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Leslie Cockburn Bets on American Casino
Photographer Marc Scheff
When American Casino premiered at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival on April 26, it was a moment of realization of what went wrong in our financial organizations. This debut feature documentary by Leslie Cockburn takes us into the battle between Wall Street and Main Street before the economy came crashing down.
Cockburn sheds light on how congress passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act in December 2000, which called for less regulation on Wall Street and has led to our present situation. A little more than eight years later, the United States is living through the aftermath of this giant mistake that has affected countless Americans. Cockburn juxtaposes freshly boarded-up homes in the mostly minority neighborhoods of Baltimore, Maryland and Stockton, California with defectors from Bear Stearns, Standard & Poor’s and other players in the subprime mortgage gamble.
As we’re still knee-deep in a recession, American Casino seems to be a sure bet for a success. Director and producer Leslie Cockburn spoke to MovieMaker about her enlightening film.
Nora Murphy (MM): The timing of this film is perfect. Did you predict the economy would suffer more while you were in production?
Leslie Cockburn (LC): We began work on American Casino in January 2008. By mid-February, we knew that there would be a cascade of failures that would last years, not months. At that point bank leverage—borrowing—was completely out of control and insurance against failures relied on companies that were themselves in a very bad state. When you “followed the money” you could see there wasn’t any. By March, we knew that subprime was the canary in the coal mine, meaning there were all sorts of other loans out there that would fall apart starting right now, in spring of 2009. We felt sure that the problem wasn’t going away. In fact, the problems today are much worse than most people realize.
MM: How was directing this film different than your past endeavors?
LC: Directing American Casino was very exotic for me because so many of my former films have been shot abroad, in places like Afghanistan. This is a thoroughly American film. What was shocking was to see the devastation of whole neighborhoods, the post-apocalyptic landscape of parts of Riverside County in California, where the abandoned pools are breeding mosquitoes and piles of realtors’ “100% Financing” signs are home to colonies of rats. Empty houses are meth labs. It was very spooky. At times I felt like I was in Mogadishu.
MM: You have a hip-hop score for the film, along with songs by Bruce Springsteen and Moby. What prompted your musical selection?
LC: The musical selection is eclectic but just right for this story. Springsteen’s “I Ain’t Got No Home” is, of course, one of Woody Guthrie’s most famous songs from the Great Depression. The hip-hop tracks are really fantastic because we found them as we were shooting in inner-city Baltimore. Producer Andrew Cockburn asked the local hip-hop station whether anyone was writing songs about the foreclosures that have ravaged the city and 60 tracks arrived. Three are in the film, including one called “Losing My Home” written and performed by a group that is 11 to 14 years old. They are drawing from their own experience of family and friends and that’s what makes it so powerful. I hope American Casino will be the first of many venues where people get to hear this music. My choice of Moby, whose music you hear throughout the film, is simple: Moby is an extremely sophisticated musician. His music is brilliantly subtle, but conveys a mixture of pathos and irony and foreboding that suits this subject perfectly.
MM: What kind of message do you hope the film will send to Wall Street?
LC: The film operates on a couple of levels. On one level, I tried to make it comprehensible to everyone. On another level, there are very interesting sections for even the most jaded denizens of Wall Street. There is a former Bear Sterns banker who appears in shadow with some very interesting things to say, like the fact that he sold his “CDO squared,” derivatives of derivatives, to “idiots” and that he found it absurd that he was selling CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] at $100 million to $200 million a pop to Korean bankers who didn’t even speak English.
MM: Where do you hope to see the film go after Tribeca?
LC: After Tribeca, we hope to see American Casino go into theaters in September and eventually find a broadcast slot in the U.S. and abroad. People really want to know why this catastrophe happened. There is a hunger to understand it.
For more information, visit http://www.americancasinothemovie.com/
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Jenny on 6/02/09 at 3:29 am
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Free bingo online- Comment by Free bingo on 6/04/09 at 11:30 pm
They are drawing from their own experience of family and friends and that’s what makes it so powerful.....Nice post.
