Filmmaker Muta’Ali Muhammad thought he knew the MoviePass story—how the too-good-to-be-true movie subscription service flamed out spectacularly, culminating when MoviePass and its parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2020. After a series of baffling pricing changes and nightmare service issues, the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of purposefully locking out subscribers and misusing their data. The company’s CEOs also faced claims from four California district attorneys’ offices that they had engaged in “unlawful business practices.” (In 2021, MoviePass settled with the FTC and its CEOs settled with the district attorneys.)

But the story Muhammad learned was more disturbing: how MoviePass’s actual founders, Black entrepreneurs Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt, were pushed out of the company they created and replaced by smooth-talking, gray-haired white guys: Mitch Lowe, who became MoviePass CEO, and Ted Farnsworth, the CEO of MoviePass’s parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics. Rather than steadying MoviePass’s business model, the men pissed off the company’s loyal customers and sent its stock plummeting. Two years after MoviePass filed for bankruptcy in 2020, the Department of Justice charged Lowe and Farnsworth with four counts each of fraud related to the alleged lies they told investors and customers. They each pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial. The FBI classified it as the kind of scam that “erode[s] the public’s faith in our financial markets.” The SEC has also filed a complaint against the men, accusing them of making false statements to investors.

Muhammad ended up making a documentary about Spikes and Watt’s little-known injustice with MoviePass, MovieCrash, which is currently streaming on Max.

“I’m African American. These are two Black founders of a company that rose to such heights. And I felt what happened to them was something that didn’t need to go ignored,” says the filmmaker. “These are two people, regardless of race, who were pursuing the American dream and crossed paths with a situation that a lot of us could face if we ever are in a fortunate circumstance where we have a unique idea, patent it, build it, et cetera—but we need funding and don’t have access to it. It’s part of that quote-unquote American dream to go for our goals. And if we run into people who have a different perspective on how our dream should be executed, sometimes we can get into trouble.”

Inspired by Jason Guerrasio’s reporting on MoviePass for Business Insider, the documentary claims that Lowe and Farnsworth were installed in the hopes that they could help the founders raise money and successfully restructure the company’s subscription model. Instead, the company lost money at a frightening pace, thanks to its untenable $10-a-month subscription deal, plus a streak of gonzo spending.

Suddenly, as the documentary shows, MoviePass had a helicopter touching down at Coachella for a branded event costing more than $1 million that inexplicably involved Dennis Rodman as a brand ambassador. (A former MoviePass executive was later found guilty of embezzling at least $260,000 from the company for the event at the 2018 music festival.) Managers allegedly boarded a yacht with Farnsworth, partied with him at a Sundance event hosted at a premiere Park City mansion, and posted content of their exec-adjacent lavish celebrations on social media. The company also decided to invest in the John Travolta Gotti movie—the notably horrible gangster film which debuted to a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating—and promote it with a lavish Cannes Film Festival party where 50 Cent performed. The movie subscription business was also suddenly being spun off into…an airplane company? Hence the photo shoot of Travolta and late wife Kelly Preston posing alongside a private jet with a “MoviePass Air” insignia.

Between hemorrhaging money, technical issues, and hundreds of thousands of customer-service messages, MoviePass was a mess. In 2017 alone, its parent company lost over $150 million. Adding insult to injury, the public seemed to think that Lowe and Farnsworth were the brains behind the company. The documentary captures Farnsworth taking astonishing credit for the idea in one interview: “Any movie, any theater, any day, that was me,” Farnsworth showboats. “That’s what I created.”

Muhammad wanted to correct the historical record. “There was an assumption that, and I don’t know where it started exactly, [that] Ted Farnsworth and Mitch Lowe created MoviePass,” says the filmmaker. As such, there was not much press coverage around Spikes and Hamet being forced out, let alone the scandal that unraveled behind the scenes after they were. Says Muhammad, “People weren’t even looking into who the original founders were because it just wasn’t even a question.”

In addition to Spikes, Hamet, and former MoviePass employees appearing on camera, Lowe also participates. In an interview that was taped about a week before his fraud charges hit, Lowe says this about the company’s chaos: “A lot of these things were during a period of time where I was in the middle of a divorce, after 40 years of being with my former wife. I was totally distracted.”

Muhammad was not able to interview Farnsworth, who has an especially eclectic, failure-prone business background. In the 1990s, he founded the Psychic Discovery Network, which was promoted by La Toya Jackson and received 60 complaints in one year, according to the Federal Communications Commission. According to Bloomberg, Farnsworth became the CEO of an antioxidant-rich drink maker promoted by Chaka Khan, whose stock dropped 99% on his watch. Referring to Lowe and Farnsworth’s alleged activities at MoviePass, the FBI said in a statement that “the defendants deliberately and publicly engaged in a fraudulent scheme designed to falsely bolster their company’s stock price…. Farnsworth and Lowe allegedly made these materially false and misleading representations in press releases, SEC filings, interviews on podcasts and on television, and in print and online media.”

When I ask about Farnsworth’s track record as a businessman, Muhammad says, “We explore as far as we can, to the legal extent in a documentary, what might’ve been happening…and I think the charges that he’s facing with the SEC might be connected to some evidence that has yet to be revealed.”

Given that the investigation was unfurling in real time, Muhammad says he had to trust during the filmmaking process that the documentary’s conclusion would naturally emerge. “We just had to move forward on faith that we would get to the right ending. And it revealed itself as life took place.”

Initially, MoviePass, MovieCrash was going to end with Spikes and Hamet losing both the company and their MoviePass fortune, and learning a giant lesson. “What was hard about what happened was we had succeeded,” Spikes says in the documentary. “We had built a brand over years. The brand had enormous value in the marketplace. We were disrupting the movie industry…. You work more than a decade on something, you summit Everest, you literally make it, and it’s gone within the amount of time you as a founder can’t sell your stock. It just vanished.”

Partway through production, though, Spikes called Muhammad with a shocking announcement: He had put in a bid to reclaim ownership of MoviePass. And in November 2021, the company’s original cofounder reclaimed control of MoviePass. Under Spikes’s leadership, the company celebrated its first-ever profit. It certainly didn’t return that $80 million worth of stock that he lost, but it did give the film and the MoviePass story a rare, somewhat heartwarming conclusion.

“If I’m telling a story that has to do with any sort of trauma, loss, or vulnerability, I like to end with something that gives people a glimmer of hope or inspiration,” says Muhammad. “I was like, ‘If you get MoviePass back, you didn’t necessarily win, but you weren’t defeated.’”