A "documentary" without any....documentary?
What a strange experience watching this project. It touts itself as a "documentary" that involves toxic corporate management with a healthy dose of cultish inclinations.
But...it's really just a recap of Reuters and AP footage as well as their content. It really has nothing to say or add to the conversation about what went wrong at American Apparel. In fact, it (very literally) does NOT explain why the company actually declined (business activities). The narrative is so generalized that, at the end of the day, it doesn't seem to say much of anything at all. It uses the word "sex" as if it were a currency and would add more value to the docu-product.
You have around a half dozen sour ex-employees who dance around accusations in order to keep themselves out of court. There are NO "cult" topics or evidence. I will say that again. There is NO cult aspect to this at all. Unless you consider being able to pay people to do dumb things a "cult."
And therein lies the problem. I suspect that the makers of this project got to the end of their work and realized that they didn't actually have anything new to add to this narrative. So, some marketing folks added something more 'spicy' like the words 'cult' and 'trainwreck.'
This is just a long 60 Minutes segment (the producers of which would have exercised a lot more brevity and clarity) with nothing more to say than, "rich people are slimy." There is a kernel of something interesting here, but there simply isn't enough meat on that bone. Using interviews from a collection of employment oddities does little to add to the legitimacy of the insight.
In the end, I don't recommend this, and can't understand why anyone would.
But...it's really just a recap of Reuters and AP footage as well as their content. It really has nothing to say or add to the conversation about what went wrong at American Apparel. In fact, it (very literally) does NOT explain why the company actually declined (business activities). The narrative is so generalized that, at the end of the day, it doesn't seem to say much of anything at all. It uses the word "sex" as if it were a currency and would add more value to the docu-product.
You have around a half dozen sour ex-employees who dance around accusations in order to keep themselves out of court. There are NO "cult" topics or evidence. I will say that again. There is NO cult aspect to this at all. Unless you consider being able to pay people to do dumb things a "cult."
And therein lies the problem. I suspect that the makers of this project got to the end of their work and realized that they didn't actually have anything new to add to this narrative. So, some marketing folks added something more 'spicy' like the words 'cult' and 'trainwreck.'
This is just a long 60 Minutes segment (the producers of which would have exercised a lot more brevity and clarity) with nothing more to say than, "rich people are slimy." There is a kernel of something interesting here, but there simply isn't enough meat on that bone. Using interviews from a collection of employment oddities does little to add to the legitimacy of the insight.
In the end, I don't recommend this, and can't understand why anyone would.
- pmerrill-38726
- 5 jul 2025