Here’s some free advice: if you are going to make a documentary about a fraudulent boner-pill business, don’t make it as limp as The Great Erection Deception: The Stiff Nights Story. You can see, of course, why the makers were attracted to the subject. Anything about erections sells, and as an elevator pitch, it works brilliantly: a herbal equivalent of Viagra is discovered and pressed into lucrative service by a Mormon called Kelly Harvey and an elusive vegan called Erb Avore who are soon employing 200 people to pack capsules with “extract of golden speargrass” and taking home suitcases of cash as the product works and sales take off. Alas, however, it turns out that their supplier has been a little slapdash with the truth and “extract of golden speargrass” is actually sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra.
Unfortunately, this becomes a very slight story when the result of Kelly and Erb’s decision to keep selling their Stiff Nights pills regardless of this new knowledge – which would require the pill to be licensed and regulated and all that jazz – is that their deception is discovered by the FDA. Harvey goes to jail and serves his three-year sentence, while Erb disappears and the FDA (as well as the programme-makers) fails to track him down. The single death that a family has sued over is attributed not to Stiff Nights itself but a lookalike pill that came after Harvey’s time. Harvey is sorryish for what he’s done (“I never thought that I would be a criminal. That’s not who I was … I did make some bad decisions. I could have done things differently”). He seems content enough with the pizza delivery job he has now as a felon, and his loving family is still intact and seems to have forgiven him entirely. Save for the big “It was sildenafil all along!” reveal – which anyone with the slightest scepticism about the efficacy of herbal powders, let alone the raising of entire organs, probably saw coming – every potential narrative peak flattens into nothing.
