Hacker Cinema
Other People's Money
1991 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Norman Jewison
When a corporate raider threatens a hostile takeover of a 'mom and pop' company, the patriarch of the company enlists the help of his wife's attractive daughter—who is a lawyer—to stop the takeover. However, the raider soon becomes infatuated with her, and enjoys the legal manoeuvring as he tries to win her heart.
5 positive6 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
Or all that money might have been churning around chasing other speculative technologies. Or it might have been sitting in US Treasuries making 5% waiting for something promising. Who knows what is happening in the parallel alternate universe? Right now, it feels like everyone is just spamming dollars and hoping that AI actually becomes a big industry, to justify all of this economic activity. I'm reminded of Danny DeVito's character's speech in the movie Other People's Money, after the company's president made an impassioned speech about why its investors should keep investing:
"Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I'm not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say "Amen" after you hear a prayer. Because that's what you just heard - a prayer."
At this point, everyone is just praying that AI ends up a net positive, rather than bursting and plunging the world into a 5+ year recession.
Yes, I agree that "profit is the whole purpose of the business" is oversimplification. This point is well illustrated in "Other People's Money", 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
I doubt you'd find much polling. The movies Wall Street (1987) and Other People's Money (1991) would be the next best thing for a pop culture view of the finance industry.
Thanks for the clip! I had forgotten that movie, "Other People's Money". It has so many funny dialogues between Larry and Kate. Larry is as likeable an antihero as it can get.
In the 80's this was called Corporate Raiding. There's even a movie with a young(ish) Danny Devito called Other People's Money.
The execution has changed (pun intended), but it's an old trick.
I do have Netflix, and other subscription services, but by the nature of licensing, they're very limited. Do you only watch/read/etc the most common, most popular, current movies/music/etc? If you seek out anything a little off the beaten path, you pretty much have to own it or you won't be able to consume it, or get access to it later.
For example, I recently went through several lists of underrated (i.e. not the megahits like Ghostbusters or Indiana Jones) movies from the 80s and 90s and I'm hunting them down and watching them. Of the seven movies I watched this past couple of weeks (About Last Night, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Nothing But Trouble, Other People's Money, The Wrong Guy, Top Secret, Used Cars), ZERO of them can be found on Netflix or Hulu. Five of them can be rented individually from Amazon Prime at $4 a pop, but aren't included in their prime subscription that I already pay ~$100 a year for. That's the full extent of how you can get access to these movies from subscription services. I could have just stuck with what subscription services offer, but if it's not something new the selection gets increasingly worse and worse.
Is that what you want the future to be like? Where these movies might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth because no one can get ahold of them anymore? Because that's the direction we're starting to go in with more and more things going digital only and subscription only.
I used to work in the video game industry, but I have almost nothing to show for it outside of some trailers on Youtube, because almost all of those games were released on digital channels and are no longer available to download. I had two games on the Wii Shop and the Wii Shop is now closed and the company is defunct, so those games are gone. Another on Xbox Live for 360, and a couple of Xbox Indie Games that you can't get anymore because they killed the service. The only game you can still get is Neverland Card Battles on the PSP, and that's because it was released as a physical game.
You can still also play my Flash games I did before I got into the industry, at least until browsers kill Flash off entirely. There was a whole thread on HN recently about how we're about to lose a whole decade of culture from Flash and how one guy is trying to preserve it as best as he can.
Not being able to own the media (even if only in digital form) sucks, because companies can't be trusted to always remain solvent, always have license agreements in place, and always care about keeping all the content available for people to get. If you don't care about the content, then you probably don't care that you only get some access to some stuff some of the time, but for those that care about the time and energy that creators put in and want to experience and share those things with people that may have missed it the first time around or whole new generations of people, this current trend is terrible.
That's actually one reason why I shifted gears and started designing board games the past few years. I have perfectly good and playable copies of board games that are 60 years old now, decades after the companies have gone out of business. I won't have to go through extra effort to make sure that people can still have access to my board games long after I'm dead.
