Summary
- The PEZ Outlaw is a true story documented with unbelievable ups and downs that may seem too wild to be real.
- Steve Glew started his PEZ business out of necessity, going from near poverty to astonishing wealth through clever trading.
- Despite being outmaneuvered by PEZ, Glew remains hopeful as he looks to sell his story for a payday to pay off his debts.
The pure ridiculousness of the 2022 Netflix documentary has many fans asking, "Is The PEZ Outlaw a true story?" Documentaries come in all shapes and sizes. Some of the best documentaries ever made concern critical subjects that the documentary crew felt compelled to share with an attentive audience, hoping to educate, illuminate, and sometimes warn. An Inconvenient Truth warned about global warming, The Cove shed light on brutal fishing practices, and 13th exposed haunting truths about incarceration and its relation to racial prejudice.
Despite the most well-known documentaries generally being about serious issues — they are an important component of journalism after all — there are plenty of documentaries with much lower stakes. The King of Kong follows the competitive Donkey Kong video game circuit and nature documentaries are great for the whole family. Netflix's 2023 The Pez Outlaw is another of these lower-stakes documentaries that is still almost too ridiculous to be true. Amy and Bryan Storkel direct this story about a man who found a loophole with PEZ dispensers. But is it completely true?
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Yes, The PEZ Outlaw Is A True Story
Everything In The Documentary Happened
It would be easy to dismiss The PEZ Outlaw as a fabrication. The story follows a Michigan man who gained his fortune by selling PEZ dispensers. The kicker in the title, that he was branded an outlaw for it, is equally true. What makes the documentary so unbelievable is the wild ups and downs it takes. Steve Glew, the man at the center of it all, goes from having almost nothing to being splendidly wealthy to losing it all again. He flies under the radar of entire governments and then becomes public enemy number one for a single candy company.
The way the Storkels styled their documentary could also cause some viewers to think what they're watching is fake. It combines traditional documentary-style talking heads with reenactments that are almost mockumentary-like, but they all show real events. Even more oddly, Glew plays himself in these reenactments. So, while everyone else is an actor, the elderly Glew comes in as if he were 30 years younger. While all this may make The PEZ Outlaw sound like a tall tale, The Detroit News corroborated the story with 14 people and discovered that what is in the documentary is non-fiction.
Steve Glew Worked As A Machinist In Michigan And Sold Cereal Toys For Extra Money
The PEZ Outlaw Got His Start Out Of Necessity
As the documentary states, Steve Glew lived in Dewitt, Michigan and worked as a machine operator in the 1990s, barely able to scrape by with his wife and family. In order to earn some money on the side, he began collecting old cereal boxes and cutting out the coupons. Glew traded these coupons for cereal toys which he would turn around and sell at toy fairs. He did it to an almost compulsive degree, telling The Detroit News,
"You figure something out and then you go at it hard. You don’t go gently. You go in and you play as hard as you can. You do it as fast as you can. You don’t yield. You don’t hold back. It’s an all-or-nothing type of deal. That’s the only way I know how to do it."
At one of these toy fairs, Glew saw someone selling a $1 PEZ dispenser (the rectangular cartridge candy dispensers usually topped with an animal, item, or character from popular culture) for $25. From then on, Glew tried to find out what he could about the PEZ trading business and discovered that collectors were ravenous for the right dispenser. If he could find a rare or discontinued item, Glew could make a significant amount of money off just one trade.
Kathy Glew Is Steve's Wife Of Over 50 Years
Kathy Is Steve's Biggest Cheerleader
Along for this wild ride is Kathey Glew, Steve's wife of over five decades, who is described as plain-spoken as Steve is imaginative. She admits that there were times when Steve would recede into himself, not wanting to interact with others, but that changed after his PEZ escapades. Kathy knew the whole time, though, that her Steve had a good heart,
"He was a good guy, but you had to look for it."
Even when the game was up, and Steve sank into debt, Kathy was right there with him, content to move back into a small home with their many pets on a lonely dirt road in Lansing, Michigan. For every peak that Kathy has ridden to the top of with Steve, she's loyally followed him down into the valleys as well.
