Documentary Review: Enron The Smartest Guys in the Room

Enron The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

Directed by Alex Gibney

Written by Documentary

Starring Jefffrey Skilling, Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow

Release Date April 22nd, 2005

Published May 25th, 2005

Ask yourself this question: Where is Jeffrey Skilling right now? The former CEO of Enron, Skilling guided what he called "the number one company in the world" directly into the biggest corporate scandal of all time as he and his boss, Ken Lay, and any number of subordinates ripped off the country for billions of dollars. Where is Jeffrey Skilling now? He is not in jail, not yet anyway.  He goes to trial in January of 2006.

No doubt Jeffrey Skilling is currently occupying space in some upscale gated community as his lawyers pull every trick in the book to save his ass from federal prison. Despite being indicted and obviously having screwed millions of people, employees and shareholders alike, Jeffrey Skillings has yet to see the inside of a prison and no one seems to care.

One guy who does care is Director Alex Gibney who's extraordinary documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room details every crime committed by Skilling and his associates. It's a documentary so thorough and so damning that if it were shown to jurors they would convict Skilling and Lay without a shadow of a doubt.

The crimes of Enron all revolve around one clever scheme.  And what a scheme it was. Essentially this mostly unethical maneuver took Enron from merely being an energy creator to being energy traders. They converted to a new form of economics, sanctioned by goverment agencies, that allowed them to project profits where none existed. They would complete a business deal or stock transaction, claim the amount that could theoretically be made from this deal as profit and even if the deal went bad and no money was made the fake profit was still considered profit and was plowed into future product.

Much of the fake profit, such as money from Enron's failed bid to get into Broadband internet sales, was converted to Enron stock which could then be cashed by Executives even though, and this is the most important thing, their was no real profit to convert. The Enron executive in charge of the failed Broadband biz cashed out of the company with some 350 million dollars despite never getting the business out of the planning stages.

Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, who some say is being scapegoated by Lay and Skilling, was the architect of a plan that converted Enron debt to stock through a complicated set of fake companies that took on Enron debt for stock. Since Fastow was technically the head of these fake companies he skimmed off the Enron dollars from both sides of the table. It's again difficult to explain, and Mr. Gibney's film is at times a little unclear, but despite witnesses who say Fastow is a patsy, it was clear to me at least that he's as much of a weasel as Skilling and Lay.

That is just a skim off the top of the damning evidence in this astonishing documentary, much of which is based on the book of the same name by Business Week writers Bethany McClean and Peter Elkind who both appear in the film. They, along with whistleblower Sherron Watkins provide the most damning evidence. Watkins is particularly brave because she will be testifying in both Lay and Skilling's trials.

Director Alex Gibney, whose previous work includes the superfluous AFI's 100 Years 100 Movies, shows a journalist's care for facts and story structure and combines that with a dark sense of humor that is expressed in title cards about the companies slogan "Ask Why" and in his soundtrack of pop tunes which pop up in perfectly pitched moments and provide a running commentary alongside actor Peter Coyote's  occasionally mocking narration.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is an absolute must see. Required viewing for business schools which could use a shot of the ethical cleansing this film delivers. Required viewing also for anyone thinking of getting into the stock market. After watching this film and seeing how easily and complicitly the major banks of the world and the stock market analysts that everyone looks to for guidance went along with Skilling, Lay and Fastow, some to the point where they too were sent to jail, one must wonder just how safe the stock market truly is.

nron: The Smartest Guys in the Room shines a very bright light on some very startling information about the flaws inherent in our Corporate based America and does some powerful, yet entertaining and informative finger-pointing.  See this film and you might not be able to sleep thinking about your future in the hands of the next Andrew Fastow.

Documentary Review: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer

Directed by Alex Gibney

Written by Documentary

Starring Elliot Spitzer 

Release Date November 5th, 2010

Published December 22nd, 2010

Eliot Spitzer does not easily earn your sympathy. A child of privilege, Spitzer used a combative, bombastic style of politics to battle his way to the top of New York state political apparatus. Then, at the apex of power, he allowed his weakness for sexual encounters unencumbered by emotion, those that could be paid for without an emotional toll to pay, to end what should have been a merely colorful but deeply impactful career to be derailed.

