SnoopyStyle In 2001, the massive Enron company goes bankrupt leading to a criminal scandal. Kenneth Lay founded the company in 1985 amidst Texas deregulation implemented by the Bushes. There are questionable schemes. There are massive gambling that led to hidden losses. Jeffrey Skilling uses murky accounting practices to pump up the numbers. Executive Lou Pai uses company money for his stripper habit and leaves with $250 million. They game California's deregulated electricity market with some disgusting comments. CFO Andrew Fastow deliberately hides the increasing debt with shell companies. It all collapses in a massive loss. This is in-depth and shows the ugliness of greed. I wouldn't even call it corruption since that seems to be what they intend to do. It is almost inevitable. It is in reality a criminal organization. Whatever small amount of high-minded capitalist ideals of deregulation is quickly lost with the need and greed for money.

TA Kristof "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is a very smart documentary that deserves to be watched again, ten years later, as the U.S. still deals with economic problems caused by Wall Street bad behavior.Alex Gibney is at the top of his game in this film, capturing the story of a company that captivated the stock market through lies and deceit before collapsing in an amazing implosion.Gibney shows how Jeffrey Skilling, the head of Enron, created a culture that misled investors through illegal billing practices and through shell companies. Skilling also changes company policy so the weakest staff get fired every year, which ends up making many of the ones who stay even more competitive. The criminal behavior goes all the way up the ladder. For example, Andy Fastow, the CFO, creates shell companies that trade with each other in order to illegally boost Enron's profits. Not surprisingly, these men end up with prison terms.Gibney's film is an important picture of a Darwinian company that came to symbolize American greed and the crooked men who led it. Recommended.

calvinnme ...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.

virek213 Were it not for the fact that its collapse led to over twenty thousand employees being pink-slipped, the situation involving Enron might very well be considered a black comedy. Unfortunately, the corporate shenanigans of its morally bankrupt potentates, to wit Andy Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, and, last but not least, the late (but not lamented) Ken Lay, led to what was, in its time (late 2001/early 2002) the single biggest corporate failure in the history of the United States, and a sign of what was to come in the next seven years. This saga is told here in writer/director Alex Gibney's compelling, and at times infuriating, documentary ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM.Taken from the book of the same name by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean, this film details the rise of the Houston-based energy giant and how it manipulated its finances to hide the fact that it was a house of cards ready to collapse for several years before it did. Even more than that, however, the film shows us just how Lay and his boys, with the always-reliable help of his deregulator-in-chief George W. Bush, manipulated energy prices and the energy grid in California to produce the rolling blackouts that caused electrical costs to skyrocket, thus putting the world's seventh biggest economy in a $38 billion hole from which it has yet to re-emerge.Gibney, with able assistance from narrator Peter Coyote (remembered as the mysterious "Keys" in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL), wisely interviews those Enron employees who knew what was going on inside the bowels of their company but were powerless to do anything, and thus makes them sympathetic. But he also gives us those phone calls in which Enron traders chuckled profanely about the pain and suffering their shutting off of power plants caused Californians during one of the hottest summers on record, something that'll definitely cause one's blood to boil.If we need any reminder of how important ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM is, it comes from one of those unemployed Enron employees who warns us that what happened to them and their company would happen again. Need I say more?