Filmmaker Chris Smith on the Need for Scam Docs Like ‘Hollywood Con Queen’: ‘They Help Educate People’

Addie Morfoot

In “Hollywood Con Queen,” director Chris Smith chronicles one of Hollywood’s most audacious scams that involved an impostor who posed as top entertainment studio executives to swindle aspiring artists. Based on the original reporting of entertainment journalist Scott Johnson, and his book, “Hollywood Con Queen: The Hunt for an Evil Genius,” the three-part Apple TV+ docuseries features first-hand accounts and insights from Johnson, private investigator Nicole Kotsianas, the alleged con artist, Hargobind Tahilramani, and his victims.

In 2018, it was revealed that an imposter was posing as a variety of well-known female Hollywood executives and their assistants in a bid to lure victims out to Indonesia with the promise of work. Tahilramani became something of a media sensation when it emerged he had been impersonating women such as former Sony chief Amy Pascal, Marvel Studios executive VP Victoria Alonso and Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy, and NBCUniversal Studio Group chair and chief content officer Donna Langley in order to defraud unsuspecting film industry workers who believed they were getting their big break. (Tahilramani was arrested in 2020.)

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In the docuseries, Smith interviews a handful of Tahilramani’s alleged victims, one of whom lost hundreds of thousands of dollars flying around the world “on assignment” for Amy Pascal. The understanding was that the victim would invoice Pascal after the “research trip” concluded. Another victim in the series recounts how he was pursued by Doug Liman, who Tahilramani also allegedly impersonated, for a part in a movie starring Tom Cruise. Pretending to be Liman, Tahilramani instructed his victim to watch several films per day and write character analysis on each movie. The victim was also told to hire a trainer and that he had to audition for Donna Langley.

Tahilramani, who was also happened to be a food influencer in London, allegedly kept up the scam for close to a decade.

Smith is no stranger to con artist docus. In 2022 Netflix released his docuseries “Bad Vegan,” which explored how a celebrity restaurateur went from being the queen of vegan cuisine to being known as the “vegan fugitive.” And in 2019 the streamer debuted Smith’s “Fyre” about the unraveling of the Fyre music festival.

Variety spoke to Smith and Johnson, who served as an executive producer on “Hollywood Con Queen,” about why the series is not your average con doc and whether they ever felt conned when speaking with Tahilramani.

Chris, what appealed to you about this story?

Smith: I wasn’t looking to do a con story. I was trying to move into different directions, but then I had a conversation with Scott and he explained to me why this story was different and it convinced me. That led us on this multi-year journey around the globe trying to make sense of this whole thing.

Scott, what made this story unlike other con stories?

Johnson: A few things. First and foremost, it had always struck me that this one wasn’t really about the money. So many cons are, and as a result, they are sort of simple and simplistic and there really isn’t much more to it. But this one from the beginning seemed not only to not be about the money, but about all these other things. The manipulation, the deception, the psychological complexity, the games, and the gamesmanship.

I felt horrible for the victims, but I was also was a bit surprised that some of them, who are in the industry, would believe that Amy Pascal or Donna Langley would personally call them out of the blue and continue to call. Did that surprise you?

Smith: It’s complicated. When I was an independent filmmaker, who had done virtually nothing, living in the Midwest, I came home one day and there was a voicemail from Michael Moore asking me to shoot his next feature. I saw his movie when I was in high school, and it felt like I was plucked out of the ether … But the executives had assistants who were also interacting with the victims. So it wasn’t always the studio executive who would be doing the calling. Oftentimes, there were three way calls with the studio executive, the assistant and the victim. As far as we can tell the assistant and the studio executive were the same person.

Johnson: I think it’s tempting for a viewer to maybe say, “Well, maybe this guy had a blind spot.” Or, “That would never happen to me.” But one of the things I explore in the book is just how often, and how many times this happened to so many people. It’s really staggering.

Why do you think the con artist mainly impersonated high level women executives and not male executives?

Johnson: He had a lot of admiration for these women. For him, they were captains of industry. They were creative and influential and powerful, and they were the brains behind many of the movies that he grew up on and admired and treasured as a young person.

It becomes clear while watching the series that the person behind the con is a sociopath who wanted to be a star or at least part of Hollywood. Did you ever have any reservations about making his dream a reality by making him the star of this series?

Smith: If you look at the psychological toll that these victims felt, it felt like their stories were worth telling. It also felt like it was worthy to give (Tahilramani) an opportunity to represent himself, which we did. The bigger picture of stories like these, which I think for most of the con and scam stories that happen, is that they are educational for people. This con ran for almost 10 years, and involved hundreds of victims. If this information doesn’t reach audiences or people aren’t becoming educated on these sorts of things, these kind of cons are able to be perpetuated. Collectively, while cons stories have gained a lot of attention, I think that they do provide a valuable function in that they help educate people so that people might think twice if they come into an opportunity that seems maybe too good to be true. With everything that’s happening with AI and advancements in technology, this story almost feels quaint. So for those reasons it made sense for us to make this film.

Did you reach out to any executives like Amy Pascal for an interview?

Smith: When I first talked to Scott about this, I remember thinking internally before we chatted that if his angle is to interview all the people that were impersonated, that wasn’t interesting to me because they had nothing to do with the con. They were just victims themselves. Their story was fairly clear to me. I was much more interested in the people who had gone to Indonesia and had these experiences that we learned about through the course of making the series. That and the people that were perpetrating the con were the two things that were most interesting to me. I was happy when Scott and I chatted that he seemed to share a similar perspective.

Do you think Hargobind Tahilramani was the only person involved in this elaborate scam?

Johnson: Based on everything we know and years of reporting and our best efforts to the bottom of it, it was essentially one person. There were people on the ground who participated in limited ways as drivers or what have you. We never found any evidence of an organization.

You spoke to Tahilramani quite a bit throughout the doc. He called you at all hours of the day. Did you ever feel like he was trying to con you?

Smith: No. I don’t feel like this person did things that weren’t calculated. So I think that there was a decision made to communicate with us, and I don’t fully know what the motivation was behind that, because there’s no way to know. But to me, that’s just another thing that’s intriguing and interesting about the movie. My favorite  documentaries are ones that when you get to the end, it feels conclusive, but you still have a lot to think about and talk about and discuss.I definitely think this film falls into that category.

Chris, in addition to “Hollywood Con Queen” you also directed “Devo,” a doc about the New Wave band of the same name. The film premiered at Sundance in January. Have you found a distributor?

Smith: No. It seems like everything moves a little bit slower than it did a couple years ago, but no it hasn’t found a home yet.

“Hollywood Con Queen” begins streaming on AppleTV+ on May 8.

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