Director Michael Dault’s newest film, “Hobby Hustle,” a documentary about the sports card industry, begins with a montage of voices celebrating the card collecting hobby over a scene of a boy sorting baseball cards in his bedroom.
As the movie unfolds, like a child who grows up, its youthful illusions fade into the realities of adulthood. It took five years for Dault to finish the film. Dault is also a collector who says he wanted to document the tension between the positive and negative forces at work in sports collectibles.
“There’s a lot of good in the industry,” Dault told SC Daily. “But there’s also a lot of things that are not good. The movie is kind of a hodgepodge of everything.”
Dault is a filmmaker and producer, but he’s also an author of two books; The Sons of Summer published in 2017 and Cold Run published in 2021. With royalties earned from the books, Dault says he was able to finance the documentary by himself.
Initially, Dault’s film would focus on autograph forger Cliff Panezich, who flooded the market with tens of thousands of ultra-believable forgeries that resulted in $2.5 million in losses to unsuspecting buyers. The film delves into Panezich’s upbringing, his initial enterprise as an autograph hunter, and his eventual descent into the criminal underbelly.
But then Dault had to deal with COVID shutdowns, which stopped production. In his home, Dault conducted more research and expanded his film to feature a young hobby shop owner in Michigan named Luke Kooy, who was making a six-figure income in high school; Karl Kissner, the man who made the stunning “Black Swamp” find in Defiance, Ohio in 2012; and F1 collector La Tonya Hampton.
The documentary touches on well-known topics among people who have been around the hobby for a few years, spotlighting forgeries, the rising popularity of card breaks, the growth of card shops, and controversies in the card grading industry.
But it’s in the storytelling where the film shines.
The Black Swamp Find
One of the central figures in the documentary is Karl Kissner, credited with the “Black Swamp” find. It was a historic collection of hundreds of mint-condition pre-war caramel and tobacco cards found in a small Ohio town in 2012.
The film delves deeper into the story, bringing the discovery and cards to life. It is one of the film’s highlights – learning about how the cards were found in the attic of a home that had been passed down for generations and eventually to its final owner, great aunt Jean Hench, a hoarder.
As Kissner says in the film, “Her passion, her disease, her curse, became our blessing.”
Heritage Auctions was chosen to sell most of the Black Swamp cards, and the film reveals it was because Heritage was the first to pick up Kissner’s phone call.
A Master Forger
Panezich, whose fake autographs were once used by JSA as the standard by which others were compared, is the central figure in the film. Panezich has been called the “Madoff of Memorabilia,” but his crimes were mostly told through the eyes of law enforcement.
Dault brings Panezich forward, giving him a voice through interviews in prison, seeing him through the eyes of his mom, who was also jailed in connection to his crimes.
Panezich’s tale adds a somber and tragic tone to the documentary, balanced out by Kissner’s exuberance and deeply contrasted by Kooy’s rising success, whose father is with him the entire way.
But one quote, near the end of the movie, ties a bow around the documentary.
“The kids that are oblivious to what the industry is, I say, ‘Let them be oblivious.’” Panezich says. “The game is so much about money.”
Behind the Scenes
After filming ended, Dault became a more cautious collector.
“Since the documentary, I don’t collect autographs unless I get them from the athlete or unless it comes from a pack,” Dault said. “What tainted my whole aspect of it are these stories I tracked down.”
In a part that didn’t make the final cut, he spoke to a college student who was paying his college tuition by selling fake autographs and memorabilia.
He also interviewed a hockey collector in Michigan with a collection appraised at $300,000. But when JSA looked at the autographs on his memorabilia, they were all deemed forgeries.
“His whole collection was worthless,” Dault said. “ Even online, they sell the certificates of authentication, and those can be forged too.”
AJ Dillon of the Green Bay Packers, an avid card collector, appears in the movie and gives his thoughts on athletes signing for fans. However, his most poignant parts are when he describes often walking into hobby shops or looking at websites with merchandise bearing his fake autograph.
Film Release
Hobby Hustle premieres on February 16 on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. The official trailer will be released on January 16th on YouTube. Dault funded the film entirely out of pocket, allowing him to produce it without answering to anyone.
“Film distribution is changing and people aren’t flocking to the theaters,” Dault said. “I had a lot of distribution offers – one that would’ve put us on Netflix, but they ended up going with Ken Goldin’s show, King of Collectibles, which made sense. So I ended up finding a new distributor – 2Sox Film Pack.”
After the documentary’s initial release on Apple TV and Amazon, it will be available on other streaming platforms. Dault will celebrate the film’s debut at home with a small gathering of friends and family.
“I hope when people watch this, they approach the hobby with more caution,” Dault said. “I also want to show that the hobby is for everyone, and even if you’re an adult, it’s okay to act like a kid when being in this hobby. It’s almost like a time machine where when you get that card or that piece of memorabilia, it brings you back to your childhood.”
This article originally appeared on Sports Collector Daily.
