A tattered U.S. flag is an early image in the movie “Bailout,” directed by Peoria native Sean Patrick Fahey. Scheduled to premiere at downtown Peoria’s nonprofit Apollo Theater Oct. 5-11, the 85-minute documentary about the human cost of the 2008 financial crisis and the one-sided government assistance to Big Banks is filled with such sights: A tent city for the homeless dubbed Hopeville; everyday Americans living in an underground drainage tunnel in Nevada; regular people tearfully realizing they’d been cheated and trapped by Wall Street, then by Washington.
It used to be that if you studied hard, worked hard and paid your mortgage, the American Dream was achievable, one man says. Not anymore.
“Bailout” is the tale of an unemployed Chicago lawyer, John Titus, who stops paying his mortgage and recruits four friends to join him in a month-long trip in a 30-foot RV to Las Vegas. Their plan was to take a page from Wall Street’s playbook and spend the bank’s money by gambling and partying. En route, the five discover how people have been hurt by the financial crisis, mainly through foreclosures.
Fahey describes “Bailout” (subtitled “The Dukes of Moral Hazard”) as a muckraking social documentary and it certainly shows Americans’ anger with “the Wall Street elites who survive and thrive on their cancerous system of bailouts, fraud and political corruption that actively work in concert to destroy Main Street,” Fahey says.
Effectively explaining the background, process and intent – as opposed to errors or incompetence – that drove the economy and regular Americans into dire straits, the motion picture shows that what happened was the “ghettoizing of our entire nation,” Fahey says.
“We knew we had to make ‘Sesame Street’ for grownups,” Fahey says, so he used what he calls a “hybridized documentary narrative” style.
Fahey is an innovative and creative filmmaker.
Since attending Woodruff High School in the 1990s, Fahey – son of Mary Ann Fahey of the Ephphetha choir and various café ventures, including a restaurant and catering business in Peoria’s Twin Towers – has produced commercials, music videos, and well-received features. Now based in Chicago, where he’s creative director at Endless Eye Productions, Fahey in 2007 Sean directed his first documentary, “The Tractor Builder,” set in Peoria, followed by 2009’s feature-length biographical-historical “Message from the East,” about famed poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, and later that year the first fictional movie in the Sudanese Nuer language, “Ba Ne Jek Mal” (“We Meet in Peace”), which was used as a fund raiser for the not-for-profit Panyijiar Community Development Services (PACODES) group to build libraries in Southern Sudan.
Enlisting comic and actor John Fox, musician Sergio Mayora, journalist Nicole Erhardt, and jobless sidekick Ruben Castillo, Titus (and the film crew) embarked on their journey with an attitude but open minds, too. The group – different generations, races and genders united in joblessness, confusion, rage and love – travels from Elkhart, Ind., to Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Roswell, N.M., Phoenix and Las Vegas. In this way “Bailout” becomes part travelogue and part educational film, entertaining as well as informative, alternating between facts and fun, archival footage and an odyssey to uncover the effects on regular people and to just defy the powers that be. What results is a heartbreaking history of the crisis and the improper response by both the Bush and Obama administrations. It’s inspiring but depressing, with laughing and weeping by ordinary people who jokes and swear, sing and cry and wonder what went wrong and what to do next.
In another time, of course, financial activities like the Big Banks took – and continue to take – might be called “rackets.” Insolvent banks, phony insurance, questionable ratings agencies’ judgments, forgery, collusion and corruption apparently occurred. There was no real due diligence on the front end, and no real consequences for any criminality on the back end.
The exploitation of the deregulated financial system allowed not only conventional wisdom about real estate to become ridiculous, it made the rule of law itself meaningless.
Besides Titus and his pals, Fahey interviews experts and gains insights from progressives and conservatives alike: liberals such as economist Yves Smith, commentator Noam Chomsky and journalist Chris Hedges, moderates including hedge-funder Steve Megremis and banking analyst Christopher Whalen, and self-described conservative Dylan Ratigan and even Florida Tea Party founder Karl Denninger.
The situation is not about Left and Right, but Top and Bottom, people vs. Big Banks.
“We’re going back to a monarchy/corporate statism,” says Whalen, a respected independent. “That’s really what it is. It’s not Left and Right anymore. It’s the individual versus the corporate state.”
Fahey not only directed and co-produced “Bailout,” he co-wrote and edited the film, effectively mixing animated moments, silly spoofs (a “Wall Street Wheel of Fraud” game) and quick cuts with tender interviews, candid portraits and cinematic eavesdropping that nicely frames the Big Picture.
It’s a picture that’s no longer beyond comprehension.
“The dialogue is no longer beyond the grasp of the people,” Fahey says. “It’s just the opposite – it’s in the street. Kids know all about complex derivatives, credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities frauds. They aren’t blind anymore.”
It’s also a call to action, Fahey adds.
“A big part of the movie is about how people have a civic duty to protest what’s going on,” he says.
Screenings are $5 at the door, first-come, first-served. For advance tickets and show times, go to: http://bailoutusa.eventbrite.com/