Making a Statement About Debt

Writer-director James D. Scurlock set out to make a "romp" about Americans' wacky spending habits with his first feature-length documentary, "Maxed Out" (see review on Page 33).

"The beginning of the movie is this Realtor in Las Vegas building an 11,000-square-foot house," Scurlock says. "She's sort of giggling about it, like, 'Gosh, this is ridiculous. I don't know why I need this; I can't even afford this if interest rates go up.' " Queen's "Under Pressure" blares in the background.

Originally inspired by "Super Size Me," chronicling the similarly named filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's month-long McDonald's-only diet, Scurlock says, "I remember brainstorming and thinking we'll just get someone for six months who'll just accept all the credit offers he can to see how much debt he can get himself into." Laughing, he says, "Then I thought: God, that's probably not a good idea, because you can eat fast food for a month and then stop, but if you binge on debt for several months, there's a good chance that you'll never get out of it."

Instead, he found dozens of people willing to talk on camera about their financial troubles: parents whose children committed suicide because of debt, military families whose homes were foreclosed on, academics describing the marketing techniques of a financial industry that, in Scurlock's words, "packages and sells debt really effectively and efficiently."

In other words, stories that are more "horror" than "ha-ha."

"Making a documentary, you never know what it's going to end up being," Scurlock says. "If I'd known the film was going to be what it was, I never would have made it. I would have thought it's too dark, it's too academic, it's not going to be entertaining, it's not going to be compelling."

Hence the pumping soundtrack of Queen and original works by Oscar-nominated composer Benoit Charest (2003's "The Triplets of Belleville"). Buying the music rights was one of the film's biggest expenses, Scurlock says, "but I felt like it was really necessary because it's such an intimidating topic to a lot of people."

Intimidating, yes, and shameful. "This one guy from Debtors Anonymous, the 12-step program, called it 'the last taboo,' " Scurlock says. "He says, 'I'll talk about my alcoholism or my drug addiction or my sex life, but this is the one thing that I can't bring up at a cocktail party. . . . No one wants to know that you have financial problems.' "

Unlike most young independent filmmakers, Scurlock, 35, financed the film himself. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school his senior year -- "I was only a couple of credits away; it drove my mother nuts, still kinda does" -- he ran a restaurant franchise, started an investment newsletter and made a killing in the market before cashing out and moving to Los Angeles. (He details those years in his book, "Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders.")

"I wrote screenplays for a while and couldn't get anyone to read them . . . and someone said you should either go to film school, and I really didn't care for school, or you should make a documentary." Or three, he decided, because "maybe after three documentaries I'd know how to make a film."

His third one was "Maxed Out." "I started by hiring a guy who had done a lot of casting for reality television, and we started trolling the Internet for stories" about "goofy" money flubs.

But then Scurlock started talking to academics, including "Credit Card Nation" author Robert D. Manning, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren and radio host Dave Ramsey, who appear in the film. They "were very generous about sharing their networks of people" willing to speak on camera about their money troubles.

The only people he couldn't get to talk, it seems, were representatives from credit card companies, the people for whom he had the most burning questions. "How can this industry be making money hand over fist while their customers are going broke? There are people behind these numbers, and that is really what this film shows."

In breaking "the last taboo," Scurlock says the film has inspired his friends, as well as strangers, to break their silence about painful financial problems. After all, what Scurlock witnessed while filming is the pervasiveness of Americans' debt: "A lot of people living in these beautiful gated communities . . . [are] having a really hard time paying their bills. They look around and go, 'I must be the only one, because everyone else is so rich.' And their neighbors are all looking out of their windows and thinking exactly the same thing."

'Music' at AFI

Sunday at the AFI Silver Theatre, banjo player Stephen Wade will perform with country music great Zan McLeod, Liberty Dawne Rucker, Jason Byrd and Michael Monseur after a screening of the Emmy-nominated film "Catching the Music," written by Wade and directed by Jackson Frost.

"Catching the Music," which first aired on WETA 20 years ago, explores how music binds musicians as it is passed from teacher to student. The creator and star of the one-man shows "Banjo Dancing" and "On the Way Home," which played for 10 years at Arena Stage, Wade wrote the 54-minute film as a travelogue of sorts, filmed in the Capitol's shadow in Washington, in Chicago and high in the mountains of Kentucky.

Sunday's event starts at 2 and costs $15. For tickets and more information, visit http://www.afi.com/silver or call 301-495-6720.