Alex Gibney’s documentary Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer tells the three track story of Eliot Spitzer’s life from his rise to Attorney General of New York in the late 90’s to his crowning himself the ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’ where he battled corruption and dirty financial dealing in ways that few had done before to his astonishing fall from power.

Track one of Client 9 is about the exciting and sexy world of high end escorts. As Wall Street rode the boom of the late 90’s internet explosion and the rise of deregulation in Washington, high end escort services boomed to service a new crop of mini-millionaires riding high on the filthy lucre of derivatives trading and mutual fund meddling.

The best of the best of this new era of the whorehouse was New York’s Emperor’s Club where models, athletes and wannabe starlets paid their bills by offering what was dubbed “The Girlfriend Experience” to Wall Street’s elite. The Girlfriend Experience is package that allowed clients to act as if their escort was really a date, merely one that was guaranteed to end in sex.

Whether Eliot Spitzer signed up for The Girlfriend Experience or not is up for debate. What is known is that as Governor of New York; Spitzer somehow managed to set up thousands of dollars worth of escort’s services through The Emperor’s Club under the nomme de plume George Fox and that at least one of these trysts with an escort named Ashley Dupre, variously known as Veronica or Kristen depending on the client, was captured on a wiretap.

Track two of the story of Client 9 lays out the background in front of which the Eliot Spitzer’s story became the ultimate distraction. As Wall Street’s self appointed Sheriff Eliot Spitzer led a crusade against powerful Wall Street fat cats with massive bonuses and the shadiest of shady practices among traders and trading firms. In his fight Spitzer made powerful enemies such as former NYSE Chairman Kenneth Langone, former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg and longtime Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone.

These three men, two powerful and one who knows how to manipulate that power, each had a serious bone to pick with Spitzer as their money was at stake in Spitzer’s crusade against the dirty deals on Wall Street. As Alex Gibney lays out the story each of these men emerges as unabashed bad guys in interviews, in their own words they admit with relish the joy they took in watching Spitzer fall and leave plenty of evidence behind of what they may have known and even influenced in the case against Spitzer.

Spitzer’s story became the perfect distraction from the trouble Wall Street was in 2007 and 2008. AIG, with Hank Greenberg as CEO, certainly needed a distraction what with their illicit practices leading to a massive collapse that required a multi-billion dollar bailout from Washington. That they could distract from that story by watching the man who started the investigation of them seems almost too perfect, a point not missed by director Gibney.

The third track of Client 9 is Eliot Spitzer in his own words and here is where the story stumbles. In his words Spitzer is not a man prone to introspection. Thus, Spitzer is not as forthcoming as many would hope. His inability to open up combined with the roughhewn political style demonstrated throughout the story make Spitzer a less than sympathetic central figure.

Does he own what he did? Yes, but he also doesn’t offer any apologies and while he refuses to speculate or lay blame on others for what happened to him, Spitzer is enigmatic about what drove a man with his powerful enemies, high profile and so much at stake to take such ridiculous chances for mere sexual favors. These are the things of which a sex addiction is made yet, slightly to his credit; Spitzer avoids a simple diagnosis for why he did what he did.

The most controversial figure in Client 9 is not Spitzer or his powerful enemies but rather an actress. Wrenn Schmidt plays the role of Angelina the fake name of the real escort who was Spitzer’s most often paid for companion. When the real Angelina agreed to talk with Alex Gibney off camera with assurance that her name and face would never be revealed, Gibney made the controversial decision to have Ms. Schmidt act out a transcript of his interview with Angelina.

The information is revealing and it applies to all three aspects of the story of Client 9. It’s fair to say that the information she reveals is necessary to the outsize, ambitious narrative Gibney paints, one of conspiracy meeting flawed humanity in the form of a Modern Greek Tragedy. But, having an actress play act the words of Angelina leaves one feeling a little uneasy as if on slightly shaky ethical grounds.

Thankfully, Alex Gibney does not push the ethical envelope too much and admittedly there is a certain humorous irony to pushing the bounds of decency in a story about Eliot Spitzer. Nevertheless, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is, if at times uncomfortable, an engrossing story told with a bold voice and a grand vision, a flawed man, a flawed story and a near perfect documentary.