Adam Salky knows about the stress of getting into college. The director of Lifetimeâs movie about the college admissions scandal, which is titledâget thisâThe College Admissions Scandal, says he attended high-pressure college prep school as a teenager.
âThere were friends of mine who had unbelievably expensive consultants having them prep for the SAT,â Salky says. âIt was nothing like what Rick Singer was doing, but just the world of pressure around kids and families was something during that time of life that I understood.â
Singer, the admissions consultant at the center of the sweeping scandal, pleaded guilty to money laundering, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion for bribing college coaches and SAT exam proctors to ensure several teenagers got into their universities of their choice. And as soon as news broke that actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were among the parents accused of using Singerâs services, Salky says executive producer Gail Katz knew it had to be a movie. Soon, she and the projectâs writer, Stephen Tolkin, put together a pitch and sold it to Lifetime. Salky hopped on board nearly immediately.
âI loved the script,â he says. âIt reminded me so much of the pressure I felt as a teenager, so I signed on to do it.â
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The movie premieres on October 12, while the real-life drama is very much still unfolding; just last week, Huffman was sentenced to a month in the slammer for making a payment improve her daughterâs SAT score. The evolving nature of the ripped-from-the-headlines story didnât impact the production, which is inspired by true events. Sorry, but that means thereâs no Olivia Jade character.
âThe film is not about any of the real families,â Salky says. âWe looked at all the families involved and we kind of said to ourselves, âWhat kind of people were part of this? There were people connected to Rick, people who want the kids to go to those kinds of schools, people who had a certain socioeconomic level,â and we really actually tried to avoid any similarities to anyone specific with regards to the families. But Rick Singer is a real character in our film.â
Salky says Tolkin was researching the scandal every day, but to pen the script he mostly used the 200-plus-page affidavit detailing Singerâs scheme as source material.
âI think Rick was able to make parents feel like they could have some degree of control over the process and that was the power that he was selling,â Salky says.
Without giving away too much, Salky says âa large partâ of the movie occurs on the day the scandal breaks. Salky doesnât sympathize with the scandal parents, but as a new parent himself, he says he can at the very least understand the pressure they must feel.
âItâs this feeling that parents have that helping your kid get into college is the last thing they have to do for their kids while theyâre still in the house,â he says. âAnd itâs a very insecure period of time. So many things on the checklist of getting into college are out of the parentsâ control.â
And Salky is proud that The College Admissions Scandal âexposes the system.â He says the process of getting into college is broken, with all the emphasis put on test scores and GPAs.
âKids are stressed out and hopefully this movie shines a light on that and the whole system,â Salky says. âIâm not trying to give the parents an out because clearly there were decisions that were made that were not moral decisions that were the wrong decisions to cheat and to do something that is illegal but I do intimately understand the atmosphere that created that problem.â
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