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.
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.”
Related Stories
Lipman-Stern was a...
Park Filed Complaint Against President Lee Ahead of 2021 Election Jang Youngha Sentenced to One Year in Prison, Two Years Probation Confirmed The police have launched an investigation into Park Chu...