Hollywood: Making Cash From The Crash

Let’s face it, risk management and collateralised debt obligations aren’t cool. In fact, not much of the finance industry is cool. Sure, a job in banking may enable you to drive around in a Porsche but tell anyone you paid for it on the back of your knowledge of the energy derivatives market and they’ll quickly lose interest.

For a long time, Hollywood apparently felt the same way – and broadly speaking, I wouldn’t knock them for it. Back to the Future probably wouldn’t be as loved as it is today if it told the story of Marty McFly reconsidering his hedging strategy. And I don’t even want to think about the commercial success of Over the Hedge if it had been about Mayfair fund managers instead of CGI racoons.

The only time the finance industry appears on the silver screen is when the focus is on the excesses of banking or a specific scandal, à la Wall Street or Rogue Trader. The problem is, there are only so many times you can play on the heartless trader cliché and Barings can only break once; there just wasn’t enough material. That was, until 2008.

The credit crunch thrust the world of banking into the public consciousness and someone, somewhere in Hollywood had dollar signs flash up in their eyes. It’s not just wily hedgies who can make money from a crisis – we’re suddenly being presented with several different films about finance and big-name actors have been queuing up to get involved.

For the first time your profession is going to be featured heavily on the big screen. You’ll be joining an elite list of professions which have been romanticised by Hollywood, including astronauts, secret agents, and, er, CGI racoons. Hang on a minute, did banking just become cool?

Well, it really depends on how good the films are. Last year’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps sadly came across as a cynical ploy to cash in on the original. The weak script had little insight into the industry, and the actors, particularly everyman Shia LaBeouf, didn’t come across believably. (Its only redeeming feature was Charlie Sheen’s cameo – which was genius in its naffness.) With all the genuinely interesting real-life characters that populate the industry it was clear the only reason Gordon Gekko was used is because he was the most likely to bring in the big bucks. It may have been a moderate success at the box office, but surely it’s the last time we’ll see this banking lizard on the big screen.

An alternative to this approach is to focus on the facts and create a hard-hitting documentary. The Academy Award-winning Inside Job went down this route and presented the public with a gripping step-by-step tour of what – and who – really caused the credit crisis. For an audience whose only exposure to the industry is their own bank manager and the occasional ‘lunch is for wimps’ pop culture reference it provides an eye-opening experience. The film is clearly aware of this and plays heavily on the shock value, with a tagline asserting the film ‘cost $20tr to make’ and featuring a politicised Matt Damon as the narrator. Damon is aggressive in his criticism of the Obama administration for hiring so many of the people who had been accused of crippling the industry.

Unfortunately, critically-acclaimed documentaries rarely prove a runaway commercial success. The obvious compromise here is to take real life and dramatise it. Rogue Trader was a success in the late 1990s with Ewan McGregor playing a banker before it was cool. On the same lines Margin Call is due for release shortly and features a dramatised account of the collapse of the Lehman Bro…er… a fictional bank that definitely isn’t Lehman Brothers. The film has a big name cast with names like Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and Demi Moore making an appearance, keen to flex their acting muscles. Whether or not it is a success you’ll at least finally be able to have a nice easy reference to use when people ask you what you do: “I do what Demi Moore does in that Margin Call film. No, that’s not the one where she is a stripper. Oh nevermind.” On second thoughts maybe use Irons as an example instead.

Another movie on the horizon is Arbitrage (hint to naming a financial film: use a word picked randomly from the pages of the FT). Only at the early stages of production, it’s probably a little too early to tell if this is going to be one we’ll be proud of. However, while Al Pacino was initially linked to the film he has since been replaced by Richard Gere, and given that director Nicholas Jarecki’s only other claim to fame is writing the script to woeful flick The Informers we don’t have the highest of hopes.

The subject of last month’s square mile cover story, Jordan Belfort, aka the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’, is also due for the big screen treatment. With Martin Scorsese directing and Leonardo DiCaprio taking the leading role, it certainly has a chance of being a hit given their previous track record of making successful films. In fact when you read Belfort’s story it’s hard to imagine it won’t be a winner – if maybe not something you’ll be waving about as a prime example of your trade.

If all these previous films have something in common, it’s their attempt to dwell on the dramatic and often tragic aspects of an industry that ‘rules the world’. While it is true that scandal and drama sell extremely well, comedy arguably sells better. But is it tasteless to profit from laughing at a financial crisis the world is still yet to escape from?

Will Ferrell doesn’t seem to think so and is set to star in an upcoming film called Swear to God about a hedge fund manager who believes he has met the almighty. It might be hard to imagine at the moment but if banking had its own Anchorman, packed with memorable quotes and absurd personalities that gently poke fun, rather than mercilessly criticise, then that may be the best way for Hollywood to make money out of the crash. Hey, it might even paint banking in a sympathetic light. Or is that just a bit too much to ask?