When the makers of “American Cannibal” — which opens today at Cinema Village — began to follow the television writers Dave Roberts and Gil Ripley in their efforts to come up with a reality show and make some money, no one could have known exactly how low the writers would go in their quest.

Their descent into the black hole of reality programming is sometimes hard to watch, but often fascinating. At the onset, Mr. Ripley confesses: “I just have to convince myself that reality TV is not as bad as I think it is.” “American Cannibal” shows that it is much, much worse.

The co-directors of the documentary, Mike Nigro and Perry Grebin, have culled two years’ worth of footage of the writers brainstorming pornographic ideas, looking for people willing to eat other people on camera, and coping with a hot blond hypoglycemic in a coma.

On film it is not possible to tell if the pair are talented writers, but they are smart, funny guys. The two quickly abandoned their efforts at highbrow entertainment. Their clever but poorly executed idea for a sitcom that mashed “The Golden Girls” and “Sex and the City” in its first episode was passed over, and their idea for a documentary series that would follow NYC firefighter recruits failed to find a buyer early on.

So the duo resorted to pitching reality shows — one about cannibalism and another about deflowering virgins — to a porn promoter in the back of a strip club.

The tagline of their pitch for “Virgin Territory” — “When you win it, you lose it” — seems an apt description for what transpires on screen.

Would-be producer Kevin Blatt was pleased with their pitches and hoped that working with the two writers would bring him the credibility he craved. The show that the three moved forward on was called “The Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge.” Mr. Roberts’s rationale? “The money’s green.”

They started looking for contestants willing to do whatever it takes to get on reality television. The “winners” who agreed to compete arrived on an island, where they were told that they would have to eat each other to survive.

Switching between pitch meetings, production outtakes, and talking heads, the co-directors of “American Cannibal” expose the superficiality, redundancy, and idiocy that have always been rumored to plague television production.

“American Cannibal” goes on to show just how reality-show contestants are used and abused by shows that dangle remote chances of fame in front of them. As the writers are shown coming up with more and more ludicrous situations to get the contestants into, their passive malleability becomes more disturbing. At one point, when the host of the show leaves in the midst of filming the pilot, the director retorts: “I don’t care WHAT you tell the f***ing contestants! We don’t have to explain stuff to them.”

But the fact that people with hard bodies and small brains will sign on to embarrass themselves on reality television is nothing new. The fascinating aspect of “American Cannibal” is how everyone involved with “The Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge” — not just the contestants — makes slippery-slope trade-offs for a fleeting chance that they will get what they want down the road.

Messrs. Roberts and Ripley want to be successful writers, Mr. Blatt wants to be seen as a legitimate producer, and the hypoglycemic wants to be in Playboy.

Things do not end well. Messrs. Ripley and Roberts part ways, and the money invested in the show and the footage are wasted.

The finished product of “American Cannibal” is at times a bit unwieldy, but Messrs. Nigro and Grebin have created a disturbing portrait of reality television gone wrong.

As events begin to wind to their painful conclusion, it becomes hard to distinguish the foibles of the contestants from the writers, producers, and others on-screen. As the tagline for the film puts it: “Some people are so hungry for fame … They’ll swallow anything.”