Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

**Alex Gibney** (0:10)
Hello, this is Alex Gibney, and this is my commentary on the film, An Assortment of Random Thoughts, and hopefully instructive background materials for your listening pleasure.
The film starts with a Tom Waits song, What's He Building? Tom Waits is the perfect music for this film because he has a kind of tragicomic quality to his music. You know, the very sad tunes are often go with happy lyrics and vice versa, but What's He Building was so great. It's a meditation on a neighbor next door, some mad scientist who's building something strange. It's very funny but also very dark. And also in a very direct way, ask the fundamental question about Enron. What's he building as if, you know, it's asking about Jeff Skilling or Andy Fastow or Ken Lay. What are they doing in there? These aerials of Houston, I think, are extraordinarily beautiful. A really nice use of HD. And here you have some of the characters talking about it. But the glistening skyline, those are the two Enron towers right there. And there's something about HD that really captured the sheen of Enron, this kind of glistening company. One of the great things about this aerial sequence too, that Maurice Alberti so elegantly shot, is the way we turned it upside down. And that was the way Enron was. Everything in the end turned topsy-turvy. And so this image at the beginning, without any comment until now, is all about that whole idea of it turning upside down.
I like this transition very much. We always go in the film from glistening shots of skyscrapers to newsreels of what was actually happening. It helps to undergird this idea of what is real and what is a kind of bizarre stage set. I love putting this interview with Bethany up front, too, because when people first see her, they always remark how they didn't know what she was doing. Such a pretty young woman in this very big, high-octane film about finance, but she earns your respect by the end of the film. Now, this song was absolutely key to me. It's Billie Holiday's version of God Bless the Child. And like a lot of the Tom Waits music, it has that tragicomic quality. I mean, it's such a haunting, beautiful melody, and yet the lyrics themselves are so very dark. All about how the strong lorded over the weak.
This sequence was much talked about in The Cutting Room. It ends up being a recreation of a suicide. And as you find out later, it was that of a man named Cliff Baxter. But the fact was, when you first see this in the film, you don't know who this person is. And I think that's key to its use and its value and ultimately its effectiveness. This is a person on a late night drive listening to a haunting sound on the track. And it's important, I think, that we be inside that car, because then we're empathizing with this character. We don't know yet who this character is. And then the gunshot. Now, here's another one of these transitions, where then we go in to the newsreel, where we hear the announcement of this man's suicide, and we learn for the first time that this man was Cliff Baxter. But I think what's key to that recreation is that you don't know in advance that it's Cliff Baxter. It could be anyone, but the important thing is, you're there in a very intimate way, that haunting moment when somebody decides to take their life. These are images of the actual funeral of Cliff Baxter. There's no way of knowing, you know, why anybody commits suicide, but you can sense the cost of this, even with skilling now answering here. You know, when one human being dies as a result of something like this, you tend to take it much more seriously than endless headlines of losses to investors. I think that, you know, this was a very poignant human tragedy. In many ways, the whole thing, the whole incident of Enron, was a very stark human tragedy. Now, Skilling, throughout this film, gives an enormous amount of testimony before Congress. You really see his character. There is a very arrogant moment from Skilling. I mean, it's almost as if he's spitting at the congressman. Jeff Skilling is an extraordinarily theatrical person, and you can really see it in the hearings in a way that is very palpable.

**Jeff Skilling** (5:15)
I did not do anything that was not in the interest of all the time that I worked for Enron Corporation, that was in the interest of the shareholders of the company.

**Alex Gibney** (5:24)
Skilling is absolutely convinced even today of his rectitude. That's a very interesting thing, and I gave him a lot of credit for going before the House and Senate and taking them on in that way. Now, this space is such an extraordinary space. It took us a long time to get in here. It was so toxic for people that the company that now owns this space, this empty trading floor of Enron, wouldn't let us in as if there were somehow ghosts we were going to stir up. But we finally got in, and it is an extraordinary—it's like a spaceship. And you really sense the Titanic elements here. I mean, these two staircases were so much like the staircases I would imagine of the wheelhouse of the Titanic, but this is a Titanic, a spaceship Titanic.