User Reviews

I agree with previous posts: "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is right up there with the biggest horror films of our time. And this one is scarier because it's real.

It's hard to say what boggles the mind most: the complicity of Arthur Andersen, the banks, and the traders in this elaborate scheme of making a failing company look profitable; the fact that the executives cashed out their stock at high prices and froze the employees' stock accessibility until it was worth nothing; the derisive laughter of the traders over the Enron-caused blackouts in California ("let them fall into the ocean - let them use candles); that Lu Pi, a guy who ran a failing Enron company, left that company with $250 million in his pocket; or the fact that Ken Lay died before they could convict him of anything. Take your pick, it's all disgusting.

When one of the California power companies called Enron and said there was a fire in the plant, the trader chuckled and said, "Burn, baby, burn." That sums up Enron's, the banks, the traders', and Arthur Andersen's attitude toward the common man - burn, baby, burn. Let's hope that's what Ken Lay is doing right now.

This is a great documentary even if you don't understand business. The only part I didn't quite get were these dummy corporations that Flatow started up to hide Enron's losses which were then invested in by the banks. That was a little complicated, but you'd think someone would have realized that the CFO of Enron running companies that were supposedly selling to Enron was a conflict of interest. Funny, no bank picked it up. They won't give you a mortgage, but they'll pay a fortune to a dummy corporation.

Probably my favorite part was the mark to market accounting system employed by Enron and signed off on by Arthur Andersen. I have no understanding of a reliable accounting firm allowing such a thing. In other words, if I have a book proposal, I can report a profit of, say, $30,000 on the book even though it isn't sold and I haven't seen a dime. And one wonders how they cooked their books. With help, that's how.

A very interesting expose on the greed, hubris, lies, etc. that brought Enron down. This film is well-done and digs up a lot of dirt. The PBS viewing showed a little clip after the film which discussed the strange trial results, which was probably the biggest problem with the film - it pretty much ends with the bankruptcy of enron and doesn't show much about the trials, since they took place later, although they would make for a great inclusion. To me, the most incredible part of the film is that fact that these guys would stand up every day and tell bold-faced lies to the employees, the government, the investors, and make it all sound good. They had to be thinking in the back of their head "it's all going to come crashing down someday"...

When Enron filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2001, it was a shock to most Americans. But as "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" shows, it shouldn't have been. The documentary, narrated by Peter Coyote, traces the energy giant's origins - including CEO Ken Lay's childhood - to its rise as one of the largest corporations in the United States.

What's really interesting is the intricacy of Enron's actions around the world, and how it pulled off all its shenanigans (aided, of course, by Kenny Boy's contributions to George W. Bush's first presidential campaign). Among Enron's more vicious acts was its manipulation of California's electricity in summer, 2001, and how Arnold Schwarzenegger let the company off the hook. Not to mention that Enron's collapse was accompanied by Lay's draining of the employees' retirement.

Enron's downfall - followed over the next year by the implosions of Adelphia, WorldCom and Tyco - just goes to show the dangers of letting corporations run rampant. The whole way through, the documentary manages to be funny, just at the sight of what Enron was doing, abetted by Arthur Andersen.

All in all, I definitely recommend "E:TSGITR".

PS: In "Bowling for Columbine", Michael Moore proposed a TV show called "Corporate Cops" (based on "Cops!"), in which people like Ken Lay would get strip-searched.

Even after reading Kurt Eichenwald's "Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story", I was not prepared for the near-Greek tragedy presented in this smartly produced documentary of the Enron scandal based on yet another book by journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. Directed by Andy Gibney, the 2005 film follows the complicated rise and fall of Enron in an easy-to-follow, chronological order since the mid-1980's, using actor Peter Coyote's lucid voice-over narration. Enron started as a moderate-sized Houston gas-pipeline company that grew exponentially, reaping benefits for shareholders and far more so for the Enron executive team for a long, uninterrupted stretch. Billions of dollars were collected due to speculative mark-to-market accounting techniques approved by the SEC, and Enron consequently became one of the world's largest natural-gas suppliers.

