The World War II documentary "The Messenger" has been pulled from the Philadelphia Film Festival because so much of it was, well, made up according to USA Today.

I had a feeling this would happen to some film eventually. "Anybody" can make a documentary now, but not everybody should. Relatively affordable digital video equipment and software are the building blocks. Theatrical and critical success of docus like "Fahrenheit 911" and "Supersize Me" made making a documentary sexy. It even looked like you could make money. That's unchartered territory for most documentarians.

The small shame is the filmmaker is squirming around and trying to employ that awful new concept of "truthiness."

And the real shame is the well-meaning producer sank $100,000 into the 16 minute long project. A lot of legitimate filmmakers could turn out two pretty nice 28 minute PBS length projects for that amount of money.

One of my veteran documentarian friends wrily observed that it's easier to get money for a reception than a film. The reception food is a little harder to swallow today, thinking about the good money wasted on this episode of phony documentary making.

Photo of the SONY DCRVX 2100 from one of my favorite tech sources: JR.com