What did Enron buy and sell, actually? Electricity? Natural gas? It was hard to say. When a New York market analyst questions Enron’s statements of profit and loss, during a conference call, Skilling was unable to respond and calls him using bad word which creates a bad buzz on the street. Occasionally, Skill and Lay were less than circumspect. At the very moment the claim has been done, they should have known that the organization was bankrupt, inflated its earnings, been worthless for months and overshadowed its losses through so corrupt bookkeeping procedures that venerable accounting firm of Arthur Anderson was demolished in the aftermath. According to its top executives, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, It was the best energy company in the world.
#THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM SUMMARY MOVIE#
From the very beginning, the movie claims that it was a con game. There is a general feeling that Enron was a good organization at first and finally turned up to be worst. He robbed his workers’ pension funds to purchase a little more time in his last days. It depicts the story of how Enron rose to be the 7th largest corporation in America with what was mainly Ponzi scheme. No matter what is your stand on politics, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” will make your anger to rise. This is not a documentary about politics.
Televised taking the perp walk in handcuffs, both he and Lay face criminal trials in Texas. Then he suddenly resigns, but not quickly enough to escape Enron’s collapse not long after. Toward the end, he sells $200 million in his own Enron stock while encouraging Enron employees to invest their 401K retirement plans in the company. The movie uses in-house video made by Enron itself to show Lay and Skilling optimistically addressing employees and shareholders at a time when Skilling in particular was coming apart at the seams. It was McLean who started the house of cards tumbling down with an innocent question about Enron’s quarterly statements, which did not ever seem to add up. It is best when it sticks to fact, shakier when it goes for visual effects and heavy irony. It is assembled out of a wealth of documentary and video footage, narrated by Peter Coyote, from testimony at congressional hearings, and from interviews with such figures as disillusioned Enron executive Mike Muckleroy and whistle-blower Sherron Watkins. There's also a mysterious 'M Yass', to whom large sums were paid the movie suggests it stands for 'My Ass'.The documentary is based on the best-selling book of the same title, co-written by Fortune magazine’s Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. He left Enron with enough of the latter to become the biggest landowner in Colorado. The most bizarre figure on view is a Chinese-American in charge of energy resources whose chief interests were strippers and money. With considerable wit, the film makes a complex affair lucid (at least for the time you're watching it) and it is interesting to learn that the favourite book of the chief operation officer, Jeff Skilling, is Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. The principal figures are as contemptible as the Russian politicians and bureaucrats who were responsible for the Chernobyl disaster and show the same contempt for the well-being of decent, hard-working people. This excellent documentary is a fascinating story of greed, criminality and self-deception that spreads out from Enron's flashy HQ in Houston to the White House and the whole financial world that was complicit in the company's activities.
The perpetrators of the events leading up to the scandalous collapse of the house of cards that was America's seventh largest corporation thought themselves masters of the universe. T he title of Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is ironic.
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