The sub-genre revolving around scams has become quite the rage among the people who love true crime documentaries, and Bad Actor: A Hollywood Ponzi Scheme is yet another example of that. D-list Hollywood actor Zach Horowitz (popularly known as Zach Avery) is at the center of the story. The guy is currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence for the massive fraud he committed. This documentary looks into how he managed to do it, his motivation behind doing it, and the impact it left on people’s lives. Let us get into the details.
What is the documentary about?
I’m sure you all have some idea about Ponzi schemes, but since I’m here to explain things anyway, let me just lay it down for you. Basically, you are tricking people into investing money, promising them great returns, then tricking more people into investing so that you can keep the promise you made to the first set of investors, and so on. At one point of Bad Actor, an expert calls it the evil cousin of the pyramid scheme, which is quite fitting.
Zach Horowitz from Fort Wayne, Indiana, could go down as possibly the greatest Ponzi schemer ever. The documentary progresses in a typical manner, bringing in people from his past—like a school friend who never thought Zach would do something like this. One key takeaway here would be the fact that Zach studied psychology at Indiana University, which had some part to play in what he would become in the future. Zach’s descent into his maddening journey of fraudulence and deceit started with him opening a smoothie bar called ‘Fül’ in Chicago, right after getting out of college. It is said that he got the seed money from his mother, who came into quite a fortune at that time. But Zach made up a story about Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz being his main investor. Obviously the story was needed to convince people to start investing, and Zach found his first victim right after landing in LA—aspiring actor Craig Cole. For Craig, Zach was this guy who had the dream of making movies, owned a company bankrolled by Starbucks, and had so much money in his bank account, which was clearly enough to get him to sign up. The two of them soon became best friends, and Zach was on his way.
What followed after that was pretty much what you expect. The documentary established the fact that many people take pride in investing in movies, which only made things easier for Zach. He was, of course, extremely charming and a master manipulator. He also put so much effort into scamming people, like showing them legitimate documents about the investment and how the likes of Netflix and HBO were interested in buying the rights to his movies. All this seemed extremely real, and the number of Zach’s victims only kept increasing. But there’s always one fundamental flaw in Ponzi schemes, which is the lack of an exit strategy. Zach may have successfully scammed so many people and stolen their money, but he didn’t know how and where to stop. Also, when the returns started to dry up (because Zach spent more money than he should), some of the investors realized what was happening and went to the law. Once Zach was on the FBI’s radar, it was only a matter of time till he got caught.
Why did Zach do this?
That is always the big question in a story like this one. Obviously people like Zach are a kind of psychopath, but this documentary does go quite deep when it comes to exploration of motive. What we actually realize is Zach never liked the life he had, and he always wanted more. He genuinely wanted a better life, where he could belong. Once the Ponzi scheme started rolling, Zach’s own quality of life only got better. He started flaunting that lifestyle—new house, fancy car, expensive watch, and things like that. Despite knowing he would get caught one day, Zach couldn’t (or didn’t want to) stop as he didn’t want to let go of what he had achieved. Of course, calling it an achievement is never the right thing, given Zach didn’t earn any of it, but we should also consider the amount of hard work he put into the whole thing.
One very strange thing, however, is Zach being a terrible actor in front of the camera. He used to pay large sums of money to the producers (cash he made from his Ponzi schemes) in order to get five seconds of screentime. Despite getting the opportunity to work with stalwarts like Brian Cox, Olivia Moon, and Ralph Fiennes, his career couldn’t take off. Had Zach had any talent, things might have worked out for him, and he would have found a way to pay back the investors; who knows?
Final Thoughts
Considering how far documentary filmmaking has come, I was surprised to see Bad Actor taking a basic, template-based approach to tell a story as fascinating as this one. The result is obviously a documentary that is quite bland overall and often boring.
But that’s not where the trouble ends. The documentary gets really problematic as it projects Joslyn Jansen as the director, only to reveal in the end that Joslyn is actually an actor playing the part of a director who’s trying to make a documentary about Zach Horowitz. The actual director is documentarian David Darg, who has an Oscar nomination under his belt (for the short film Body Team 12). Yet, you see Jansen getting credited as the director of the documentary everywhere. Obviously, this is a deliberate creative choice to make the audience experience how being deceived feels, but it is rather cheap. It’s another thing that they didn’t manage to convince the real Zach (and his wife Mallory) to be a part of the documentary and hired actors for the reenactments. But tricking the audience into believing Joslyn is directing the whole thing, while she is the one who’s getting directed (in reality), is just foolish and utterly pointless. Instead of this, they probably should have focused on telling the story in a better manner, which would have made the documentary exciting.
