Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hollywood Con Queen’ On Apple TV+, A Docuseries About A Scammer Who Impersonates Female Hollywood Executives

Hollywood Con Queen, directed by Chris Smith, is a three-part docuseries that takes a look at a con artist who, via impersonations of various high-powered female show-business executives, managed to scam a number of people working in the business out of modest sums of money. But what the “con queen”, as the person has been dubbed, did more was manipulate their victims into making trips out to Indonesia and other psychological tortures, all with the promise of providing them work.

HOLLYWOOD CON QUEEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of Jakarta, Indonesia. A journalist goes around with a fixer, trying to find the location of a source.

The Gist: In the first episode, journalist Scott Johnson, who wrote about the con queen for The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 and then wrote a subsequent book about the case, takes us through what the scammer would do. They’d email a creative type offering work on a project, then at some point, the creative type is introduced to a well-known executive on the phone, and that person sets up the project, complete with contracts and itineraries. The victim would not only waste money on flights and hotels that never got reimbursed, or paying for things like martial arts training, but at times people in Jakarta, where the victims would be sent, would take “fees” in cash.

Among the executives who were impersonated were Sony’s Amy Pascal, Paramount’s Sherry Lansing, Universal’s Donny Langley, Wendi Murdoch, and others. In one of the cases presented in the first episode, the scammer even posed as movie producer Doug Liman to get their victim on the hook.

We hear from three sets of victims: a photographer who was flown back and forth to Indonesia three times in the span of three weeks, an actor who was sexually propositioned by the scammer posing as the former wife of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and a couple who were dropped in the middle of a market without a fixer or anyone to help them. All of them took these elaborate ruses because they sounded like legitimate opportunities; in some cases, they would have been career-changers.

Because of the low-stakes money that the scammer collected, and the fact that the victims voluntarily went to Jakarta to do this work they were supposedly being offered, it was hard to get law enforcement involved. But while Johnson was investigating, Nicole Kotsianas, whose private investigation agency was hired by Pascal, kept looking into the con queen, even after Pascal’s case was settled. After the story in THR came out, people came out of the woodwork to give both Johnson and Kotsianas tips, which led them to an Instagram influcencer in London named Hargobind Tahilramani.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Hollywood Con Queen is reminiscent of The Tinder Swindler, but the scam that the con queen was running was much more elaborate.

Our Take: Most of the time when we watch docuseries about con artists and their scams, we try our hardest to think that “this could happen to anyone,” but at some point the same thought creeps in: “Why didn’t they see this big, red flag?” But in Hollywood Con Queen, there were no red flags, at least not that we could see. There may have been insane things that happened once the con was well in progress, but it seemed exceedingly possible for all of these intelligent creative types to fall for what the con queen was offering.

Why? Because the entertainment business is a gig economy, and we’re nothing if not intimately familiar with that mentality. When a work opportunity comes across your email, sure, you do your best to vet whom it’s coming from. But work is work, and if it seems that it’s going to be lucrative and/or high-profile, you start to let down some of your defenses. It’s also not unusual to front money for things like travel or training and get reimbursed for it later. So there nothing about what the con queen was doing that would raise anyone’s attention, at least not until extreme things start happening.

So we watched these stories with fascination, despite the preponderance of reenactment scenes, which in this case is a necessary visual storytelling technique given the lack of real footage of, well, anything. Hollywood Con Queen can best be described as more of a visual podcast, given that there isn’t really much visually that can be added to the story, at least in the first episode.

In the next two episodes, Johnson and Kotsianas narrow in on Tahilramani, and we’re looking forward to learning more about him. How was he able to do such good impressions of these executives? How was he alone able to make these scams so elaborate? And why did he seem to be more in it for the psychological manipulation and torture than for the modest sums that he received?

Sex and Skin: The actor who was a victim definitely had some creepy and disturbing interactions with the con queen, but we just hear about those.

Parting Shot: The person claiming to be the Con Queen of Hollywood says over the phone that they were also a victim, if you can believe it.

Sleeper Star: We watched Kotsianas closely because she’s definitely outside the Hollywood system, and the way she conducts her investigation indicates that.

Most Pilot-y Line: A little more context about the people the con queen was impersonating would have been helpful for audiences that aren’t well-versed in the entertainment industry. Just saying “these are powerful people” isn’t enough for audience members who don’t recognize the names of the executives being impersonated.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hollywood Con Queen is a fascinating look at a scam that was so well-designed that it’s hard to find the red flags that you usually see with con artists and their scams. But it’s also an interesting look at just how far people will go to make it in the entertainment industry.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.