I love docs but often research the subject after watching and it's INCREDIBLY rare to see a doc that doesn't play fast and loose with the facts for the sake of creating a dramatic arc or thrilling moments.
It's ESPECIALLY true in "true crime" docs. The director has an idea of painting the subject as either sympathetic guy who was wronged by a corrupt system (Making a Murderer) or evil mastermind (The Jinx) just to give two recent examples.
Turned out years later the giant reveal at the center of The Jinx which made it such a viral hit was 100% manufactured by the director cutting up audio to make Durst say things he didn't. He also lied to the police about the audio so it wouldn't spoil the ending of the doc.
Jarecki never had to apologize for the blatant dishonesty in the doc, never had to give back the Emmy. It's still universally acclaimed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/arts/television/robert-du...
Sorry to rant, but the "documentary" film industry is a fucking joke. I have so many more examples...
It's because with documentaries, the target audience is someone who is expecting to get some semblance of truth from the thing. But the issue is that given two documentaries, A and B, if A is more narratively/cinematically/etc titillating, it will get produced over B. Which means that the cost function of engagement will drive a documentary right up to the constraint of "not lying" as it can possibly go.
If you really care about accuracy, don't watch documentaries. And please if you are one of my friends stop recommending that I watch them to get informed about something.
The incentives are definitely misaligned. Viewers want and expect accuracy, but most of all what they want is to be entertained and most aren't going to look to hard to see how accurate a really entertaining doc is.
And as you said the incentive for filmmakers is to produce the most entertaining doc possible to get more butts in seats and more streams which means funding and continued work in the industry. Accuracy doesn't really play much into what gets produced and released.
Is there something glaring I am missing?
https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/chernobyl-expert-serhii-plokhi...
Edit: oh and that’s without mentioning all the factual errors in the story itself. Like the three volunteers who went into the plant to open the drains didn’t die, but are alive today, cancer free and collecting their pensions. So are most of the people who watched the plant burn the first night on the bridge.
The biggest steam boiler explosions in history were still many orders of magnitude less than that, and those were purpose-built pressure vessels. The core wasn't going to drop into a pressure vessel, just whatever makeshift containment they had enacted at that time. Had the core come in contact with the water it would have converted a large chunk of it into steam, which would within moments blow open whatever cracks or leaks existed in the containment, blowing a lot of radioactive rubble into the surrounding environment.
That would have been a huge setback, but nothing near a multi-megaton nuclear explosion.
Chernobyl still managed to poison large areas of Europe, but the effects were mercifully localised and temporary.
A steam explosion would have increased those effects and the areas they affected by some orders of magnitude.
See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14752799/ and many other studies done with similar objectives such as https://www.medpagetoday.org/meetingcoverage/ata/54237?vpass... . It is not something that sits well with various politicians because the liability question was never really answered and so this is just another inconvenient truth.
It does, thank you.
There are other things I don't like about the mini series, but really just minor ones. The last episode was a wasted opportunity, so. Using the Vienna meeting would have been the perfect setting to cover the international reaction as well.
That being said, I saw a lot of similar decision processes in my career in purely capitalist jobs to the ones that lead to the screwed up test in Chernobyl.
Also, I believe the Soviet authorities at the time may have incorrectly believed that a large explosion was possible - in that respect the show may be correctly repeating a mistake that was made at the time.
This crappy trait isn’t limited to that time and place. The incident that comes to mind is gulf war 2 Bush “We don’t do body counts”.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/we-count-they-dont...
It is worth listening to the podcast that accompanied the TV show. One of the things they mention quite a bit is where they deliberately deviated from the truth for practical/dramatic/pacing reasons[†], had to pick a narrative path from conflicting records, or had to make bits up to fill gaps in the (publicly available) records, and one or two cases where they toned down rather than ramped up an issue for tonal or "no one would believe it was quite that way" reasons.
It is both an enlightening insight into the process of making a show like that, and gives useful context to start on your journey if you want to delve deeper into the real reality of the events.
[†] merging many people into a single character, exaggerating immediate effects, reordering/repurposing actual events (a helicopter did crash but not at that point), pretty much that entire courtroom scene in the final episode, ...
That's why I don't like entertainment that stylizes itself as factual. For general audience, there are only two modes of understanding: either something is obviously fiction, or obviously reporting. There's no middle line.
From the shows that try to blend the two, you get things like people believing fictionalizations in HBO's Chernobyl and then becoming opinionated on nuclear energy; people learning history from docudramas; people thinking Top Gear is factual and not staged; people thinking all those performers on talent shows are actually doing these things for real...
