Margin Call

Given that the cast includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and Stanley Tucci, there was almost no way I wasn’t going to enjoy Margin Call. I just didn’t realize just how much I was going to enjoy it.

The movie starts out with what is a familiar scene to anyone who worked in high-tech, as well, of course, as those who’ve labored in financial services. Even when it’s extras being paid Actors Equity no-lines minimum getting tapped on the shoulder and frog-marched out of the office with their carton of personal items, it’s still gut-wrenching.  Stanley Tucci’s character, shown the door (and having his phone instantaneously turned off) after 19 years with “MBS” (More Bull Shit?), exemplifies the pain and anger that lay-offs engender.  Never more so than in times of high unemployment and major economic uncertainty; never more so than when you’re getting older; never more so than when you’ve just bought a new house; etc., etc.

But the movie isn’t really about lay-offs. It’s about the machinations of a financial services industry that helped create a bubble that would put Don Ho and Lawrence Welk to shame.

Movies about financial maneuverings can be tricky business, as you need to simplify and dramatize something that’s intricate, complex, and a bit esoteric.  CDO’s, anyone? It will be a lot easier to do the Bernie Madoff story: everyone understands a Ponzi Scheme. Except, apparently, Ruth Madoff who confessed to Morley Safer that she hadn’t known what one was. Her son Andrew had to explain it to her.

But, Margin Call, does, I think do a good job of explaining how the whole thing works, without getting in the way of a good story.

Without giving away the story, Stanley Tucci’s character was a risk manager for an investment banking firm. On his way out the door, he slips a thumb drive containing his research to a junior colleague. The junior colleague completes the model and realizes – unholy moley – that the firm is way in over its head with the junk it’s holding, and could well go under.

This precipitates an all-nighter on the part of the senior execs as they decide what to do, what to do.

I liked Too Big to Fail, the reality-based HBO film about engineering the bailout that “saved” capitalism, but I think that Margin Call does a better job of explaining to the non-insider but relatively aware viewer just how we got waist deep in the Big Muddy.  Gordon Gekko aside, greed is not necessarily good, but it sure does seem to be the way the world works.

Speaking of Gordon Gekko, I saw Wall Street when I was working at Wang. One afternoon, during that lull week between Christmas and New Year, I tromped over to the nearest theater with a bunch of colleagues to watch a movie that had the product we worked on as an extra.  For whatever reason, Wang had acquired the Shark system – near real-time stock market data – from Walsh Greenwood, and was running it on its mini-computers so that research analysts and portfolio managers could have access to information that, heretofore, was only available to brokers and traders. Shark – including the inflatable sharks that were the product giveaways, and product documentation – were pretty prominent in the background in a couple of the Wall Street trader scenes. We felt famous!

Ah, those quaint olden days, before you could turn on your TV and watch a real-time ticker run across the bottom, while some analyst or another makes us crazy about what’s happening in the market. Or just get a real-time quote on your smartphone.

I think life for us amateurs was actually easier when you had to look up where a stock closed in the financial pages of the morning paper.

But the Shark team at Wang, in our tiny and modest way, helped usher in the democratization of market data.

Naturally, Wang didn’t capitalize on the advantage we had with Shark in the portfolio management world.

The year after Wall Street came out, I was part of the vertical strategy team that was going to save Wang.

I was on the financial services team, and my tiny and modest suggestion was that we focus on the portfolio and money management markets, as we actually had a toe-hold in those communities to build on. A couple of the top portfolio management systems actually ran on the Wang minis. (Am I dating myself here, or what.)

But, alas, this market was too small to be of interest.

Why go after a $10M market you can own, when there’s a $100M market that you can’t even get a piece of?

Anyway, Wang’s not taking my brilliant suggestion had perhaps one iota over nada to do with Wang’s epic fail. Maybe those mini-computers with the 9” floppies had something to do with it. Not to mention Dr. Wang’s management style. (As I recall, he had to okay the type of paper that data sheets were printed on. An EVP had to okay your travel, and they waited until 5 p.m. the evening before to approve your trip.) Still, our vertical “strategy” spoke to at least a piece of the company’s mentality.

The next Christmas season, the Shark gang went to see Working Girl, still one of my favorite business movies. Gimme a working class hero (or heroine) any old day. Who says class warfare’s bad for the soul?

By the next holiday season, I had a foot out the door, and a lot of the folks on the Shark team had more than a foot out. They’d been tossed out on their ears in early December as part of one of the worst lay-offs I’ve ever experienced. It was, in fact, the lay-off that eerily came to mind when I saw the opening lay-off scene in Margin Call.  The tap on the shoulder, the partially sympathetic but mostly brusque meeting with HR, the pathetic march to the elevator with that carton of personal effects. (We didn’t use security guards, as they did in the movie. We had human/humane buddies to help people out the door. I was one of the buddies in the great December of ‘89 Wang blood bath.)

But the look on the faces of those getting laid off – even if they’re paid actors – is always the same.

Why me? What next? Why me?

Boy, am I ever happy to be out of that fray.

Meanwhile, I give Margin Call two thumbs up. Loved Stanley Tucci. Loved Kevin Spacey as the sad and weary head of trading. Loved Jeremy Irons as the head guy. (Named John Tuld, in a presumed nod to Lehman Brother’s Dick Fuld. James Woods played Dick Fuld in Too Big to Fail, so Fuld is getting better looking.) I even enjoyed Demi Moore in her minor role as the head of risk management. She was far less wooden than I usually find her performances.

So if you’re in the market for a good movie, you could do worse than put Margin Call on your shopping list. And the best news is: you don’t have to go to the theater. At least on Comcast, it’s on demand. (No wonder I can go years between toe steps into a movie theater…)