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 Jones, co-writer and co-director of "Boom Bust Boom," uses
puppetry and animation to get the message across -- as well as
interviews with economist Paul Krugman, actor John Cusack, Bank
of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane and others.
The film, which cost under 400,000 pounds ($594,320) to make, is
getting its first public screening at Britain's University of
Manchester on March 31. Its producers say they are in talks to
release it in cinemas and on video channels.
"Boom Bust Boom" is the latest in a series of documentaries on
the 2008 financial crisis, including Michael Moore's
"Capitalism: A Love Story" (2009) and Charles Ferguson's "Inside
Job" (2010).
Jones said he had avoided seeing those films to have more
creative freedom. His project came about when he heard from the
Dutch economics professor and entrepreneur Theo Kocken, who is
also the film's co-writer, that university students were not
being educated about past financial crises.
"It bugs me that teachers or professors blindly teach economics
without recognizing the crashes, the real world," Jones said in
a telephone interview. "Throughout history, crashes were
constantly going on."
In the opening scene of "Boom Bust Boom," the ex-Python, 73,
shows up on Wall Street to make an on-camera announcement.
"This film is about the Achilles heel of capitalism -- how human
nature drives the economy to crisis after crisis time and time
again," he declares.
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For the rest of the movie, Jones pops up in unlikely places to make
his point: he pokes his head in front of a pair of puppets, rides an
animated choo-choo train, and interviews a Yale University academic
at the behavioral research facility Monkey Island in Puerto Rico.
"Boom Bust Boom" provides a clear, blow-by-blow explanation of the
2008 crisis: how excessive lending to the non-creditworthy caused a
giant bubble that eventually burst. The film then goes into great
detail about past bubbles, from 17th-century Dutch tulip mania to
the 1929 Wall Street crash.
It concludes that unless the teaching of economics is overhauled --
and economic models factor in instability as a normal feature of
capitalism -- crises will keep happening.
"If the professors start parroting these party lines, I think you
should pelt them with vegetables and rotten fruit," actor and
commentator Cusack recommends to students watching.
"That's what I would do."
($1 = 0.6696 pounds)
($1 = 0.6730 pounds)
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Mark Heinrich)
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