Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. 2005 HDNet Films & Magnolia Pictures.
Featuring: Andrew Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay, Gray Davis
Narrator: Peter Coyote
Written and directed by Alex Gibney
Available at Amazon.

The film documentary based on the best-selling book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, it's a compelling and surprising look at the collapse of Enron, and how it also took Arthur Andersen with it. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, this movie will make you mad no matter what your politics are.

The movie portrays Enron not as a good, honest corporation that went bad, but as a billion dollar con game almost right from the start, essentially worthless for many years, and only creating profits out of thin air, thanks to "hypothetical future value", where Enron could basically throw out any number figure, and that was the money that they "made" that day.

We also learn that Enron knowingly created California's energy crisis in 2001, and there never was a shortage of power. Instead, Enron's traders were known to ask power plant managers in "getting a little creative in shutting down plants for "repairs", driving up electricity prices up to nine times higher. There is also audio of the traders bragging about how they'll be "retired by age 30", and rich beyond their wildest dreams thanks to this.

Several years later, billions of dollars lost will remain forever lost, Kenneth Lay is dead, and Jeffrey Skilling sits in prison. And who knows how many lives were directly or indirectly affected by the company's demise, although one executive named Lou Lung Pai who had a taste for strippers cashed out early, and he now lives like a king in Hawaii. This documentary should be mandatory viewing. Highly recommended.