Even Michael Lewis Was Surprised Hollywood Bet on The Big Short. In early 2. 00. 8, I started working on what became my book The Big Short. I’d written one book about Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, and pretty much assumed I’d never write another, as I further assumed that nothing would ever happen on Wall Street that was as interesting to me as what had happened to me—or, if it did, I’d be the last person anyone on Wall Street would want to tell about it. What caught my attention in late 2.

Wall Street banks. Citigroup’s losses went from $6 billion to $4. Merrill Lynch announced a $4. Morgan Stanley announced that it had lost more than $9 billion on what appeared to be a bet by a single trader. The big Wall Street banks had become the dumb money.

Their employees, the putative best and brightest, and surely the most self- interested people on the planet, were committing mass suicide. How had that happened? Someone had to be on the other side of the big Wall Street firms’ stupid bets. I set out to find as many of these people as I could.

Four denizens in the world of high-finance predict the credit and housing bubble collapse of the mid-2000s, and decide to take on the big banks for their greed and. Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com. Watch 90 Minutes In Heaven (2015) Movie Stream on this page.

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There turned out to be about 1. The group included some seriously interesting and peculiar people—the sort of oddballs and misfits who would have a hard time getting a job at a big Wall Street bank.

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Several had come to the subprime- mortgage bond market cold, with little knowledge of bonds or mortgages and none at all of credit- default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Yet they’d found a way to see what the expert insiders had missed: that the big Wall Street banks had become so bizarrely organized that it was hard to say where their stupidity ended and their corruption began.

This handful of peculiar people had bet directly against the biggest banks on Wall Street, filled with the putatively smartest people, and made billions: how had THAT happened? To my surprise these peculiar people proved willing to tell me their stories. But when I set out to retell them I ran into a couple of problems. One was the sheer complexity of modern finance: how to explain credit- default swaps and collateralized debt obligations to my mother? I’m actually not sure that my mother ever read The Big Short—she prefers mysteries—but she has always been my standard: if my mother can’t understand what I’m saying, there’s no point in saying it. The second, related problem was how to get my mother to want to understand credit- default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. It’s never enough to explain complicated things to a reader; the reader needs first to want to know about them.

If the thing is seriously complicated, the reader must very badly want to know about it. My job, as I saw it, was to make the reader badly want to know about credit- default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. The marvelous characters who had foreseen the collapse of the financial system became the solution to both my problems. My reader (so I hoped) would feel it was worth trying to understand credit- default swaps because these enthralling characters were also trying to understand them.

Even then, I wasn’t so sure. One measure of my uncertainty can be found on page 7. It was an apology to my mother. BRAD PITTCrunchy survivalist. By Jaap Buitendijk/. Cheap Legend Of The Naga Pearls Movie (2017) Movie.

Who’d make a movie about credit- default swaps? Who for that matter would make a movie of any book of mine? By 2. 00. 8, when I started gathering string for The Big Short, I had come to think of the movie business as a place that spent huge sums of money with incredible enthusiasm to ensure the movies of books were never made. That year I had the fifth of what had become an annual conversation with Billy Beane, about the Insane Finances of the Movie Business.

Billy was the general manager of the Oakland A’s and the main character of another book I’d written, Moneyball. After Moneyball was published, in 2. Billy took the movie people at their word: he thought they actually intended to make a movie about his life. The idea disturbed him. The book had already brought him more attention and hassle than he wanted in one lifetime. He would have paid the movie people to prevent the book from becoming a movie.

He called me to say as much.“You’re seeing this entirely the wrong way,” I said, or something like it. They send you money until they figure out you’re not a movie, only a book.”That had been my experience for 2. The movie people would call to say how excited they were about some book or magazine article I’d written. They’d send me money, frosted with enthusiasm and rumors. It felt like being inside a stock- market bubble, with my story as the object of speculation. I took no offense. I’d done no extra work.

They’d paid me for nothing. In every case I felt I had tricked them into buying something they couldn’t use, by writing a “true story.”The movie people long for “true stories.” The reason for this is not that they long for the truth. Actually, I don’t know the reason for this: it may be as simple as that it is a lot easier to excite other movie people, without demanding they read anything, if you can claim that the story is true. But not all true stories are equally easy to turn into movies. The sort of true stories I write tend to contain long passages about such abstruse subjects as mortgage bonds or baseball statistics.

I assumed the movie people, after they had sent me a check, came to their senses and realized how much harder it was to make a movie about mortgage bonds or baseball statistics than to make another Spider- Man.“Just say yes and take the money before they change their minds,” I told Billy Beane, back in 2. By 2. 00. 8 he was convinced of the genius of my approach to the movie business. The Moneyball movie was clearly never going to happen, and yet every year or so he’d still receive a check, to renew the option. Each time he’d call me, laughing, and saying (roughly), “This is so great! It’s like free money!”Then something changed. As I was finishing up The Big Short, a writer- director named John Lee Hancock began filming my book The Blind Side. The movie studio that had bought the rights to film it (with the usual unbridled enthusiasm) had secretly decided that it really only wanted to make it if Julia Roberts wanted to be in it, without, apparently, first checking with Julia Roberts.

Julia Roberts did not want to be in it. John Lee Hancock had trundled his funny and sad script for The Blind Side all over Los Angeles and been turned down by every studio. The movie executives all said the same thing: the story wasn’t commercial enough.

The Blind Side got made into a movie only because Fred Smith, the billionaire founder of Federal Express, knew personally the Tuohy family, the book’s main characters, and thought the whole story was just great, so why shouldn’t it make for a great movie? The babysitter showed up wearing a dress, and my wife is putting on makeup.”I now think of the movie industry not just as a place that pays writers not to make movies of their books. It’s also a place where movies of books happen, but only in response to a specific kind of accident. The accident is when the book collides with one of about 1. Fred Smith decides he is willing to pay for The Blind Side and, because he has the money, The Blind Side gets made. Brad Pitt decides that he’s going to make Moneyball and, because he can persuade others to pay for it, Moneyball gets made. The writer- director Adam Mc.

Kay reads The Big Short and tells his agent that he’d really like to make it into a movie, and his agent (this part is just movie- business rumor) tells his (reluctant) movie studio that the director might reconsider his lack of interest in making another Anchorman movie for them if they first let him make The Big Short. And because Adam Mc. Kay’s five previous movies have taken in a total of $7. The Big Short gets made. My role in making the movies of my books—the role of the author—has been essentially that of a spectator.

I think it is fair to say that the people who make movies from books would just as soon that the books’ authors be dead. I don’t take this personally.

Sitting 2. 1,0. 00 feet above the sacred Ganges River in Northern India, the mountain's perversely stacked obstacles make it both a nightmare and an irresistible calling for some of the world's toughest climbers. In October 2. 00. Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk arrived in India to tackle Meru. Their planned seven- day trip quickly declined into a 2.

Despite making it to within 1. Heartbroken and defeated, the trio returned to their everyday lives, where the siren song of Meru continued to beckon. By September 2. 01. Anker had convinced his two lifelong friends to undertake the Shark's Fin once more, under even more extraordinary circumstances than their first attempt. MERU is the story of that journey, an expedition through nature's harshest elements and one's complicated inner demons, and ultimately on to impossible new heights.