A European PEZ Executive Helped Glew Make $4.5 Million In 11 Years
Glew Found A Way To Get Rich Off Bringing PEZ To The US
Not content with digging through recycling bins outside PEZ factories like other collectors, Glew upped his game. He traveled to Australia, South Africa, and finally on a tip from another collector, Slovenia. There he drove through the night to arrive unannounced at the warehouse guarded by armed personnel. Somehow, he convinced the owners to allow him to purchase PEZ dispensers directly and bring them to America. Nearly every month for 11 years, Glew traveled back and forth between America and Europe, bringing suitcases of cash for bribes, transactions, and more.
After some time, Glew got in touch with a European PEZ executive in Hungary who offered him liquidated dispensers and even made extra for him. Glew paid 27 cents for one dispenser and would sell them in the US for anywhere from $5 to $1000. Over the course of his career, he brought around two million dispensers into the States.
In 1998 alone, he made a profit of $750,000 and was able to hire a staff of six to help him. He and Kathy bought a larger farm, his son Josh was given a house, and his daughter Moriah got to go to college. Beyond Glew's entrepreneurial spirit was one major mistake the PEZ corporation made.
PEZ Failed To Register A Trademark With US Customs
One Corporate Mistake Opened The Door For Glew
The reason Glew was able to make so much money off this seemingly simple business was because of one significant oversight on PEZ's part. The company never registered its trademark with U.S. Customs, meaning Glew could waltz from country to country with tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and there was nothing illegal about it. However, that doesn't mean everything he was doing was strictly above board either. Glew said to The Detroit News,
"I broke a lot of rules if not actual laws. Rules were rearranged if you’ll allow me to put it in a sunny light. You dance the line. It’s a razor’s edge. One slip the wrong way and you’re a jailbird."
PEZ was still the only company legally allowed to sell the dispensers, though they never pursued legal action against Glew.
The PEZ Corporation Got Even With Glew
PEZ Found A Way To Undercut Glew
Instead of suing Glew, PEZ outmaneuvered him. Glew was not shy about what he was doing, taking out full-page ads to sell his wares, and PEZ America took notice. When they complained to their European PEZ parent company, Glew's Hungarian connection got scared off. Undeterred, Glew hatched a new plan. He began designing his own PEZ dispensers and hired a middleman to have PEZ make them, obfuscating his involvement.
Glew took out a $125,000 loan and mortgaged his house for the same amount. With that $250,000, Glew hired a toy broker to order his designer PEZ for a German candy company ostensibly intending to sell the products in Taiwan. Instead, they wound up in Michigan. Glew planned to make $2.5 million off his $250,000 investment but PEZ was a step ahead. Before he could sell most of his dispensers, Glew discovered on the PEZ website a section titled "Misfit Dispensers": replicas of all 18 designs he made.
PEZ flooded the markets and essentially made his products worthless, putting Glew $250,000 in the hole. When Glew called his toy broker to figure out what happened, the broker cryptically responded,
"The right hand knows what the left is doing."
PEZ had gotten wise to Glew and the outlaw himself had been swindled.
Glew Is Now In Debt Though He Has A Plan To Make It Back
Glew Thinks His Story Is Worth Some Money
After the failure of his plan, Glew once again withdrew into himself like Kathy had seen him do many times in the distant past. Hurt and betrayed, Glew nearly gave up until he had another idea: he could sell this entire story as a memoir to pay off his debts. And this is where that thought and The PEZ Outlaw intersect. Glew began writing his unbelievable rags-to-riches story in 2010, on a blog with the express hope that someone would see it, and option it for a book or movie.
Playboy magazine wrote a story and Warner Bros. was briefly interested before dropping the idea. Glew was then contacted by several documentary filmmakers before he settled on Amy and Bryan Storkel. While the attention to his story has vindicated Glew in his mind, he is still waiting for a payday as the magazine and documentary both only paid nominal fees. The PEZ Outlaw is certainly a documentary that could become a movie but even if it doesn't, the true story of Glew's life, told as is, is more interesting than most fictional narratives created for the big screen.
The PEZ Outlaw
TV-PG
Documentary
Comedy
Family
The PEZ Outlaw is a documentary film by directors Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel, released in 2022. The film follows the story of a Michigan man named Steve Glew who traveled to Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall with one goal in mind - to find a factory that holds some of the most valuable PEZ candy dispensers to have ever been made and smuggle them back home to reverse his family's fortunes.
- Director
- Amy Bandlien Storkel , Bryan Storkel
- Release Date
- March 12, 2022
- Runtime
- 85 Minutes