What resonates most from this searing film is how circumstantially pathological the chief villains are in this true corporate morality story. While the infamous Ken Lay comes across as the corrupt figurehead we have already come to know through news reports, it's really Enron CFO Andy Fastow (dubbed appropriately "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") and especially President and COO Jeff Skilling, who are mercilessly exposed here. Skilling is portrayed as a brilliant leader and a corporate Darwinist, whose favorite book is Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene", which he apparently translated into a bloodless performance review policy that worked like a genetic algorithm for people. Employees were rated on a 1-5 scale based on the amount of money one made for the company. Skilling mandated that between 10-15% of employees had to be rated as 5's (worst). And to get a rating of 5 meant that one was immediately fired. This review process was dubbed "rank and yank". Such was a typical example of his survivalist thinking.

The corruption spread throughout the company, as Enron was responsible for, among other things, gaming the Northern California "rolling blackouts" in 2001, whereby the company profited as huge parts of the state were plunged into darkness. Citizens were threatened by a deregulation plan that essentially enabled a number of immoral Enron traders (led by Tim Belden) to place calls that drove up energy-market prices and took advantage of power-plant shutdowns. Of course, the Bush family dynasty does not come across unscathed in the Enron story and justifiably so according to their inextricable ties to Lay. Gibney effectively uses video footage from testimony at congressional hearings, as well as interviews with disillusioned former employees such as Mike Muckleroy and whistle-blower Sherron Watkins (who uses some effective pop culture references like "Body Heat" and Jonestown to get her points across).

There are some amusing vignettes and images that tie some of the disparate elements together with excessive glibness. The documentary is best when it sticks to the facts, for this is one inarguable case where fact is truly stranger than fiction. Extras are plentiful on the 2006 DVD. Gibney provides an informative albeit verbose commentary track, and four deleted scenes, about twenty minutes in total, are included that become redundant with the film's portrayal of corporate malfeasance. There is also a fourteen-minute making-of featurette, as well as a "Where Are They Now?" snippet on the principals and three separate conversations with McLean and Elkind on how they got the story, how they validated their findings, and their enthusiastic reaction to the film. Other bonus materials include Gibney reading from scripts of skits performed at Enron and a Firesign Theater sketch about Enron's demise, as well as Fortune Magazine articles written by McLean and Elkind and a gallery of editorial cartoons.

Based on and named after the bestseller book Smartest Guys in the Room, this documentary provides an insightful look into the scandalous fall of Enron Corp. There are no actors in this documentary and yet it is dramatic. Such were the factors leading to the 'amazing rise and scandalous fall' of Enron that even a documentary featuring events preceding that historic day in December 2001, when Enron filed for the largest bankruptcy in the corporate US history, seems like a tale of epic imagination.

This documentary is neither as detailed nor as insightful as the book, but it does a great job of providing an insightful and reasonably detailed account of the Enron saga. Overall, it is not of any incremental value for the people who have read the book. However, if you can't go through 464 pages, this does a great job of enlightening you on the drama that Enron was.

...because I can't see what's different from what happened here and what the banks did that caused the global collapse of 2008. Turning hard assets into derivatives and selling them on the market? Knowing that a product is worthless and encouraging its trade anyways? This sounds familiar, it's just Enron traded derivatives on fuels and the banks did it on real estate. Thus I guess there is nothing different here other than the banks committed crimes on such a large scale that all of the criminals wouldn't fit into prisons without us building more, plus all of those campaign contributions! Congress couldn't let THAT dry up! So here we sit with 0% interest rates on our savings until the banks recoup every cent that they lost, so I don't see how this is different from what was threatened in Crete - confiscation of a portion of all depositors' funds to make the banks there whole, except here in the U.S. it is happening slooooowly, so nobody complains of outright theft. But I digress.

Now to the film itself. It takes almost two hours to chart the history of Enron, from the beginning in the mid 80's to its sudden collapse in 2001. There are interviews with everyone involved with the company from accountants to regular employees, and like all Ponzi schemes, people might have had their doubts and suspicions, but nobody wanted to upset the money train especially if they are on that train. And like all Ponzi schemes Enron came to a sudden abrupt end when there was no way to hide the fact that all of the money and the profits were not real.

