The Big Picture

Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman tells the complete story behind Paolo Macchiarini’s crimes. The documentary focuses on finding clues and witnesses to understand how Macchiarini got away with his actions. The series raises questions about Macchiarini’s intent and showcases the devastating impact on his victims.

Season one of Peacock’s drama series, Dr. Death, was released alongside a 4 part docuseries produced by Peacock that focused more on the facts of the real-life story. Dr. Death: The Undoctored Story follows the case of Dr. Christopher Duntsch, a surgeon in Dallas, TX, who killed nearly every patient he operated on. From 2011 to 2013, Christopher Duntsch performed 37 operations, out of which only 4 patients survived unscathed. The documentary series takes an in-depth look at his crimes and those most affected by them. Now, alongside season two of the Dr. Death scripted drama series, comes the accompanying documentary, Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman.

The true-crime special follows the story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, who was once considered a world-renowned thoracic surgeon. On the surface, he was a ground-breaking surgeon who used stem cells in his patients’ trachea transplants. He had gained enough buzz and fame surrounding his surgical work that he was even courted and featured in an NBC Special with Meredith Viera called A Leap of Faith, which aired in the summer of 2014. This special, however, also set in motion a series of events that unraveled the pioneering persona Paolo had created thread by thread. The story of his con-man lifestyle broke in 2016 thanks to an article written by Adam Ciralsky for Vanity Fair. Unlike a more recent Vanity Fair exposé, this piece, titled The Celebrity Surgeon Who Used Love, Money, and the Pope to Scam an NBC News Producer, made serious waves. There was also something else in the works behind the scenes. Shortly after the Vanity Fair piece broke, a three-part documentary series titled The Experiment focused on the after-effects of Paolo’s experimental surgeries. This led to a criminal investigation, which ultimately led to the arrest of Paolo Machiarrini.

Now that Paolo is the new focus of the Peacock series’ Dr. Death, Collider had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman’s executive producers Mary Robertson and John Pappas about the documentary special, its story, and how it stands out among its contemporaries. The role of executive producer varies from project to project. When it comes to Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman, both Mary and John played similar but different roles. When asked about her duties as an executive producer, Mary shared, “My job involves working closely with our partners at Peacock and the other executive producers to envision the structure for a project like this [and] build the access to the individuals that are key to key and integral to the telling of the story. [I also] make decisions about where we’re filming, and when, and what the look of the project is, and continue to support the team throughout the editing process as we make decisions about the flow of information.” John Pappas, who is wearing two hats as a co-executive producer alongside Mary, and as the director of the project. When it comes to being a co-executive producer, he said, “The co-EP role is being sort of a second brain to Mary’s. And really managing the team that is working on the project. Day to day, and making sure that we are hitting our deadlines and … just helping to organize the actual production of the documentary.”

Telling the Story of ‘Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman’
Image via TV4 Nyheterna

When discussing the story of Paolo Machiarrini, one thing becomes clear: the man appears to be nothing more than someone who wanted fame and glory. His determination took him to lengths far enough to cost innocent lives. Storytelling is an important aspect of documentary development, something that John Pappas took seriously as the project director. When asked about creating Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman, John shared, “The biggest thing that I do first is just listen a lot. It’s having an insane number of conversations with as many people as you can to make sure that you are understanding this story in all aspects of it.” There are a lot of moving parts to the downfall of Paolo Macchiarini, but the catalyst would most likely be something that has nothing to do with medicine at all. It was a love scam that began toppling the dominoes of Paolo’s sham career. Because there were so many elements to this story, the creative team needed to get their details correct. John said, “The last thing you want to do is to set out to try and tell [a story] and then find out two days before you finish that, ‘Oh wow, I had no idea about these certain facets.’ … I had a great mentor who talked about how you should always match form to content. So, you look at what your story is, and it’s like, ‘Okay, how do we best tell this story?’ Really laying out a plan for the edit even before we get out into the field and start shooting interviews and shooting scenes.”

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Unknown details and discoveries often pop up during documentary creation. One of the most notable is from the HBO docu-series The Jinx, which ended with a shocking hot-mic moment that led to the arrest of Robert Durst. When asked if any surprises popped up during the making of Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman, Mary said, “We had revelations throughout the process, um, you know, every time we gained access to someone new, it felt like a point of revelation or a surprise.“

‘Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman’ Tells a More Complete Story Than Its Competitors

Paolo Macchiarini’s crimes are reprehensible, and as such, the executive producers of Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman wanted to make sure that they told the complete story. Most creators often approach projects like this from a specific point of view, and executive producer Mary Robertson elaborated on this. Mary shared, “I think we were trying to tell the story of Paolo Macchiarini, but to really focus on his transgressions in the workplace and to understand how we got away with it at various institutions for so very long. There are other dimensions to his story, but for the most part, we wanted to understand ‘how did a doctor get away with this?’” This was no small task, and director John Pappas had to work backward to make sure to leave no stone unturned. He said, “It was sort of like going back in time and being a detective– finding all of the people who saw something bad happening and knew it at the time but either were prevented from saying something or couldn’t say something or didn’t understand the full context of it. But to find those clues to figure out how he got to where he did, and how he did this for so long– It’s like trying to find as many first-person witnesses, you might say, to kind of sort of help us solve the mystery.” One first-person witness was Paloma Cabeza, who almost fell victim to Paolo’s experimentation. Paloma has not spoken on camera about her experiment, and Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman will be her first, making this project stand out above its competitors.

One thing that all of the new works about Paolo Macchiarini have in common is this fact: Paolo Macchiarini did horrible things to innocent people. But there is the question about his intent, something Mary mentioned during her conversation with Collider. Mary shared, “I think there’s a meaningful question about whether or not he operated with a desire to do harm to his patients. I don’t think we know that that’s the case.” John expanded on this, saying, “I used to work on another series for CNBC called American Greed, and I think it was the psychology surrounding what compels someone to do something like this [that] is always fascinating.” Paolo Macchiarini’s story is both fascinating and horrifying and may have a deeper effect on viewers than they’d think. John shared, “It’s rare that something I work on actually makes me cry, and I just watched this new scene right at the end of this one patient in particular, and what she went through was just devastating, and it is very difficult to watch.”

While the story is certainly one worth sensationalizing, it is important to remember that there are real people who were affected by this man’s choices. According to John, there is a deeper insidiousness to his misdeeds. He said, “I think the most insidious thing he did was offer people hope when there wasn’t hope. There were so many patients who came to him who he told, ‘I can fix you,’ and in reality, oftentimes in medicine, the answer is, ‘We can’t fix you [but] we can treat you. We can help make you comfortable, but we can’t fix you.” Mary had a more journalistic viewpoint of the story, sharing, “I try not to have an opinion, but I will say that there are questions about what [he] himself believed, right? How much of his own lies he himself believed– those are interesting questions.” Given the breadth of outreach and research done by this co-executive producer team, viewers will have enough facts to form educated opinions on the deeds of Paolo Macchiarini.

Dr. Death: The Cutthroat Conman is available to stream exclusively on Peacock.

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