22 June, 2024 Siobhan Marie Day 0 Comments 5 categories

The Big Short: Star-Studded Cast Gets Funny…

ABC News‘ Chris Connelly interviews stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, and Ryan Gosling, along with director Adam McKay for Good Morning America as they discuss adapting the 2015 film The Big Short from the complicated 2010 book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis about the 2007-08 Financial Crisis.

The Big Short; directed by Adam McKay; screenplay by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay; based on The Big Short by Michael Lewis; starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt; produced by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Arnon Milchan for Regency Enterprises and Plan B Entertainment and distributed by Paramount Pictures. (2015)

"The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" is a nonfiction book by Michael Lewis about the build-up of the United States housing bubble during the 2000s. It was released on March 15, 2010, by W. W. Norton & Company. It spent 28 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and was the basis for the 2015 film of the same name. Photo Credit: Google Images

Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance. Lewis was born in New Orleans and attended Princeton University, from which he graduated with a degree in art history. After attending the London School of Economics, he began a career on Wall Street during the 1980s as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. The experience prompted him to write his first book, Liar's Poker (1989). Fourteen years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics. His 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game was his first to be adapted into a film, The Blind Side (2009). In 2010, he released The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. The film adaptation of Moneyball was released in 2011, followed by The Big Short in 2015. Lewis's books have won two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and several have reached number one on the New York Times Bestsellers Lists, including his most recent book, Going Infinite. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons

The 2007–2008 financial crisis, or the global financial crisis (GFC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. Predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages targeting low-income homebuyers, excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions, a continuous buildup of toxic assets within banks, and the bursting of the United States housing bubble culminated in a "perfect storm", which led to the Great Recession. Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to American real estate, as well as a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. Financial institutions worldwide suffered severe damage, reaching a climax with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, and a subsequent international banking crisis. The preconditioning for the financial crisis was complex and multi-causal. Almost two decades prior, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation encouraging financing for affordable housing. However, in 1999, parts of the Glass-Steagall legislation, which had been adopted in 1933, were repealed, permitting financial institutions to commingle their commercial (risk-averse) and proprietary trading (risk-taking) operations. Arguably the largest contributor to the conditions necessary for financial collapse was the rapid development in predatory financial products which targeted low-income, low-information homebuyers who largely belonged to racial minorities. This market development went unattended by regulators and thus caught the U.S. government by surprise. After the onset of the crisis, governments deployed massive bail-outs of financial institutions and other palliative monetary and fiscal policies to prevent a collapse of the global financial system. In the U.S., the October 3, $800 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 failed to slow the economic free-fall, but the similarly-sized American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which included a substantial payroll tax credit, saw economic indicators reverse and stabilize less than a month after its February 17 enactment. The crisis sparked the Great Recession which resulted in increases in unemployment and suicide, and decreases in institutional trust and fertility, among other metrics. The recession was a significant precondition for the European debt crisis. In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US as a response to the crisis to "promote the financial stability of the United States". The Basel III capital and liquidity standards were also adopted by countries around the world. Photo Credit: Google Images

The stars and director discuss adapting the complicated book into a film that movie goers can understand, they also discuss with Connelly, Bale’s award nominated role in the film as Dr. Michael Burry, the eccentric neurologist turned hedge fund manager who first notices the housing bubble and predicts the financial crisis in 2005, two years before the global economic events that would lead to the Great Recession.

Actor Christian Bale accepts Best Actor in a Comedy award for 'The Big Short' onstage during the 21st Annual Critics' Choice Awards at Barker Hangar on January 17, 2016 in Santa Monica, California. Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for The Critics' Choice Awards

Actor Christian Bale, winner of Best Actor in a Comedy for "The Big Short," speaks onstage during the 21st Annual Critics' Choice Awards at Barker Hangar on January 17, 2016 in Santa Monica, California. Photo by Lester Cohen/WireImage

Michael James Burry is an American investor and hedge fund manager. He founded the hedge fund Scion Capital, which he ran from 2000 until 2008 before closing it to focus on his personal investments. He is best known for being among the first investors to predict and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010. Photo Credit: Google Images

Christian Bale as Michael Burry in "The Big Short" (2015) Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry in The Big Short from Paramount Pictures and Regency Enterprises (2015)

The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline observed in national economies globally, i.e. a recession, that occurred in the late 2000s. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that it was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. One result was a serious disruption of normal international relations. The causes of the Great Recession include a combination of vulnerabilities that developed in the financial system, along with a series of triggering events that began with the bursting of the United States housing bubble in 2005–2012. When housing prices fell and homeowners began to abandon their mortgages, the value of mortgage-backed securities held by investment banks declined in 2007–2008, causing several to collapse or be bailed out in September 2008. This 2007–2008 phase was called the subprime mortgage crisis. The combination of banks unable to provide funds to businesses, and homeowners paying down debt rather than borrowing and spending, resulted in the Great Recession that began in the U.S. officially in December 2007 and lasted until June 2009, thus extending over 19 months. As with most other recessions, it appears that no known formal theoretical or empirical model was able to accurately predict the advance of this recession, except for minor signals in the sudden rise of forecast probabilities, which were still well under 50%. The recession was not felt equally around the world; whereas most of the world's developed economies, particularly in North America, South America and Europe, fell into a severe, sustained recession, many more recently developing economies suffered far less impact, particularly China, India and Indonesia, whose economies grew substantially during this period. Similarly, Oceania suffered minimal impact, in part due to its proximity to Asian markets. Photo Credit: The Balance

You can watch the interview and hear all about that and more from the stars and director of The Big Short about transforming Hollywood into Wall Street and actors into hedge fund managers, as they adapt a complicated subject matter into an Academy Award nominated Best Picture film that took home the Oscar for Adam McKay for Best Adapted Screenplay, for his screenplay adaption of Lewis’s book along with co-writer Charles Randolph.