The first in our series of Lie! Cheat! Steal! Fake It! Docs looking at complicated ethical equations, this film by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn is "a powerful and shocking look at the subprime lending scandal,” according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. “If you want to understand how the US financial system failed and how mortgage companies ripped off the poor, see this film.” David Denby in The New Yorker, called the film "a terrific documentary" and "a lucid and comprehensive picture of a rotten system."
4 for $24! Buy all four Lie! Cheat! Steal! Fake It! Doc's (American Casino, Yes Men Fix the World, Fraude: Mexico 2006, Orgasm Inc) and save. Package currently only available by calling the Box Office (413.MoCA.111)
MASS MoCA Screens American Casino Where Mortgages Replace the Chips
(North Adams, Massachusetts) – American Casino, the first film in Lie, Cheat, Steal and Fake It, MASS MoCA’s Thursday night documentary film series, brings to life the lying, cheating, and stealing that was involved in the subprime mortgage catastrophe and how it has affected millions of people and shaken our economy. Created by the husband-and-wife team of Leslie (director and writer) and Andrew (writer) Cockburn the film will be shown in MASS MoCA’s Club B-10 at 8 pm on Thursday, January 21.
An infamous email from one Standard & Poor’s analyst to another read, “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.” Many people knew that the promotion of risky and essentially impossible loans was going on and that the system would eventually collapse. But the system continued and when the house of cards fell it placed our country into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. American Casino goes on a complete before-and-after journey of this crisis -- filming began before any of the big bank bankruptcies and continued throughout the crisis showing specific examples of how everyday people were caught in the mess.
Writer Andrew Cockburn states that his goal for the film was “to make the point that most people who defaulted on their loans weren’t irresponsible lowlifes. They were hard-working people who found themselves in a situation they couldn’t control.” To illustrate this situation clearly for its viewers the film takes you between two worlds that seem thousands of miles apart: talking heads on Wall Street describing the climate of greed and carelessness that produced the financial meltdown and those who were at the receiving end of this incredible gamble.
Unlike other documentaries like Michael Moore’s most recent Capitalism: A Love Story which draws its effect from personal attacks at the people responsible, the Cockburns’ documentary truly attempts to educate and explain the economic forces responsible and provide the viewer with a glimpse into their effects – from gainfully employed but homeless school teachers to pools at abandoned mansions that act as breeding grounds for West Nile virus-carrying mosquitoes. The Los Angeles Times’s Garry Goldstein says its “hard not to be shocked by this stranger-than fiction look at how a toxic mix of unbridled greed, mass financial manipulation and the probable effect of a 2000 government deregulation act upended our nation’s entire economy.”
The film (and all the films in the Lie, Cheat, Steal and Fake It series) will be introduced with Williams College professor Shawn Rosenheim who will also lead a post-screening discussion with other scholars and activists.
Leslie Cockburn is an experienced documentarian with more than 20 years of experience. She has made films for PBS’s Frontline and she directed and produced Peter Jennings Reporting From the Killing Fields. In 1997, Cockburn co-produced The Peacemaker starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. She was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton and has produced dozens of segments for 60 Minutes, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Colombia, Zimbabwe, and Russia. She began work on American Casino in January 2008, when she and her husband Andrew, who co-produced the film, recognized the signs of a potentially devastating financial collapse.
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