By Stacey Harrison
There’s no denying that the financial crisis of 2008 was one of the most dramatic events in U.S. history. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it would make for good TV.
The makers of Too Big to Fail, the HBO film adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s bestseller, knew that the behind-the-scenes minutiae involved in how several of the nation’s largest and most integral financial institutions began to go belly-up — resulting in a taxpayer-funded bailout that was unprecedented in size and scope — would be tough to make palatable to a general audience. Heck, many of the people involved in the real-life story didn’t (and still don’t) fully understand it.
But having an all-star cast on hand, while concentrating on the moral gray areas the characters inhabit, and how the choices they make affect millions if not billions of people, turns the story into much more than just a dry history lesson. In fact, writer Peter Gould says he approached it like a “disaster movie.”
“Personalities are part of it, definitely, because there’s a human story here,” Gould says. “The other part of it is, economic policy may not be sexy, but the fact that all of us have credit cards and bank accounts means that pretty much all of us have a stake in what was going on.”
Too Big to Fail debuts tonight at 9pm on HBO.
Director Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) has plenty of talent to work with in front of the camera. The roster includes William Hurt as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Paul Giamatti as Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, James Woods as Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Edward Asner as Warren Buffett, Billy Crudup as New York Federal Reserve president (and current Treasury Secretary) Timothy Geithner, along with Matthew Modine, Tony Shalhoub, Bill Pullman, Cynthia Nixon and Topher Grace.
For Sorkin, seeing the story brought to life by a quality director and top-flight actors was gratifying, and he says it will help audiences understand the magnitude of what occurred.
“You get to see really what we were up against and how this was perhaps the most catastrophic thing that had happened in our economy since the Great Depression and that we were really on the edge,” he says. “People don’t really appreciate often how close to the edge we really were. I think that this project puts that into perspective.”
Photo: Credit: Macall B. Polay/HBO