‘Operation Varsity Blues’ reenacts and reorients a national scandal

NEW YORK ( AP) — Chris Smith didn’t initially think the 2019 college bribery scandal made for a good documentary subject. He was editing “Fyre,” the hit Netflix documentary about the music-festival fiasco, when his longtime collaborator, Jon Karmen, suggested another real tale of fraud and spectacle be their next film.

“I didn’t see it at all,” said Smith in a recent interview. “I thought it was well covered.”

But like so many American scandals, there were deeper, less-widely understood layers to the college admissions media storm. Everyone knows about the celebrity mothers -- Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman -- who went to jail for using bribes to secure their children’s places at elite universities. But what about William “Rick” Singer, the mysterious orchestrator of the scheme?

“Rick still felt like an enigma to me,” said Smith. “And the actual machinations and details of how this scheme actually worked, I didn’t understand.”

Just as the failed Fyre festival was a window into the farcical world of social media influencers, the college bribery scandal revealed more widespread rot in higher education. By shifting the focus, Smith’s “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admission Scandal,” which debuts Wednesday on Netflix, attempts to reorient center stage in a headline-grabbing drama that has already spawned one Lifetime movie.

The documentary, like the scandal, has a dose of Hollywood. Smith uses a hybrid approach that includes familiar non-fiction techniques like talking heads, but it also uses reenactments drawn from the Department of Justice’s transcripts and wiretaps. Matthew Modine plays Singer, a former college counselor who created what he called a “side door” to college admission that helped wealthy parents get their kids into top colleges like Stanford, Yale and the University of Southern California by bribing coaches, cheating on tests and falsifying student biographies.

“Felicity Huffman is a colleague and I know her husband. My daughter worked for a couple of seasons on ‘Shameless.’ I just felt bad for them,” says Modine. “As a parent — I’ve got two children that went to college — we all want to do what’s best for our children to help them get a leg up. But not to this point, to the point of fraud.”

Karmen, who wrote the documentary, focused on the FBI’s 204-page affidavit. He and Smith used the taped phone conversations and emails to script scenes that show how Singer operated, and how parents hooked into a scheme that in the high- priced, ultra- competitive world of top-tier colleges, didn’t seem so far-fetched.

“Not a lot of people have the time to read through a 200-page affidavit. Part of our job as filmmakers is to take all of this information and distill it into a format that can be easily consumed,” says Smith. “Absent many people wanting to go on camera, the wiretap transcripts were the best lens into that world.”