‘Less regulated than ever’: inside the wild world of telemarketing
When a spam call comes in, the voice on the other side is, more often than not, robotgenerated. But it still might belong to an actual human, someone who is ringing you from their kitchen table while they pat their dog or scroll through Facebook. Or perhaps they’re at a call center, a boiler room such as the hellhole in Sam Lipman-Stern’s wild and winsome documentary, inspired by his own adventures in the world of telemarketing.
The three-part series Telemarketers, co-produced by a group including Danny McBride and the Safdie brothers, and co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough, comes as a pungent counterpunch to series such as Succession and Billions, which examine American greed through the lens of excess and quiet luxury. It takes a gloriously scuzzy approach to its portrayal of large-scale profiteering, offering a Dickensian portrait of a band of characters who had few options besides clocking in at an outfit that was grooming employees to fleece unsuspecting victims to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Lipman-Stern was a 14-year-old high-school dropout when he started working for Civic Development Group (CDG), an entity whose bland name belied its predatory nature. His parents, a health teacher and a social worker, didn’t ask too many questions. “I never really told them about what happened there,” says Lipman-Stern, who now lives in Colombia. “My brother and I were, I guess, free-range kids.”
The company’s founders, a pair of New Jersey brothers, preyed on the vulnerable – both their marks and hourly waged employees. The CDG gaggle were mostly convicted felons with no better job prospects. They worked and partied in an anarchic space in a nondescript office building in the commuter town of New Brunswick.
The film opens with video that Lipman-Stern shot on a VHS camera that was a gift from a psychic named Phoenix, who was living in his family’s attic at the time. (“They’re hippies.”) The footage is electrifying evidence of a working environment that would have any HR executive ejecting bricks. Baby turtles crawled over computer terminals. Sex workers stalked the bathrooms. Employees chugged beer and took drugs in plain sight. Schmuck style reigned supreme. (Here would be a good place to mention that LipmanStern, 36, cut his teeth at Vice media.)
“Have fun, pass the hours, make the sales quota” was the operating principle. “You want a good fucking salesman? Hire a fucking crackhead,” one of the workers is filmed saying. “I’m deadass serious. They know how to talk to people, they know how to get what they want out of people.”
Lipman-Stern started shooting footage on the regular at the encouragement of one of the office’s more senior members, “Big Ed”. When Lipman-Stern told his colleague that he harbored an interest in film-making, “he encouraged me to bring in a camcorder the next day. He’s like, ‘Dude, you want