- #Enron the smartest guys in the room soundtrack movie#
- #Enron the smartest guys in the room soundtrack serial#
Most disturbing of all, we watch the company in desperation, buckling under the weight of its fraudulent activities, as its most outlandish conspiracy is rolled out. We're shown how Fastow set up a web of subsidiary companies to disburse and obfuscate the firm's massive debt, and how Skilling promoted a cutthroat culture within the organization that prized the most cunning and ruthless behavior in its associates.
#Enron the smartest guys in the room soundtrack movie#
The movie goes into exhausting detail documenting the company's shady "mark to market" accounting processes, with which it could claim hypothetical future earnings (that never actually occurred) as real income, and the senior management's shamelessly unethical "pump & dump" strategy of artificially manipulating the firm's stock price and then cashing out their own personal stock options, all the while encouraging employees to invest their entire 401ks and personal savings into company stock. For a long time they fooled everyone, their illegal schemes personally making them millions upon millions of dollars each, until one day, almost in a blink, the whole thing came crashing down. Together, along with numerous cohorts also identified here, these men built Enron into the nation's 7th largest corporation, claiming over $70 billion in assets, almost entirely fictional. We're introduced to our primary villains: Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay, the neglectful father figure who turned a blind eye to the rampant corruption breeding within his ranks so long as he kept making money President and COO Jeffrey Skilling, the arrogant golden boy with big ideas and a dangerous risk addiction and CFO Andrew Fastow, the amoral whiz kid whose aptitude for concocting impenetrable paper trails allowed the company to falsify amazing record profits while hiding tens of billions of dollars in debt. It's a story about people, a genuine tragedy in which otherwise intelligent, talented men are undone by fatal flaws in their character, and who fall from grace so spectacularly that they turn our country's capitalist system completely upside down. Every moment of this really happened, and our nation is still reeling from the consequences.Īlex Gibney's documentary, based on the non-fiction book by Fortune magazine writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, makes it clear from its beginning that the Enron scandal isn't a story about numbers. And this is no fantasy with a happy ending.
#Enron the smartest guys in the room soundtrack serial#
A hook-handed serial killer may give you a momentary jolt, but the soulless monsters of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room destroyed thousands of lives, flaunted countless federal laws, and crippled an entire state's economy. While the major studios are busy churning out waves of PG-13 teen horror chillers and hard-R splatter porn month after month, by far the scariest movie of the decade turns out to be a documentary about finance and accounting.