It says here that Brad Pitt has optioned The Big Short. As loyal readers, you’ll know that I’ve been using the platform of Unlikely Words for several years to advocate for a movie based on Liar’s Poker. Actually The Big Short and Liar’s Poker could be released together as a part 1 and part 2 of the financial collapse. Shia Labeouf could play a young Michael Lewis.
Pitt’s Plan B productions is going full steam ahead on an adaptation of Lewis’ latest, “The Big Short,” about the events that led up to the current financial fiasco. They’re set offer Charles Randolph (”The Interpreter,” “The Life of David Gale”) $750G to write a script, reported New York mag’s Vulture.
Every couple months or so, I do a little Googling to see if Liar’s Poker has been optioned yet. Turns out it was optioned 20 years ago. Make the fucking movie already.
We pledge to meet and even get to know ordinary people who do not work for Goldman Sachs, so that we might better understand their irrational behavior, and exploit it only when necessary.
Plan B Entertainment, is closing on a deal to option Lewis’s next book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a chronicle of Wall Street greed and the swollen U.S. housing market. Pitt is also considering starring.
I swear if someone doesn’t start making a movie about Liar’s Poker soon, I’m going to start typing in all caps. And I’ll mean it, too. The fact that it’s not a movie yet makes me itchy.
The on again, off again movie version of Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, is back on. Bennett Miller, director of Capote, has been brought in to steer this ship home. He will, apparently, be taking the movie in a direction different, and more mainstream, than original director Steven Soderbergh.
Here’s a video of Michael Lewis explaining the origin of The Blind Side. There’s about 15 people in the theater when he does.
If it’s pettiness you crave, here’s a bazillion word, 2 part series on The Forgotten Man Of Moneyball, Eric Walker. In an interesting move assuring a constant bias, the author of the piece is that forgotten man, Eric Walker.
Lastly, I’d like to again ask why Liar’s Poker has not yet been made into a movie.
Since the Moneyball script was leaked this summer, some folks took it upon themselves to shoot a scene, just to see how it would come out. Execution isn’t flawless, but it is a cool visualization of what the movie will/would be like. I imagine tighter cuts and dialogue delivered a little snappier, but we can work with this.
I’m compelled to see this, but I wish that it hadn’t been made so astonishingly formulaic. I guess we really did need Steven Soderbergh’s oddball ‘Moneyball’. And. Please! Someone. Option. ‘Liar’s Poker’.
In a new interview on HuffPo with Terrence McNally, Michael Lewis explains why it only SEEMS like all the financial firms were full of idiots (instead of actually being idiots).
As a trader inside a big Wall Street firm…you would face a decision: Do I exercise my independent judgment and bet against this market, or do I just keep going along with what my firm is doing? If you exercise your independent judgment and bet against sub-prime mortgage bonds, you not only probably run into some political conflict within your firm, but you’d never make the big score for yourself… The minute you make a bunch of money from your bet, your firm is doomed. They couldn’t pay you. So the smart thing was just to go along and hope it lasted long enough for you to get rich.
If you read Michael Lewis’ latest Bloomberg column, Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools, quickly, you might think it’s a brutal take down of the newest Wall St muckraker (Taibbi) by the grand marshal of Wall St muckraking (Lewis). Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, this column seems to be satire. I can’t decide which I’d prefer to see, a Lewis/Taibbi Tag Team, or a knockdown drag out between the them. In any case, a good read.
America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.
Art Howe didn’t come out of ‘Moneyball’ looking that awesome, so he was hoping for redemption from the recently axed ‘Moneyball’ movie. In this article, he claimed Michael Lewis never talked to him. Only thing is, Lewis did. “Accusations of journalistic bias are the last refuge of the scoundrel“, says Lewis, replacing patriotism with accusations of journalistic bias in Samuel Johnson’s famous quotation.
Vanity Fair has a habit of posting stub abstracts of their bigger articles. This isn’t exclusive to VF, Rolling Stone does it, too, but it is an annoying way of using the web. Barry Ritholtz takes them to task for this, and then publishes the PDF that they sent him to drum up publicity. If you can’t wait until next week to read Michael Lewis’ take down of Joe C and AIG that explores among other things:
How A.I.G. F.P. became the first stop for Wall Street banks looking to insure the massive amounts of debt they were buying, packaging, and selling: “We were doing every single [credit-default swap] deal with every single Wall Street firm, except Citigroup,” says one A.I.G. F.P. trader. “Citigroup decided it liked the risk and kept it on their books. We took all the rest,”
click above for the full article.
In other Michael Lewis news, you probably knew that the Siderbergh/Pitt vehicle, ‘Moneyball’, got axed last week. Here’s an insider’s version of events that doesn’t make anyone at Sony look very good. Sandra Bullock’s ‘The Blindside’ continues to truck, and still, for some reason, no one has made any moves to make ‘Liar’s Poker’.
What’s coming for the big banks?
“I think they steadily become much more boring. I think they steadily attract a lesser caliber people to work for them and they pay less.”
“The people who created the problem are so powerful in deciding in what the solution to the problem will be.”
I’ll say it again. No one wants to make Liar’s Poker into a movie? How can this be?
In the Esquire article about Roger Ebert a few weeks back, Ebert mentioned his interview interview with Lee Marvin as one of his favorites, and now they've republished it online.
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