Hello! Welcome to the Margin Call episode of Slate Money Goes to the Movies. I'm Felix

Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Anna Shamansky. Hello. And I'm here with Lizzie O'Leary of Slate and

various other places. Yeah, that's good enough. That's me. Hi. Hi, Lizzie. What are you up to these days?

I host another podcast for Slate called What Next TBD, which is the Friday show about tech and

power in the future. And you have picked Margin Call. I picked Margin Call. We are going to go into

a lot of detail about Margin Call, but you picked it because you like this movie, right?

I do like this movie. I think it's incredibly well acted. I apologize for the Kevin Spacey aspect

of this movie, but I really... I've liked this movie since I first saw it because it's sort of

dark and weird, and it's like a bottle episode of a movie. Everything takes place in this very

compressed timeline with high stakes and not too much explanation, which is something I tend to

go for. It isn't loaded down with extraneous exegesis. No, and it's not preachy. And it's not

preachy. So we're going to unpack a lot of what happens in Margin Call. We're going to talk about

which bank the bank is, how realistic it is, and even start talking about like bigger picture

war tales of Lizzie O'Leary's time as a capital hill reporter back in the day. All of that

coming up on Slate Money goes to the movies. Slag presents Hans Free Conversations.

Hello, car commuter, dog walker, stroller pusher. Your hands are busy. It's why we created

Hubble's in Slag, because sometimes talking is easier than typing. Huddled without the hassle.

In Slag. Okay, Lizzie, I normally start these things by asking where were you and how old were you

when you first saw this movie, but this movie didn't come out all that long ago. So it seems

a weird way to begin it, but it was how long after the financial crisis did this movie come out?

I think it was made in 2011. Yep. So not that long after, like the wounds were still pretty raw.

And it was clearly the some kind of attempt to dramatize the financial crisis. That was the idea.

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