Also very interesting is the gladiator/macho corporate culture described, largely caused by COO Jeff Skilling waking up one day, realizing he was a nerd, and wanting to throw off that nerd persona. He lost weight, worked out, got Lasik done on his eyes, and began to organize adventure trips for himself and an inner circle of Enron executives, some of which involved actual bodily danger. He instituted an Enron employee ranking system in which employees were ranked from 1-5 and those in the lowest ranks were automatically terminated. It was the Billionaire Boys Club minus the murder and involving a much bigger club.

Of course, now the scandal looks almost quaint compared to what we've been living with since 2008.In 2005, when this film was made, such an implosion by a company that had been named "most innovative company" for six consecutive years by CEOs, 1996-2001, the last year being the year of Enron's collapse, was still quite the spectacle. The irony is that if Enron had collapsed in 2011 instead of 2001, I doubt anybody would have gone to jail. Heck, it might not have even been newsworthy except in Texas! Also, the company might have even received a federal bailout.

The highlight of the film for me - a video "Christmas card" to Ken Lay made by Enron execs in which they do a comedy sketch about "creative accounting" which turns out to be EXACTLY what the company was doing that hid their problems.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is suave and well-crafted, but betrays some wishful thinking and apologist tendencies.

Some ex-Enron workers venture poetic but unmerited speculations about their corrupter associates, conjuring hypothetical images of their former friends now reflecting back on their transgressions and experiencing ethical remorse. We are subjected to clichés about their having to face their own "shadows" and whatnot, all of it speculative, and in spite of any evidence that they ever experienced a moral twinge or regretted anything other than getting caught.

There's also an insidious "slippery slope" message, some philosophical waxing upon the blurriness of ethical lines, and depictions of compulsive personalities, all of which introduce unwarranted moral ambiguity. Bethany McLean, one of the investigative journalists, surprisingly lays overmuch of the blame on Andrew Fastow, declaring that the fraud started with him (!) even though Fastow is elsewhere shown to have been recruited into a company already corrupt from the top down. There is some subtle attempt at containment here. This film skewers the culprits one moment, but then shrinks from the implications.

The WORST example is a naive question given undue emphasis by being left "provocatively" open-ended. The narrator, Peter Coyote, asks, "What motivated the corrupt traders? Was it their million dollar bonuses? Or was it docile complicity?" (I'm paraphrasing here) A no-brainer answer you might think, but then - I kid you not - the documentary suggests the second possibility and launches into the fascinating but entirely irrelevant Milgram experiment, in which reluctant subjects are persuaded by an authority figure to voluntarily electrocute others. But Enron traders were a uniformly sanguine lot, evidenced by testimonials and taped conversations displaying naked greed and delight (generous clips of which are included in the documentary). Yet we are supposed to imagine they were the victims of obedience training?

It's a bit much...

Maybe two or three of the commentators don't pussyfoot around, and through them "The Smartest Guys" successfully conveys the perils of the free market and deregulation; but these lessons get watered down by wistful undertones and feigned ambiguity. Post-Enron, the communist charge that capitalists are "cannibals" now seems undeniably apt. Yet we forever flatter ourselves, rehearsing the cant of the free market ideology, according to which the profit motive encourages 1) innovation and 2) hard work. Granted. But what the pundits and economists invariably overlook is that the profit motive also encourages 3) robbery. Adam Smith's *other* "invisible hand," if you will ...hidden behind the back and gripping a knife! Enron calls for an inquiry into the nature of capitalism, not an explanation based upon specific personalities. Human nature is what it is, and there will always be people ready and willing to cut throats when given motivation and opportunity. To misquote the NRA: People don't kill people.. incentives do.

Final criticism: a bit of shabby hypocrisy. One of the Enron execs is portrayed as having sleazy encounters with strippers; the viewer is then dutifully treated to lots of footage of nude strippers... ha!

