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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

  • Episode aired Oct 13, 2005
  • R
  • 1h 49m
IMDb RATING
7.8/10
4.5K
YOUR RATING
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Home Video Trailer from Magnolia Home Entertainment
Play trailer2:05
1 Video
6 Photos
Documentary

Corporate audio and videotapes tell the inside story of the scandal involving one company's manipulation of California's energy supply and its, and how its executives wrung a billion dollars... Read allCorporate audio and videotapes tell the inside story of the scandal involving one company's manipulation of California's energy supply and its, and how its executives wrung a billion dollars out of the resulting crisis.Corporate audio and videotapes tell the inside story of the scandal involving one company's manipulation of California's energy supply and its, and how its executives wrung a billion dollars out of the resulting crisis.

  • Director
    • Alex Gibney
  • Writers
    • Bethany McLean
    • Peter Elkind
    • Alex Gibney
  • Stars
    • Kenneth Lay
    • Peter Coyote
    • John Beard
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.8/10
    4.5K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Alex Gibney
    • Writers
      • Bethany McLean
      • Peter Elkind
      • Alex Gibney
    • Stars
      • Kenneth Lay
      • Peter Coyote
      • John Beard
    • 74User reviews
    • 219Critic reviews
    • 82Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Videos1

    Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Trailer 2:05
    Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

    Photos5

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    Top cast43

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    Kenneth Lay
    Kenneth Lay
    • Self
    Peter Coyote
    Peter Coyote
    • Narrator
    John Beard
    • Self
    Barbara Boxer
    Barbara Boxer
    • Self
    • (archive footage)
    George W. Bush
    George W. Bush
    • Self
    James Chanos
    James Chanos
    • Self
    • (as Jim Chanos)
    Dick Cheney
    Dick Cheney
    • Self
    Bill Clinton
    Bill Clinton
    • Self
    • (archive footage)
    Carol Coale
    • Self
    Gray Davis
    Gray Davis
    • Self
    Reggie Dees II
    • Young man the stripper dances in front of
    • (as Reggie Deets II)
    Joseph Dunn
    • Self
    Max Eberts
    Max Eberts
    • Self
    Peter Elkind
    Peter Elkind
    • Self
    Andrew Fastow
    Andrew Fastow
    • Self
    David Freeman
    • Self
    Philip Hilder
    • Self
    Al Kaseweter
    • Self
    • Director
      • Alex Gibney
    • Writers
      • Bethany McLean
      • Peter Elkind
      • Alex Gibney
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews74

    7.84.5K
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    Featured reviews

    shifraleah

    Boys gone amok

    I just saw this movie at Talk Cinema in Philadelphia. It was an excellent depiction of hubris and greed. The clips of Ken Lay et all were self serving and only seemed to intensify their greed. I would have liked more exploration in to the ties with the Bush Dynasty but that said it was an interesting intense film. Definitely one that I would be happy to recommend. There is one critique I would make is that although the film touched on the many lives that were ruined by the Enron Scandle,it did not give them a real human face.

    In the eighties we called people like the Enron Executives "Masters of the Universe." Now we can call at as we see it, Over grown former nerds with no morality and no conscience.

    .
    8anhedonia

    'Twas hubris killed the beast

    The chief characters in the Enron debacle all seemed to be functioning on the same mantra, that Gordon Gekko line from "Wall Street" (1987) that epitomized the 1980s: "Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good." Except what Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow did wasn't in the 1980s, but in this century and they blithely and without any compunction did it for personal gain while tens of thousands were left with nothing.

    The Enron scandal was a tough one to understand, at least to me it was, because you could never quite figure out what Enron did. And director Alex Gibney breaks it all down matter-of-factly, never taking sides, never being judgmental, to show us what happened. Of course, he really doesn't need to be judgmental because the actions of Lay, Skilling and Fastow (and a few others) speak volumes.

    Gibney's film very well could have been a convoluted mess. But he never loses sight of the fact that this is essentially a story about people. Not only the masters of the universe whose hubris eventually brought them down but, more importantly, the people whose livelihoods depended on what Lay, Fastow and Skilling did and who, unlike those three, didn't have millions to fall back on.

