When the Sarah Rose Miss Teen Princess America Pageant came to Mount Rose, Minnesota it added lying, cheating and hiding criminal evidence to its list of winning feminine attributes such as charm, talent and petal-fresh skin. This is the world of Drop Dead Gorgeous, a satirical look at a small-town beauty contest.

Drop Dead Gorgeous unleashes an unsuspecting documentary film team into this outrageous fictional world and dares to report back on the deep, dark secrets of small-town American life - and the quest of one determined teen to keep her dignity and dreams amidst the malevolence. The result is a savagely fun and twisted comedy that goes to the edge of what is acceptable and tips all the sacred cows along the way.

But despite the seething, scabrous events chronicled in Drop Dead Gorgeous, almost all of them have a basis in reality. Beauty pageants have produced more than their headline-winning share of mishaps, anorexics, jail sentences and ridiculously choreographed dance numbers - it's just that Mount Rose has done it all in one single contest.

Writer Lona Williams knows this irreverent world because she went through it herself and lived to tell the tale. Williams is from a small town in Minnesota and participated in the Junior Miss Pageant. She then went on to become first runner-up at the national competition in Mobile, Alabama. "It's not like I was raised to be in a pageant. But, like one of the contestants in the movie says, `If you're 17 and you're not a total fry, it's just what you do.'"

"There is an undercurrent of truth to it all," Williams explains about her script. "I actually cut the ribbon for the new sewer system in my hometown and rode in a swan float. At Nationals, we did a very bad `physical fitness' number with step ladders." But Williams says she always felt like an outsider, so it was easy to observe and not take it all too seriously.

For Williams, taking it all too seriously is the one fatal downfall of the otherwise down-home folks in fictional Mount Rose. "The more seriously people take anything in life, the funnier it becomes, and the easier to parody," she explains.

And parody she did, to her heart's content, unleashing a torrent of American-buying, God-fearing, lip-synching ladies who will stop at nothing to succeed.

Williams forged a group of extreme characters drawn from real-life small-town pageant contestants, including the disgustingly rich, the cloyingly popular, the spectacularly untalented, the pathetically outcast and the simply desperate to escape. Although most of the characters are teens, she did not flinch at placing them in the midst of some rather absurdly adult situations. "Posers and hypocrites, big dreams and criminal impulses are not exclusive to adults, especially in a place like Mount Rose," says Williams. "Part of what makes pageants so crazy is that they evoke all these grown-up emotions from kids. The odd perversity of it was something that appealed to me. So I took the insanity that already exists and pushed it to another level."

Williams' script was so adventurously bold in its comedy that producer Gavin Polone immediately sensed it was something to which both teens and adults would respond with shock, outrage and laughter. "It was just one of the funniest scripts I ever read," says Polone. "Coming from Lona Williams, who has experienced Minnesota pageants first hand, it had the perfect combination of being pointedly real and yet outrageously comical at the same time. Parts of it are affectionate and parts of it are really very, very darkly funny."

The politically incorrect setting of a beauty pageant didn't concern the producer. "For better or worse, beauty pageants are something very much in the public consciousness. I mean, a lot of people still sit in front of their television set, rooting for their home state in the Miss America contest. It's something that seems to be really ingrained in our culture," explains Polone. "America is about winning. We like our heroes to rise to the top and beat everyone else, and that's exactly what beauty pageants are really about. Whether you love or loathe beauty pageants, the situation in our fictional town of Mount Rose is still hilarious."

To capture the situation in Mount Rose, Polone brought in director Michael Patrick Jann, with whom he had worked on the no-holds-barred MTV comedy series "The State." The producer knew he needed someone with a brash sense of humor and the guts to go all the way on the screen. "Michael really understood the movie in a way that went beyond other people, and Lona and I just connected to him," comments Polone. "We were really in sync about how to approach the comedy."

Jann was intrigued by the opportunity to go for broke - skewering just about every possible American institution and leaving nothing, except the purity of dreams, sacred. "There was nothing middle-of-the-road about Lona's script at all. It came out swinging," Jann comments. "And that really attracted me. This wasn't some run-of-the-mill romantic comedy or something you might see on TV. It was a very bravely drawn satire with a real, explosive point of view."

Jann was intrigued by the opportunity to go for broke - skewering just about every possible American institution and leaving nothing, except the purity of dreams, sacred. "There was nothing middle-of-the-road about Lona's script at all. It came out swinging," Jann comments. "And that really attracted me. This wasn't some run-of-the-mill romantic comedy or something you might see on TV. It was a very bravely drawn satire with a real, explosive point of view."

Jann also loved the documentary style carefully cultivated by Lona Williams. "I loved her concept because if you're from a small town and you have any sort of big dreams to move on or to be something, you've got to get noticed," says Jann, "so the beauty pageant becomes the end all, be-all for young women in Mount Rose. But what is so absurd is how meaningful it becomes to them, way out of proportion with things like health, honor and even obeying the law. If you're outside of it the whole thing makes no sense, but if you're inside of it you're willing to do pretty much whatever it takes to win. So it was perfect to do it as a mockumentary, revealing that inside reality."

