The drinking, the drug abuse, the arrest — they really happened.

The bizarre kidnapping his mother arranged, and the detention in an "extreme rehabilitation" facility, were also snatched from Monty Lapica's real-life experiences.

But the abuse by guards, the attempted transport to Samoa, the daring escape at Honolulu International Airport — those have to have been made up, right?

"No," said Lapica, the real and fictionalized central figure of the new independent film "Self Medicated."

"Some events are imagined or made up, but all of that stuff really happened," said Lapica. "The heart of the film is real life."

The 25-year-old Lapica wrote, directed and stars in "Self Medicated," a stranger-than-fiction account of a troubled adolescence punctuated by Lapica's bizarre, authorized abduction by Teen Help, one of several names used by the controversial World Wide Association for Specialty Programs and Schools.

The film was shot in Las Vegas, Arizona and Hawai'i and co-stars Hilo-born actress and singer Kristina Anapau. It screened at the CineVegas Film Festival in June. Lapica intends to enter the film in the Hawaii International Film Festival, and others.

"I like very radical character art," Lapica said. "I'm fascinated with the process of change from one extreme to another and capturing it in a way that is so gradual the audience doesn't realize it until later. That's the ultimate challenge."

It's a challenge for which Lapica had been preparing himself for years. A cinema buff since he was a child, Lapica couldn't help imagining, even in his lowest moments in captivity, how his story might one day play out on the big screen.

By the time he set to writing the screenplay while still a film student at Loyola Marymount University, the project had taken on larger significance. Lapica didn't want a chronicle of personal aggrievement, but a cinematic expose on the dangers of private institutions that abuse juveniles in the name of rehabilitation.

Lapica doesn't dispute the long litany of problems that led his mother to fall for Teen Help's slick pitch.

Both mother and son were sent into an emotional tailspin when Lapica's father died of a heart attack at the age of 48. Unable to find comfort in each other, both found other ways to numb the pain.

Lapica, who had been a straight-A student and a standout baseball player in his Las Vegas-area community, drank, dabbled in pot and psilocybin mushrooms, and watched indifferently as his academic and athletic life slipped away.

As a last resort, Lapica's mother hired Teen Help to kidnap her son and take him to a halfway house in Salt Lake City.

"They promote it as a kind of utopia for teens," Lapica said, by phone from Nevada. "They show you pictures of teens singing around a campfire and frolicking under waterfalls. But in reality, there was abuse."

The World Wide Association for Specialty Programs and Schools, has been the subject of several allegations of abuse and mistreatment over the years. Critics say the association's offshore facilities let the organization circumvent U.S. laws. Facilities associated with the organization have been forced to close in Mexico, the Czech Republic and Costa Rica.

The CBS News Program "48 Hours" took an in-depth look at the programs in 1998, and reports in the Denver Rocky Mountain News included interviews with teens who said they had been verbally abused, assaulted and otherwise mistreated by workers at some of the facilities.

"I was neglected and dehydrated," Lapica said. "Other people were tied up, emotionally and physically abused. The staff was completely untrained to deal with troubled teens."

Lapica escaped once, only to be recaptured and sent to a facility in St. George, Utah. He was to be transported to another facility in Samoa when he staged his second escape in Honolulu.

"It's amazing," Lapica said. "I was 17, and even though I looked like an adult, there was a total lack of rights. Legally, they could kidnap me and take me to a remote island without my consent."

After the second escape, Lapica called his mother from a pay phone. "She was concerned and distraught and she had lost all faith in their abilities," Lapica said. "We had a heart-to-heart and made a solemn promise to work together to start to heal. It was a long process, but that's sort of where it turned around."

Within a few years, Lapica had reversed his situation and graduated from Loyola Marymount magna cum laude and, perhaps more valuable, an outline of what would become "Self Medicated." Lapica finished the screenplay in six months.

Though just 24 years old and a first-time director at the time, Lapica was able to raise $1 million in private funds for his first feature. An solid actor in his own right, Lapica assumed the lead role of Andrew and surrounded himself with Hollywood veteran actors Diane Verona ("The Insider"), Michael Bowen ("Kill Bill: Vol. 1") and Greg Germann ("Ally McBeal").

After three grueling auditions, Lapica settled on Anapau to play Andrew's best friend, Nicole.

"They were intense," Anapau said. "I basically did the whole movie in audition."

Anapau 25, who most recently starred opposite Christina Ricci in Wes Craven's "Cursed," said she was sold as soon as she read the script.

"I cried the first, second and third times I read the script," she said. "It's an important movie, and it needs to be made."

Anapau knows a bit about precocious genius. She trained in classical ballet at an early age, graduated from Hilo High at 15, and landed her first movie role ("Escape from Atlantis") at 16.

Lapica admits that drawing so deeply, and at times so literally, from his own experiences wasn't as easy as it might seem.

"Writing the script, I drew from my experiences as much as possible and I think that helped make it a compelling film that was heartfelt and had real emotion," he said. "But it's difficult to re-create (reality) when you're shooting.

"It's eerie in a way," Lapica said. "But sometimes the images and the memories start to blend together."

Having commended his personal journey to the big screen, Lapica said he's anxious to get started on his next project, a feature film tentatively titled "Methodical" that he hopes to shoot in February.

"It's a revenge story in which three benign, innocuous individuals become cold, calculating, machine-like creatures hellbent on revenge because of loss and betrayal," Lapica said.

This time, the story is purely fictional.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.