Earlier this week came the announcement that A24 and Apple are developing a movie about Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX cryptocurrency founder who was convicted of fraud in 2023. Lena Dunham is attached to write the script, based on the Michael Lewis non-fiction book “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.”
My fundamental question is always this: Beyond providing a showy role for an actor hoping for an awards campaign, why adapt an already widely reported story? What unexplored insights are there to be mined?
I was in the minority two years ago when I said we didn’t need “The Dropout,” Hulu’s prestige series about Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos scam, and I’m probably in the minority saying the same about this project too.
Hollywood executives never seem to tire of this trope, churning out a quartet of series in 2022 that were a variation on the same theme, including the one about Holmes, another about the con artist Anna Delvey, yet another about the rise and fall of WeWork executives Adam and Rebekah Neumann, plus one more about Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, who resigned from the company after a series of concerning allegations.
It’s unclear what we, as audiences, are meant to get from these projects. Maybe some viewers find some entertainment value, but to me, these shows come across as empty re-enactments that tend to be shrugging in their “welp, corruption!” sensibility.
All that aside, looking ahead to the proposed Bankman-Fried movie, I’m not sure Lewis’ book is the best source material. According to U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, Bankman-Fried “orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, stealing over $8 billion of his customers’ money.” He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion.
Despite these facts, Lewis has been criticized for developing a “misguided soft spot for the fallen crypto king,” per The Guardian, resulting in a book that is unable to “disguise the fact that Lewis can’t bear to think ill of his subject.”
A 1997 profile of Lewis in Vanity Fair noted that his work “raises the question of how heavily he may be placing his thumb on the scales when he weighs the ingredients of his dashing dispatches” and his “history suggests that he may be particularly susceptible to the lure of a shapely, larger-than-life narrative.”
Those are concerning traits in a non-fiction writer, but ironically, prized skills in Hollywood. Is Dunham, most famous for capturing millennial angst in her TV series “Girls,” the right person to tackle any of this with a clear eye? Time will tell.
As a critic, I’m always curious why certain types of stories get green-lit. A cynical read might be this: These stories don’t galvanize audiences to demand more scrutiny of corruption, but instead deliver a false but reassuring message that the system works because every so often, a powerful figure falls from their lofty perch.
Hollywood has always had an affinity for schemers and maybe that’s because show business is run by similar types: High on their own supply of overconfidence and fast-talking obfuscation. In 2022, when all those prestige series came out, I wrote about a different and far more interesting approach to the scammer genre:
1993’s “Six Degrees of Separation” starring Will Smith (and based on the John Guare play, which was inspired by real events) is a good point of comparison. It’s a movie that’s interested in more than the mere fact of the swindle, but why it worked: Smith’s character has an innate understanding of human nature and, despite the con, a genuine desire and need to connect with people. And the self-congratulatory swells taken in by his lies are really just projecting onto him all their neuroses and biases. Perhaps that’s because Guare (who also wrote the screenplay) wasn’t aiming to recreate a scandal, but instead used a true story to inspire his imagination and poking around the nooks and crannies of human nature.
”Six Degrees of Separation” … feels rich and complicated because it also contemplates the way ideas about race, and the smug assurance that only other white people are racist, plays into the game Smith’s character is running. That’s notably missing from the aforementioned projects. Whether it’s Anna Delvey or Elizabeth Holmes, their whiteness is so obviously key to affording them the benefit of the doubt and getting them through doors. And yet the shows about them aren’t interested in exploring this in any depth.
I’m holding out hope there are screenwriters with deeper things to say about the moral rot that has shaped corporate America. Whether there media executives and financiers willing to back them is the tougher question.
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