Feel good piece. When you see consolidation as orchestrated by Tribune and Sinclair, that's a natural step in the evolution of any dinosaur business that is declining. In the immortal words of Danny Devito in the movie "Other People's Money," "Increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes."
The best response to this is probably Larry the Liquidator's speech to shareholders of New England Wire & Cable, Inc., a fictional company in the movie "Other People's Money"[1]:
Amen, and amen, and amen. You'll have to forgive me, I'm not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say 'Amen' after you hear a prayer. Because that's what you just heard - a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called 'The Prayer for the Dead.' You just heard The Prayer for the Dead, my fellow stockholders, and you didn't say, 'Amen.' This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead! You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead, alright. We're just not broke. And do you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow, but sure.
You know, at one time, there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best god-damn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future. 'Ah, but we can't,' goes the prayer. 'We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?' I got two words for that - 'Who cares?' Care about them? Why? They didn't care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years, this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, 'We know times are tough. We'll lower taxes, reduce water and sewer.' Check it out: You're paying twice what you did ten years ago. And our devoted employees, who have taken no increases for the past three years, are still making twice what they made ten years ago. And our stock - one-sixth of what it was ten years ago. 'Who cares?' I'll tell ya -- Me.
I'm not your best friend. I'm your only friend. I don't make anything. I'm makin' you money. And lest we forget, that's the only reason any of you became stockholders in the first place. You wanna make money! You don't care if they manufacture wire and cable, fried chicken, or grow tangerines! You wanna make money! I'm the only friend you've got. I'm makin' you money. Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be used productively. And if it is, you'll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves. And if anybody asks, tell 'em ya gave at the plant. And by the way, it pleases me that I'm called 'Larry the Liquidator.' You know why, fellow stockholders? Because at my funeral, you'll leave with a smile on your face and a few bucks in your pocket. Now that's a funeral worth having!
--
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102609/ -- a clip of the speech is currently available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q
In the past I thought about CEO like about a big boss of some plant etc. Lee Iacocca, Akio Morita.
Good old days...
I only can keep in mind movie "Other People's Money".
> The entrepreneur of post-industrial America, playing God with other people's money. The robber barons of old at least left something tangible in their wake- a coal mine, a railroad, banks. This man leaves nothing. He creates nothing. He builds nothing. He runs nothing. And in his wake lies nothing but a blizzard of paper to cover the pain. Oh, if he said, "I know how to run your business better than you," that would be something worth talking about. But he's not saying that.
And Swordfish is a great movie about being a hacker... specifically the common recruiting process.
On a more serious note, I do agree with you. Some decent movies with a office environment/work theme: Boiler Room (2000), Duplicity (2009), Glengarry Glen Ross, Other People's Money (1991), Swimming with Sharks and Wall Street (1987).
I've also enjoyed the dramatized real-life stories in Rogue Trader and Barbarians at The Gate.
What you are saying looks to me like it fits with this remark from the article:
in determining whether an act is right or wrong, the powerful focus on whether rules and principles are violated, whereas the powerless focus on the consequences. For this reason, the powerful are also more inclined to stick to the rules, irrespective of whether this has positive or negative effects, whereas the powerless are more inclined to make exceptions.
I think a more interesting question to me would be in regards to people following "internal rules" vs. "external rules". People like Jesus and Ghandi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seem to be willing to break external rules out of deference to a highly developed set of internal rules -- or, perhaps, they follow a set of rules grounded more in reality than social convention. By that I mean that things like racial discrimination aren't simply "morally wrong", they are bad thinking with negative consequences. For example, the (racial) discrimination thing: My recollection is that one of the most successful crime lords of all time was willing to work with the Irish mob, the Jewish mob, etc whereas historically the Irish mob only worked with the Irish and excluded the Jews, Italians, etc. Same for other groups: They were all quite insular. Whether you are a crime lord or a business, inclusiveness is a practical strength which gives you greater access to whomever happens to have talent. If you are the only place some people can go to get a fair shake, Bonus! -- because they will work their butts off for you and be die-hard loyalists. Not because they really give a rat's patootie about you but simply because (to quote a favorite movie line from "Other People's Money") you aren't their best friend, you're their only friend.