“As a morality tale The Merchant Pell grabs one poetically and stabs one intellectually.

“People say that knowledge is power. I say that depends on what you do with it.

“The beginning act of carelessness or negligence can be as simple as a non-optimum thought, a misspoken word, a discarded piece of paper, out of which all the ills of the world can be extrapolated.”

– Iain Jones
   Director

Iain Jones came across a remarkable character, a hidden influence in our society:

Benjamin Pell, a self-confessed information spy.

Pell moves around the city of London at night, taking specifically targeted rubbish bags from outside the top corporations, law firms, management companies, PR firms, lobbyists, private homes, in other words, anybody who either handles matters for the famous and powerful or is famous and powerful.

But in Benjamin Pell’s own words, “you don’t have to be famous, I’m just going through everything”.

Pell sifts through more than a thousand bags of information each week to find secret, confidential and sensitive documents which he then sells to rival companies, the British tabloids, broadsheet newspapers or anyone to whom the information is valuable.

In doing so, Pell makes a lot of money.

Many legitimate, respected and award-winning journalists depend on Benjamin Pell to supply them with his “smelly exclusives”. The stories, which Pell helps to piece together using a variety of legally, professionally and socially questionable practices are then sold to unsuspecting readership as legitimate journalism.

Benjamin Pell’s point of view: “My method is the original form of journalism. It’s just something which modern-day journalists are too lazy to do. Because ‘gutter journalism’ meant, I assume, literally going through people’s rubbish … It’s all been going on since the time of Adam and Eve … the Serpent told on them. He was the first … journalist. I mean they’re all snakes, aren’t they?”

Benjamin Pell turned out to be a complex character, a raconteur with an ingenious, scheming intelligence who revealed on film his eccentricities ranging from emotional vulnerability to amorality, and who embodies the treachery of modern mass media.

Within 3 months Jones had filmed 40 hours of footage regarding Pell and his activities. What he captured on film is quirky, funny and disturbing.

The Press, and hundreds of its editors and journalists have dealt with Pell and many fear their involvement with him being revealed. They didn’t know Pell was taping hours and hours of conversations and negotiations that he was having with them.

Pell “knows” that they need and fear him, and has been quoted as saying, “I run Fleet Street [the British newspaper industry].”

Mark Watts, a leading investigative journalist for the Sunday Express says, “How would their readers feel if they knew the way the newspapers were getting their stories? It’s a bit of a secretive area. It’s an area that they don’t really like to talk too much about in the industry. The newspapers’ job is to go around exposing stories. This is one story that the newspaper industry does not want exposed because an aspect of it is about itself.”

The cream of the legal profession, whose clients’ information has been successfully targeted by Pell, also do not want this story told. The ones who could put Pell in jail, won’t. If they prosecute him, their own negligence will be exposed and they fear that if the truth becomes known, their reputations and businesses will be crippled.

According to Jones, “Benjamin represents the generation that parents can’t get to leave home and other complex problems that modern society is struggling to cope with.”

Jones says, “The film is a cautionary tale, unflinchingly honest about Benjamin Pell’s activities, our media culture and its antisocial behavior. It deals with deceits that permeate society, issues that adversely affect humanity, and reveals a shockingly treacherous aspect of our culture which has been used and will continue to be used to inflict pain and suffering and even to ruin lives.

“Only when one has been the victim of this Machiavellian activity does one begin to understand how insidious it really is and then it is often too late to completely rectify the damage that has been done even when one is innocent.

“Hopefully the advent of this film will shed some light on those who lurk in the shadows with ill intent and will encourage you to take the small measures required to prevent yourself becoming their next victim.”

Pell’s choices:

    To expose the negligence in a way that benefits everyone, or
    to be a part of that negligence by taking advantage of it for personal profit.

His internal conflict:

    “Can I expose who I am and what I do, and be more than I could from keeping in the shadows of it all?”

Watch The Merchant Pell and decide for yourself.

Copyright © 2001-2011 by Hollywood Jones, LLC.   All rights reserved.