Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Synopsis: The inside story of one of history's greatest business scandals, in which top executives of America's seventh largest company walked away with over one billion dollars, while investors and employees lost everything. Based on the best selling book. Format: DVD Color: Color Rating: Not Rated Genre: Documentary Runtime: 110 Year: 2005 Release Date: 2006-01-17
Narrated by veteran actor, Peter Coyote, this DVD is disturbingly real. It reveals the depths that people will sink at the expense of others, and it reveals how widespread it was.First, Arthur Anderson Consulting signed off on "mark to marketing" accounting. In other words, Enron could report their projected earnings as actual profits. They could "report" profits of millions of dollars that they didn't have. They paid bonuses and other excesses with these projections.Next, Jeff Skilling was hired by Ken Lay..
OK, I admit it. I didn't get the whole Enron thing a few years back. The Enron collapse happened too soon after 9/11 and I was completely preoccupied with that and our subsequent war on terror to pay much attention to the Enron story. Plus I figured that it was probably too complex for me to understand without doing a lot of research and I just didn't want to give it that much attention. And on top of that, I had never even heard of the company before so understanding what had happened at this Texan compa..
I went into Alex Gibney's "Smartest Guys in the Room" having read Robert Bryce's "Pipe Dreams" and Kurt Eichenwald's "Conspiracy of Fools" thinking to myself: should be good, but no way the movie is going to come close to telling the story like those two authors did.Well, surprise, surprise: the movie is outstanding on its own terms and all credit goes to Gibney. While the books focus on unraveling all of Andy Fastow's 'Special Purpose Entities' like the Raptors, LJM, Chewco, etc., Gibney brilliantly focus..
