Decades before Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi and Jenni "JWoww" Farley became known for their antics on MTV's "Jersey Shore," there were the gum-cracking, big-hair stars of “Wildwood, NJ.”

On the surface, the girls and women interviewed in the 1994 documentary, celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer, played into similar stereotypes as the stars of "Jersey Shore." But behind the rough, tough facades, these girls were entirely different, says director Ruth Leitman.

In 1992 Leitman, Carol Weaks-Cassidy, Julie Wolffe, Karen Enenkel and Nicole Torre set out to the southern tip of the Jersey Shore with a Super 8 camera. Their goal was to get inside the heads of the teenage and 20s-aged girls who flocked to the Wildwood boardwalk in search of summertime excitement.

“One of the things that drew me to the girls in Wildwood,” Leitman told NJ.com over the phone, “is how confident and resilient” they were.

“They’re a little broke; they’re trying to make ends meet but they’re going to get through the summer however they can,” Leitman said. “It’s the way they are going to live even if it’s for a finite amount of time.”

Leitman felt that the women in New Jersey were “kind of misunderstood.” And she found out that when she gave them an opportunity to talk, they had a lot to say.

“I think, especially in terms of media stereotypes, we look at girls from New Jersey as not having great aspirations and dreams, and that was not true,” Leitman said. “They were a lot more introspective and I saw that from the very beginning.

“There’s a certain power in understanding how other people perceive them,” Leitman said. “They will play into that stereotype a little bit to achieve what they need to achieve.”

Though the hairstyles and fashion has changed since 1994, some of the images in the documentary are prominent today. The Giant Wheel at Mariner's Landing still provides a stellar view of the town, while the tramcar (or the "shoobiecar" as one girl called it in the film) continues to warn people to "watch the tramcar, please." And most of the people who flood the boardwalk during the summer are not from the area.

As was the case for Leitman. Born and raised in Abington, Pa., a suburb on the northern fringes of Philadelphia, Wildwood for her was the “forbidden place.” Her parents never let her go there, even when all her friends went after prom. When Leitman was finally allowed to go, after high school, she brought her camera with her and starting photographing people, mainly teenage girls, she said. Eventually, Leitman said, it got to the point where she wanted to hear what the girls had to say.

“Wildwood, NJ” won several awards at small film festivals (in 1994, film festivals weren't as grandiose as they are today) when it was released. It earned a Winner Audience Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, and Official Selection awards at South By Southwest (SXSW) and the Philadelphia Film Festival, among others.

After that, Leitman said, it pretty much went unseen for many years. That's until blogger Rich Juzwiak got a hold of the movie and wanted to write a post about it on his blog FourFour advancing the 2009 premiere of "Jersey Shore" on MTV.

“He wrote to me and said, ‘somebody gave me a VHS tape of your film and I love it. I want to cut it down to a few minutes and write something about it,’” Leitman said.

Leitman was in the middle of another production and thought nothing of it, so she didn't respond. Juzwiak cut it down anyway, Leitman said, and wrote a post about it. The four-minute condensed version (which can be seen at the top of the article) by Juzwiak made its rounds on the Internet. BuzzFeed and Jezebel (part of Gawker Media) are among the sites that come up in a Google search. The clip was also posted on Reddit last week.

“People just started contacting me about it,” she said. “Some really interesting things have come from it.”

Now a film professor at Columbia College Chicago, Leitman will play clips from “Wildwood, NJ” during lectures and a lot of the time, she said, her students have already seen parts of it on social media. Musicians, including pop singer Lana Del Rey and indie rock band Twin Shadow, have used clips in music videos. A fashion designer in France even modeled a clothing line based on what the women were wearing.

“I love the fact that it came back, that I have nothing to do with it,” Leitman said. “If I were to try to drive a bunch of people to it, anything that I would do would be completely ineffective. What’s happened is that its ended up on hundreds of blogs.”

But while “Wildwood, NJ” has been passed around the web and Juzwiak’s four-minute condensed version has over 460,000 views on YouTube, the images of the Jersey Shore most people see are that of the MTV show.

“Reality television should be called non-reality television,” Leitman said. “It’s a Petri dish. It’s an experiment, and it’s not real. It lacks integrity and authenticity.

“I think that the characters in ‘Jersey Shore’ play into really negative stereotypes about what people from New Jersey are like,” she added. “It’s like New Jersey on steroids.”

Two girls interviewed in Ruth Leitman's "Wildwood, NJ."

Leitman admits that some of the subjects in “Wildwoowd, NJ” possess the same traits as the stars of “Jersey Shore.” That’s most obvious in the girls who talk about fighting and being with guys just for their looks.

The women in “Jersey Shore” are “proud of their own ignorance,” she said. That’s not the case in her film, Leitman said.

“Filmmakers try to control their subject or story,” she explained, “and I feel that this is a narrative I didn’t write because the general public is writing it, and that’s very cool.”