Waiting for 'Superman' Staged Scene

Have we found director David Guggenheim’s kryptonite? The New York Times has found a serious problem with his much-lauded Waiting for 'Superman', a documentary about education: He staged a scene. In the scene, a mother and her son tour a Harlem charter school, and she says, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning to get there at 7:45, that’s what we will do.” But it turns out that her son had already been rejected, and Guggenheim instructed her to pretend as though she hadn’t already learned this. He explains, “As a filmmaker, I wanted to see her reaction to the school, and her genuine emotion. So that scene is real; her reaction, her talking to kids touring the school, is how she would play it.”