Pitch People is an odd movie in a lot of ways. This is a documentary that made the festival rounds in 1999, when it was new, but wasn’t able to score a theatrical release then. For 2024 it has been newly remastered, and it had a tiny run in US cinemas this spring; now it’s available on streaming. But it is a relic adrift in time, very much an artifact of its moment a quarter of a century ago yet one that, partly because it was unable to develop any sort of life of its own back then, feels lost now.
It might be impossible to be nostalgic about this movie itself, but there could be, for viewers of a certain age, a limited amusement to be found in the subject matter: the people who demonstrated and hawked kitchen and household gadgets on late-night TV and home-shopping cable channels. Xer and Boomer insomniacs will remember wee-hours informercials for everything from chamois cloths to Ginsu knives that somehow managed to be simultaneously rapid-fire and urgent — limited time offer! buy now and also get this salad spinner! — yet drag on for 30 minutes or an hour or longer.
The goofy-90s-cheese factor is high here, but any nostalgia is small and cheap. Writer-director Stanley Jacobs — whose only other movie is the 2016 low-budget sci-fi drama 96 Souls — interviews a bunch of these pitch people, and often tries to lend them an operatic gravitas (sometimes literally!), but they are not particularly charming or interesting, not even in a faintly rascally way. Instead, an unintentional whiff of sad disrepute lingers over them and their shameless salesmanship, a hangover from the far more intriguing brief history of hucksterism with which Jacobs opens the film: there’s a direct line from Wild West medicine wagons and carny snake-oil salesmen, to 1950s cooking television shows that were designed to sell products, to Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of America TV to lift the limits on how long advertisements could be, to 24/7 QVC. (A 25th-anniversary coda, one continuing that direct line from snake-oil salesmen on to today’s Instagram influencers, would have been welcome.) Indeed, in a throwback to carnival sideshows, these pitch people would also be found at flea markets, trade shows, and fairgrounds attempting to separate passersby from their money, and — as we witness here — often succeeding.
There’s a contradiction in the film’s dedication, “to anyone who has made an honest living at convincing a complete stranger to hand over a few bucks for something that may — or may never — benefit them.” I’m not sure that constitutes a wholly honest living. And as late-stage capitalism has descended into economic precarity and debt-soaked financial despair in the intervening decades, Jacobs’s chipper vibe is distasteful now in a way it perhaps was not in the booming 1990s.
more films like this:
• The Founder [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Netflix UK]
• The Wolf of Wall Street [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Paramount+ US | Netflix UK]