How did Enron become the world's largest corporate bankruptcy? A culture of greed, and fraud, coupled with an accounting system ripe for abuse, was part of it. But one also needs to understand the way that markets work (ironically, since Enron claimed to know this better than anyone else). The rise in Enron's share price had all the hallmarks of a classic pyramid scheme, whereby, if you claim to be making enough money, you can get away without proving it, because investors all want in, not out. Meanwhile, Enron bankrolled its regulators with the money it did have to stop them asking about the money it didn't. Finally, when all this was exposed, the firm was worthless, even though there had been at least some successful businesses within it, because, fundamentally, like all businesses, Enron has sold confidence and now this commodity was in very short supply; but Chief Executive Jeff Skilling's claim that "it was a classic run on the bank" is disingenuous to say the least, given that the real money that Enron did (at one time) make was earned through deliberately operating with very low reserves. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' tells some of the story of Enron's collapse: and it's a compelling tale, although I found the use of background music rather annoying (the story is divided up into titled sections, with each section being the name of a song, which feels rather heavy-handed and obvious). But is gives a good flavour of what went on at Enron, although it doesn't go into the full details of the crooked financial transactions, and (like all the books I have read on the same subject) doesn't manage to answer the killer questions: what were, year-on-year, Enron's real profits and losses? and who knew what, when? Probably, these are impossible questions to answer: the picture that emerges is of a company where the bosses didn't want to know, everybody's job was to keep their superior happy and rich, and if you could do this, they wouldn't ask how you had managed it (or how rich you had made yourself in the process); a happy conspiracy until, eventually and inevitably, the money ran out. And as I said before, the irony is that this company that tried and failed to buck the markets was itself the high priest of market capitalism. If Enron's failure at least induces a dose of scepticism about the self-proclaimed (and invariably loaded) champions of market economics, some good at least will have emerged from what is otherwise a sorry tale.

Enron was the US energy company that "Fortune" named as "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years and, at its height, it employed 22,000 people and claimed revenues of around $100 billion. It went bankrupt at the end of 2001 and this documentary was released in 2005, but I did not see it until four years later. By then, we had experienced 'the end of capitalism as we've known it' and the most serious collapse in financial markets since the Wall Street Crash. What Enron and the wider market crash have in common is the murky world of derivatives, an excessive exuberance for risk, and simple avarice and hubris, while the mother and father of both crises are deregulation.

Alex Gibney co-wrote, co-produced and directed this work which, though occasionally complex, is compelling viewing and a lesson to us all on corporate greed and regulatory failure. Interviews with key observers and extracts from Congressional hearings are linked by a narration from Peter Coyote. The heroines of the story are Bethany McLean, the financial journalist who first questioned the valuation of Enron, and Sherron Watkins, the senior manager who blew the whistle on the company. The villains are a long list of men headed by Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay and Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling. Maybe there is a gender lesson here as well - as many financial and political ones.

OK. I remember when this came out, I thought that business stuff is not my forte, and so I never bothered to watch it. But tonight my boyfriend was watching it on PBS, and the filmmakers and people being interviewed totally make it understandable. And I am totally appalled. It boggles my head that these people, not just Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, but also just the common traders on the floor, were so scarily insane and greedy. Some of the clips of traders talking on the floor or phones about events in California, etc., were the scariest and (I know I said it before, but...) appalling! I highly recommend this film. I feel terribly sorry for all of those people who got caught up in the maelstrom. Somehow, I find this documentary about corporate finance gone bad creepier than any horror film... cause it is real!

If you haven't seen it or haven't seen it recently, it's well worth watching. Systemic fraud -- accountants, lawyers, regulators, investment banks, etc: "complicity across the board", "all too easy", accounting gimics, Alan Greenspan connections to the company, con man extraordinaire dissection of Jeff Skilling, massive egos, greed, lack of ethics among execs, connections with Bush family and Gray Davis downfall, testimony before House and Senate -- all well laid out in this documentary few years before the financial crisis hit: "Enron gambled entire future on the idea that its stock price wouldn't fall." Same rationale repeated a few years later with real estate as substitute. Doesn't offer much confidence that same exact thing is happening again in some form, papering over the losses from the the credit crisis with something else...

Warning though: your blood will be boiling by the end of it.

