Nobody picks up calls from unknown numbers anymore: most likely it is the operator of a telephone, electricity, gas or water company, willing to do anything to force us to rethink our domestic finances in an operation that, supposedly, will only take five minutes .
Los teleoperators commercials are the flames of our daily hell, we have them completely demonized even though we know that the culprits of the harassment are rather those who have sat them down to call in exchange for a derisory pay. Telemarketers, the new HBO Max documentary series, does not arrive to change our opinion about it. On the contrary, after the first of the three hour-long episodes already available on the platform, we are perfectly sure that We will never again take a call from a number that we do not have in the agenda.
Produced by safdie brothersAmerican indie film geniuses, and actor Danny McBride, among others, Telemarketers is the story of the biggest American telemarketing scam, told by one of the former CDG (Civic Development Group) employees, Sam Lipman-Stern, who he began recording what was happening in the company ever since, at the age of 14, in the year 2001, he found a place in a cubicle equipped with a telephone and computer.
Lipman-Stern was a high school dropout, just a dead-end skateboarder from suburban New Jersey who spent his time getting blindsided with his buddies. If he was too young for McDonalds or Burger King, the recruiters at CDG welcomed him with open arms, because they basically had no regard. What’s more, he was one of the few companies that not only did not ask for criminal records, but directly recruited criminals, recently released from prison or on provisional release. A whole school of life for a teenager: active murderers, robbers, drug dealers and prostitutes.
If he was able to record freely with his camera, it was because the atmosphere was such uncontrolled revelry that the office of The wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) seems like a child’s thing next to it. Plenty of alcohol, all kinds of drugs, casual sex, racing in rolling chairs, constant nonsense. The rule was that there were no rules if the results were above the minimum quota. Otherwise, to the street. Those who stayed had the golden mouth, like the very charismatic Pat Pespas, a total “legend of telemarketing”, who snorted heroin from the Bronx to get in tune before picking up the phone, and has become the maximum star of Telemarketers . The camera fell in love with him, and he with the camera.