There was the famous relative in the music business — Art Garfunkel — whose name he never tired of dropping, the airline that had no actual planes, the blimp business whose German-built airships kept crashing and then the boy band idea that he cribbed from somebody else, whose entire “production line” he studied and stole.
And even when the bands hit it big, where did the money go?
Lou Pearlman was a bubbly, cheerful impressario behind Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, LFO and the lads of O-Town, selected and groomed for stardom on his TV series “Making the Band.”
A New Yorker who set up shop and made Orlando — “O-Town” — the pop capital of the world in the ’90s, Pearlman spent millions making these groups into stars, spent millions maintaining the aura of success and millions more fighting to maintain his status as “the Sixth Backstreet Boy,” trying to keep them from collecting all the money they actually earned from their endless tours and staggering record sales.
The “real” money? It all came from “investors,” those scores upon scores of bankers, high-to-medium rollers and mom and pop retirees Pearlman would invite backstage and order his kids to “sing for them,” a capella. Which they did.
He “schmoozed” the rich and the well-connected. He got a band out of New York on a private flight “cleared” by the Bush administration hours after 9-11, and allegedly avoided Florida justice by being pals with the attorney general, then governor. That wouldn’t stop the Feds. Eventually.
Pearlman spent like a drunken sailor, so who knows if he actually stashed some of the hundreds of millions that passed through his hands? The investors lost everythng.
Pearlman ran, a new Netflix documentary about him declares, “the longest running Ponzi scheme in history,” as if the similarities to Mr. Bankruptcy and Sketchy Bank Loans are My Business, Donald Trump, wasn’t still on the clock. But Pearlman “created” something — glorious pop sung by precision-dancing pretty boys. He made unknown kids rich and famous and dominated world pop for about a decade before it all came crashing down around his ears.
“Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam” is a quick-and-dirty “true crime” series that interviews as many principals as would agree to sit on camera, a brisk overview of Pearlman’s rise and fall that leaves much out and that never misses the chance to show us the “wrong” courthouse when detailing the suits filed by his various bands to get out of their contracts.
But what’s here is pretty juicy. Filmmaker David David Terry Fine “(Salaam Dunk”) got A.J.McLean and Howie Dorough (Backstreet Boys), Erik-Michael Estrada (O-Town), Michael Johnson (Natural) and Chris Kirkpatrick (*NSYNC) to talk, on camera, along with Pearlman employees, his nurse “girlfriend,” an FBI agent and state investigator who came after Pearlman after his business model began to unravel, and a reporter (Helen Huntley) who documented Pearlman’s schemes and whose blog helped track him down when he went on the lam from justice in the mid-2000s.
How could nobody have known it was all for show, all a big-spending sham designed to “break” bands by making them appear big before they were?
“When you have a deal with the Devil, he’s not going to show up as the Devil,” Kirkpatrick surmises, now wise to the shenanigans of the man he and his proteges all called “Big Poppa,” the guy who put them up in a mansion — his, or one he bought for the band — showered them with gifts, “totally spoiling” them even before they were successes, and yet seemed to never share the millions he collected from their tours and epic record sales.
My first day as entertainment reporter the Orlando Sentinel, I was ordered to the Federal Courthouse (which I had to find) to cover the *NYSNC suit to break their contract with Pearlman.
As a journalist, I interviewed guys from *NSYNC at their posh lakeside Windermere mansion and stared, slack-jawed, at Justin Timberlake’s IRS W-2 form, submitted as evidence in the band’s suit to break their Pearlman/Trans Continental contract. They were the best selling band in the world, and Timberlake’s “income” from Pearlman? $20,000
Covering that trial, I joined a press scrum which included Chris Cuomo, who looked to “the local guy” (me) as the “expert” on all this. I wasn’t. But as we waited for the folks involved to make their statement at the conclusion of the proceedings, we mulled over this whole “airplane rental” to “blimp biz” to music megamogul, eyeballing the way Pearlman surrounded himself with wannabes (his driver was Timberlake-pretty, and not yet in a band), and how it didn’t seem to add up as being on the up-and-up.
A “billionaire” dabbling in TCBY yogurt franchises, trying to launch an NYPD Pizza chain and Pearl Steakhouse biz made as little nickel-and-dime sense as what real billionaire Mark Cuban once said of the guy who ran casinos, mail order steak and a fake “university” out of business.
“Real billionaires don’t mess with stuff like that.”
For Pearlman, it was all about “momentum,” his confidantes suggest in “Dirty Pop,” that “a shark’s got to keep moving” ethos. He spent money to make money, raised loans to pay off loans and juggled as fast as he could as banks enabled his fraud as surely as they have other “rich” huxters whose pose is “I’m rich and I keep getting richer.”
The series isn’t definitive, but it isn’t exactly “bad” either. Experts or band devotees or even random Orlandoans will spot all the facts that weren’t checked, the interviews not landed and the key figures left out altogether.
Cheney Mason, Pearlman’s folksy, blustering lawyer, either misremembers or gilds his credentials when he says he was “already famous” in Orlando as Casey Anthony’s lawyer” (one of them) when Pearlman summoned him to defend him against the bands that wanted out of their contracts in the late ’90s. The Anthony case was over a decade AFTER that.
Leaving out Pearlman’s leeching off New Edition/New Kids on the Block wizard Maurice Starr, a starmaker who was a real showman and a real musician, is a major omission. Without Pearlman, there are no Backstreet Boys. Without cozying up to Starr, learning his formula, there would have been no Pearlman.
Dipping into the allegations that Pearlman was “inappropriate” with some of the young men and boys in his stable of talent, without anyone actually admitting he did something to them, is understandable, but classic “we don’t have it but we mention it” quick-and-dirty “reporting.”
Considering how few of Pearlman’s insiders will actually admit that he was doing anything financially wrong, or that they realized it, that “molester” angle always going to be a dead end.
And using AI to mimic Pearlman’s voice (narrating from his autobiography) and CGI to animate Pearlman’s lips from a promotional video to let him relate his business “family” philosophy is just cheesy, a shoot-your-film-in-the-foot stunt that adds nothing.
With Backstreet managing a sort of oldies tour comeback, and Timberlake one or two traffic tickets shy of needing that *NYSNC reunion cash, “quick and dirty” may be all this sordid story of salacious bookkeeping merits. But you’d like to think that that lightning in a bottle success, the backstabbing Backstreet intrigues, that since people went broke and at least one person died — not due to Pearlman’s barely-airworthy (“insurance scam” is suggested) blimps — it would be nice if somebody took the time and money and shoe leather to do this “scam” justice.
Pearlman wrote that it was all about living “a life you can look back on and feel good about.” One band member marvels that he was able to meet you, “identify your dream, and within minutes, he’ll be selling your dream back to you.”
For the singer/dancers — Aaron Carter included — who started out anonymous and broke, that must have seemed like a kind of genius with Pearlman a sort of Wizard of Oz.
Looking at how he did it may be terribly unsavory, in terms of those suckered into “investing.” But some sucker had to put up the money to buy a “million dollar bus” and hire bodyguards for totally anonymous nobodies for their unknown “band” tour of Germany. That’s humbug even P.T. Barnum would appreciate.
Rating: TV-14, profanity
Cast: Lou Pearlman, Michael Johnson, AJ McLean, Helen Huntley, Melissa Maylen, Howie Dorough, Erik-Michael Estrada, Andy Gross, Jerry Rosen and Chris Kirkpatrick
Credits: Directed by David Terry Fine. A Time Studios production, a Netflix release.
Running time: 3 episodes @:41 minutes each
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