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Premise:

An office of telemarketers pushing phony "Fat-Away" weight-loss pills ("Tell your friends it went "fat-away") are slowly being murdered one by one...and somebody is responsible!

Production Notes:

Director Lee Bennett Sobel brings you TERRORMARKETERS, a comedy/horror feature film that was completely improvised based on an outline written by Sobel and Geraldine Winters. This was Sobel’s second all improv comedy feature film, produced by shooting with two digital video cameras trained on the actors at all times and shot very quickly in four nights during a heatwave in New York City in June, 2003. The total budget for the film was $1,000.

The movie was inspired by jobs Sobel had as a telemarketer at which he was actually pretty successful. The public backlash against intrusive sales calls recently resulted in the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Call Registry and increasingly stricter regulations. “What inspired the movie was how incredibly personal it is to enter a stranger’s home via their telephone. That and I found some of the people I worked with to be pretty memorable characters in and of themselves!” said Director Lee Bennett Sobel.

The movie gave Sobel exactly what he needed to make a micro-budget feature film: a movie set in a single location, that of a sleazy telemarketing office. “I wanted the claustrophobic feel of movies like ‘Das Boot’ so that you could feel how tense the situation was for both the people getting called and the telemarketers themselves.” The people called are never seen on camera but are heard through the phones, putting the audience right into the shoes of the caller. “We shots hours and hours of footage of the actors improvising with the people they were calling end edited the movie down to just the choicest bits.”

Sobel feels that improv comedy features must have built in tension for the actors to play off: “Everyone hates telemarketers. Telemarketers even hate themselves and wish they could be doing anything but this! So there is so much tension built into the situation that is really gives the actors plenty to work with.”

Synopsis:

Welcome to the sleazy pit known as Fat Away, Inc.'s telemarketing office. Seven telemarketers (of various psychological makeups: all of them askew) making minimum rage, sit at "stations" consisting of beat-to-shit phones and stacks of stale leads long out of date where they cold call people to sell a phony weight loss product. They're warriors of the telephonic age...nah, who are we kidding, they're a bunch of misfits that couldn't get better jobs so they're stuck doing something no sane person would want to do!

Meet ANTHONY SCAMBONI, the polyester-suited business man proudly lacking in ethics, constantly one step ahead of the law. He hires his nephew GREGG as the new office manager. Gregg is a guy for whom the 80's never ended, who fancies himself a slick hot-shot, has a $100 a day coke habit and hasn't been able to keep a job anywhere of any kind. Scamboni is pushing out the current manager, a super nice nerdy guy all the telemarketers liked named TERRENCE KRINSKY who Gregg tries to get to admit he's really sad about leaving but is actually happy because he ended up getting the kind of dream job Gregg would kill for — and this torments Gregg to no end. Terry, as the gang calls him, is sorry to leave his co-workers, the "team" (which makes Gregg grimace) who he considers his friends. The telemarketers all have a party for Terry and Gregg sees this as an opportunity to hit on the females in the office but when he doesn’t score he promptly busts up the party and sends everyone back to work.

Gregg announces that since the economy is so bad at the end of the night the weakest links will not be returning. He grills each employee, playing on their weaknesses and enjoying taking them apart. Meanwhile, Gregg keeps getting phone calls from someone threatening him. The caller knows his name and says at the end of the night he will be dead. Gregg thinks it must be one of the telemarketers playing a joke on him but when the phone on his desk rings again it sounds like a mafia hit man and once Gregg gets a box with his uncle’s head in it he knows the killer means business.

One of the telemarketers jumps up, claiming to be an FBI agent and pulls a gun on Gregg, but the guy has to go to the bathroom and entrusts someone else to hold the gun on Gregg. But then the "FBI" guy is murdered in the bathroom and when another telemarketer goes in looking for him she also meets a fate worse than death…okay maybe not worse, just the same. Soon the bodies are piling up and paranoia reaches a peak until the only one left is Gregg. When the phone rings he answers it and it's the killer who sobs that it was all his fault for taking his. Gregg quickly realizes it's Terrence Krinsky! As Terry sobs on, Gregg grabs the FBI agent’s gun and a fight ensues. A shot goes off and Gregg slumps to the floor. Later, Terry is seen announcing to the office that he is now the owner of Fat Away, Inc. He will be much better than the old management as far as taking care of his employees. As applause fills the air, we see that Terry is addressing all the corpses of former employees and the victorious cheering is all in his head.

Director’s Biography

Director Lee Bennett Sobel is a native New Yorker and graduate of New York University’s film school. He has worked as a story editor for movie and television producers in New York and Hollywood, and currently runs his own company in New York as a music promoter/DJ. In 2002 he started Lo-Fi Entertainment Home Video to distribute his own movies and eventually other filmmakers’ work on DVD. To date he has directed six low budget feature films including UFO FEVER and LUVRGRL which are available from his own website www.lofientertainment.com and ROCKABILLY VAMPIRE distributed by Troma Entertainment.

TERRORMARKETERS Cast & Crew

Mark E. Phillips - Gregg
Claudia Alick - Linda
Jay Cavanaugh - Rick
Anna Studebaker - Ronny
Bill Edwards - Bernie
Sharon Freedman - Mandy
Barrett Ogden - Arthur
Jamie Melser - Erotika
Myles Evans - Terrence
Daniel Werzinger - Scamboni

Voices: Karen Rousso, Becky Flaum, Jon Ermler, Amity Givens, Dave Sweeney, Austin Basis, Kristofer Updike, Jay Cavanaugh, Mark E. Phillips

Produced & Directed by Lee Bennett Sobel
Creative Consultant Geraldine Winters
Associate Producer Phil Mazo
Director of Photography Jon Miller
Editor Marc Serhan
Camera Operators Jon Miller, Amy Feller
Horror Makeup FX: Dyana Aives

DVD Extras:
Deleted Scenes
Movie Trailer
Screen Tests