COLUMNISTS Capitalism: A love story, the latest documentary by Michael Moore – demagogue or truth-seeking crusader, depending on your viewpoint has been well-received at the Venice Film Festival. The subject lends itself perfectly to film according to Mr Moore because “it’s got it all – lust, passion, romance and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day”.
He believes the financial crisis is making people more receptive to his brand of political activism. It’s an opinion shared by another film-maker, Mike Bonanno, one half of the American activists, the Yes Men. His documentary The Yes Men Fix The World has been on release in cinemas this summer and will be shown on More4 this autumn as part of the True Stories series, which last week premiered the Michael Winterbottom adaptation of Naomi Klein’s critique of “disaster capitalism”, The Shock Doctrine.
“When we started making this film five years ago people looked at us like we were crazy,” he told me. “But events caught up with us.” He has, he says, been inundated by requests from people who want to pursue the Yes Men’s own brand of activism. So they drew up a social networking game (“the Facebook of political activism”) where people post challenges.
These stunts do not go down well with their corporate targets. A spokesman for ExxonMobil, a butt of a Yes-Men joke, asserts “it is a serious matter when people willingly misrepresent themselves”. To which Mr Bonanno responds “no one is hurt”. Do such hoaxes translate into anything more substantial? “It’s not the best or only way to change things but it is another way. We are a morale booster for activists. It shows corporations are not impregnable fortresses.”
And just to help activism along, Mr Bonanno, will be revealing his trade secrets at the end of the month at a seminar, “Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men”, part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Liverpool.
He is keen someone launches a satirical attack on bonuses. This could be done, suggests Mr Bonanno, by pretending to be a banker at a conference and announcing “a new fantastical bonus. Or to get onto television in the guise of a CEO and denounce future bonuses on the grounds they’re unfair.”
Banks, you’ve been warned.
Roubini cameo
This week, we heard that Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor, who recently warned of the danger of a double-dip recession, has been offered a cameo role in Oliver Stone’s upcoming Wall Street sequel. Despite prophesying the economic crisis, he told me, he would never have predicted being offered a role in a Hollywood film.
Mr Stone approached Professor Roubini to discuss the financial meltdown as part of his research. “The focus of the scripts two or three years ago was hedge funds, now it has turned to commercial banks,” says Prof Roubini, who threw a cocktail party so that the Hollywood director and the actor Shia LaBoeuf could talk to asset and hedge fund managers and bankers.
Will “greed is good”, the immortal words delivered by Gordon Gekko in the original, be even more pertinent now? People have always been driven by greed, says Prof Roubini. “It’s not as if bankers or traders are more greedy than then.” The question, he says, is how do you make sure regulation and incentives curb its excesses? Such policy issues are unlikely to make the final cut.
British drama
Hopefully Wall Street will not have the kind of dialogue delivered in BBC2’s drama The Last Days of Lehman Brothers. The line, “if we’re going to get Barclays we need to buy at a premium to the market value”, is hardly the stuff of drama.
Hard to see how it appealed beyond readers of the financial pages. A boardroom of interchangeable, dark-suited men was typically confusing. Mississippi-born Ken Lewis, chief executive of the Bank of America, as played by Likely Lad James Bolan, appeared to be from the north of England. I wondered how I had missed the story of supermarket king Ken Morrison’s bid to buy Merrill Lynch.
Nonetheless, having witnessed Lt James Dempsey (TV’s Dempsey & Makepeace) JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon it does make you wonder which prime time TV actors would play Andy Hornby, Fred Goodwin et al in a drama of the British financial crisis. All suggestions welcome.
