Not a day goes by when we don’t feel an overwhelming sense of loss and emptiness over the fact that we no longer live in a world in which Lehman Brothers exists. We miss the palpable sexual tension between Erin Callan and David Einhorn. We miss Dick Fuld, entering his office on the 31st floor by rappelling down the side of the building using his dick as rope. We miss Bella, more than you’ll ever know. But mostly, we miss knowing that there’s a bank trading floor where at any given time, we could witness a bunch of employees playing a game in which they temporarily paralyze each other via electric shock (this sort of stuff goes on in Stamford, of course, but it’s not a game, and they don’t tase each other with a “gun”). Luckily, the memory as been preserved by former Citadel partner-cum--filmmaker Julio DePietro.
Another striking scene features a twisted version of musical chairs, where the last player to buzz in with a joystick when the music stops gets an electric shock. DePietro said he heard the game was so popular on Wall Street that it once shut down the trading floor at Lehman Brothers for an afternoon.
To make it more realistic, the four actors playing the game asked for an actual shock during their close-ups.
“The performances look real because they are,” DePietro said. “They’re in real pain.”
Citadel’s DePietro Uses Hedge-Fund Skills to Direct First Movie [Bloomberg via BI]
