NEW YORK – 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.