A Writer’s Inside Story on Telemarketing

WASHINGTON--Fraudulent telephone marketers, based largely in Southern California and Florida, cheat Americans out of billions of dollars each year and generally are not prosecuted because law enforcement agencies lack the manpower to go after them, according to a new congressional report. -- Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1990

Women. Men can’t live with them and can’t--well, see ourselves without them. Take the case of playwright Lenore Carlson and director Lisa James, two women holding up a mirror to four con men and their bizarre business. The oracle at Delphi had a few words for it: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”

But Carlson is the first to argue that she’s no prophet. When beginning “Palladium Is Moving” three years ago, she didn’t suspect that her subject of telemarketing fraud would be making headlines the week her play opened at the Court Theatre in West Hollywood.

“It started as a result of getting introduced to the telemarketing world as a software dealer,” Carlson said. “It’s an underground business world. These guys all know each other. There’s the Newport Beach Boys. The Barracuda Brothers. They spy on each other all the time. They jump from room to room to room. And they spend as much time conning each other as they do conning people over the phone.”

Research came while she worked on the fringes of the “boiler rooms”--small offices packed with phones where salesmen practice their highly theatrical con-artistry.

While programming their computer software, Carlson watched the telemarketers as though she were a member of an audience at a production. She overheard salesmen con strangers out of thousands of dollars for grossly overpriced or nonexistent coins, travel packages, and oil and gas leases. She witnessed fistfights over client lists. She suppressed laughter as the fraudulent salesmen clicked staplers next to phones to simulate a ticker tape. She examined sound machines filling inert rooms with background business atmospherics.

In a macho environment where women are, at best, second-class citizens posing as secretaries to be “openers” for a man’s sales pitch, a woman programming a computer is barely noticed.

A writer’s ideal voyeur status. However, she didn’t want to write a “reality-oriented, hard-boiled business play” in the style of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

“I wanted to write an absurd piece about four men in the claustrophobic arena of a boiler room,” she said. “These guys are absurd. These guys live on the edge. And I wanted to capture their lack of proportion.”

Carlson wrote “Palladium” quickly. Then, she said, she “spent two years finding out why it didn’t work.”

Carlson comes from an academic and business background. Her approach to a production might strike theater professionals as painfully naive. Friends who read “Palladium” said it needed a male director. So she mailed her script to theaters, requesting names of potential directors. Meanwhile, rewrites changed the structure from two acts to three, then to one, as Carlson labored to find “the arc of the story.”

“I’m this overeducated individual, but none of my degrees have anything to do with drama,” Carlson said. “I have a degree in business, a degree in clinical work, all these licenses. But it’s all meaningless. I don’t live enough. I’m too academic.”

Carlson’s first profession was psychiatric social work. She was employed for seven years at Central City Community Mental Health Center, then for two years had a private practice specializing in children. After getting “a little burned out,” Carlson took a job in the Los Angeles Times’ advertising department. Fortunately, she changed careers just as The Times upgraded to computer technology. She received a free education in software systems.

“Bingo! I loved it and went into my own business.”

Another career was simultaneously opening up for Carlson: theater. She had always written poetry and prose. But during the 1987 Fringe Festival in Los Angeles, which was open to all artists, Carlson tried writing plays. “The Rainbow Room,” about a slow night in a West Hollywood women’s bar, became a minor critical hit of the festival.

Carlson was hooked.

“What I loved about the theater is it got me out of academia,” she said. And when her new business venture, D.C. Systems, plunged her into yet another new world, Carlson knew what she had to do.

“I saw this world and said to myself, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. Wow, what a wonderful world to tap into for my writing!’ ”

Carlson next tried her hand at an all-male play.

While Carlson searched for her “Mr. Right” male director, Lisa James was looking for a playwright.

Actress James had scored a major success with her directing debut of “Heartstopper,” which ran about five months in 1987 at the Eagle Theatre in Beverly Hills. Like Carlson, her inexperience led to breakthroughs. “I didn’t know the rules,” James said, “so I broke them.” Following the successful run of “Heartstopper,” James hoped to direct another play--immediately.

But two years passed while she looked for the right play.

“I didn’t find anything that had an original thought,” James said. “If the writing was good, the plot was boring. If the plot was sort of OK, the writing was dull.” She began examining classics.

During her arduous search, James worked as an observing director on the CBS television series “Designing Women” and co-wrote an NBC movie-of-the-week, “The Gifted One.”