The documentary team comes to Mount Rose with one burning question: what does it take to become the Miss Teen Princess America? Jann summarizes the answer: "What is unearthed is basically the story of a bunch of extremely ambitious girls, only one of whom can be the winner. Mount Rose takes that basic teenage and American fantasy to the limit."

MICHAEL PATRICK JANN (Director) makes his directorial debut with the wickedly bright dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous. Jann began his career while still a student at New York University, moonlighting at MTV in the News Division and founding the college comedy troupe The State, which performed in a successful Off-Broadway show. Combining the two, he went on to write, direct and perform in the unconventional MTV comedy series "The State."

Jann's other directing credits include commercials for ESPN and for Sprite featuring basketball great, Grant Hill.

GAVIN POLONE (Producer) partnered with Judy Hofflund in 1997 to form Hofflund/Polone, a management and production company. They recently produced A Stir of Echoes starring Kevin Bacon and written and directed by David Koepp. Their first feature together was the HBO movie "When Trumpets Fade," and they have also produced four pilots for television."

Polone was an agent at ICM from 1987 through 1989. He then moved to UTA from 1989 through 1996, eventually becoming a partner there.

JUDY HOFFLUND (Producer) started her career as the first woman in the mailroom at Creative Artists Agency. Following her time at Creative Artists Agency, she moved on to form the successful boutique agency, Intertalent. Intertalent later merged with United Talent Agency where she was a partner for two and a half years.

Hofflund is now partnered with Gavin Polone in Hofflund/Polone and together they recently produced A Stir of Echoes. Their first feature together was the HBO movie "When Trumpets Fade" and they have also produced four pilots for television.

LONA WILLIAMS (Writer, Executive Producer) has written extensively for television. Among her many credits, she most recently served as co-executive producer of "The Drew Carey Show," and currently has a three-year overall deal with Disney Television.

She recently sold New Line Cinema another darkly comic script titled Sugar and Spice, the story of a popular High School cheerleader who becomes pregnant with the star quarterback's child. Wendy Finerman will produce the film directed by Hank Perlman. New Line expects production to begin later this spring.

MICHAEL SPILLER (Director of Photography) studied Film at S.U.N.Y. Purchase in upstate New York and there met his long-time collaborator, Hal Hartley. Spiller has shot six feature films for Mr. Hartley; their most recent collaboration, Henry Fool, provided their third trip to Cannes. Apart from his work with Hartley, Spiller has photographed the films The House of Yes, Niagra, Niagra, Search and Destroy, Walking and Talking, and shared credit on Chinese Coffee.

His television work includes the hit HBO series "Sex and the City," two seasons of "The Adventures of Pete & Pete," for Nickelodeon, and the PBS special "Punch and Judy get Divorced." Spiller has also shot numerous documentary projects that have taken him around the world for HBO, PBS and BBC, as well as extensive work in the music video and promotional and commercial advertising fields. Spiller and Michael Patrick Jann first met on a series of commercials for ESPN and collaborated several times before undertaking Drop Dead Gorgeous.

RUTH AMMON (Production Designer) took on the task of creating Mount Rose, Minnesota, a picture-perfect heartland small town with a kitschy surface and a killer instinct underneath. Ammon's previous credits include Gideon's Webb, Monument Avenue, Lust, Who's The Man?, Fly By Night, Strictly Business, Hollow Boy and Tales From the Darkside.

JANICE HAMPTON, A.C.E. (Editor) has collaborated with John Waters on the films Hairspray, Cry Baby, Serial Mom and his latest work, Pecker. Other notable directors she has worked with include Garry Marshall (Nothing in Common), Penny Marshall (Jumping Jack Flash), Wim Wenders (Hammett), and Sylvester Stallone (Rocky II). Additional films include Angus, Separate Lives, Ghost in the Machine, Pump Up the Volume, Woo, and Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6. She most recently completed writer/director Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You.

DAVID CODRON (Editor) lists among his feature credits The Opposite of Sex, which garnered four 1999 Independent Spirit Award nominations, including Best First Feature. Additionally, he cut The Last Step, Star Struck, Hear No Evil, Dr. Hugo and Fishing with George. Additionally, he has edited 14 episodes of "Flipper" and a number of movies-of-the-week, including "Murder in New Hampshire," for which he received an A.C.E. Award nomination for Best Editing.

MIMI MELGAARD (Costume Designer) had an opportunity to go over-the-top with her designs for the Miss Teen Princess America contest. She has designed costumes for Brown Requiem, The Last Night, Tiger, Black Circle Boys, How To Be a Player and The Little Death. For television, she was costume supervisor on the series Northern Exposure. Her television credits include "Sleepwalker," "Three" and the movies-of-the-week "Enemy" and "Bloodhounds."

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (Composer) made his first impact on mass consciousness as singer/keyboardist/conceptualist for DEVO, generating many hit songs and albums and providing inspiration for much of the electronic music to emerge in its' wake. He has also lent his talents to commercial sound design, providing music for over 300 television commercials and winning a Clio Award, and scoring for television, most memorably for "Pee Wee's Playhouse" and MTV's "Liquid Television." Four years ago, Mothersbaugh began to focus his musical energies on scoring for feature films, and his credits in this realm include the #1 hit Rugrats, The Movie; Rushmore, The New Age, Bottle Rocket, and Happy Gilmore.