Episode
EP057 - Don't Make a Documentary (It'll Ruin Your Career) w/ Luke Korem
- Podcast
- Doc Walks
- Published
- Jun 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4073
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Summary
We hit the boardwalk with Luke Korem—the Emmy-winning documentary director behind DEALT, MILLI VANILLI, and ACTION—and somewhere between a guy blasting EDM off a portable speaker and the bats under the bridge, Luke hands us a filmmaking philosophy worth bottling: it's all the same muscle. Doc, series, scripted—storytelling is storytelling, and the trick is knowing a series is a sprint and a feature is a marathon. Luke walks us through the whole arc: his accidental first feature LORD MONTAGU (a chairman, a castle, fifty grand, and four guys who'd never made a film), the SXSW-winning DEALT about blind card magician Richard Turner, and how the real story is never the hook—when it comes to DEALT, it's a man learning to embrace his weakness. We get the gospel of "no control" (the studio that passed on MILLI VANILLI, then came begging six months later), why he prays his way through the gambles, and why AI makes real human stories more valuable, not less. Then Ben hijacks his own podcast with the greatest one-that-got-away in doc history: the time he tried to con conman Frédéric Bourdin—subject of THE IMPOSTER — into a movie, got double-crossed, taunted by a Photoshopped postcard from the French Riviera… and learned years later the postcard was forged by his own friend in Paris. Luke's verdict: cut that out and make it its own episode. Plus: Luke's mom's catering empire, his magician dad, the gateway drug of renting EDTV, and plenty of advice from a man with zero social media. DISCUSSION LINKS: LORD MONTAGU (2013) | DEALT (2017) | ACTION (2019) | THE NEW YORK TIMES PRESENTS (2020) | MILLI VANILLI (2023) | WINNEBAGO MAN (2009) | THE IMPOSTER (2012) | CHOP & STEELE (2022) | HIGH HOPES (2023) | CHEER (2020) | LAST CHANCE U (2016) | EDTV (1999) | FIELD OF DREAMS (1989) | THE KARA…