"Ask why" was Enron's enormously ironic marketing slogan for many years preceding its collapse, even as company officials ignored, shut out, and denigrated the few analysts, reporters, and employees who paused to ask why and how exactly the company was making money claimed in its earnings reports.

The film will make you shake your head at the gall of Enron, from its self-assured, overly confident executives to the merciless conduct of the energy traders bred within the company's cut-throat culture.

The film discusses the casualties of the Enron fallout, from its employees, its stockholders, retirees who held Enron shares, the entire state of California and Gov. Gray Davis himself.

The film provides a scathing criticism of capitalism unleashed, an aspect that I believe is most overlooked in the wake of Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco. The film, as did most media reports, focused on the personal conduct of the key players, the high-power executives now mired in civil and criminal proceedings: CEO Jeffrey Skilling, CEO Kenneth Lay (now deceased), and CFO Andrew Fastow.

While the conceit and deceit of these executives cannot be over-stated, so much emphasis on their individual culpability distracts from the overall culture of communal greed and reckless hype that saturated all of society during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In the film, Sherron Watkins, a former Enron VP considered by some to be a whistleblower, commented: "Enron should not be viewed as an aberration, something that can't happen somewhere else . . . It can happen again."

Right now, we still live in the shadow of Enron, with heavy-handed oversight and finger-wagging politicians. The real challenge will be 10 or 20 years from now, when the country is experiencing its next major economic boom. Will analysts do their job and demand to see proper balance sheets? Will regulators turn a blind eye to questionable accounting practices? Will shareholders even care that puppetmasters may be manipulating the skyrocketing numbers?

Will ANYONE care so long as gobs of money are being made, until its too late? We humans have a very short memory, and history tends to repeat itself.

I would rate the documentary higher, except that I found much of the inserted pop-culture clips to be unnecessary, distracting, and gratuitous (five minutes of strippers?).

Really enjoyed Alex Gibney's Scientology:Going Clear doc recently but this is not as engrossing or as dynamically told. Its very nuts n bolts. Greed is good, this guys is a repressed geek, etc etc which over the course gets repetitive and dull. Who knew large corps had shady practices in a larger unregulated and new futures industry, its like the crashes of the 80s never happened but of course we are doomed to repeat history.

The story of Enron, the energy company, and its rise and inglorious fall. We see its origins in the 1980s, how it was set up with energy deregulation in mind, and how it profited off the deregulation. Moreover, we see how it took accounting practices to the extremes, to the point that the senior executives were cooking the books. There is also coverage of the unethical practices of Enron' traders, particularly in the California electricity market. In the end it all comes crashing down, losing everyday, law-abiding employees their jobs, savings and pensions.

Brilliant documentary. A great telling of how greed and hubris can lead to crime of the highest magnitude.

Very well told. You can see how the illegalities just build. From legal mark-to-market accounting, the executives then start to overstate future profits. When these profits don't eventuate, rather than mark the profit down, they cover up the shortfall. Eventually the accumulated difference is so great that they feel they can't reverse it.

Using company promo footage and presentations you can see how easy it must have been for investors and employees to fall for the lines.

Not just an examination of corporate greed and lack of ethics but an examination of the baser instincts of mankind. So many cases of people choosing to do what was good for them, rather than what was right. The CFO, who was setting up all the dubious accounting schemes, was even skimming some of the company profit for himself! Thieves stealing from thieves.

Highly engrossing. Told in very intriguing fashion by narrator Peter Coyote and written and directed by Alex Gibney (based on the book by Bethany McLean), while the subject is complex, it is reasonably understandable.

Interesting for so many reasons too. The fact that they managed to hoodwink equity analysts for so long, the momentum effect - the more they got into it and the better they did, the less they could go back, the effects on investors and employees, the hubris on display.

A truly great documentary, one that should be used in business schools and ethics classes.

When Enron was granted permission to use mark-to-market accounting it saw the start of the dramatic increase in its profits and its share price. The method allows a company to claim projected earnings from projects once the deal is signed. With this in place Enron was able to earn money without actually earning money. However this could not go on forever and the company was under pressure to continually come up with new ideas to keep the deals and money flowing. And it did so, to the point where it was widely praised within the business community and by stockholders. However things would eventually catch up with the company and a few years ago the company collapsed in bankruptcy before the arrests began.

