safe investments

Those who have seen Boiler Room, which I just watched last night, can see the irony in this:

But systemic corruption—and that is the right word—has been unveiled at lenders across the board. Two of the most revealing stories on the culture that overtook the lending industry were published early—February 4 and March 28, 2005—by the Los Angeles Times. Reporters Mike Hudson and E. Scott Reckard found court records and former employees who described the boiler-room culture that pervaded Ameriquest—hard-sell, scripted sales pitches, complete with the “art department” in Tampa. Ex-employees confirmed, as did Lisa Taylor, the loan agent quoted at the top of this story, that copies of Boiler Room, the movie about ethically challenged stockbrokers, was indeed passed around as an Ameriquest training tape.

[Ex-employees] described 10- and 12-hour days punctuated by ‘power hours’—nonstop cold-calling sessions to lists of prospects burdened with credit card bills; the goal was to persuade these people to roll their debts into new mortgages on their homes.

Power hours. And if the power-hour culture pervaded the market leaders, what of smaller lenders and mortgage brokers? Here is Glen Pizzolorusso, a young sales manager at WMC Mortgage, an upstate New York brokerage, who earned—get this—$75,000 to $100,000 a month:

What is that movie? Boiler Room? That’s what it’s like. I mean, it’s the [coolest] thing ever. Cubicle, cubicle, cubicle for 150,000 square feet. The ceilings were probably 25 or 30 feet high. The elevator had a big graffiti painting. Big open space. And it was awesome. We lived mortgage. That’s all we did. This deal, that deal. How we gonna get it funded? What’s the problem with this one? That’s all everyone’s talking about . . .

We looked at loans. These people didn’t have a pot to piss in. They can barely make car payments and we’re giving them a 300, 400 thousand dollar house.

To business reporters of a certain age, boiler rooms are associated with the notorious stock swindlers of the late nineties—A. R. Baron, Stratton Oakmont—criminal enterprises all. But all the elements of the bucket shops of the past—the cold calling, the hard sell, the bamboozling of over-their-head civilians, not to mention the outright lying, forgery, and fraud in its purest form—were carried out on a massive scale and as a matter of corporate policy by name-brand lenders: IndyMac, Countrywide, Citi, Ameriquest.

I could spoil everything

Many people who know me know that I don’t like the way the idea of the SPOILER affects discussions of movies. They know this because I reveal the ending of every film I’ve ever seen in the least polite way possible. It’s a single speech whose delivery lasts as long as there are people remaining in the room. Actually, no, that’s not what I do.

When I end up talking about SPOILERS it usually happens in one of two ways:

  1. Someone is talking about a movie but doesn’t want to give away the end.
  2. I want to say something about a movie, but I first I ask to make sure I won’t “spoil” it.

I never “spoil” a film if someone doesn’t want me to, but I rarely ask someone not to “spoil” one for me. I’m not sure why I don’t mind. I suppose partly it’s related to my interest in history: I’m used to being interested in things while knowing how they turn out. And partly it’s because for me a really good movie is a movie I still like after seeing it more than once or twice.* Sometimes I miss out on enjoying the unexpected, but I rarely feel like the whole experience has been ruined. And when I do, it’s often because the surprise is the best thing about the film. And that’s the kind of movie I don’t usually watch more than once anyway.

Managing SPOILERS isn’t very difficult in in-person or voice conversation. As long as no one blurts things out, all you have to do is first agree to reveal or not to reveal the SPOILERS before continuing. Online – at least in an open-readership blog and comments format – it’s a different story. You can’t really tell if everyone has seen a particular film, or how much they’ve seen, or how much they’ve heard, or if they mind or don’t mind learning SPOILER information. So you’re left with the choice of leaving things out that you really want to talk about or putting up big SPOILER warnings and trying to hide the discussion while keeping it available for those who want to see it.

This can lead to what I think of as unfortunate outcomes, such as:

  • a posting about reviews of a movie I won’t name in which the author expressed disagreement with one reviewer’s assessment of a particular part of the movie (among other things), and then said they wouldn’t discuss that point because it was a SPOILER and SPOILERS must not be revealed. As it happens, I’d seen that movie and knew that that plot point was a total SPOILER. So I could see why the author left it out. But it was a huge part of the conversation I had with other people who saw the movie with me, and if I were writing about the film, I’d hate to prevent myself or the occasional reader from talking about it at all.
  • In a comment thread, someone recommended a movie whose name I will not reveal but which is a procedural based on a true story in which a famous actor plays a journalist investigating someone’s wrongful conviction. I’ve seen this movie and thought it was known as “that movie in which a famous actor plays [see above description]” – in other words, I thought its outcome was part of what it was known for. But another person strongly objected to the recommendation as being itself a spoiler. This is a film from over 50 years ago.

