You may know Mark Wahlberg from his recent turn as a crazy bald pilot in Flight Risk, or you may know him as Marky Mark, Dirk Diggler, the guy who isn’t Ted in Ted, or the Entrouage dude. You may not know Wahlberg as a valuable force in the documentary filmmaking scene thanks to Unrealistic Ideas, his production studio with Archie Gips and Stephen Levinson. The studio has produced McMillion$, MoviePass, MovieCrash, Gold, Lies and Videotape, Murders at Starved Rock, and other documentaries. Unrealistic Ideas’ latest is the Prime Video docuseries Spy High, a quirky but disturbing look at a spy ring orchestrated by Lower Merion High School in what would become known as WebCamGate. It’s a wild but intimate documentary that feels like Citizenfour Jr.
The series is directed by Jody McVeigh-Schultz, who has worked with Wahlberg and Unrealistic Ideas before. “I mean, as you can imagine, Mark Wahlberg is very busy running dozens of businesses and making amazing movies, but he really is a champion of documentary film and documentary projects,” explained Jody McVeigh-Schultz, who added:
“Mark is a champion of docs and really cares about making interesting stories. I think one of the things we try to do at Unrealistic Ideas is create stories that I think can be exciting for people who aren’t necessarily, like, documentary nerds, right? Things that are accessible and also, this story is harrowing, but it’s also really fun to watch this documentary, it’s absurd, and I think it’s Pop-y in a way that other documentaries may not be. So I think it’s really watchable, and that’s part of what we’re going for in Unrealistic Ideas.”
“Now, this is my third project with Unrealistic Ideas. I’ve worked there as an editor. They brought me on as a director and really, like, helped sort of launch my directing career, and really believed in me and gave me a shot at directing after, starting as an editor,” continued McVeigh-Schultz. “And I should shout out two sort of mentors there, Archie Gips and Dave Wendell, who, from the beginning, they brought me the project and were like, ‘We think you’d be great for this.’ And I had the Philly connection, but they’re just super involved EPs, and have made this amazing.”
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Down the Digital Rabbit Hole of ‘Spy High’
Lower Merion High School circa 2010 is fertile ground for this documentary — there are issues of class differences and race; students were getting laptops and new technology was altering education itself. At this upper-class school, 2,000 students received laptops they could take home with them, not realizing that they were recording the students in their bedrooms. McVeigh-Schultz grew up in Philadelphia and remembered WebCamGate, and after working as the supervising editor on McMillion$, he was the best person at Unrealistic Ideas to direct this story.
“I was aware of it. The high school at the center of this story is really famous for Kobe Bryant going there. You know, he went to high school, was like a mega star in high school, and went straight to the NBA. And then in 2010 they sort of became famous for this story,” explained McVeigh-Schultz. “I was in LA at that point, but I still heard about it. [Unrealistic Ideas] came to me and were like, ‘Have you heard of this?’ And I had.”
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“I knew the area pretty well,” continued McVeigh-Schultz, “but also the subject matter and the sort of suburban scandal, the privacy issues, it was just really fascinating to me. And I think my favorite kind of documentaries, especially from a director’s point of view, are ones where you sort of know what the story is like, what’s been reported, and then once you start digging in, the story is way different than you thought. And that happened here, right?” The filmmaker elaborated:
“So, people kind of know about Blake Robbins. He was the one sort of at the center of this media firestorm. But you know, there were 400 images captured of Blake Robbins, and overall, there were tens of thousands of images of other students, and so that was just fascinating to sort of go down the rabbit hole, essentially. There were other victims of this, and we started talking to more and more of them, some who were public, some who were not and now wanted to.”
“This is a story that I think probably people locally thought they knew, and I think they’ll see it in a completely different way, even if they felt like they knew the story really well,” added McVeigh-Schultz. He’s right — Spy High spins outward into something you wouldn’t expect. See it spin for yourself when Spy High premieres on April 8, 2025, on Prime Video. Watch it then through the link below:
