How Sam Lipman-Stern turned old footage from a shady workplace into an HBO documentary

24:59Sam Lipman-Stern turned old footage from a shady workplace into an HBO documentary

Sam Lipman-Stern was a teenager when he started working as a telemarketer at Civic Development Group.

Along the way, he made friends with his coworkers — who ranged from high school dropouts to ex-cons — and witnessed unbelievable levels of office hijinks. He began to document life at the call centre, but the longer he worked there, the more he and his friend Pat Pespas began to suspect there was something bigger going on at the company.

What happened next is captured in the new HBO true crime docuseries Telemarketers, filmed in large part and co-directed by Lipman-Stern.

He stops by Commotion to tell host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about what led him to bring his camcorder to work, and how the three episode series also doubles as a time capsule for life at the turn of the century.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: I'm so interested in Telemarketers because you put on the show and then as you begin to watch it, it's this incredible behind-the-scenes footage of Civic Development Group where you used to work. We see people getting tattoos at work. We see people doing drugs at work. We see people falling asleep, playing maybe baseball with a water cooler — the nuttiest kind of stuff possible. And you think, this is not a real workplace.

You have this beautiful opening to the show where you say, "I just wanted to film me and my friends doing dumb things, and that's how I ended up picking up a camera." Why did you begin to film this place where you worked in the first place?

Sam: So I first started filming at CDG as a teenager, and all the characters that you're describing were just so fascinating. I mean, here you had a lot of high school dropouts like myself, some college kids, but mostly ex-cons — people that were just out of prison, and they were living in a halfway house, and maybe their parole officer said, "Hey, you can work at this place called CDG. They'll hire you with a criminal record."

But what that did is, there were just so many interesting people with crazy stories working there. And as long as you made your money, which was about $200 an hour, you could basically do whatever you wanted in the office. Like you said, people were selling massive amounts of drugs. Any kind of drug you wanted, you could get it there. One guy came in selling pit bulls one day.

Elamin: Oh, my God.

Sam: Yeah. I mean, literally, it was a marketplace, but everyone would share their stories between calls…. One day, I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone — another caller, Big Ed, who's in episode one — and he was like, "Look, dude, we're all a bunch of losers. You're a teenager; this isn't your dream. You don't want to be a telemarketer for life. What do you want in life?" And I was like, "I want to be a documentary filmmaker, and I would love to film this place," you know? And he said, "Bring in your camera tomorrow."

Elamin: Wow.

Sam: And he was an authority figure there because he was a manager. We just started filming the office hijinx at first

WATCH | Official trailer for Telemarketers:

Elamin: There's this point in the show where you and your coworker, Pat, decide you're going to take filming a bit more seriously to document what is happening here. This is no longer just filming shenanigans; something is going on, [and you're] going to try to find out what it is…. Did the environment around you shift at all? Were people still willing to be as candid with you?

Sam: The thing is, I kind of grew up there at CDG with all these guys…. They saw me go from a teenager to a guy in his early twenties that wanted to do a documentary. I don't think they ever thought it was going to turn into anything, but the callers were always really supportive.

Elamin: I think what made the documentary cut through — because people have been reporting on telemarketing scams for some time — is how deeply entertaining and warm that footage is, especially at the very first episode, because you make a connection with the people…. It got me thinking about the fact that right now in every workplace, we all have our phones; we all have cameras accessible to us all the time. It felt like you being behind the camera at that time, that's the thing that made the dynamic work. Do you think you can make this documentary now?

Sam: That's a really good question. I mean, I think that there's something really special to the fact that this early footage was before the era of having cameras in our cellphones — and it was just one camera, so everyone was paying attention to the camcorder that I had. Also, there's something about the look. Not to get too nerdy, but I love the look and feel of that footage from the late '90s, early 2000s. Our generation, if you're a millennial or whatever, grew up with that as the first camera maybe your family had. We all had these tapes sitting in a closet somewhere, and they've got this really nice warm feel. To make this exact doc, I think it had to be from that era. That being said, the time period we're in now where everyone has a 4K camera in their phone, I mean people are doing incredible things with those. But I hope we see more interesting office footage taken with modern technology.

Elamin: Well, I guess that's what I'm trying to get at, right? You had the camera fixed on yourself as you're making some of these calls, and then a coworker would walk by and see the camera and they'd just start making faces at it. Honestly, it made me kind of emotional watching that because that's what you did when somebody had a camera on: you just kind of clamored for the attention of the thing, you know? But now, all of us have these cameras. It kind of feels like we're weirdly monitoring ourselves all the time, so we don't do that, you know what I mean?

Sam: I'd never thought about it like that, but you're totally right. I mean, having a camcorder that you could bring into your office was a totally new technology at that time period, and people didn't know how to react. The way we think about the camera [now] is very different from how we did back in the early 2000s. I think that is why we get some of those great reactions. If it was me with a cellphone filming, we wouldn't get those same reactions.

Elamin: No, people would maybe be numb to it in a way that is not really reactive. But then also, you have this added dimension of the first footage that you took, you uploaded to YouTube. YouTube wasn't this sort of open space where anybody could find anything at any point; you kind of had to know what you were searching for in order to find it. Now that YouTube's algorithm is bringing you stuff randomly, everyone is a bit more careful with it — which is why watching Telemarketers felt like a beautiful time capsule of this pre-social media internet moment.

Sam: It was right when YouTube came out that we started posting those videos, and back then, YouTube was so exciting, you know? "Oh wow, we can actually broadcast our videos! Even though they're getting 25 or 30 views, or whatever. They exist!" You know? And it really is a time capsule of that time period, for sure.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Sam Lipman-Stern produced by Danielle Grogan.