Hot Picks: Prophet Of Ecstasy

Fifth Season’s commitment to bespoke programming – ‘best-in-category’, as the company’s mantra goes – is embodied by the factual titles in its catalogue. 

Besides docs that cover familiar and zeitgeist subjects like Hulu’s WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn and Discovery+/ Amazon’s Curse Of The Chippendales, its recent factual slate has been peppered with lesser-known but larger-than-life titles such as religious cult doc Escaping Utopia and truecrime caper The Pez Outlaw.

To that list is added Prophet Of Ecstasy. Much like Pez Outlaw, the three-part series for Canada’s public broadcaster CBC falls into what Fifth Season executive director of acquisitions Liz Tang calls the “stranger-than-fiction” category.

Prophet Of Ecstasy tells the story of Michael Clegg, a former priest-turned-drugs kingpin. After uncovering the recipe for MDMA in the 1980s, Clegg teamed up with chemist Carina Leveriza to mass-produce the drug, introducing it to the Dallas rave scene and making it ubiquitous in the global party revolution.

The doc, which intervenes dramatic elements, also looks at academic and drugs activist Rick Doblin, who has championed MDMA’s therapeutic potential over a 30-year fight for decriminalisation, exploring the science of the drug as a tool in mental health care.

Tang says Fifth Season was originally approached to sell the film as a feature-length single but, after assessing Laurus Productions’ material, access and the sense that the film-makers had a “global espionage story” on their hands, the distributor helped finance the making of a three-part series.

Despite its hooky nature, array of pulpy characters and globetrotting narrative, Tang says, Doblin’s parallel story, which is steeped in academic research, infuses the doc with specialist factual beats, providing extra differentiation in a packed doc market, but also broadening the pool of buyers – from streamers to (perhaps) liberal-leaning PSBs.

“The characters help set it apart. This is a doc about a drugs kingpin who was a former man of the cloth. He is a character and you can see that on the tape,” she says.

“But it’s a topic that resonates with different markets – some countries are already looking at legalisation, so it’s timely in that way. But also, you have the backdrop of the 1980s and 1990s rave and club scenes, with great music, so it’s an uplifting series, as well as being strong on the science.”

Laurus Productions, Tang adds, is a dab hand at producing “stranger- thanfiction” docs, having previously helmed Maple Syrup Mayhem, which tries to solve the notorious syrup heist of 2011-12, while exploring the popularity of the pancake accompaniment.

Tang says Prophet Of Ecstasy, like The Pez Outlaw – which Fifth Season sold to Netflix globally – follows a subject of “something undeniably illegal, but at the same time you’re kind of rooting for them”.

Fifth Season’s redevelopment of the idea into a three-part series is aimed at tapping into international buyers and is the format it will take to the global market. However, the doc has also been cut as a 90-minute single, aimed at North American buyers.