Patrick Pespas and Sam Lipman-Stern in Telemarketers
Photograph courtesy of HBO
There has been an unfortunate trend this year for biopics about big business. First up came future dad movie classic Air and the slightly less entertaining Blackberry, but the mini-genre soon descended into parody with the arrivals of Tetris and Flamin' Hot. In a world drowning in content masquerading as movies, these visualized Wikipedia pages felt almost immediately exhausted.
All of those films ask the same question: how does it feel to develop and launch a hugely successful product? Telemarketers, a new three-part HBO series debuting on August 13, asks a different, more intriguing question: how does it feel when you’re convinced your hugely successful bosses are scammers?
The documentary, produced by the Safdie brothers alongside Danny McBride, goes behind the scenes at Civic Development Group, a New Jersey-based telemarketing firm in the mid 2000s as two members of staff slowly turned from salesmen into whistleblowers. The team’s job was simple; fundraising on behalf of charities benefitting the police, fire fighters, and veterans. The kind of people others are keen to help out. The telemarketing team had scripted replies to most inquiries from potential marks including the big one; “How much of my donation will the police receive?” The answer was around 10%, with CDG bosses pocketing the rest.
The grainy and amateurish footage from the time was shot around 2007 by employee Sam Lipman-Stern, a self-confessed “piece of shit” high school dropout and aspiring skater/graffiti artist. His parents made him join the company aged just 14 and he switched from filming his skater friends to capturing his colleagues, uploading clips of their office antics to YouTube. The purpose of the videos wasn’t viral stardom, but simply to document a workplace like few others. There were no rules at CDG: as long as the employees brought in donations, the bosses were happy. While the YouTube clips show G-rated fun like office chair races, the real atmosphere at CDG was more like a bar than a workplace, and more than a little lawless.
Courtesy of HBO
The team, Lipman-Stern explains, is mainly composed of people looking for quick work and those fresh out of jail. Many, it is explained, were recruited directly from halfway houses. Misuse of office equipment might have made it to YouTube but Telemarketers shows a workplace where drug dealers operate freely and often alongside those they sold to; in one extraordinary scene, star salesman Pat Pespas snorts heroin while still making calls.
CDG didn’t do background checks and hoped those they employed wouldn’t look into their business, either. However, over time, it became impossible to ignore that what these people were being asked to do wasn’t entirely kosher. It’s a set-up that eventually led to the company being closed down by the Federal Trade Commission, kicking off a story of greed, deception, and chicanery as Lipman-Stern and Pespas team up to expose the entire corrupt telemarketing industry from within.
You can understand why Telemarketers appealed to both the Safdies and Danny McBride. There is a raw and untamed quality to the footage that makes you feel many people in the call center would have been cast in Uncut Gems or Good Time had Benny and Josh Safdie stumbled across the place at the time (as Lipman-Stern and Pespas speak to former colleagues to piece the sordid story together, the tone switches from Jackass-style japes to something akin to a thriller). McBride, meanwhile, has examined how the American dream and exploitation are often closer than you’d like to think across three hilarious seasons of The Righteous Gemstones.
The series isn’t revolutionary, it fits neatly into the scammer doc cannon alongside The Inventor or either of the Fyre Fest films, but it is gripping and visually unique. Lipman-Stern has gone from skater kid to a full-fledged director (he is listed as co-director alongside Adam Bhala Lough who, among other things, directed videos for Lil Wayne and MF DOOM).
His and Pespas’ story is one of determination and bravery. What Telemarketers gets right is showcasing the story from their point of view. The story of business, whether it’s as big as Air Jordan or as corrupt as scamming elderly folks for cash, should always be told from the bottom up.