    It's impossible not to feel incensed by what they did. Lay, Fastow and Skilling destroyed countless lives, yet they left with millions. There's a moment when Lay bemoans that his net worth dipped from $20 million to, I believe, $6 million. Yeah, tell that to the Oregonian utility worker, whose $340,000 nest egg was eventually only worth $1,200 after Enron stock tumbled in the wake of the scandal.

    What's ultimately devastating about this film is listening to the tapes of Enron traders joking about how they were holding California hostage and letting people there suffer without electricity. These chaps are cold, callous and exemplify the Enron environment.

    This is a fascinating film because it exposes these guys for who they are. And after listening to those interviewed in this film, it's impossible to believe Lay and Skilling were somehow oblivious to it all. How else could you explain why they insisted Enron employees invest in the company stock while they themselves were cashing out?

    What's equally infuriating is realizing how Wall Street sucked up to Enron and how investment firms turned on anyone who dared to question Enron's power.

    Of course, it's not surprising at all to see Lay's connections to the Bush family. But I am certain Dubya really didn't know very well someone he called "Kenny Boy." Just as, I'm sure, W's photos with Jack Abramoff mean absolutely nothing, either.

    There's a moment in "Wall Street" when Bud Fox asks Gordon, "How much is enough?" And Gordon replies, "It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another."

    That's exactly what Enron did under Lay and Skilling. Except they did it on the backs of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans who lost pretty much everything. I can only hope the American justice system does right by all those workers.
    9bitcetc

    In the dictionary next to "hubris"....

    One powerful theme in "The Smartest Guys in the Room" is expressly articulated and repeated for emphasis: this is the story of people, not arcane financial accounting methods or numbers, and because it is people, it can happen again. Enron is just the manifestation of the evil begotten by hubris, in spectacularly public fashion. It is classic Greek tragedy, and it is one from which its chief protagonists, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, must not escape.

    Yes, it is a movie with a point of view, but this is not a Michael Moore documentary. Director Alex Gibney brilliantly tells the story simply by interviewing people who were participants in the events, showing the time lines of those events, and interweaving an astonishing amount of video and audio footage taped at Enron, by Enron itself. The movie resolved for me the question: "What did they know, and when did they know it?" They knew. They not only knew; they designed the company to be the ultimate shell game, with no pea. The only thing Enron ever had to sell was its stock price. And they did know that was their only product.

    As a Houstonian, I admit that I, a supposedly sophisticated business professional, was intimidated by Enron's assertion in its glory days that the reason I didn't understand its business was just that I wasn't smart enough. My friends, managers and lawyers, some from Harvard thenselves, also admit to the same intimidation. It was not that the questions were not being asked; it was just that we were silenced when Enron avowed that they were the smartest guys in the room. They asserted it, and we believed them. Thank good Fortune that one reporter, Bethany McLean, in almost too soft a voice to be credible as a giant killer, kept asking.

    I wish this movie might inspire a larger remedy than the one being attempted by the Department of Justice. Why doesn't Harvard deny admission to people like Jeff Skilling, who, when questioned in his entrance interview whether he was smart, replied, "I'm (expletive deleted) smart"? Why isn't some humility and modesty still ranked a virtue? Why do we celebrate the rise of the specialist educated only in his field, and wholly ignorant of the inevitability of the fall of the Greek protagonist who becomes blinded by arrogance, power, greed---- in short, hubris? Why is ethics a specialty study, instead of integral to every field of study? I sat open-mouthed as the tape showed Jeff Skilling seriously selling a new business idea: selling futures in the weather. He parodied himself on tape: he had a new, better idea than the "mark to market" booking which allowed Enron to book future theoretical profits once they had signed a deal; now he would institute "hypothetical to book", booking profits as soon as he had an idea. What, ultimately, was the difference between the parody and the reality? The horror of listening to traders, who sat in a room directly below Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, with staircases between their executive offices and the trading floor, laughing at the misery they were inflicting on California as they extorted profits from that misery, leaves me outraged long after the movie is over. They threatened and may have cost lives with their fraudulent tactics. They admit it on tape, laughing. They knew. It was their business plan. To make Andrew Fastow the scapegoat for what Enron was developing as its business plan before he was ever hired is simply the continuation of the shell game with no pea. Look for the "designated fall guy". They still think they are the smartest guys in the room.

