Enron - the movie

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D

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 10:11:56 -0500

Subject:[Fwd: Enron - the movie ]

 

 

 

 

 

Enron - Smartest Guys In The Room: the movie -

http://www.enronmovie.com/

 

I highly recommend this film - D

 

 

 

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http://www.afterhoursfilmsociety.com/menu.htm

 

http://www.afterhoursfilmsociety.com/reviews/enron.sht

 

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Not Rated, 153 minutes running time

Reviewed by Michael Wilmington

Copyright 2005, Chicago Tribune

 

Even if the financial pages bore you-even if you've never watched

Lou Dobbs or Neil Cavuto and never will- " Enron: The Smartest Guys in

the Room " should hold you spellbound.

 

Alex Gibney's documentary on the collapse of the high-flying

Houston energy company is a powerhouse: a non-fiction movie that

pulls a motherlode of high drama and dark comedy out of one of the

decade's most fascinating news stories.

 

At its best, it's a thriller that makes John Grisham's paranoiac

concoctions seem almost tame. Based on the book of the same name by

Fortune Magazine reporters Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean, with both

journalists as frequent on-camera interviewees, it's an exhaustive

but engrossing account of the incredible rise and fall of Enron-and

of top bosses Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and their double-dealing

executives, duplicitous accountants, rapacious traders and hapless

employees, all of whom became enmeshed in what now looks like the

biggest corporate crime in American history.

 

In damning detail, with laser-sharp lucidity and razor-keen

humor, " Enron " describes how an initially modest Texas gas pipeline

combine, born from a merger of Houston and Omaha natural gas

companies in 1985, grew into a vast corporation with (allegedly)

billions in profits, huge stock sales, numerous subsidiaries,

ambitious projects all over the world (from California to

Afghanistan) and a media-fed reputation as America's most innovative,

forward-looking company.

 

As if all that weren't enough, Enron had super-clout as well:

intimate ties with the Bush administration (to which it contributed

Secretary of the Navy Tom White), plus enough power to bring

California to its knees and bleed it white during the 2000-2001

energy crisis-before

 

Enron itself collapsed in a chaos of frantic executive stock

selloffs, resignations, suicide, prosecutions, mass layoffs,

plummeting stock prices, a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, disgrace and high-

profile criminal indictments.

 

At the center of this storm are two amazing characters: one-time

Enron president and chief operating officer Jeff Skilling (brother of

Tribune Co.'s renowned WGN-Ch. 9 meteorologist Tom Skilling) and

chairman and chief executive officer Ken Lay, the man called " Kenny

Boy " by his longtime pal and political beneficiary, President George

W. Bush.

 

Lay, who was there from the start, and Skilling, who joined Enron

in 1990, are under indictment and declined to be interviewed for this

movie, on their lawyers' counsel. But they're on screen plenty

anyway, in TV news reports, taped congressional hearings and on

Enron's own slick promotional films and goofy in-house comedy skits.

 

Both emerge as compelling, contradictory figures: Lay, the

preacher's son who rose to the heights by preaching the gospel of

market values, and Skilling, the one-time brainy nerd turned macho

executive and prophet of hard-boiled business. They're also such

 

ordinary-appearing guys. Lay looks a bit like a fatherly local

real-estate salesman who always has a pat for your back, Skilling

(described by Gibney as a " Jay Gatsby " -like figure) like the local

chamber of commerce mover and wannabe shark.

 

How did these two-and an oddball raft of supporting characters,

including Skilling's right-hand guy Lou Pai, a devoted fan of

Houston's striptease scene-manage to jimmy the system for millions?

 

On the evidence here, the whole company seems to have been a big

show: a vast chimera, built by the end on dubious laws and outright

fraud and deception. If " Ask Why " was the company's official

motto, " Money Talks " and " The Hell with Ethics " seems to be the

secret ones.

 

The movie proffers two key factors in the company's demise:

first, the adoption of " mark-to-market " accounting, a policy used by

Enron's executives and accountants (the since-collapsed Chicago-based

Arthur Andersen firm) to claim profits that never existed on the

basis of the deals that were supposed to eventually produce them.

 

The second was the creation by Enron chief financial officer

Andrew Fastow of innumerable mythical companies to hide all their

actual losses from investor scrutiny.

 

But there's lots more, climaxed by the fleecing of Enron's own

employees, who were encouraged to keep their eventually worthless

stock while top dogs like Skilling and Lay sold theirs for millions.

Most infuriating of all, and most illustrative of the culture of

greed that consumed Enron's elite, are the phone tapes we hear of

juvenile-sounding Enron traders making coarse, stupid jokes about the

mess they've made of California's power supply and the fortune

they're reaping from it. " Burn, baby, burn! " one giggles as forest

fires threaten the state's power plants.

 

There are some more inspiring tales of company whistle-blowers.

But by the end of " Enron, " we've gotten a crash course in how to

hoodwink the stock market, traduce accounting firms, deceive and bilk

your investors and your own employees and bollix up state and federal

systems while deluging elected officials with campaign contributions.

 

Reporters Elkind and McLean have uncovered and organized all the

appalling facts, and Gibney-producer of Martin Scorsese's excellent

blues documentary series and the Antoine Fuqua concert

movie " Lightning in a Bottle " -has presented them with Michael Moore-

style humor and showmanship.

 

That fits. Showmanship seems to be what Enron was all about. The

Enron execs we see here are ballyhoo boys and hucksters, so skilled

at manipulating appearances, milking political connections and snow-

jobbing media opinion that they might be operating to this day-if

they hadn't been such lousy businessmen.

 

So the movie does more than entertain and enlighten you. At the

end, you also realize you've been watching a classic American tale,

one that we can only hope will never be repeated-though it well might

be.

 

Directed and written by Alex Gibney; based on the book by Bethany

McLean and Peter Elkind; photographed by Maryse Alberti; edited by

Alison Elwood; music by Matt Hauser; executive producers, Mark Cuban, Wagner, Joana Vicente; produced by Alex Gibney, Jason Kliot,

Susan Motamed. Narrator: Peter Coyote.

 

 

 

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