Drugs, Fraud, Whistleblowers, and the Safdies: Inside the 22-Year Journey of HBO’s Bombshell Miniseries ‘Telemarketers’
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Two decades ago, Civic Development Group put a lot of people to work who couldn’t find it anywhere else. The telemarketing company employed high school dropouts, convicted felons, and drug addicts, many of whom felt as though they’d found their calling at a company that incentivized them to unwittingly participate in a high-stakes grift.
As they juggled calls on behalf of policemen unions and other charitable organizations, inadvertently duping gullible targets into opening their wallets, they had no idea how little money actually went to the organizations themselves. In truth, CDG was making a killing, keeping 90 percent of all donations — while its staffers treated the office as a hedonistic playground.
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The footage of those antics provides the backbone for the first episode of “Telemarketers,” directors Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern’s gritty and often darkly funny look at the CDG’s scam and the wider conspiracy of telemarketing firms that persists to this day. Across three episodes, the directors get inside the maniacal world of their subject and expose its corruption from the inside out. Yet when former CDG employee Lipman-Stern handed his cousin-in-law and veteran documentarian Bhala Lough around 100 hours of footage in 2020, it needed work. “It was a mess,” Bhala Lough told IndieWire during an interview over Zoom with his co-director. “Nothing was labeled. But within the mess was a lot of gold. It was overwhelming.”
Lipman-Stern was a 14-year-old high school dropout working at CDG when he gathered the first explosive footage of the workplace, continuing to gather material as he grew up and began investigating the big picture with fellow CDG staffer Patrick J. Pespas. Over the course of three alternately hilarious and disturbing episodes, Lipman-Stern and Pespas engage in a series of ramshackle road trips and confrontational interviews in a quest to take on powerful forces beyond their full comprehension. The project has been percolating for 22 years, ever since Lipman-Stern started working at CDG.
“I was obsessed with this story from when I was 14,” Lipman-Stern told IndieWire. “When I was in the office, I would notice so many characters coming in and out constantly. These are not your average people. They were ex-cons, bank robbers, murderers, heroin kingpins. There are all these misunderstood people.” With time, he began to see them in grand literary terms. “I’ve always enjoyed Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck books. These people felt like those kind of characters, and I just became obsessed with documenting them. I didn’t know exactly what it would become.” Eventually, he centered on Pespas — aka Pat — as a kind of Michael Moore-meets-Hunter S. Thompson warrior of justice, who emerges from his drug addiction to track down firm answers about the full extent of CDG’s scam. Those misadventures lend a playful and endearing quality to a project that could easily have followed the more traditional true crime blueprint.
Instead, it resembles a different tradition: the wayward anti-hero you can’t help but love. The series is co-produced by the Safdie brothers’ Elara Pictures and Rough House Pictures, the company co-founded by David Gordon Green, Jody, Hill, and Danny McBride (where Bhala Lough oversees nonfiction projects). The outcome feels like a natural extension of both companies’ fiction work: The grimy backdrop and anarchic circumstances of CDG echo the Safdies’ “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time,” while many of its rough-and-tumble characters wouldn’t look out of place alongside McBride’s overbearing, self-righteous eccentric in “Eastbound and Down” and his other work. But nothing in this decade-spanning project was scripted. “There was definitely a punk rock element to the whole thing,” Lipman-Stern told IndieWire. “We just started following the leads.”
However, with Pespas struggling with a methadone addiction, the project dissipated for around eight years until Bhala Lough came on board. The filmmaker tracked Lipman-Stern’s efforts to re-engage Pespas when he tracked him down to his New Jersey home at the height of COVID and goaded him back into the project through a window. At first, Bhala Lough showed that footage to the Safdies in an effort to get them to direct it, as aspects of Pespas’ story recalled the brothers’ ostracized basketball player documentary “Lenny Cooke.” Instead, “When Josh and Benny saw this footage, they said, ‘You have to direct it, and it has to be like this,’” Bhala Lough said. “I agreed, but made sure they would produce it.”
Eventually, Josh Safdie was absorbed by his upcoming solo directing vehicle with Adam Sandler and Megan Thee Stallion, but “Benny stuck around and was really part of this on a daily basis,” Bhala Lough said. “That was really cool.” After 13 long months of development and packaging, HBO came on board. The loose style of the documentary, however, didn’t change: Many of Lipman-Stern and Pespas’ strategy sessions and phone calls to telemarketing agencies take place at McDonald’s. And Pespas’ uneven interviewing style, which is both sincere and unwieldy, was never replaced by more refined methods even when he secured a sitdown with a high-profile senator. “We wanted to be scrappy because of their comfortability on camera,” Bhala Lough said. “I didn’t want to be that crew with fucking 30 people and lights and all that makeup and shit.” Because Pespas was too anxious to fly anywhere by plane — which leads to one of the series’ best comic twists — Lipman-Stern brought a GoPro on their road trips, which find them traveling all the way down to Florida. “He’d make our editor watch like all eight hours of a single drive,” Bhala Lough said.
They agreed not to overwhelm Pespas with traditional interview prep. “We would always have lists of questions to ask, but at the end of the day, I would always want Pat to ask the questions in the way he would ask them,” Bhala Lough said. “I didn’t want him to memorize a list. He wasn’t not going to do it anyway. I tried not to interject my professional documentarian stamp on him.” In one of the more outrageous moments of the documentary, Pespas attempts to confront a police figure directly involved in the telemarketing scandal but gets his name wrong. But in other conversations, his honest frustration over the scam in question injects a soulful immediacy to the proceedings. “We leaned into Pat’s amateur investigative journalist persona,” Bhala Lough said. “But we couldn’t tell him what to do.”
Still, “Telemarketers” contains plenty of revelations about the depth of the swindle. While CDG was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in 2010, the filmmakers locate another service still enmeshed in the process of stealing from unsuspecting victims, and Pespas even gets hired by the company to expose its tactics. Their ultimate goal remains unchanged — getting Congress to hold a hearing about telemarketing scams so that Pespas can testify and make the case for tighter regulation. “This wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky thing,” Lipman-Stern said. “We really believe that Pat deserves to sit in front of Congress as a whistleblower. If there’s regulation in this industry, the money should go to good causes. These are donations from generous Americans who don’t even have the money to give. We want it to go to the right place.”
The arrival of the series gives Pespas a new lease on life. While the documentary labels him a “telemarketing legend,” the directors say their subject wants to continue his cause with a career in media. “He has this star quality to him,” Lipman-Stern said. “He’s charismatic, really nice, has a pure heart. He’s almost childlike in a way — but he’s not a small-minded person.”
The first episode of “Telemarketers” airs on HBO on August 13.
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