    No, I'll never be selected for the jury pool now, but I wouldn't have been anyway. I'll buy the DVD and watch it a few times during the trials and seethe, lest I forget. Excellent movie, the best kind of documentary.
    10writeon_susan

    An American Tragedy

    This film is a profoundly entertaining chronicle of American corporate power run amok. Profound because as it dramatizes the rise and fall of Enron, the film casts a longer shadow over the still largely unchanged corporate environment that spawned this smoke and mirrors company. Entertaining due to clever use of storytelling devices, imagery and soundtrack, despite what looks to be a low budget.

    The film's strength is in its portrait of the massive "group think" inside and outside of the corporation that supported Enron's rise. It is astounding and chilling to look back on the cheer leading role played by banks, financial media, accounting firms and government. And though Enron, the film, may be weak on explaining how the company built itself up from a simple gas pipeline business to a post-modern corporate megalith, it was probably a wise choice to leave detailed descriptions of the financial manipulations to the book of the same name. The film, does though, miss an opportunity early on to provide a basic explanation of the central paradox of Enron -- earning heaps of money by exploiting commodities trading and accounting methods, while losing heaps of money in real world ventures. Enron set up its first commodities trading desk to capitalize on inside knowledge of the gas business, and then tried to replicate this model with water, broadband, electricity, etc. In actually a trading firm, Enron evaded investment firm regulations by portraying itself as an industrial firm.

    Yet, despite some shortcomings, the storytelling is powerful, especially the eye-opening dramatization of Enron's role and the political manipulations behind the California energy-crisis. After viewing the suffering of average Californians, juxtaposed against the callousness of Enron's West Coast energy traders, it felt good to see Kenneth Lay walking in handcuffs.

    More than once, the phrase, "this can happen again," echos in the film. It has happened before -- leveraged buyouts, the Savings and Loan crisis, the burst Internet IPO bubble, the 1920s Stock Market crash. A new financial vehicle generates untold riches for some, goes bust, and millions, sometimes billions ... disappear. Enron, the film, is the textbook on how one corporation recently stole from investors, employees and its "customers."

    Ask why do we keep on letting this happen.
    8noralee

    An Entertaining Introduction to A Business Scandal that Affects Everyone

    "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is an excellent introduction for the general public to the scandal for someone who didn't hear first-hand the warnings about the New Economy that sneered at the responsibilities of a public company or read the articles in Fortune, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, or Business Week while it was all building up, then come tumbling down.

    While the film leaves out some of the technicalities, it does an entertaining job of combining talking heads, lively graphics, news clips, incendiary dramatizations (such as of busy, noisy shredders), company documents and whistleblower-obtained stunningly damning audiotapes, web broadcasts and video tapes to document how a major company could grow out of smoke and mirrors to become the largest bankruptcy of its time, bringing down countless victims with it.

    Establishing an arresting time line that serves like a ticking clock, the film is excellent at visually demonstrating how other corporations, particularly lenders and brokerages, profited from not revealing the truth.

    The filmmakers particularly gleefully accent the company's political connections, going beyond the popular "Kenny Boy" friendship of CEO Ken Lay with George W. to extend to the Bush clan and inner circle, including the Federal Reserve's Greenspan, to hone in on how it fomented self-serving deregulatory policies, with a special emphasis on California and its frighteningly manipulated energy, and resulting political, crisis.

    The filmmakers do make some of the talking heads seem objective when they actually have their own profitable axes to grind, such as shareholder attorney William Lerarch, and let the Johnny-come-lately legislators look a little too good as they puff up at the Congressional hearings.

    A bit too much is made of the executives as former nerds, as these guys weren't computer geeks; rather there were class issues at work that are hinted at in the brief biographies in the culture of traders who were entrepreneurally lifting their incomes by gambling. At the same time, whistleblower Sherron Watkins's actions and motivations are not emphasized as particularly heroic in going against the company's macho culture (the many Deep Throats cited in the credits as anonymous sources are amusing).

