9/5/2023 0 Comments N sync members![]() He could have flown them on a charter plane he leased out. That’s the story, but we asked everyone and they were like, “Yeah, we think so.” But he didn’t actually own any planes. Kunkel: We also couldn’t even prove he flew New Kids. And as a greedy businessman, he was like, “I’m gonna make money off these kids.” The way he explained it to us was - and it sounded very legit and reasonable - he wanted to start this record label because he flew the New Kids on the Block on one of his planes and saw they were a billion-dollar business. It was like, “Actually, if you include this, I feel really uncomfortable about safety.” Lance, do you remember, initially, being weirded out by the fact that this middle-age businessman with no background in the music industry wanted to start boy bands?īass: No. ![]() Kunkel: We didn’t take anything out that we were worried was going to make anybody look bad - it wasn’t that kind of thing. There were even some people in the film that asked for certain things to be taken out, and we obliged them, because they were scared of certain things they said. There’s a lot of weird things that people are afraid to tell the full story of, because they don’t know who else is out there that might hurt them. And some people are really just kind of scared for their lives, still. It’s hard to crack that open again and feel those feelings. He hurt a lot of people - especially the Ponzi scheme victims who lost everything. One, they just don’t want to go down that road again. He could just talk to them and be like, “No, we’re going to do this the right way and tell the real story,” and that really helped.īass: There were still people who were nervous. ![]() So having Lance on board helped to build that trust. The reason a lot of the people in the story haven’t been involved up to this point is because nobody trusted that the story was going to be told the right way. It was important to have Lance involved to make sure we were doing things the right way and, honestly, for casting. I wanted to tell a more in-depth story.Īaron Kunkel: We always pitched it as more of an investigative documentary. I will totally do this, but it has to be the correct tone.” Because so far, anything that’s ever been told about Lou was the salacious, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll type stories - the Vanity Fair, the “American Greed”. Lance Bass: Aaron said he wanted to do the Lou Pearlman story, and my first reaction was like, “OK. Lance, how was this film initially pitched to you? For his latest project, he teamed with director Aaron Kunkel of Pilgrim Media and used his clout to persuade members of ’N Sync, the Backstreet Boys and O-Town to sit for interviews. With the distance to reflect on his relationship with the con man, Bass has now produced a documentary about the late criminal, “The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story.” The film, which premiered to strong reviews at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, last month and opened in limited theatrical engagements last week, will debut Wednesday on YouTube.īass, now 39, has been quietly dipping his toe into the nonfiction space for the last few years, producing documentaries about gay civil rights in his home state of Mississippi and a Christian conversion therapy school in the Dominican Republic. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where he would die at age 62 in 2016. He even funneled the money he made from the music groups into his scheme, creating fake pay stubs to convince investors he had a fleet of airplanes. history, persuading investors and banks to put more than $300 million into his two fictitious travel businesses. A decade later, in 2008, Pearlman would plead guilty to running one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S. They weren’t the only ones who’d been bilked out of millions.
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