People who’ve “known” me online for a while are no doubt familiar with my attitude towards SPOILERS, as I’ve brought it up before. I’m repeating it here because I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately – this is where my time previously spent blogging has gone in the last few weeks – and I’m going to start posting about them. I won’t include SPOILERS just for the heck of it, and there might be posts where I purposely leave them out for effect.** But while I’ll provide warnings and use the “below the fold” feature – unfortunately not very effective for those on RSS – I’m not going to leave something out if it’s part of what I want to discuss.

_____

*I once held the view that I need to see something three times before I know how much I like it. The first time it’s as new as it can be to me; the second time I’m under the influence of my expectations from the first time; the third time I have more perspective and am ready to start thinking about it “as it is.”

**But I’ll answer if anyone really wants to know.

overestimated

I don’t usually pay attention to movie ratings – as opposed to movie reviews – but Netflix has a feature I really like. If you haven’t rated a movie, it shows you both the rating the Netflix users as a whole have given and the rating it predicts you will give based on your previous ratings.

I’ve been watching a lot of older movies lately, so I wanted to see a newer one. There Will Be Blood came up as related to some other movie I’d put in my queue. I hadn’t heard anything about it but the name; I wouldn’t have considered it had the description not mentioned Upton Sinclair’s Oil, which I haven’t read but know something about. Netflix users gave it somewhere around 3.5 out of 5 stars; Netflix predicted I would give it a 1.5. Netflix was about right, but there’s no way to give half-stars, so I gave it the 1 it deserved.

unconventional

When I watched a little of the coverage of the Democratic convention this afternoon, I thought I was watching the Olympics again; when I looked at the coverage later in the evening, I was glad to see that the stadium had filled up. There was some talk a week or two ago about the weather: some Obama opponents had been hoping for rain. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I’m not so sure rain would have been such a downer.

One of my favorite movie sequences of all time is the convention scene in Meet John Doe. It’s held in a heavy rain and through the downpour the sight of all those umbrellas is quite striking both visually and as a sign of the dedication of the delegates. On the other hand, it ends in a riot, so we can be glad Obama got sun.

You can watch the scene here, starting at about the 0:45 mark. It ends here. (For those concerned with such things: the clips don’t give away the end of the movie, but they’re kind of spoilery.)

so that’s what happened to the mime from French in Action

I recommend watching this before you know what it’s about.

(I can’t remember where I saw this video, but it was a while ago. This made me think of it again.)

sketchy subways

Article. Illustrations. (U-bahns, too.)

I liked this:

Frost also rides the F train and is buddies with Velandria on Flickr’s subway sketchers group. But the two have never met face to face.

Meanwhile, the New York Times tried to draw a quick portrait of riders on the Q train one morning. Kind of disappointing, although I guess they didn’t have much time. (Incidentally, both articles came out around the July 4th weekend, probably because those were expected to be slow news days.)

“Listen, I–I’m sorry to tell you this, but, uh, you’ve been fired. Management had to replace you with a Mac II and a part-timer with a Masters degree.”

I know there are people – I count myself as one – who are reluctant to watch even medium length videos online, especially if they’re of something that could easily be covered in a transcript. But this is an actual short film with actors and everything, and it’s darkly comedic too: “The Debt.” I saw it on Bravo sometime in the 1990s and I’ve been looking for it online for a few years now, ever since I started paying attention (more or less) to debt in the news. It fits in with the mood of the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s (the debt counter shows the 1992 interest); aside from the technology the characters use, it doesn’t seem all that out of date.

Note: it’s on youtube in two parts of 5 and 7 minutes (not counting credits it’s just over 10 minutes), but if you play it at the link above you should be taken directly from part 1 to part 2. For more on the film go here and click on “shorts” in the top menu.

subtlety

I don’t know the politics of Ted Turner, but I saw in the listings that this movie was playing on Turner Classic Movies last night. I’d never heard of it before. I’ve still never seen it.

scene from the mortgage mess

Francis William Edmonds, The Speculator (1852)
(Smithsonian American Art Museum)

other americas

What reporters know and don’t report is news–not from the newspapers’ point of view, but from the sociologists’ and the novelists’. It enabled me, when I learned a little of it, to write my Shame of the Cities. But it took time and sharp listening to get that little. Though I had nothing to do, professionally, with criminal news, I used to go out with the other reporters on cases that were useless to my paper but interesting to me. Crime, as tragedy and as a part of the police system, fascinated me. I liked to go for lunch to the old Lyons restaurant on the Bowery with Max Fischel or some other of the “wise” reporters. They would point out to me the famous pickpockets, second-story men and sneaks that met and ate there; sometimes with equally famous detectives or police officials and politicians. Crime was a business, and criminals had “position” in the world, a place that was revealing itself to me. I soon knew more about it than Riis did, who had been a police reporter for years; I knew more than Max could tell Riis, who hated and would not believe or even hear some of the “awful things” he was told. Riis was interested not at all in vice or crime, only in the stories of people and the conditions in which they lived.

The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 223