Finally, actress Jennifer Solt told James she’d read a sensational play during a writing workshop.

James got a copy of “Palladium Is Moving” (the title refers to a bogus commodities venture). “I couldn’t believe a woman had written it,” James told Carlson. “It has such an edge to it.”

“I don’t write like a man,” Carlson said. “I just write.”

James had found her play. And Carlson had found her director.

“I’m very negative and she’s very positive,” Carlson said of their working relationship. “We balance each other perfectly.”

Carlson agreed with James that the play wasn’t ready yet.

“It read great on paper,” Carlson said, “but what reads great on paper doesn’t necessarily play great on stage. So with my tenacity and obsession I went back to the drawing board. I wanted to do this world of telemarketing.”

Carlson and James created a typical L.A. collaboration: Fed-Exed and faxed revisions, plus lots of telephone conversations. Scripts went back and forth.

“I have no life,” Carlson said, “but Lisa’s a very busy person. So what you do when you can’t get a hold of her is Fed-Ex scripts.”

The rewrites were helped by Carlson’s insider status in telemarketing. She came, she saw, she wrote. And she phoned James.

“You won’t believe this!” Carlson would preface over the phone before detailing another outrageous telemarketing incident.

Once James read some pages and asked Carlson to stop exaggerating.

Carlson responded: “This is like a whitewash! This is nothing!”

“This play doesn’t even begin to touch this world,” Carlson told James. “I had to throw out so much of this world to make a play. It’s a world that really hasn’t been tapped.”

“Finally I said, ‘This is a shooting script,’ ” James recalled. “I told her future changes would be made on our feet in rehearsals.”

Besides, James was eager to see how the telemarketing world could be exploited on stage. “The telemarketing strategies are so theatrical,” James said. “When they teach newcomers how to sell, they’re trained theatrically. The salesmen are actors.”

But in rehearsals, two women faced four men. Would the wars between men and women begin? James would even be directing her husband, Gregg Henry. Problems?

James agrees the situation was a challenge but now “it’s almost become genderless. It isn’t really about handling the men and how they relate to me. It’s about respect for each other’s talents. The collaboration is the thing. The guys are not feeling threatened.”

Carlson was impressed after observing James during rehearsals.

“Lisa has an amazing ability to work in the midst of chaos,” Carlson said. “I’m more academic, more rigid. We’re alike in how we think about entertainment, but different in how it works.”

This difference led to a few minor conflicts.

“Every time I would change something,” James said with a laugh, “Lenore would say, ‘I have to have it in writing. I have to have a clean script.’ Finally I said, ‘What do you think this is, NBC? You’re going to get pink pages every time you revise?’ ”

Carlson began distancing herself from rehearsals and from “Palladium Is Moving.”

“At some point, the writer has to let go,” James said. “Then the director gets it, and they interpret it. Then I have to let go, and the actors take it. I will never get it exactly as I want it.”

Carlson’s method for “letting go” was simple: starting a new play. But each working day she still enters the world of “Palladium” and observes this “special breed of men.”

“The world I’m capturing are the guys that really make the big bucks,” she said. “There’s a certain breed of guys that can cold call and get people to send them checks like 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 a shot, without ever having seen them. That’s what I found amazing. In one way it’s business. You can argue that they’re in a class by themselves. But maybe they’re not. It’s just they let their pants down. They’re oxygen to each other. They feed each other, like piranhas. And they exhaust their clients, churn them until nothing’s left, nobody’s buying anymore cause everyone goes broke. Then they move on.”

“There’s a dehumanizing factor to it,” James said. “You are in fact conning people. There’s a fine line between legality and illegality. These guys are ruthless. They’ll say anything they have to say to make a sale. Some men will become women when they have to on the line to make a sale. They even imitate women.”

Insider Carlson corrects outsider James on this point.

“Not in the world I’m writing about,” she said. “You can’t be a woman in this room. When you’re asking people to send checks in this amount, people won’t send to women.”

How does Carlson feel “Palladium” will be received?

“People will say these men don’t act this way,” she said, “but trust me, this is the tip of the iceberg.””Palladium Is Moving”

Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood; (213) 466-1767.

Curtain time is 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 7 p.m. Sundays, through Sept. 16. Tickets are $17.50 Thursday, Friday and Sunday, $20 Saturday.