American Casino

In December of 2000, congress passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which called for less regulation on Wall Street and, according to a former director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, "freed Wall Street to essentially shoot itself in both feet." Eight years later, the US economy is crumbling, and trapped under its wreckage are the American homeowners and taxpayers.

Politicians love to talk about the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, but American Casino director Leslie Cockburn gets to the crux of the matter, eliciting candid revelations from defectors from Bear Stearns and Standard & Poor's and other high-level players in the subprime mortgage gamble. On the flipside, she gives a voice to the minority Americans on "Main Street"—a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister—who were the unwitting chips in this high-stakes game of chance. Scored to the tune of eloquent hip-hop numbers like "Foreclosure Song," created especially for the film, the filmmakers cruise past rows of freshly boarded-up homes in the mostly minority neighborhoods of Baltimore and Stockton, California. Here, foreclosure and property neglect have led to the spread of drugs, crime, and disease. And, lest we forget, Cockburn reminds us that it's the Main Street Americans who are now bailing out the financial institutions responsible for the fall.

“A revelatory howl against the still-gestating, $8 trillion-and-counting financial-services industry bailout, Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino follows the money that changed hands, or account columns, at every step of the subprime home-loan scam. … Changing keys … Cockburn turns to African-American neighborhoods of inner-city Baltimore to individualize the humiliating pain and real danger behind the collapse of the derivative-fueled housing boon.” SLANT MAGAZINE - Bill Weber

“American Casino is a powerful and shocking look at the subprime lending scandal. If you want to understand how the U.S. financial system failed and how mortgage companies ripped off the poor, see this film.” (Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist)

“FASCINATING! A TERRIFIC documentary chronicling the subprime-mortgage mess and the financial collapse of the past two years…
With a rare cohesive power, the Cockburns fill in the lines of connection. They function a little like Raymond Chandler as he traces the corruption that produces, at the end of a long chain of circumstances, the lady in the lake... The movie is a lucid and comprehensive picture of a rotten system.” – David Denby, The New Yorker

“Aerial shots of decaying properties suggest an unfolding real-life version of a horror film, meticulously structured.” – Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“Leslie and Andrew Cockburn's searing expose of the subprime mortgage crisis matches Wall Street's numbers and graphics
to the flesh-and-blood individuals whose lives have been devastated by the deliberate machinations of bankers and traders.” – Ronnie Scheib, Variety

“No heist thriller could ever compete with this probing documentary about the subprime mortgage scandal and the financial industry’s
greedy embrace of a $12 trillion taxpayer bailout… (by) longtime muckrakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn... The movie manages to get its arms around a complicated story that constitutes one of the great moral outrages in U.S. history.” – J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

“An often devastating history of the greed, cynicism and short-term myopia that got us all into this current mess.”
– Kevin Lally, Film Journal International