Going Gonzo On The Banksters: "Bailout" To Screen At Derby City Film Festival In February
“Bailout” to Screen at Derby City Film Festival in February
Guest Post By Film Creator John Titus
This is the first in a series of pieces we’re writing about Bailout. Steve Megremis, who publishes The Daily Bail and speaks on several facets of the financial crisis throughout the film, extended his generosity to our project by letting us write about the film here.
Today the Derby City Film Festival announced that Bailout is among its 2012 lineup of films. It’s somewhat fitting that DCFF—held February 17-19 in Louisville, Kentucky—has agreed to screen Bailout. Gonzo journalism was officially born here with the publication of Hunter S. Thompson’s game-changing “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.”
Gonzo deviates from standard factual narratives in that the author altogether jettisons any pretext of objectivity and figures prominently as a character in the story.
That description reads right on Bailout: an unemployed Chicago lawyer (moi) stops paying his mortgage and enlists four friends (also unemployed) to join him on a trip in a Winnebago to Las Vegas, where we plan to tear a page out of Wall Street’s book and piss away other people’s money gambling, etc.
Along the way we interview Americans adversely affected by the financial crisis, principally through foreclosures. In between these interviews and the action in the Winnebago, a handful of bloggers and journalists walk viewers through several financial frauds that have robbed—and continue to rob—Americans from top to bottom.
The names in this latter group will be familiar even to casual readers of economics and financial blogs like Daily Bail. In addition to Megremis, we explore the crisis with Karl Denninger, Dylan Ratigan, Yves Smith, and Christopher Whalen. They do an absolutely dynamite job of explaining the causes of the crisis to mom and pop.
Viewers also hear from Tom Dart, the Cook County Illinois sheriff who’s stood up to the banks by thwarting various foreclosure efforts more than once, as well as from linguistics professor Noam Chomsky and journalist Chris Hedges.
So let it not be said that we cover only one side of the old guard political spectrum; indeed that absurdly false and misleading divide is depicted in the film for what it is—the butt of a bad joke that’s overdue for a richly deserved death. Thus viewers see a “leftist” like Chomsky bashing Barack Obama and while witnessing beat downs of George Bush and Hank Paulson by free market capitalists.
Bailout includes archival footage of the usual suspects on Wall Street and Washington, D.C. But personally, after months of watching reel upon reel of these cretins nearly perjure themselves (when not answering questions that were never put to them), Director Sean Fahey and I had to replace three of them with puppets. Yeah, puppets and Jose Cuervo were the only things that kept us sane.
The crazy layer cake that is Bailout is held together by the narration of stand-up comedian John Fox, who mans the Winnebago through the streets of Vegas, where he has a week-long gig at the Tropicana’s comedy club. Foxy’s wild man antics are legendary among funnymen.
“I tell fuck jokes for a living,” Fox growls in a baritone rasp. He’s got that voice.
Fox lived a half-block down my street for 10 years before moving to California to be closer to his family. He was actually a canary in the coalmine of the financial crisis, as comedy clubs closed and downsized throughout 2006-07 and Fox’s income dropped 75%.
That collapse was the first of many signs that our economy was dying of certain causes—never explored or even acknowledged in the media—that drove me to blogs, where the truth is important enough for actual discussion. It also meant Foxy stayed in our neighborhood a lot more often, and we became as close as brothers as a result. I’ll have more to say about Foxy in a later post.
What resulted from all of this is a documentary about the financial crisis like no other. Bailout has several angles that distinguish it from many outstanding predecessors. First, the TARP bailout is not only decried, but roundly debunked as a total sham. To this day, TARP remains Congress’s costliest outrage and is arguably its greatest slap ever to the face to middle America, which overwhelmingly—and correctly—opposed the legislation that transformed our political landscape forever.
Second, Bailout focuses on unchecked criminal fraud that lies at the root of the crisis. Not greed. Not deregulation. Not free markets. Not income inequality. Not threadbare left-right politics. No. Fraud—and the official refusal to punish fraud or indeed to uphold the rule of law at all—lies at the root of our ills. Bailout describes several frauds in granular detail that you just don’t see anywhere else.
