Two years ago almost to the day, the college-admissions scandal broke. By now, you’re probably familiar with the overarching themes: Wealthy parents wedged their children into elite institutions with the help of an admissions savant who preached the gospel of the “side door,” i.e. using fake athletic resumes to gain admission through a school’s compromised athletic department and, occasionally, through straight-up SAT/ACT cheating.
We marveled together at the eye-popping ease with which the wealthy few gamed a system that already caters to them. At one point, we could probably recite the major beats by heart: the high schoolers photoshopped into shots of sports they didn’t play, actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman serving their time, and Donald Trump mysteriously pardoning one of the most brazen offenders implicated in scandal. It’s a tale that so perfectly fit a particular mold of American greed and fraud that it felt almost too heavy-handed to point that out.
The story is told cohesively for the first time on film in Operation Varsity Blues, the latest documentary by Chris Smith (who also directed Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened). It lands on Netflix Wednesday.
As with Fyre, Smith set his sights on the confidence man at the center of the scandal. But this time, that man wasn’t nearly as available to him. While Smith never interviewed Billy McFarland for his documentary, there was plenty of footage of McFarland speaking on camera to choose from. That’s much less true of Rick Singer.
“He was such an enigma. He was such a hard person to understand,” Smith told me. “I think without actually doing an interview or talking to him it was very difficult to find out. I think our goal making the film was to collect as much information as we could about this person and put it together in a cohesive way that, you know, [viewers] could come to their own conclusions.”
Singer has yet to give a national interview. In one of the few actual videos of him in Operation Varsity Blues, he’s seen tanned, shirtless, and stonewalling a guy with recording equipment after the scandal broke, calmly moving to his car and barely acknowledging the questions lobbed his way (which is mostly, “Is the system broken?”). Singer doesn’t even seem flustered; it’s like he means to stay unknowable until the end, and has the unblinking resolve to do so.
An absent subject presented an interesting challenge for Smith. To meet it, the film takes a departure from straight documentary. Its talking head interviews are interspersed with dramatizations of Singer growing up, as well as re-creations of wiretapped conversations between Singer and parents or coaches. (Jon Karmen, Smith’s longtime collaborator, had written an approximately 60-page screenplay based on the case’s federal affidavit, which he repackaged and presented to Smith.) The effect is very Unsolved Mysteries meets The Social Network.
At times, watching actors recite lines that hew to the actual way people talk on the phone reminds one of why scripts take liberties in the first place. Still, it was just as often a helpful device. You can read a transcript of a wire-tapped call—but it’s not until you see approximations of the private-equity guy or Hot Pockets heiress chatting with Singer about their crimes while, say, walking through 12-bedroom poolside villas that you see the full absurdity of this scandal. The wealth is inescapable.
“As a documentarian, we’re always trying to capture reality or some sort of truth. And looking at these conversations—many of which happened, you know, where people didn’t know they were being recorded—that was almost more truthful than anything you can do in a documentary,” Smith said.
Even Singer becomes a little less mysterious through these conversations with parents. He clearly didn’t have a nature that fit into many worlds—he was reportedly fired from coaching high school basketball in the late ’80s, for example—but his strangeness could disarm the rich and powerful. His Caesar haircut and quick shifts from jocular to coaxing to light berating seemed to have a captivating effect on his marks. Singer is not at all charming, even in the hands of Matthew Modine, who plays him in the reenactments—but one can imagine that these people were not used to being spoken to like Singer spoke to them, which could explain the hold he had.
Alongside the dramatizations, Smith frames the film with videos of high schoolers getting into school and getting rejected; kids articulating their frustrations with the admissions process and kids angered by the scandal. All were pulled from YouTube, with the subjects’ permission. “We originally planned to interview all these kids for the film, and then realized that it was all already there in a way that would be so much more authentic than what we could ever do by bringing them into a studio,” Smith said.