HBO to Dramatize The Financial Meltdown In All Its Gory Details

Like those who enjoy their car-chases, their full-frontal nudes, their dance-and-song ensembles, the strip of the populace tickled by the thought of Hank Paulson cringing over a toilet is now, evidently, sufficient to launch a movie.

Various news sites are reporting that HBO has acquired the rights to Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s prodigious chronicle of the financial crack-up of 2008.  Aside from Peter Gould, who has been tagged to distill a screenplay from the book, and executive producers Paula Weinstein and Jeffrey Levine of Spring Creek, no names have been attached to the project.

Great with math – at 624 hardcover pages, Sorkin’s book shirks few of the difficulties of fathoming why Wall Street fell asunder – Too Big is also a prolific voyeur.  We see Paulson, stupefied by pressure, vomiting with the stress of his office.  We see Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld sobbing as his firm goes belly up. Too Big is a saga, in other words, not only of avarice and egotism but of the spontaneous discharge of bodily fluids, enacted by oldish white guys against a backdrop of impenetrable spreadsheets.

My question is, at whom will HBO be aiming this?  The excreting-elderly-white-guy-demographic (a devout lot, no doubt)?  Wonks who like a good cry?  Or will it be a flick for those who prefer their Schadenfreude still raw with the recent past?  More to come on this.

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