Working for an American multinational myself I am always interested and critical of the business model of making more and more money and keeping the stock increasing in value being the only way to survive. So I have watched films like this and like The Corporation with interest and appreciate the way that they sell a complex issue in easy to understand ways. With the Enron film it is all the more interesting because it is a prime example of how it all fell down and how easy it is to con the market – which, regardless of the legality of the accounting method used, is basically what they did! The film tells the story well and it is a tale that never struggles to fascinate. Lesser hands could have fudged the telling but the team here structure it well and use footage from Enron and C-Span to really good effect. In fact I did wonder how much this film cost to make because the vast majority of it is stock footage and a handful of interviews.

Although they lay things out well, the film doesn't manage to avoid nailing its colours to the mast; which is a shame because the story is compelling enough and damning enough to work without resorting to cheap digs, funny footage and so on. Sadly it does use this – not to the point of distraction but just to the point where I wondered if the makers didn't think that the facts would be strong enough to make the audience get the point without the extra bit of hammering. The film also stretches to bring in Bush and his cronies as if they were also to blame; it doesn't labour this point but what little it does is stretched – again it could have done less and allowed the audience to draw its own conclusions.

Overall this is not a perfect documentary because it is a bit biased and based on commentary from subjects all on one side of the fence. However it is well structured and easy to follow, stripping away the feared complexity of the tale and telling it in a fascinating and engaging way. A cautionary tale that I doubt that those that needed to learn from have learnt from. Well worth a look and yet another good documentary making it into cinemas.

I personally cannot stand arrogant, ego-drunk, machismo-frustrated, spoiled rotten white nerds-with-a-'tude like Jeff Skilling. If you peel back the thin coat of academic and financial success, he is precisely the type of guy that creates viruses for computers and banks and e- mail accounts who cum off the feeling of instigating the panic and disturbance of masses by sitting at a keyboard with a scantily dressed call girl over his lap, spanking her with the other hand, snorting coke off her cleavage when he has a few seconds to look away from the screen of complicated numbers and abbreviations.

Alex Gibney's documentary is a crime procedural. It's fashioned in a way in which it primarily entertains, what with very familiar songs over the soundtrack with tongue-in-cheek relevance and the subject of the biggest white collar confidence scheme in history. Regardless of a viewer's politics, this will make you relish the image of what must be happening to these guys in prison. It's about how ENRON grew to be one of the largest corporations with what was fundamentally a scheme to rob Peter to pay Paul, and ultimately ransacked the retirement funds of its employees just to prolong the inevitable.

There's a notion that ENRON was a group of decent businessmen gone bad. The movie make the case that it was a con game almost from the start, much to the tune of a Mamet script. At the time CEOs Ken Lay and Skilling claimed that they were running the best energy company in the entire world, they had to know that it had been bust and of no value for years, had exaggerated its profits and covered up its losses by the simplistically clever bookkeeping practices so corrupt that their accounting firm was ruined.

They evidently bragged constantly about being exceptionally smart and clever, but Skilling and Lay were the opposite of cautious. When a market analyst makes an inquiry into ENRON's statements during a conference call, Skilling can't answer and just settles for cursing the guy out, which, if someone with such sense and facility could just try to conceive, causes a lot of gossip and unwanted heat. One approach was to create fictitious offshore corporate names and move their deficits to those accounts, which were off the books. They are named with wild and thoughtless haste, one of them being "M. Yass."

In what did ENRON deal, really? That is what I wasn't sure of till I saw this. I read at one point that they were a natural gas company. But then they were in the electricity market. This film depicts them as they essentially created a market in energy, laid bets on it and stage- managed it. They moved on, even genuinely taking into consideration trading weather. What was this company's product, I ask? The answer turns out to be keeping a high share price no matter what. We find out that its traders, mostly young white guys who gradually gain a lot of control and become high-stakes high-tech gamblers, lost the whole business in bad trades, and concealed their deficit by burying the news and creating counterfeit profit reports that propelled the share price even higher!

