In 2005, a student sex scandal rocked New England’s 200-year-old Milton Academy prep school. A 15-year-old girl was caught with five varsity athletes in the boys’ locker room.
The incident, which became national news, also became the starting point of a book, “Restless Virgins,” written by two alums who’d graduated several years earlier.
The book, a series of interviews with students, revealed a culture of sex and drugs among the rich kids.
While the book reviews weren’t great — one called it “prurient,” while customer reviews mostly found it boring — it still made it to the extended New York Times Best-seller List.
How could you fail with a title like that?
Now, Lifetime has fictionalized the book in a TV movie — though the “Restless Virgins” title remains.
Big surprise? Turns out that hardly any of the students are virgins or restless.
In the movie, they mostly seem happy to be rich, in prep school and free to have as much sex as they want.
The movie centers around outcast Emily (Vanessa Marano), a middle-class student who runs the school newspaper and hasn’t been accepted to an Ivy League school.
Emily is hot for Lucas (Max Lloyd-Jones), a scholarship student who used to be Emily’s pal, but has since gone over to the dark side. He is now one of the popular jocks who hangs only with the “Elites” — the top, richest girls.
Lucas is living the good life (we learn later that he is a virgin, but isn’t restless because he’s saving himself for someone special), and finds Emily annoying.
In real life, Emily would not be one of the loser girls because she’s flat-out gorgeous and smart as can be.
Anyway, one thing the seniors traditionally do each year is pass something memorable onto the juniors.
Dylan (Charlie Carver), the top jock lacrosse player and son of a US senator (Timothy Busfield) — who is also an alum of the school — finally comes up with a great plan.
The jocks will ask one of the “Elites” for sex in the locker room, film it with a hidden camera and give the DVD to the privileged juniors as their parting gift.
When Lucas — who no longer finds Emily annoying and is falling in love with her — leaves her at the carnival to go make the video with the guys, she is obviously angry.
So angry, in fact that, that when she investigates, she comes upon the video and uploads it to the school news site — even though Lucas, of course, wasn’t there. Ooops.
Most of this — sex video, school newspaper girl, and even Emily and Lucas — is fiction. But with a title like ”Restless Virgins,” who cares?
Meanwhile, the acting is quite good and the kids extremely beautiful, even though the real sex scandal story was very different. But it coulda and woulda been just like the movie if they had a video camera. And got outed by the angry-yet-courageous school newspaper editor.