I love a good documentary. That said, watching a lot of them, a question is constantly hovering in the back of my mind: Why was this a film? Too many docs are content to convey their information and stop there. My favorite documentaries are the ones that understand that film offers them new tools to tell their story. Perhaps this is why The PEZ Outlaw, a surprisingly grounded documentary about a truly wild story, works so well. Despite being inspired by a blog, The PEZ Outlaw couldn’t work as anything but a film.
“I mean, every dedicated collector is crazy a little bit in his mind.”
Steve Glew was a depressed and impoverished machinist living in rural Michigan. His natural tendencies towards being a collector eventually introduced him to the semi-local toy convention circuit, where he could sell rare items to collectors with more spare cash. It was here that Steve discovered PEZ. Yeah, the sticks with the pop-up head that dispensed candy.
PEZ, it turns out, has a surprisingly robust collector circuit. Steve quickly noticed a rare arbitrage opportunity: PEZ Europe had a lot of designs that PEZ America refused to release, making them incredibly rare in a pre-Internet era. If Steve could go straight to European manufacturers, most of which were in former Soviet states hungry for American money, he could get enormous amounts of PEZ dispensers unavailable in America, which he could then bring back and sell directly to collectors here.
But it turns out someone wasn’t too happy with Steve’s scheme: Scott McWhittie, the President of PEZ USA. Thus began a years long attempt by PEZ USA to shut Steve down — and a years long crusade by Steve to try to find new and increasingly colorful ways to find rare PEZ dispensers to bring back to America. Steve dubbed himself the PEZ Outlaw and fought Scott McWhittie for years.
“Because otherwise he would not be a collector.”
Look, the story of the quixotic quest of one man to fight a company determined to shut him down is inherently a pretty solid one. If that’s all there was to The PEZ Outlaw, it might still be a pretty interesting documentary. Directors Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel work hard to make that interesting. Knowing that Steve Glew has a love of Tom Clancy novels and a tendency to narrativize his life, they use reenactments heavily, often heavily stylized to make it feel like a noir or a crime thriller.
But the real secret to the Storkels’ success lies in their understanding of Steve. It’s not just that the recreations are intended to get us closer to how Steve was feeling; Steve plays a younger version of himself in the recreations, imbuing them with a giddy amateurism. Beyond that, the Storkels’ take seriously the revelation that Steve is bipolar. Rather than fetishize Steve’s condition or medicalize the narrative, they let Steve and his family be frank about how it impacted some of the decisions he was making as ‘the PEZ Outlaw’ — but also how he was a good partner and parent.
Indeed, the film’s more moving segments deal with Steve’s bipolar disorder and his wife’s Parkinson’s, and the evolution of their relationship together. Dealing with a maligned and misunderstood thing like bipolar disorder can be challenging for a ‘quirky’ documentary like this, but The PEZ Outlaw walks that line well.
“Collecting is…. more or less a disease.”
I have a lot of the same tendencies Steve does. If a car follows me for more than a couple turns, I definitely get paranoid. I throw myself into hobbies with an obsessive vigor. Hell, I’m a reformed collector as well. Ask my partner if we’ve had an easy time finding places to store my gigantic Criterion Collection stash.
So I can see myself in Steve. The movie works hard to make him relatable, to ground his story. Which is remarkable, in my opinion, because looking back: It’s a wild story. It’s a David and Goliath story about a strange moment in time when one man went blow-for-blow with a corporation. But it’s also, unfortunately, a story about why the corporation will always win that fight in the end.
Despite that, though, The PEZ Outlaw is as entertaining as it is moving. It’s an ambitious documentary about a small story, and it is wonderfully told.
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