How (and Why) ‘Dirty Pop’ Deepfaked Lou Pearlman

Backstreet’s back! And so is NSYNC, O-Town, and all of Lou Pearlman’s other boy bands (and his crimes) in hit Netflix docuseries “Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam.”

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If that all sounds familiar , it is probably because this already happened: In 2019, NSYNC member Lance Bass released “The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story.”

This one, directed by David Terry Fine and executive produced by Pearlman-boy-band band-boy Michael Johnson, who is also one of the main on-camera participants, is a three-part documentary series employing a very present-day storytelling device. ( Johnson was one-fifth of Natural , and no, I had never heard of them either.)

Pearlman serves as the narrator of the 2024 doc about his misdeeds. That was complicated by the fact that Pearlman has been dead for nearly eight years. Enter actor Chris Banks — or at least his mouth — and a healthy dose of machine learning .

“Lou 2,” as Fine calls his monster as you see it on screen, is built on the base of a real Pearlman video. Decades ago, in the same home office where Pearlman penned his full-of-shit memoir, the blimp executive (not a shot at his weight: Pearlman literally leased blimps for a living) slash music producer slash Ponzi schemer filmed a 15-minute (Johnson estimates) pitch video for a studio-in-a-box product.

The product was crap and it never made it to market — but its instructional video proved invaluable to Johnson and Fine.

While Lou 2 spits out real Pearlman pearls of wisdom in “Dirty Pop,” none of them are what he’s actually saying in the pitch video. Johnson, who owns the rights to Pearlman’s life story, and Fine pulled all of Lou 2’s dialogue directly from Pearlman’s (AKA Lou 1) autobiography. Like his words, Lou 2’s gestures are authentic to Lou 1, they’re just out of context. (“An editorial exercise,” Fine said of matching movements with words.)

To achieve the desired seamless effect, Fine zoomed in on Banks’ head for “as much resolution on his mouth as possible.” The actor , who bears exactly zero resemblance to Pearlman , mouthed the words and the AI went to work. Fine fed the artificial intelligence “a lot of different angles” of the real Pearlman from (real) archival footage. Bingo-bango, fake Lou Pearlman. Any moments that looked a bit squirrelly could be masked by a VHS-effect overlay, which Fine says he used (primarily) to make his Lou 2 video appear of the same era as the doc’s archival footage.

Manipulating the audio was a similar process, Fine said; just with a different AI model. Fine, who used to work in visual effects, acknowledged that a version of this could have been achieved through analog work performed by humans.

“Everything we did was totally accomplishable with a great compositor ,” he said. “We’d be able to do this in VFX — I don’t know if the cost would be more or less , depends on the vendor — but the time that this took had less to do with asking an artist to tweak X, Y, and Z and more to do with tweaking the underlying AI algorithm that was accepting this input and producing this output.”

Johnson says the tech they used for Lou 2 is more than 12-months old at this point. We’re “light years” beyond what you see in “Dirty Pop,” he said. (Johnson just made a project with OpenAI for the Tribeca Film Festival, and he says that one of the ChapGPT-owner’s executives asked him how they made Lou 2. “That’s fucking cool,” Johnson said of being one step ahead of even those guys.)

Just having a lookalike play Pearlman in a reenactment “wouldn’t be the same,” Johnson said, emphasizing his former producer/manager’s unique “mannerisms” and “body language.” Anything less than real Lou “would take you out of the story that we’re telling,” he said.

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OK, but what if it was a really good actor? Funny you should ask: Johnson, who (pre-arrest) traveled the world with Pearlman documenting his life, recalled to IndieWire the time Pearlman pitched Philip Seymour Hoffman on playing him in a biopic. Sadly, that particular piece of footage has been lost to time.

The choice to deepfake Pearlman came with the added benefit of some poetic justice.

“Lou was, himself, just a total fake,” Fine said. “So much about him was just a scam.”

“The decision to do that was so rooted in his character and the way that he made people feel,” Fine continued. “Everybody had this different impression of who Lou Pearlman was. He was this chameleon-type figure and could say the thing he needed to say in different environments to get the buy-in that he needed to keep his scam moving forward. And so it just felt perfect for a deepfake.”

(The short version of Pearlman’s crimes: He swindled money out of people under the guise that they were investing in his next great boy band. In reality, Pearlman forged all of the financial documents that kept everyone happy, blew all the money either on himself or in bad business deals, and was convicted of running the longest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history.)

The result is so convincing that Fine, Johnson, and Netflix had multiple conversations about how to inform viewers of what was real and what was not. The “back and forth” was “frustrating,” Fine said, and the filmmakers ultimately did not get the specific language (“synthetic media”) that he lobbied for.

“Dirty Pop” opens with some old footage of the Backstreet Boys when they were actually boys (well, maybe not Kevin). Two-and-a-half minutes into the first episode we get a glimpse at Lou behind his desk, and a warning:

“This is real footage of Lou Pearlman. This footage has been digitally altered to generate his voice and synchronize his lips. The words were written by Lou in his book, ‘Bands, Brands & Billions.'”

Subsequent episodes have an abridged version of the title card within their own opening minutes.

“Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam” is available on Netflix. There, it finished number 2 to “Cobra Kai” last week and tallied 5.6 million views.