Hollywood's Bank Run

The pitchfork mobs didnt quite make it to Wall Street in 2008. So seven years later, the man who brought you Anchorman decided to give it another go with The Big Short.

- Jessica Pressler, photos by Amanda Demme

"Can we get a shot of the napkin?” Adam McKay asked his director of photography, pointing toward the table where an uncharacteristically angry looking Steve Carell was seated, doodling fiercely. The cocktail napkin in question bore the name of Okada, the glitzy Japanese restaurant in the Wynn Las Vegas where New York hedge-fund manager Steve Eisman first encountered Wing Chau, a smug manager of collateralized debt obligations (investment vehicles composed mostly of home loans), in January 2007. It was Chau’s ignorance of the toxicity of these products that cemented Eisman’s belief that the housing market was doomed and ultimately persuaded Eisman to double down on his bet on its collapse, a bet that was later immortalized in financial journalist Michael Lewis’s best-selling book The Big Short.

Nearly ten years later, the scene between two once-obscure money managers was being reenacted, this time on film. For budget reasons, and because Okada had closed not long after the market crash, the scene was being shot at another casino, Harrah’s, in New Orleans. Set designers hadn’t gone so far as to re-create the restaurant’s 90-foot waterfall, but they’d done their best to conjure the atmosphere, with a toqued chef at a sizzling hibachi and authentic details like the cocktail napkins. Though that wasn’t why McKay wanted the shot. “He’s drawing out the CDOs,” the director explained, as the camera zoomed in on Carell sketching the financial product in a way that looked vaguely like Italian spumoni. “Any chance I have to illustrate this stuff, I take advantage of it.”