{"id":78,"date":"2007-04-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-24T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/enron\/"},"modified":"2022-03-29T15:04:17","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T22:04:17","slug":"enron","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/enron\/","title":{"rendered":"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Who would think a documentary about the collapse of a mammoth corporation could play out like a drama with the emotional power of Greek tragedy? But that is the impact of <i>Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room<\/i>, the inside story of one of history\u2019s greatest business scandals, in which top executives of America\u2019s seventh largest company walked away with more than $1 billion while investors and employees lost everything.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Based on the best-selling book <i>The Smartest Guys in the Room<\/i> by <i>Fortune<\/i> reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and featuring insider accounts and incendiary corporate audio and videotapes, this tale of greed, hubris, and betrayal reveals the outrageous personal excesses of the Enron hierarchy and the moral vacuum that led CEO Ken Lay \u2014 along with other players including accounting firm Arthur Andersen, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Skilling and Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow \u2014 to manipulate securities trading, bluff the balance sheets, and deceive investors.<\/p>\n<p>A fascinating exploration of corporate culture and epic misdeeds, <i>Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room <\/i>takes viewers from the heyday of soaring profits through the prolonged fallout, including the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the 2006 convictions of Lay, Skilling, and Fastow, followed by Lay\u2019s death two months later, which vacated his conviction.<\/p>\n<p>Filmmaker Alex Gibney saw the Enron story as more than a corporate scandal: \u201cI felt that the film would give me an opportunity to explore some larger themes about American culture, the cruelty of our economic system, and the way it can be too easily rigged for the benefit of the high and mighty.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Academy Award-nominated study of one of the biggest business scandals in American history, this film chronicles a corporate disaster in which executives walked away with over $1 billion, leaving investors and employees with nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":10550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1245,1225,1226],"class_list":["post-78","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-crime","topic-politics-and-government","topic-social-justice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room | Insider Trading Scandal | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How did top executives of America\u2019s seventh largest company walk away with more than $1 billion while investors and employees lost everything?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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