August and everything after

By Steven Zeitchik

It's hard to watch "August," the Josh Hartnett drama that opened this weekend about an Internet mogul poised to lose it all in the summer of 2001, without connecting to something more immediate: the collapse of an equally illusory era (though this time with far more traumatic consequences), that of our current banking/housing/credit/media economy. It's all built on quicksand, this "August" world, (watch Rip Torn's character chew into Hartnett's Tom Sterling for a company that exists for no particular purpose and whose employees sit around eating snacks all day). Sure, there are fewer skater-boy 25-year-olds running the show these days. But there's just as much smoke-and-mirrors.

If that point wasn't clear enough when sitting through the movie, it resounded with a chilly clarity on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, where Hartnett and director Austin Chick did a publicity turn and rang the closing bell. (This after a Cinema Society-First Look event earlier in the week, where it felt a little like 1999 all over again, only with real-life celebrities replacing the dot-com ones...and a good thing too; we'd take Kirsten Dunst over Jeff Bezos any day).

There couldn't have been a more perfect time for the movie's creators to promote at ground zero of the world's financial markets. By 3:30, a few digital tickers had already primed the room with a message welcoming guests of the "movie premiere," and at the stroke of 4:00, above the chaotic, trash-strewn floor, Chick pushed a button and Hartnett slammed a gavel, bringing to a close one of Wall Street's worst days in recent memory. Among the jacketed traders -- at least the ones not so distraught by the day's slide they couldn't be bothered to look up -- the sight of a movie star seemed to provide the best news of the day, a welcome respite from the rest of the Freddie and Fannie-fueled misery. When a young actor seems like the only thing between a Wall Streeter and a whole pile of Prozac pills, we're in trouble.

At first the stock market seemed like an obvious choice to promo the movie, since the whole close of the dot-com era was accompanied by a return to sanity--ie, the adults finally coming in and getting rid of the kids who were recklessly joyriding those bulls. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized there's something of a subversive irony to throwing an event there. While the movie would seem to celebrate the return of rational, if sharpie, (witness David Bowie as the head of a venerable investment bank), players to the market, the underlying message may be one that punctures all bubbles, not just dot-com ones.

"The Dow is below 11,000 for the first time in a long time, so I'd say there's something there," producer David Guy Levy told Risky Biz on the floor when asked about the pic's relevance. Chick also seemed to suggest there's something in it for the traders, some of whom were at that moment mugging for a photo with Hartnett. "The audience for this movie is Wall Street, not downtown hipsters," he said.

Hollywood often gets criticized for being a beat behind. Well, this movie is certainly about a long-ago period, culturally if not chronologically. But when all is said and done, after the economy has cratered and studio movies begin to reflect the concerns of such a ravaged world, we have a feeling "August" will be seen less as a requiem for a bygone era and one of the first chronicles of a new, potentially far darker one.