In a sense, this documentary depicts the sort of slick, stunning, witty con games for which we love to see fictitious feature films about them is itself a great insight into why we love those feature films, Ocean's Eleven, Heist, Entrapment, The Great Train Robbery. Why? An early justification is that the thieves are likable and their victims are somehow deserving. Untrue. In ENRON's case, most of California were the victims! But why do we chuckle at the slickness of it? It actually happened!

The movie is amassed of a plethora of footage, from testimony at congressional hearings, and interviews with disillusioned ENRON people. It's at its best when it sticks to factual footage, least when it goes for visual effects and representative inserts which give it more of the feel of a Discovery Channel special.

Bethany McLean played a role in exposing the scandal, and she is so cute and poised, with such a soft, tender voice and a doe-like disposition. I chuckle when I imagine how innocent she must have sounded when she asked a simple question about ENRON's quarterly statements, and suddenly their whole "house of cards" started tumbling.

Most appalling is how ENRON contemptuously concocted the fake California energy crisis. Doesn't it sound so fun to say this after hearing about it: "But there never was a shortage of power in California." Using recordings of traders calling California power plants, we alarmingly listen in on them shutting down for "repairs." They pushed the price of electricity up ninefold. Twists don't stop there. Wait till you see how Skilling futilely tried to slither away before the company went kaput.

It's silly that there hasn't been more rage over these swindles and crises. The cost was immeasurable, not just in deaths caused by the blackouts, but in the amount of money for which Californians sued to regain what they paid in overcharges during the fake crisis. If ENRON were instead Al Qaeda, or Hammas, if terrorists had staged blackouts and power failures all throughout the enormous state, reflect on how we'd look upon these same scandals. Nevertheless the crisis, made doable by deregulation persuaded by ENRON's lobbyists, is still being laid at the door of too much regulation.

Overall I found this to be a decent recap of the Enron saga, or at least the pre-trial portion thereof. However the film is necessarily simplistic, and there's a high dose of cable-documentary cheese (re- enacted funerals, gratuitous topless dancers, inappropriate Oingo Boingo songs, etc.) I have not read the McLean/Elkind book yet but just re-watched this DVD. A few of their interviewees are irrelevant (Kevin Phillips; a consumer watchdog person; the local priest). For some reason it is never explained that the blonde with the Merchant-Ivory accent arrived via Vinson Elkins, attorneys at law, although I think this is rather an important tidbit. With your average Mark Cuban production you could do far worse; I predict it will go over big with assistant professors of sociology in Santa Monica.

Rolled my eyes at the part about The Milgram Experiment, but did get a good laugh when the narrator described Gray Davis as a "then-likely Presidential candidate"

This was probably the largest scam ever in the US corporate history that resulted into 29,000 people loosing their jobs and medical insurance. Average severance pay was measly $4500 while total of $55 million in bonuses was paid to its the top executives! Its employees lost $1.2 billion in retirement funds, the retirees lost $2 billion in pension funds while its top executives cashed in $116 million in stocks! The founders started the company with a goal to change the world but over the period greed took over. And they simply became the pawns in the hands of their own hauteur, their greed that catapulted the company into a deep dark abyss.

It all started with their Mark-to-Market strategy that used hypothetical future value (HPV) that allowed company to book profits no matter how little cash actually was in the pipeline. Its policy called PRCR which was actually rank and yank that almost mandated its managers to fire 10% of the employees every year! Its practice of using its core business energy as a financial instrument and its executives' pump and dump philosophy took the company further deep into the trench. And few miscalculated moves as India Dabhol project, CA power scam, Bandwidth initiative hurt the company even further. The company was a sheer smoke and mirrors. So were they the smartest guys in the room? Well! Probably yes but we're blinded by their own demons!! How many such smart guys are out there? Once again quoting Mark Twain " History never repeats itself but it often rhymes." Well structured. It unfolds the ugly side of greed and ambition that prevailed in one of the greatest companies of its time. A great watch even though it is now a bygone.

The moral of the story is that greed and power can overwhelmingly corrupt any man's soul.