A lot of people can't tell the difference between fact movies and fiction movies.
And that doesn't even get into clearly biased documentaries (but I assume that most documentaries are at least trying to be factual instead of entertainment...)
Given the recent thread on adam curtis documentaries I'm inclined to believe the opposite. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880448
By the way, I thought Inside Job was a vastly better film about the crisis that was criminally under-rated. Definitely worth checking out.
Not perfect by any means, but far more informative than The Big Short, and not as dumbed down.
If a BBB tranche goes under, the investors in the BBB tranche get nothing to protect the AAA tranche (and above). In effect: BBB tranche can fail safely, that's the entire point of them.
That's why they only shorted the BBB tranche (with exception of Brownfield Capital, who did go all the way to the AA tranche). AA was safer and more reliable: so for a short its a riskier move to short.
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The scene does in fact lay the ground basis of tranches and CDOs, which is better than most Hollywood movies. But its still filled with misconceptions, and the Jenga tower (though dramatic) isn't helping at all.
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Synthetic CDOs was very poorly described. The "rating agency" scenes were pretty much purely fiction and just designed to enrage the audience and IMO unhelpful to the general discussion. Etc. etc.
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CDOs of CDOs were accurately described IMO. Hammed up by explaining the "yesterday's fish in today's soup), but that at least is somewhat of an accurate analog.
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I mean, it was a solid movie. But look, I know how reality works. I've actually taken the time to look at (some) of the Congressional Hearings and read some of the papers for how that whole thing worked back in 2008. And there are also some good Frontline Documentaries on the whole 2008 crisis in general.
They were further hurt by the fact they kept a huge amount of their assets in AAA MBS. Which had now become illiquid and (temporarily) lost value.
AIG's bailout by the government was a critical inflection point; if they hadn't, the entire insurance/financial services industry was at risk.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150qdkrd30ggk...
That's how crappy of a movie it was from a documentary perspective. They're missing the perspective of one of the major players entirely.
A lot of banks saw what was going on in the market, and decided to "cover their ass" just in case the mortgage industry collapsed. They didn't quite go short like Burry (and everyone else in the movie), they just "hedged", to protect themselves just in case of a collapse.
Any bank that was worried about what was going on would have bought a few credit-default swaps from AIG (not that everyone knew that AIG was the main CDO counterparty: they bought CDS from the market and AIG happened to be one of those sellers).
If AIG went bankrupt, a huge number of shorts (well, "protection buyers") on the mortgage market would have gone bankrupt with them.
AIG isn't covered in the movie because it runs entirely counter to the narritive the movie is trying to build. A huge number of banks did in fact see the mortgage crisis and take moves to protect themselves.
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That's the thing about CDS and going short on the mortgage market: even if you were right about it, you had to also be right about the so called "counterparty risk". The bank who took up the long-side of the bet against you still needed to be around to make the payout.
That's why AIG was bailed out. Also: because the collapse of Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual and other financial companies was wreaking havoc on the economy.
The movie wanted to focus on the narrative that "Bailouts are bad". Well, sure. But its pretty easy to build that narrative by ignoring the AIG situation, as well as Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual.
If you go back and look at the actual history and debate of the bailout, the question is way more ambiguous.
>> the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in fact very true
That's not what the Jenga scene implied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hG4X5iTK8M
You know what a number of my friends took from that scene?
"Wow, the banks are so stupid. Why would AAAs rely upon the B-tranche?"
Yeah, cause that scene is misinformed. The Jenga Tower is upside-down. America's Mortgage market wouldn't really collapse until the AAAs were being threatened (which eventually, they were, but because of CDO-squared and Synthetic CDO leverage).
But yeah, its a long story. You'd expect that the core of the story would be covered by a reasonable documentary. But "The Big Short" isn't one, its an entertainment movie.
Note: genuine question, never having purchased any CDSs! ;-)
What I can say is that a CDS wasn't purchased directly in most cases. It was indirect.
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So for example: if you're a bank looking at a bunch of CDOs (and therefore: CDO-squared, which people didn't realize was a problem yet). You're seeing default rates creep up in 2006 and you're worried that things might collapse.
You then see a CDO that's insurance-protected. It has a lower %yield, but that's because some of the % is going towards CDS / insurance to protect your basket of mortgages. You check with the ratings agencies and they rate the bond at AAA (because even if the underlying mortgage fails, you have a big-bank providing the CDS protecting the mortgage).
