Goodbye to the evil executive

THE filmmaker son of a stockbroker has brought some humanity to Wall Street.

Kevin Spacey

KEVIN Spacey has a lot of experience playing a classic Hollywood archetype: the evil executive.

In Glengarry Glen Ross, he was a corrupt office manager. In Swimming with Sharks he was an abusive and sadistic Hollywood producer who tells an assistant he has "no brain" after he brings him Equal instead of Sweet'N Low. Most recently, in Horrible Bosses he played a boss who promises a hard-working employee a promotion, then gives it to himself.

In short, he has played these characters the way Hollywood has always drawn them. The US may be a nation that likes to see itself as built on free enterprise and self-made pluck, but when it comes to the movies, it gets shady boardrooms, cigar smoke and unadulterated greed.

Margin Call, opening in Australia in March, is different. A low-budget movie with a high-powered cast, its Wall Street characters are flawed, cynical -- but, for once, actually human.

Set during the height of the global financial crisis, it has a cast that includes Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. It zeroes in on a group of executives trying to save their 107-year-old financial institution from imminent collapse: notably by selling off billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities in a single day, before the bottom falls out of the market.

Unlike most films that view business through the lens of Hollywood, such as 2000's Boiler Room and 1987's Wall Street, there are no perp-walk scenes or moralistic finger-wags. When offered financing from producers who wanted these elements introduced, the filmmakers turned them down.

"I suppose you could say there are deeply evil people in the world," says Irons, who plays the firm's chief executive, John Tuld. "But I think in the main, most people do their best and try and hold on to their jobs." (Tuld's name is a hybrid of Merrill Lynch's ex-chief executive John Thain and Lehman Brothers' ex-chief executive Dick Fuld, the filmmakers say.)

Painting business executives in an unfavorable light is a Hollywood tradition that dates back to the silent era. One reason was simple: vilifying senior management and elevating working stiffs sold more tickets. "There are more little people that go to the movies than big people," says Tom Pollock, former chairman of Universal Pictures and a producer of Up in the Air, the 2009 movie in which George Clooney played a consultant whose unfortunate job it is to lay people off for heartless executives who don't want to do it themselves.

During the Depression business people were portrayed as fat-cat plutocrats, and in movies such as Frank Capra's You Can't Take it with You and Mr Deeds Goes to Town, they were often set straight about what truly matters in life, and it's not money. It was a welcome message to audiences who had little.

Hollywood has been famously left-leaning for decades, even as it teemed with shrewd business operators. Larry Ribstein, a professor of law at the University of Illinois who wrote a paper called Wall Street and Vine about the historically negative portrayal of business in film, concludes that the ongoing antipathy to corporate execs in films has nothing to do with politics. Rather, many creative types -- notably screenwriters and directors -- are expressing their own perennial resentment of bottom-line focused studio heads, who often seek to dilute a film's message for mass-market appeal.

Orson Welles, director of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane, about a ruthless media mogul based on William Randolph Hearst, detested interference and famously refused to allow studio executives to visit the set. "He was feeling that artist resentment," Ribstein says.

By the 1950s and early 60s, amid the rise of the modern corporation, business films such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit depicted drones struggling with the soul-sucking nature of office work. In Billy Wilder's The Apartment, Jack Lemmon plays Bud Baxter, an insurance-company clerk who is conflicted about some of the things he must do to get ahead, notably, lending out his residence to his superiors for extra-marital trysts.

Hollywood's suspicion of business intensified in the 70s as Americans' trust in institutions eroded following the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, and amid a growing inequality between the salaries of chief executives and workers. Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, who teaches a class about perceptions of business in popular culture, cites a Yankelovich pollthat found that 70 per cent of Americans in 1968 thought business was a positive influence in public life, compared with 15 per cent in 1976.

Films of that era, ranging from the 1974 thriller The Parallax View, to 1979's The China Syndrome, reflected a growing paranoia about corporations' impact on people's lives. The golden age of the corporate villain began in the 80s as a succession of hostile takeovers led by larger-than-life characters dominated the headlines. Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" sermon on the beauty of making money was adapted from a commencement address broker Ivan Boesky gave at Berkeley, and the film came out several months after he pleaded guilty to insider trading.