Screenplay...................................... 7 / 10 Interviews........................................ 9 Visuals................................................ 7 Sound................................................... 5 Editing................................................ 5 Music....................................................... 6 Timeless Utility................................. 7 Total.................................................... 46 / 70 = 6.6 (rounded to 7) Verdict................................................. Recommended.

I remember the Enron debacle and the jokes that followed. But what I remember most, being a Californian, were the rolling blackouts. A ball that was set in motion several years earlier with deregulation of the energy sector in California culminated with California power companies having to buy power at a rate higher than they could sell it, which spelled blackouts. Ah! Free markets and capitalism.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is an analysis of the Enron financial meltdown. There was so much I didn't know about it and this documentary certainly fills in the huge knowledge gaps I had. I think that the most important takeaway was that many parties had to be complicit with the business practices of Enron for them to have gotten to where they got. That was the most eye opening fact to me--that banks, lawyers, and America's oldest accounting firm were complicit in Enron's unethical practices.

This documentary can really rankle you, especially if you were victimized by Enron or a company like Enron. Just watching stuffy old white men rake in money while lying to everyone is infuriating. With a fallout of 20,000 jobs, billions in pension and retirement, and the other benefits lost, it's hard not to be upset knowing that the demise was orchestrated by a handful of greedy execs. "Enron" is a wonderfully enlightening documentary about unchecked greed coupled with the intelligence to exploit the system.

It is a pretty good documentary on the Enron scandal, but somewhat lacking in detail in comparison to the book. They did a great job explaining how toxic Enron's culture was but the book did a better job explaining the player's backgrounds as well as the fraud itself.

I also wish they had gone into more detail on Lay, Skilling, and Fastow's backgrounds. I don't think it is an accident that a pipeline company run by an academic, strategy consultant, and structured finance guy ended the way that it did (destroyed their physical business to sell vaporware and financial engineering). Some of the pipelines they sold off for pennies to fund things like broadband trading are now worth billions (see Kinder Morgan)

If you really want to learn about all the financial aspects, as well as more on the character's backgrounds I suggest reading the book this documentary is based on.

these guys sure were smart. smart about who the real 'mark' was. including enron employees, SEC officials, customers, the entire state of California, and investors who fell for the constant wash of new investment ideas.

how do you sell futures in the weather ???? w.c. fields said it best, there's a sucker born every minute.

these guys were so smart they outsmarted themselves. they were so ingrained with their greed and evil schemes of fraud and theft, they lost sight of the truth and began believing their own lies, like a true psycho-sociopath.

the damage they wrought is incalculable in terms of reputations and lives ruined, retirements shattered and indeed lives lost from the MAN MADE power 'shortages' during fatal heat waves in California. the cold bloodedness of the enron traders making quips about 'aunt Millie' suffering without electricity to run the air conditioner shows the extent some people will go to make money.

'mark' to market. logging profits that haven't happened yet. apparently someone in the SEC didn't read the story about 'dont count your chickens before they hatch'.

the ONLY time people, the O-N-L-Y time you MAKE MONEY in the market is when you SELL the instrument and turn it into CASH. anything else is just wishes and dreams and fantasy on paper. numbers on PAPER. the enron gang cleverly worked around that axiom and look at all the people who fell for it and will in another 15 or 20 years when the lesson has been forgotten and the tendency towards greed again kicks in on a nice big scale.

A remarkably engaging documentary about how "the boys" were selling potential profits for 20 years with just their smiles, audacious demeanor, and a little bit of fraud. It's been almost twenty years, and the story of Enron doesn't even seem that unique anymore. There have been so many ludicrous stories of "fake it until you make it" and general accounting fraud incidents that the question of how they could think they would get away with this seems foolish. Moreover, some of them got away with it. Everyone sentenced for this has since been released. Lou Pai has been affected at all, and Jeff Skilling is doing energy trading again.

And what has changed since anyway? Everyone still fabricates numbers and facts to keep that share price high because that's paramount to success. Corporate ethics or lack thereof are still toxic just in a more refined way. Likewise, everything is still run by people who will go to their graves before they acknowledge that they prioritize their bottom line and hundreds of millions in offshore accounts over tens of thousands of employees.