You purchase the CDO (aka: buy a bunch of mortgages on the market), WITH CDS insurance. The CDS portion is sold to the highest-bidder at a separate time. The CDO-buyer didn't care "who" insured the CDO, they just wanted some kind of insurance.
That turned out to be a problem when AIG was revealed to be the owner of $500+ Billion in CDS. As such, the "insurance payout" protecting those CDOs ended up being vaporware.
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So now you're the US Government, looking at this problem. Do you let AIG collapse? If you do, all $500 Billion worth of AIG's CDSes fail (and therefore the CDOs fail). But if you let that happen, other banks also fail (and these other banks made the CORRECT decision: buying insurance to cover their ass).
This is the "Toxic Debt" problem. The toxic debt was passed from company-to-company: everyone "related" to AIG was going to be affected, and no one really had an idea of who AIG was related to.
Note: Bush let the first few banks (ex: Lehman Brothers) fail. They saw in realtime as the "toxic debt" of Lehman Brothers brought down the rest of the market.
By the time AIG was at risk, George Bush had seen enough. When one bank collapses, it causes many other banks to collapse in ways that cannot be foreseen.
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I admit that one could make the argument that it was the smaller-bank's fault for forgetting about counterparty risk (not caring who took up the other side of the CDS).
But by the time banks were falling and collapsing like dominoes in 2008, I think Bush didn't care about the morals of this particular case. It was about stopping the domino effect in general.
Its like the Options market. You can be the seller of a call option without knowing who your counterparty is. Similarly: you don't necessarily know who the counterparty to your CDS is.
The CDS was not a standard instrument like the options market. The details of each-and-every CDS changes with each prospectus. This is very common in the bond market: bonds change (callable vs non-callable vs puttable, vs tax free vs taxed, in a CDO or CDO-squared or Synthetic CDO, or a SLAB or an MBS or... etc. etc. Lots of differing details).
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So when you buy a CDO-squared in 2006, you didn't necessarily know that AIG was providing the CDS-insurance associated with that CDO. (Hypothetically. I'm assuming that such a product existed back then...)
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If it helps, consider a $600 call option on TSLA that expires a month from now. Lets say you want to be the seller of this call option (which is a kinda-sorta insurance-like product on the price of TSLA).
You can sell this Tesla-insurance on the options market. But you will NEVER figure out who is on the buyer-side of your deal.
And vice versa: the buyer of the TSLA insurance (call option) will never know that you were the one selling that insurance. A middleman handles all the details. Neither side really cares "who" is the counterparty is, they just expect that the other side can pay up.
(In the case of options: the clearing house / middleman is a very large bank who guarantees the payment. It turns out that the middlemen of the CDS deals in 2008 were less reliable)
By my understanding: people just forgot about counterparty risk in 2008.
You have to remember: banks like Lehman Brothers have been around for over 100 years. The idea that a big bank would collapse was a completely alien thought in 2007.
It was one of those "don't care" situations. Oh, they're a big bank. They wouldn't choose to take on more insurance than they can handle (or whatever). I don't care which bank is the CDS insurance, I just want some insurance from somebody. Besides, mortgages have been reliable for decades, getting CDSes to cover my ass on an already safe mortgage is the height of paranoia. Etc. etc.
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You also have to remember that various banks work pretty hard to "hide their hands". If you hear that a big bank is selling CDOs, the all the smaller banks will similarly sell CDOs (trying to get a "piece of the action").
If you're a big bank deciding to make a $500 Billion bet, you really want to make sure that the details of your bet remains a secret. Otherwise, the smaller banks (who are more agile than you) will make those deals before you finish your deal.
The Jenga tower should really be inverted. The BBB tranche gets knocked off the tower to protect the AAA tranche at the base.
The ratings agency scenes are fictional in the sense that no conversation actually happened, to our knowledge, but it's 100% true that the ratings agencies played right along with the industry, and were incentivized to give higher ratings, just like the FAA was incentivized not to ground Boeing after the first 737 Max crash.
After all, I love the HBO series, watched it three times by now. Still one of the best mini series ever produced. As shown by the fact that you have to dig that deep to find deviations from reality. In most other cases, you don't even have to scratch the surface.
And in my lay man eyes, the RBMK reactor (which was also found to violate soviet requirements from the 70s) was a disaster waiting to happen. Inherently unstable, optimized for grid stability instead of safety, lacking control and monitoring, erratic behaviour under certain conditions and no clear operating procedures.
Edit: Also nice is that the first reaction was to blame the operators and not the system as a whole. Kind of what always happens with aviation accidents as well, it always the pilots fault first.