Strange, that there has not been more anger over the Enron scandals. Now, he says, his retirement fund is worth about $1,200. A power company lineman in Portland, who worked for the same utility all his life, observes that his retirement fund was worth $248,000 before Enron bought the utility and looted it, investing its retirement funds in Enron stock. The usual widows and orphans are victimized. Their pensions are gone, their stock worthless.
As the company goes belly up, 20,000 employees are fired. We hear Enron traders laughing about "Grandma Millie," a hypothetical victim of the rolling blackouts, and boasting about the millions they made for Enron. Using tape recordings of Enron traders on the phone with California power plants, the film chillingly overhears them asking plant managers to "get a little creative" in shutting down plants for "repairs." Between 30 percent and 50 percent of California's energy industry was shut down by Enron a great deal of the time, and up to 76 percent at one point, as the company drove the price of electricity higher by nine times.
There was never a shortage of power in California. The most shocking material in the film involves the fact that Enron cynically and knowingly created the phony California energy crisis. 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 exec Mike Muckleroy and whistle-blower Sherron Watkins. The documentary is based on the best-selling book of the same title, co-written by Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. In hindsight, Enron was a corporation devoted to maintaining a high share price at any cost. It moved on into other futures markets, even seriously considering "trading weather." At one point, we learn, its gambling traders lost the entire company in bad trades, and covered their losses by hiding the news and producing phony profit reports that drove the share price even higher. The corporation basically created a market in energy, gambled in it and manipulated it. What did Enron buy and sell, actually? Electricity? Natural gas? It was hard to say. well, take out the period and put a space between "y" and "a." Yass." These "companies" were named with a reckless hubris: One stood for "Maxwell Smart" and the other one. We're shown a schematic diagram tracing the movement of debt to such Enron entities. One Enron tactic was to create phony offshore corporate shells and move their losses to those companies, which were off the books. During a Q&A session with employees, Lay actually reads this question from the floor: "Are you on crack? If you are that might explain a lot of things. When a New York market analyst questions Enron's profit and loss statements during a conference call, Skilling can't answer and calls him an "a-hole " that causes bad buzz on the street. Skilling and Lay were less than circumspect at times. In an astonishing in-house video made for employees, Skilling stars in a skit that satirizes "HFV" accounting, which he explains stands for "Hypothetical Future Value." Little did employees suspect that was more or less what the company was counting on. One accounting tactic was called "mark to market," which meant if Enron began a venture that might make $50 million 10 years from now, it could claim the $50 million as current income. To keep its stock price climbing, Enron created good quarterly returns out of thin air.