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American Casino definitely sounds intriguing, and seems to have the potential to make a solid impact. I like the idea of representing inner Baltimore through a soundtrack emphasizing hip hop music, but also the manner in which Moby and Springsteen were used.
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When i was a child i have been fascinated to casinos now the things are changing people like to play from their homes but still the offline casino is a niche. American Government is against online casino and we at Austin tree service support this gesture for ban but i think if the rules are stringent probably all Americans can enjoy playing in online casinos.
- Comment by Hawaii Cruises on 9/09/09 at 7:35 am
Casinos, Cruise and travel are something which every one enjoys but as far as casinos are concerned it is still being seen as a bad thing in most of the countries because of frauds which are associated with it. So we need to find a solution to deal with casinos.
- Comment by vehicle magnets on 9/19/09 at 1:50 pm
She has always taken on big, complex subjects, often with a financial component, like the inner workings of the Colombian cocaine cartels, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe or the heroin trade in Afghanistan. she gets g equally excited about radical fundamentalism in Pakistan and oil speculation in New York. The financial disaster that was unfolding in January 2008 when she decided to take on the project was so important that she dropped everything to do it.
- Comment by backyard swing sets on 9/20/09 at 4:52 am
The title of Leslie Cockburn’s nothing-if-not-timely documentary “American Casino” says it all, an apt description of the world created by the reckless Wall Street financiers who have brought the U.S. economy (as well as the rest of the world’s) to its present sorry state. Much like Charles Ferguson’s Iraq War documentary “No End in Sight,” Cockburn employs a straightforward, just-the-facts approach to her devastating play-by-play indictment of the barely legal shenanigans that led to our current mess.
- Comment by Tempurpedic on 9/20/09 at 7:46 am
I think her goal with the film is to help people understand what has happened and why. In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple. One one level, anyone can understand the film. On another level, even the jaded bankers, the financial engineers and “quants”, who have quietly helped throughout the project, are shaking their heads at the revelations.
- Comment by berkel slicers on 9/20/09 at 7:48 am
“I don’t think most people really understood that they were in a casino” says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. “When you’re in the Street’s casino, you’ve got to play by their rules.” This film finally explains how and why over $12 trillion of our money vanished into the American Casino.For chips, the casino used real people, like the ones we meet in Baltimore. These are not the heedless spendthrifts of Wall Street legend, but a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister of the church. They were sold on the American Dream as a safe investment. Too late, they discovered the truth. Cruelly, as African – Americans, they and other minorities were the prime targets for the subprime loans that powered the casino. According to the Federal Reserve, African-Americans were four times more likely than whites to be sold subprime loans.
- Comment by digital publishing on 9/20/09 at 10:09 am
Some of the film’s commentators discuss how subprime lenders target minorities; lawyer John Relman details the city of Baltimore’s civil rights case against Wells Fargo. The implication is that the strain placed on the urban and suburban poor was less than random, if not intentional. Investment banks like Wells Fargo took advantage of minorities, especially those more vulnerable due to bad credit. As if you weren’t enraged enough already.
- Comment by Intervention on 10/04/09 at 8:24 am
None of this is new information for anyone who has at least been semi-sentient for the past six months or so, from the initial stock market free-fall and the attendant billions in government bailouts to Jon Stewart’s on-air mano-a-mano with Jim Cramer. But what makes Cockburn’s film a particularly valuable addition to the burgeoning collection of economic crisis postmortems is that she goes beyond the facts and figures to show us the human faces behind the numbers. Cockburn offers specific, poignant examples of people who existed as merely a line on a brokerage firm’s computer screen
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Have a nice day and continue working in the same way!- Comment by My news blog online casino on 11/16/10 at 5:30 pm
I think her goal with the film is to help people understand what has happened and why.
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