Third, Bailout relies a lot less on its narrator for evidence and a lot more on its witnesses. By way of comparison, the narration in Bailout accounts for less than 14% (by word count) of the movie; Matt Damon’s narration of Inside Job more than doubles that figure. In Bailout, there are more and longer uninterrupted sequences of financial experts going back and forth on a given topic; our goal was to let viewers listen in on conversations among people who actually know what they’re talking about.
Finally, Bailout is a call to action. Too many documentaries to count have done a great job of royally pissing us off while at the same time leaving me shaking our heads: what in the Sam Hill should we do with our outrage? Not Bailout, amigos.
Bailout screens at the Derby City Film Festival on Saturday, February 18, 2012, at 3:30 p.m. EST.
Come join us if you can.
We’ll be the loud party around the 100% made in America 1986 Winnebago.
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Official Trailer for Bailout
Jan 5, 2012 at 10:44 AM
Reader Comments (24)
Congratulations are due to the creator Cheyenne (John Titus), Director Sean Fahey, Kevin and the rest of the production crew for their hard work and determination in seeing the dream to fruition.
I'm guessing that it might be shown at a film festival closer to you sometime this year. Cheyenne can elaborate on that possibility.
http://www.iffboston.org/
http://georgesblogforum.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-daily-climb-2/
http://georgesblogforum.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-daily-climb-2/
http://georgesblogforum.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-daily-climb-2/
DB—thanks for the props. Sean and I busted ass for three months solid to get the cut, which came a long way from the September screener.
George—thanks for the karma. A million would be killer. Then again, the bailout is a wound that continues to eat away at middle America, which is sick of Wall Street’s shit and of the politicians who enable the ongoing graft that defines our modern era of finance.
Dar & Gomp—Cheers cheers may Gomp and Dar live 900 years.
Den—if you mean the song in the trailer, that’s Ike Reilly (who in an act of amazing generosity lent us a rock bus for the Vegas trip). Ike does a podcast called “Where’s My Goddamn Medicine?” http://www.rockridgemusic.com/ikereilly/podcast/ We had a composer, Andrew Edwards, score the movie. And Sergio Mayora, who’s playing the guitar in the movie poster, has 3 (and maybe 4) songs in the movie. He’s a talented musician who pulls no punches. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjy9hJb-CDk
Sage—we’ll finalize the movie in the next 2-3 weeks. (You have to send movies through technical guys who smooth out the audio and color so everything’s consistent.) When we do we’ll press a bunch of DVD’s and whatnot and I’ll update then. We’ll submit to Telluride when it’s open for entries. That fest is around Memorial Day.
All—thanks for the support. We’re doing everything we can to spread the word we live by here on the Bail. I’ve screened “Bailout” with well over 100 people now. The good news is that a lot more people are hip Wall Street’s game of 3-card monte—way more than in 2008 when TARP passed. The bad news is that TV is the most powerful hallucinogen on earth, and old habits and party affiliations die hard. So the show must go on…
http://market-ticker.org/
"SEC" Proven criminal scam gang aiding USA working class pensions bust via Biggest LOOT scam Protection.
Obama scam Wall street Reform Bill actually provided new scam weapons for loot at lightening speed as a Gift to Wall(FRAUD) street Casino Bankster Financial Terrorists.
NETFLIX insiders LOOT billions in just 2 years with biggest scam Fraud planning and execution and now NETFLIX is insolvent will go bust like Worldcom?Enron/DOTCOM Fraud scam play Books.
http://www.henzellaw.com/frame.htm
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Dollars and Sense, Show 11 -- The Fix Is In, the 2nd Great Depression
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=65CnOUhEFIk
http://911blogger.com/node/23027
By William D. Cohan Jan 8, 2012 4:00 PM PT
Almost 65 years ago, in 1947, the U.S. government sued 17 leading Wall Street investment banks, charging them with effectively colluding in violation of antitrust laws.