Margin Call is swimming against the tide, as producers think the public wants more films about business evils. Recently released was Tower Heist, in which Alan Alda plays a Bernard Madoff-like figure whose wronged investors seek vengeance; early next year comes Richard Gere as a hedge-fund manager gone awry in Arbitrage.

First-time director J. C. Chandor, who previously worked as "a low- to mid-level commercial director" for brands such as Subaru and America Online, wrote the first draft of the script for Margin Call over a frenzied week in November 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The son of a longtime Wall Street executive, Chandor says he wanted to draw a more balanced portrait of the financiers who were being demonised in the media for causing the global economic collapse.

The caricatures of executives being denounced by politicians at the time bore little resemblance to Chandor's dad, he says. Jeff Chandor worked on Wall Street for 40 years, mostly at Merrill Lynch -- a firm that at one time engendered such loyalty that employees called it "Mother Merrill".

Although Jeff Chandor admits that he often found Hollywood dramatisations of Wall Street to be entertaining, "I didn't meet many Gordon Gekkos in my career at Merrill, even when we went over to Salomon Brothers to do a presentation."

His son says he drew some of the inspiration for Spacey's character from his father. To look like the kind of guy who had spent close to 40 years at a firm, Spacey, 52, gained 4kg, wore suspenders, and insisted on using a hairpiece in a bid to age himself by about 10 years. Some on the set worried that the hairpiece might be distracting, but Spacey said, "Just trust me . . . this isn't my first rodeo."

Margin Call depicts a harrowing 24 hours at a storied investment bank after a laid-off risk management officer (Tucci) hands a bright young analyst (Zachary Quinto) a flash drive on his way out the door. What it reveals sparks a frantic struggle to save the firm.

When Quinto read Chandor's script in early 2009, he and his two partners at their new production company, Before the Door Pictures, agreed to sign on to produce the film. It was the first project that they were unanimously enthusiastic about, Quinto says, largely because it fits into their mission to make films that inspire debate about current events. Wall Street was a hot topic, but this cut both ways. This was, after all, an attempt to make a drama out of people having meetings about collateralised debt obligations.

Chandor did take some precautions to keep the budget low. He says he "built a fence" around his script -- setting the majority of the action within the confines of a single office building and keeping the story relatively simple.

Some potential backers nevertheless turned him down because "they were saying, 'Oh, people will be in minks by the time this comes out,' and no one will give a crap,' " he recalls.

One suggested adding a sex scene to spice things up and make the film more commercial. (The idea that two executives would escape for a romp during the most stressful 24 hours of their lives "was absurd," Chandor says.) Another said he would finance the film so long as Chandor tweaked the script to include a scene in which one of the younger characters discovers corporate malfeasance and turns his boss over to the feds, to satisfy audiences' blood lust. In other words, a perp walk.

Quinto and his partners stood behind Chandor when he declined those offers.

In early 2010, a young Hollywood producer named Michael Benaroya, from a prominent real estate family in the Seattle area, read the script. "I didn't want to make a movie that vilified anyone," says Benaroya, who agreed to spend $3.4 million to finance the production with the script exactly as it was written.

Spacey was the first to sign on, in the spring of 2010. He recalls thinking after he read the script, "It's not a history lesson . . . it's still happening."

Indeed, some of the top-line actors were sufficiently attracted by this attitude that they agreed to work for union-mandated minimums of $65,000 and will share in profits only if the film does well.

Australian actor Simon Baker plays Jared Cohen, a banker so cool-headed that he showers, shaves and changes his French-cuffed shirt in the midst of the meltdown, so that his co-workers never see him in a vulnerable position. Baker says he wore one of his own bespoke suits for the role, and requested a Hermes tie because he thought that the one the costume designer provided looked too cheap.

By the time Irons took the role of Tuld, shooting was already in progress. Spacey made a quick trip to London to host a benefit at the Old Vic, where he serves as artistic director. At the event, he saw Irons, pinned him against the wall and said "You've gotta do it", he recalls. Irons agreed to fly to New York a few days later.