Will Enron's Story Make Great Television?

N E W  Y O R K, Jan. 2, 2002 -- CBS is betting that its made-for-television movie about Enron's collapse, The Crooked E, will be compelling enough to keep viewers from switching channels. It won't be easy.

The topic has already saturated the media, Enron's stiff-suited executives and complicated financial dealings are hardly sexy fodder, and who wants to think about work on a Sunday? Even the movie's executive producer, Robert Greenwald, was originally turned off by the idea.

"When Enron was exploding, several people asked me if I wanted to do an Enron movie, and I said no. It was too complicated and obtuse," says Greenwald. The network, which is owned by Viacom, airs the movie Jan. 5.

Greenwald's perspective speaks to a widely held opinion in Hollywood: Business is boring. "Once you start to write about numbers, it's sedative time," says Syracuse University television and film professor Richard Dubin.

Because there's a higher potential for a business story to elicit snores than, say, a romance or an action flick, it's that much more impressive when it doesn't. The fine films that Forbes' panel voted best of the best overcame their potential pitfalls.

While it's easy to understand how the Mafia can pique initial audience interest, industries such as media, finance, tobacco and aluminum siding are hardly as inherently fascinating to outsiders. Who knew that a crew of pathetic, small-time real estate salesman (that's Glengarry Glen Ross) could be so heart-wrenching?

Enron from Everyman's Point of View

What makes these business movies work — and, for that matter, any good story — is that they're about the business of people.

That's what eventually sold Greenwald on an Enron movie. He was pitched a book, Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider, written by a young, laid-off Enron worker named Brian Cruver. The autobiographical tale was told from the viewpoint of an employee fresh out of business school.

"It was what I call a rat's-eye view of the Titanic," says Greenwald. Cruver, the feeling goes, represents everyman: lower-level employees who have no clue about what's really going on in the executive suites.

"I was the typical Enron employee who thought it was the perfect company," says Cruver. "All I wanted was to buy a new house, have the perfect life, and it all blew up in my face."

To make the Houston striver sympathetic, some of Cruver's life was fictionalized. The calling off of his wedding, for example, didn't really happen.

Nonetheless, part of the tragedy of Enron's collapse — and part of many compelling business movies — is the average Joe's often-futile quest for the American Dream. Corny, but it works.

"We watch business movies with our own goals in mind," says Jack Boozer, an associate professor at Georgia State University and author of Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique (University of Texas Press, 2002). "Audience appeal is connected with their own personal career experiences."

Who hasn't been ambitious and in search of a mentor like Wall Street's young stockbroker Bud Fox, or frustrated in a dead-end job like American Beauty's suburban ad executive Lester Burnham, or scared of being fired like the desperate real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross? The question, then, is how far these characters — and viewers — will go to get what they want.

"A story has to become personal," says Kenny Goodman, a William Morris motion picture agent. "People don't say, 'hey, that's a good business movie.' It's a either a good story or it's not."

The Corporate Cubicle, Hollywood Style

Still, business-related stories come loaded with other problems that make them difficult to translate to the screen, such as getting well-known actors to sign on.

"A-list stars are looking for roles with immediate emotional pow," says Jack Ofield, communications professor and filmmaker at San Diego State University. "Business topics are not perceived as heroic, sexy or funny, and stars and their agents can be wary about committing time and reputation to a project."

There are also issues of setting. Clothes and locales of the corporate world — cubicles and conservative suits — are inherently bland (unless, say, the action takes place at a company's headquarters in Bermuda).

Hollywood finds ways to compensate. The creators of Erin Brockovich showed their protagonist, the tough-talking legal secretary, out of the office and in the world. Having the former beauty queen trounce around in tight miniskirts and cleavage-revealing tops helped too, as did casting Julia Roberts.

Other movies overcome corporate sterility by satirizing and amplifying it. In The Hudsucker Proxy, executive offices are depicted as ridiculously oversized suites, and the mailroom is a steamy, cavernous dungeon. In Working Girl, the suburban secretaries' "big hair" was just large enough to elicit knowing snickers while successfully illustrating corporate hierarchies.

There's a fine line when it comes to depicting corporate stereotypes. Blow them too far out of proportion, and audiences will check out.

Disclosure lost viewers with its over-the-top portrayal of corporate espionage in a tech company. Scenes showing Michael Douglas — who plays an executive suing his female boss for sexual harassment — searching through virtual-reality software files came off as so far-fetched that it was tough for any mildly computer-savvy office worker to take the rest of the film seriously. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, the composite characters that Tom Wolfe painted so vividly in his novel were oversimplified and uninspiring on screen.

Searching for the Next 'Rosebud'

Another reason it's difficult to translate business stories into film is that meetings and memos are hardly visual. Only rarely can a chief executive jump out a 44th-floor window after a board meeting (The Hudsucker Proxy), or will a boss send a message as dramatic as the horse's head left in a bed in The Godfather.

When adapting the Enron book for television, the movie's writer, Stephen Mazur, knew he had to gloss over the complexities of Enron's off-balance-sheet partnerships. "You can't get too bogged down with details," says Mazur. "It's more important to find the emotional truth."

Ah, the emotional truth, the heart of what is arguably one of the greatest movies of all time and also happens to be about business. In Citizen Kane, newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane's loneliness and private life become far more intriguing than his wealth and public power. The film's plot acknowledges just that when the managing editor insists, "It isn't enough to tell us what a man did. You've got to tell us who he was." Thus he sends a reporter out to discover the meaning of "rosebud," Kane's dying word.

"The whole movie is a search for Kane's humanity," says Mazur. "You're always searching for the emotional core of any story." That might be hard to find at Enron, but Mazur hopes he has.

For more, go to Forbes.com..