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IT took sIxteen years to buIld enron but only twenty-four days for it to go bankrupt. So begins alex Gibney's riveting documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2004). the documentary is based on the book, of the same name, by reporters bethany Mclean and Peter elkind.
House of Cards
ENRON began as an amalgamation of two gas companies back in 1985. It grew to be America's seventh largest company, employing over 20,000 staff in more than forty countries and championing the benefits of a deregulated market place. Its collapse on 2 December 2001 represented the USA's largest corporate bankruptcy in history.
Gibney's documentary reveals that Enron was really a 'house of cards' built over a 'pool of gasoline.' It presents the almost unbelievable truths of the collapse by delving into the culture, personalities and dealings of Enron, as well the role of government, major investment banks and accounting firms, and the media in its demise.
What transpires is not only an economic tragedy, but also very much a human one. While a top Enron executive walked away with billions of dollars just before the collapse, billions of dollars of shares, retirement benefits and pension funds were lost, as well as tens of thousands of jobs.
Gibney's desire to make the movie came from his fascination with the almost surreal nature of the story: 'I became fascinated by the degree to which the executives at Enron were like filmmakers working on a science fiction movie: they just made the stuff up.'1
Bad from the Very Beginning
Indeed, without truly understanding the supposed 'smartest guys in the room' who ran Enron, it is impossible to understand how and why they did what they did. The excesses and egos of Enron's executive team, in particular Chief Operating Officer Jeff Skilling, Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow and Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay, their perverted manipulation of an era of 'deregulation', and the strange 'geek turned Rambo' culture of the company, are revealed through clever interweaving of news footage, internal corporate videotapes, phone transcripts and original interviews (post-collapse).
The result is a simply composed, yet deeply gripping documentary that manages to communicate a timeline of events and the personalities behind them in only 109 minutes - no...