In its complaint -- which was front-page news at the time - -- theJustice Department alleged that these firms had created “an integrated, overall conspiracy and combination” starting in 1915 “and in continuous operation thereafter, by which” they developed a system “to eliminate competition and monopolize ‘the cream of the business’ of investment banking.”
The U.S. argued that the top Wall Street investment banks - - includingMorgan Stanley (MS) (the lead defendant) and Goldman Sachs -- had created a cartel by which, among other things, it set the prices charged for underwriting securities and for providing mergers-and-acquisitions advice, while boxing out weaker competitors from breaking into the top tier of the business and getting their fair share of the fees.
The government argued that the big firms placed their partners on their clients’ boards of directors, putting them in the best possible position to know when a piece of business was coming down the pike and to make sure that any competitors were given a very hard time should they dare to try to win it.
The government was spot on: The investment-banking business was then a cartel where the biggest and most powerful firms controlled the market and then set the prices for their services, leaving customers with few viable choices for much needed capital, advice or trading counterparties.
The same argument can be made today.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/cohan-how-wall-street-turned-a-crisis-into-a-cartel.html
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2012/01/06/7802/fraud-and-folly-untold-story-general-electric-s-subprime-debacle
This piece of work goes a long way in illuminating what is wrong with our country.
For Immediate Release FROM Senator Bethany Moura [R-RI] Jan. 10, 2012
http://www.foreclosurehamlet.org/profiles/blogs/for-immediate-release-from-senator-bethany-moura-r-ri-jan-10-2012?xg_source=activity
Freshman RI Senator levels serious allegations at Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac - Jan. 10, 2012
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Senator Moura goes on to question the logic behind turning down homeowners who want to repay their loans under revised terms, but are denied and foreclosed on. “Fannie and/or Freddie take an enormous loss up-front and elect to do so.” For her, the alarms went off when Freddie Mac recently asked Congress for $124 Billion dollars. Moura says, “I believe they are intentionally creating these huge losses in mortgage defaults so they can justify on paper their requests for hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. The longer they take to review modification applications, the further behind the homeowners end up, the higher the arrearage gets, the larger the investor loss appears, therefore making a modification that much harder to qualify for. The perfect storm has been created.”
Senator Moura has actively fought for this to stop. She communicates with the Department of the U.S. Treasury Office of the Comptroller of Currency and the policy advisors of the FHFA (oversees Fannie and Freddie). She has met with Senate leadership, the Governor and his policy staff, as well as fellow legislators. “In fact, I’m working on forming a bi-partisan coalition with legislators in both chambers to stop this from continuing in our state”, Moura says. “My intent is to enact change any way that I can, and am committed to being a resource for leadership in the General Assembly. I’ve seen the devastation first-hand, and had my own experience with a dishonest loan servicer and a foreclosure. It’s a battle I’m still fighting, but have turned my frustration and experience into motivation.”
Moura states, “Watching them beat families into submission, to eventually surrender their homes is something you have to see to believe. They rip families and communities apart, destroy property values, and leave in their wake a sea of emotional wreckage that cannot be measured. It is unbelievably cruel and despicable.”
This first-term Senator is so confident in her suspicions, she’s challenging the top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to appear in Rhode Island in a public forum to defend her allegations – head on and face-to-face. Her message to them is simple. “Bring your attorneys and your staff, and I’ll have my notes, files and homeowners from Westerly to Woonsocket. Since you believe you are entitled to their money, I believe they are entitled to your answers”, declares Moura. “In this arena, I am a force to be reckoned with. Whether this fight takes a day or a decade, I will not retreat. They can bank on it (pun intended).”
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I LOVE this girl! Calling out the GSE pig men takes some nerve. Go Girl GO!
http://www.charlottefilmfestival.org/bailout
Nominated for Best Documentary Feature
http://www.free-press-release.com/news-bailout-the-movie-selects-workhouse-as-agency-of-record-1330632086.html
http://usabailout.com/content/bailout-premieres-new-york-and-chicago