Telemarketers

“From Telemarketers to Uncouth Comrades”

Stephen Charbonneau (Florida Atlantic University)

The third episode of Telemarketers features a key scene in which our muckraking protagonists – Sam Lipman-Stern and Patrick J. Pespas (Sam and Pat) – finally reach out to a professional journalist, hoping for assistance and guidance. Their contact, Sarah Kleiner, is an established investigative reporter with a track record of shedding light on charity grifts. Considering Sam and Pat are both dogged whistleblowers for the telemarketing industry, she seems like a natural ally. Nevertheless, Sam has concerns. Both he and Pat are former telemarketers and as unpolished as they come. One is a high-school dropout and the other is a previously incarcerated drug addict. In spite of these concerns, they discovered Kleiner was ecstatic about their contributions. “I was giddy,” she exclaims in the scene, “because I had documents; I had the black and white numbers, but you guys had all the stories.” This prompts Pat to respond, “You came at it from one end, we came at it from the other end.”

This single line struck me as a pithy summation of the film’s approach. Telemarketers, a short documentary series released this past August on HBO, tracks a twenty-two-year journey on the part of Sam and Pat through the underbelly of corrupt charity fundraising. Having met as misfit castaways in a shady New Jersey call center – the Civic Development Group (CDG) – both Sam and Pat grow increasingly suspicious that their telemarketing jobs are part of a larger criminal enterprise centered on exploiting the altruistic instincts of regular folk. As such, the series proceeds inductively from within the bowels of the office where Sam and Pat met, literally forged from the former’s YouTube videos documenting workplace helter-skelter. Slowly, but surely, the debauched office culture of CDG is revealed as symptomatic of a deeper systemic sickness. By documenting their experiences in telemarketing as well as their investigation, Telemarketers animates the “documents” and “black and white numbers” possessed by Kleiner. The stories featured here are primarily anchored in a dysfunctional work environment in which the signifiers of professionalism are entirely absent. On the one hand, Sam’s shaky camcorder footage indexes the wild and subterranean sphere of fraudulent fundraising. But eventually we come to realize that the same realm can cultivate a sense of community among disparate and displaced persons. The juxtaposition of past archival video with more recent talking head scenes of the filmmakers’ co-workers repeatedly demonstrates a sense of friendship and camaraderie among the employees. Over the course of its nearly three hours, Telemarketers demonstrates that Kleiner’s documents and facts accrue a hefty anthropological currency as tales “from the other end” embed us in a diverse subculture of the marginalized and forgotten.

This sense of community is conveyed most clearly through a portrait of Sam and Pat’s friendship. While this relationship is bound up with a broader collective of telemarketers – a diverse assemblage of teachers looking for extra income, high school dropouts, and people with justice history – the film is ultimately a portrayal of a bond between two co-workers who find meaning within the madness of their environment. As previously stated, the narrative arc of Telemarketers covers decades and includes periods where Sam and Pat have concluded that their story has ended, only to discover that new questions need to be answered. For instance, approximately halfway through the series, CDG is forced to shutter over findings that it was violating the law and misleading contributors. Both Pat and Sam assume that justice has been served and they can move on with their lives. However, they soon realize that executives were given a slap on the wrist and have persisted in charity fraud, only under a new name. While the two pals resume their investigation, the sense of exhilaration is less about the answers they will find or the possibility of redressing these wrongs. Rather, the constant interruptions of their decades-long endeavor are always bolstered by a feeling of getting the band back together.

This speaks to the film’s strengths, weaknesses, as well as its blend of comedy and melancholia. The warmth of Pat and Sam’s friendship is only surpassed by scenes featuring Pat’s wife, Sue. The specific scenes of Pat caring for Sue in the wake of her struggles with cancer are among the most moving in the whole film. In fact, the film suggests Pat’s personality draws people out of their shells, nurturing a sense of community in the process when he returns home at one point and neighbors are shown leaning out their apartment windows calling out to him. The film’s rootedness in such moments of companionship render its social justice ambitions both admirable and comic. There is clearly educational value in this series, and Pat and Sam’s discovery that the police unions were, in fact, co-conspirators of these telemarketing scandals is genuinely eye-opening. In this manner, the film is – to a substantial degree – a portrait of a police state where the victims of policing are inadvertently advancing the interests of a corrupt system. Scenes of former prisoners working as telemarketers and mimicking “cop voices” in order to raise money for police unions may call to mind moments from Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), especially the unforgettable mantra, “Stick to the script!”

However, the social justice ambitions of the film are tempered by inescapable moments of documentary satire. More than once in the series Sam and Pat give a direct shout out to Michael Moore, proclaiming, “This is what Michael Moore would do!” Indeed, the series mirrors Moore’s films in that the broader storyline seeks to culminate in a confrontation with an individual who wields great institutional power (such as Roger Smith in Roger & Me). There are two such confrontations, one with the president of the national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and the other with Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut. Both meetings end with an anti-climactic whimper, but the former unravels in a manner that reads like a parody of a Michael Moore film. At one point, Sam and Pat attempt to confront the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Patrick Yoes, at the group’s national convention. The filmmakers have already demonstrated that Yoes was one of the primary orchestrators of CDG’s malfeasance. Anticipation builds and Pat approaches Yoes with the query, “Hey, excuse me, Mr. Yates, right?” Yoes looks puzzled and responds that he doesn’t know a “Mr. Yates.” After initially concluding that it was another dodge, Pat eventually realizes that he got the name wrong and turns to Sam to express his regret: “Dude, I apologize, I fucked it up.” One of the series’ most pivotal moments is marred by a comic mishap that nevertheless centers the friendship of Sam and Pat. But of course, Pat’s initial reaction that the president was dodging him was not totally wrong. In spite of the misnomer, in all likelihood Yoes knew that Pat was looking for him and, even if the name had been correct, the result would probably have been the same. And, in a way, this is a more accurate indicator of systemic indifference and the need to tackle the problem in a more structural manner. Failure is likely more impactful and their ultimate success in getting Telemarketers on HBO manages to keep the campaign alive, even resulting in Senator Blumenthal’s recent announcement that he will heed Sam and Pat’s insistence on new legislation. An anti-climax short circuits our desire for an onscreen authentic reckoning, but at the same time reminds us of the deeper roots of exploitation.