Sundance festival screens Enron film

The new documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room has been screened for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival in the US.

The Sundance film festival in Utah is held annually

Touching on links between President George Bush and Enron Corp, the film closely explores the Houston-based company’s massive financial collapse and the human toll on those involved in what was the largest US bankruptcy in history.
   
Shown to packed houses over the weekend, the movie has left audiences shaking their heads and wondering how the Enron debacle could have happened.
   
“The film was about something more fundamental than Democrats versus Republicans,” director Alex Gibney said. “I wanted to raise the issue of bigger problems and tell a story that didn’t necessarily have immediate and easy-to-figure out solutions.”
   
Smartest Guys tells the story of how energy trading company Enron hid debt and used shifty accounting methods that ended in massive losses for investors and employees, and
destroyed the reputations of then chairman Ken Lay and chief executive Jeffrey Skilling. 
   
Familiar story

In December 2001, Enron fell into bankruptcy, and tens of thousands lost their jobs. Some pensioners saw their retirement accounts dwindle to near-nothing. Lay and Skilling have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges.
   
Award-winning documentary-maker Gibney based the film on the best-selling book The Smartest Guys in the Room by financial journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. 
   

“All sorts of people who are offended that a few people with a lot of money ended up doing very well, while the people at the bottom, ended up getting the shaft” 

Alex Gibney,
director

Elkind acknowledged the difficulty of distilling a 400-plus page book into a two-hour film that is easily understood, but he said Gibney succeeded.
   
Parts of the film “have an emotional impact that the best writing on the page, can’t match”, Elkind said. “People will feel disturbed, they will feel upset, and then they will want to ask, ‘why?’,” added Gibney.
   
“Ask why” was a slogan used by Enron to exhort employees to find new ways to make money, and Gibney uses the same phrase to encourage audiences to ask how the collapse happened. 
   
Explanation

The film’s short answer is greed and human fallibility – not only by Enron’s top executives, but by Wall Street financial analysts, investment bankers and energy traders.
   
Gibney admits Smartest Guys is less about breaking new ground than about telling how the collapse happened so that in the future similar financial debacles can be avoided.
   
“There has been a lot written about it, but always in bits and pieces,” he said. “We collected it all in one place.” 
   
Film firsts

The few new elements include more telephone tapes of energy traders joking about ripping off Californians who saw utility bills skyrocket in the state’s 2000-2001 energy crisis. 
   

Enron's bankruptcy devastated tens of thousands of employees
Enron’s bankruptcy devastated tens of thousands of employees

Enron’s bankruptcy devastated
tens of thousands of employees

For the first time, people hear Skilling use an expletive to describe a Wall Street analyst who questioned Enron’s earnings. The comment was widely known, but Gibney found a tape of it. 
   
Smartest Guys is tentatively set to hit cinemas in the next few months.

While Gibney said he hoped for big ticket sales, more important to him was shedding light on the bankruptcy for a wide audience.
   
“It won’t be Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “It will be all sorts of people who are offended that a few people with a lot of money ended up doing very well, while the people at the bottom, ended up getting the shaft.”

Source: Reuters