    A delightful range of popular music is also used to emphasize points, from Tom Waits to "God Bless the Child," as well as popular culture references from "The Simpsons" to "Gordon Gekko"'s defining quote also keep the film from just being like a dry episode of PBS's "Frontline". I presume the title itself is meant to recall the classic laying bare of the men who got the U.S. mired in the Viet Nam War, Halberstam's "The Best and The Brightest." The film does slight the clear-eyed folks who were warning about the declining ethics in the accounting profession and the lack of fundamentals in the bubble investments as Enron and its ilk were on the way up -- and who were vilified in the business community for their Cassandra pronouncements.

    The film does make the Enron situation seem too unique. While personalizing the stories around the head people at the company --especially as they transformed from geeks to power brokers --makes the story easier to follow in a movie, it makes this corporate culture unusual. It also lets off the management consultants, let alone the business schools' emphasis on stock price analysis, who were cheerleaders for these techniques; McKinsey and Harvard spawned at least one of the colorful figures profiled here.

    This kind of egotistical "I'm top of the world, Ma" attitude in business was also typical of the Rigas at Adelphia in Pennsylvania, Ebbers at WorldCom in Mississippi, and Scrushy at HealthSouth in Birmingham, Alabama, and the just dethroned Greenberg at AIG scandal in the heart of Wall Street, shows that enough chutzpah and money can deflect anyone, anywhere, using the same techniques -- a ruthless, macho corporate culture that forces out anyone who disagrees, browbeating regulators, hiding secret accounts and spreading around manipulative corporate philanthropy.

    At a NY Financial Writers' Association panel as the Enron story was breaking, they did an introspection that unfortunately is not provided by the film, on why they didn't report earlier that the emperor had no clothes (as one of the sub-chapters in the film puts it). The consensus was that the journalists realized they mistrusted the motives of the warners more than they doubted the motives of the corporate executives who were issuing the bravado reports and deflecting timid questions, even though the journalists too late realized that the executives had way more to gain than the Chicken Littles and they were intimidated by their own lack of accounting expertise to recognize the sliding slope of accounting ethics (though the film does very briefly touch on how the CPAs early on accommodated the bubble by too easily officially approving the now notorious "mark to marketing" accounting procedure that permitted the booking of goods not yet obtained, though there's no mention of casually lax acceptance of external auditing firms to simultaneously do internal auditing and profitable consulting).

    McLean, a co-writer of the film whose book is the premise for most of the film, did supplement the film in an interview on Charlie Rose that should be included on the DVD by naming the "shorter" (an investor who gains if prices go down) who first had tipped her off, though she didn't there mention the local Houston business reporter she cited at the panel who was the very first one to report suspicion of Enron's numbers. She also clarified on the show that while her article in Business Week is now seen as the beginning of Enron's end, her actual findings were very mildly stated, particularly compared to the full truth as it came out, and only aroused suspicions by the ferocity of the company's denials.

    Even as the film concludes with an it could happen again warning, with no analysis if Sarbanes-Oxley will help, it places too much emphasis on the uniqueness of Enron.

    Related interests

    Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
    Documentary

    Storyline

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    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Among the protesters who disrupt the meeting with Jeff Skilling at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club is Marla Ruzicka, who was killed on 16 April 2005 in Iraq by a suicide bomber. She founded CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict) which worked to help the victims of the war in Iraq and she was a former Global Exchange activist.
    • Quotes

      Gray Davis: [upon being asked whether the rumors that he was responsible for the black outs in California are just a plot by the Republican party to get him recalled]

      [shouts]

      Gray Davis: Hello!

    • Crazy credits
      Special thanks includes "all the `Deep Throats' - you know who you are!"
    • Connections
      Featured in 2006 Independent Spirit Awards (2006)
    • Soundtracks
      What's He Building?
      Written by Tom Waits

      Jalma Music

      Performed by Tom Waits

      Courtesy of Anti/Epitaph Records

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • October 13, 2005 (Australia)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Enron: Rise and Fall
    • Filming locations
      • Houston, Texas, USA
    • Production companies
      • HDNet Films
      • Jigsaw Productions
      • 2929 Productions
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 49m(109 min)
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby Digital
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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