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January 19, 2005

Enron, the documentary

As noted several times on this blog, the best book on the Enron affair to date has been the one written by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (Portfolio 2003). If you want to read just one book on the Enron scandal, then Smartest Guys is the book for you.

Now, the Houston Chronicle reports that Smartest Guys is the basis of a documentary that will debut later this month at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Filmed by Alex Gibney, who is probably best known for producing the documentary -- The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) -- based on Christopher Hitchens' searing book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso 2001), it does not appear from the following Sundance website description of the film that Mr. Gibney bothered to review any of Professor Ribstein's writings on the portrayal of business in film in preparing the documentary:

Watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a little like watching the outcome of a Super Bowl on ESPN Classic. Although you already know the final score, you're still captivated by the drama of the game, entertained by the characters, and fascinated by the behind-the-scenes revelations. And Enron is indeed an engrossingly dramatic tale, especially as depicted in all of its exquisite detail by director/screenwriter Alex Gibney. The story of Enron is not simply a cautionary tale about greed and corruption. Nor is it a story that we are unlikely to witness again, for the rise and fall of Enron is as American as apple pie.

With this film, based on the book of the same title, Gibney has fashioned a history lesson that takes us "inside" the headquarters of the seventh-largest corporation in the United States and illustrates through a series of rapidly paced interviews, corporate footage, and news reports, the "new economy" of the 1990s: a climate where companies sold ideas rather than widgets, and a corporate culture where ethics became as old fashioned and out of date as value investing. Densely packed, with a world of information for the sophisticate and neophyte alike, Enron is riveting, muckraking filmmaking that should make any culture critic of the 1990s proud.

Hat tip to Charles Kuffner for the link to the Chronicle article.

Posted by Tom at January 19, 2005 09:14 AM

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