This article featuring filmmaker Tom McCarthy (I’ve never heard of him either), is amusing – but there’s also an undertow of great significance that I’d like to address after this quote:
The idea of good things resulting from morally questionable deeds is something McCarthy’s been kicking around for nearly a decade.
“Andrew Fastow, the CFO at Enron, grew up 10 minutes from me,” he says. “I played soccer with his brother. Great family, the Fastows, terrific people. A lot of great things came out of the productivity and profit of that company – philanthropy, all these wonderful things. But all the good that came out of it, it’s not built on [anything] real. And when the cards came down, we had to pay for that. I thought that was a really interesting theme for this movie.”
Forgetting the fact that McCarthy believes Enron’s wealth wasn’t there, I really responded to his explanation of his process. This spoke to me very directly. Very forcefully. Artists transpose some experience into some other context all the time. I do it with my writing. One day I will be writing something that has NOTHING to do with Enron and I’ll remember something Ken Rice or Ken Lay or Dan Boyle said at trial and think, “Oh this is perfect, that goes right here.”
Sometimes it can be a line from trial, but more often its just a theme. Or a sense of things – the ambiance of a particular day or person and idea.
Enron is especially useful as a creative resource because there are so many facets to it. It has everything: beauty and love and lust and poverty and wealth and sadness and joy. There are a million ways to tell this story, but I think what will ultimately happen is that a million stories will be told, with bits of Enron DNA holding it all together.
