting from very representative of real life to being increasingly more shaped. "The Hills, I feel, in the beginning, was very real, very raw,” she said in 2011. "But it kind of started transitioning into being guided and manipulated, and us kind of coming up with story lines and things."
At the time of publication, representatives for Cavallari had not replied to a request for comment from the newly minted author and mother of three.
In the case of whether or not The Hills was real or fake, though, the jury — the cast, rather — is still out.
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