Hollywood Con Queen

The story is interesting and it's amazing what some people are capable of doing. What ruins the experience is the music. There is literally not a second without it and on my TV the music has the same volume as the narrators. What's wrong with the sound people in the industry? There are almost no movies anymore, where the music and effects are not double as loud as the voices. Don't you have TVs at home or neighbour's? I'm looking at you, sound designers. But this is the worst so far. Most of the time I was reading the subtitles because the voices are really hard to understand. I don't care if it's technically difficult with all the different sound formats and devices. Solve this. 8 stars for the story, 2 for the sound design, so I'm giving six (I know that this is mathematically not correct but I don't want to thrash an actually good documentary).

It is an interesting story which purports to tell the audience how one audacious individual was able to impersonate and scam hundreds of individuals, but the author of the articles and book which the documentary is based upon gets caught up in trying to discover the motivation of the person who perpetuates the lies and crimes. People are hurt financially & psychologically by the scammer, but he isn't a tortured soul. He's a psychopath. Anyone who's been in a relationship with one knows how this ends. You can view the perpetrator through a sympathetic lens and never understand what's really going on. The depths of their depravity is beyond comprehension. Suffice to say evil exists.

I've watched three con documentaries on Apple TV+ (this one, plus "The Big Conn" and "Escape of Carlos Ghosn") and this is definitely the best of the three. The three-episode length is just about perfect. It's filled with enough intrigue, tension and surprises to keep you engaged, although some of the b-roll of the detective and reporter does get a bit repetitive. Still, by the end, it's enough to give you both sides of the story and allow you to make your own decision about the motivations of the con man. He is certainly an interesting character, definitely a narcissist and probably a psychopath, but someone who never actually ruins the lives of any of the victims. In fact, a lot of the people who get taken are lucky they weren't targeted by someone a lot more evil who could have bankrupted them and destroyed their lives (at least none of the ones who were featured in the documentary were financially ruined). In any case, this was an interesting series. If you watch and enjoy it, the other two mentioned above might also be of interest to you. And, if you want to get a little more out-there and watch a docudrama that's better than all three of these, watch WeCrashed, which is a fascinating study of a con man (and his wife) who are still out there committing the same nefarious deeds. It's a great watch.

"Hollywood Con Queen" (one season (2024), 3 eps, 1 hr, Apple+) This short run documentary uncovers the fraud of dozens of low-level Hollywooders perpetuated by someone at first thought to be a woman of voice impersonations but turns out to be someone else, someone who's "sweet" and "light on their feet" but obsessively annoying, too. My takeaway from this is how the US DoJ/FBI once again leaves it up to others to develop a case till it rises to their standards of interest. Even with plenty of evidence of fraud presented to them, the FBI did not take on the case till it hit the $1 million level. This is especially egregious since the con man was operating internationally which should've pushed them to immediate involvement, whatever. The conclusion of the tale is not really solid, some justice is achieved, but the tale doesn't end with a conviction and sentencing, that still is yet to play out apparently.

I think the story can be a good lesson on scam awareness, making it worth watching. However, the nearly three-hour runtime felt unnecessarily long to me. The start of the first episode successfully hooked me, but the second episode suffered from repetitive dialogues, filler monologues and seemingly stretched expositions, which all came across to me as redundant.

Showing the efforts made to track down the scammer was intriguing, but I don't think that literally every single detail needs to be depicted so exhaustively. For example, in the second episode, there are many scenes of the journalist selfie style portrait video showing him monologuing to his phone. It's redundant because the journalist was already being interviewed by the film crew.

Towards the end, it felt weird because the journalist seemingly makes all this to be about himself.