"American Casino" tracks crisis from Main to Wall Street

Reuters, Thu Apr 30, 2009

By Kristina Cooke

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When U.S. film-maker Leslie Cockburn began filming a documentary on the economic recession in January 2008, the crisis was just beginning to unfold.

In the year Cockburn and her husband Andrew followed the stories of struggling homeowners in inner-city Baltimore, the global financial crisis redrew the landscape of Wall Street, froze credit markets and prompted large-scale job losses and foreclosures.

"We've done a lot of war reporting overseas and for us to realize we were probably in the midst of the biggest story of our time at home was incredible," said Cockburn, who has covered conflicts from Afghanistan to Haiti.

Cockburn had been reading economist James K Galbraith's "The Great Crash, 1929", and said in an interview she saw parallels in the cracks appearing on Wall Street in 2007.

"It was clear it wasn't going to get better in a few months so we decided to take the plunge and start filming almost immediately," she said.

The feature-length film shifts between Wall Street, Baltimore and suburban California -- or, to use its casino terminology -- between the gamblers and the chips.

Cockburn said she hopes the film, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, will give viewers a better understanding of what caused the economic crisis and its consequences.

After starting with a primer on how subprime mortgages and derivatives fueled the crisis, the film shifts in pace and tone, moving to inner-city Baltimore and suburban California.

There, through personal stories and interviews, the film addresses how risky bets made on Wall Street ravaged the lives of home owners and neighborhoods.

To show how interconnected the troubles on Wall Street and the rest of America are, the film-makers track Baltimore high school teacher Denzel Mitchell's mortgage through to Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs.

One early review from Variety magazine said the material was "cogent" but the movie as a whole, "never escapes a small-screen feel."

(Editing by Alan Elsner)