The Sci Fi Channel admitted Friday that it lied to the media about tonight's would-be exposé, "The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan," in an attempt to find a smart guerrilla marketing hook (ala "The Blair Witch Project") to promote "The Village," the upcoming movie by Shyamalan. (Yet, the network never revealed to its audience the truth about the movie).

The three-hour special, first announced last year in Variety (and other publications) as a documentary by award-winning "My Architect" director Nathaniel Kahn, purported to reveal secrets from Shyamalan's past. In an announcement last month the network and the filmmakers told the press that Shymalan tried to shutdown the film after the project veered off course. Now, the channel and corporate parent NBC are admitting that they went to far.

In the Shyamalan film for Sci Fi, Kahn inexplicably decided to play the part of a doc filmmaker struggling to get the full story about a mysterious man. Its a performance not far from Kahn's own battle to learn more about the life and death of his enigmatic father, architect Louis Kahn, captured in the Oscar-nominated doc "My Architect". Seeing him so effectively reprise his role as a passionate doc director in "Buried Secrets" tonight, I couldn't help but wonder about the sincerity of his on-screen persona in "My Architect." Frankly, I thought he had found an equally compelling doc subject, until halfway through the 3-hour movie when I read online that Sci Fi had admitted the lie. Unless Nathaniel Kahn is aiming for a career as an actor in Hollywood, why bother participating in such a manipulative marketing ploy?