It’s perfectly understandable if you’re already confused.
This story is an interview with the directors of Diamond Hands: The Legacy of WallStreetBets, which is set to premiere at the South by Southwest film festival this weekend. But there are two other documentaries about the same subject that have recently been released (Gaming Wall Street on HBO Max and GameStop: Rise of the Players in theaters). MGM is developing a movie version as well. Diamond Hands, however, is a particularly compelling entry in the burgeoning subgenre of “GameStop short-squeeze entertainment projects.”
Diamond Hands manages to give clarity to the complex world of options trading and also visually illustrate (through the use of memes and other media) the Wild West playground of Wall Street Bets — a notoriously rowdy subreddit devoted to aggressive stock-market speculation — and tell the story of a band of retail investors who put the squeeze on major hedge funds by driving the price of GameStop to the moon … until it (mostly) crashed.
Below, directors Zack Canepari and Drea Cooper discuss the movie from MSNBC Films and NBC News Studios, which has its festival premiere March 13 and then is coming to broadcast on MSNBC April 10 (where it will proceed to, apparently, break the cable news network’s f-bomb record).
What what was your initial reaction to this story when it broke?
Drea Cooper: I could not believe that three weeks after Jan. 6 that this was happening. I was like, “This feels like we live in a simulation, and this is the next button that somebody pressed on the other big board somewhere in the Matrix.” I think “David versus Goliath” was what every single headline used to describe the story, and I remember thinking this felt more complicated than that. It also felt like another populism thing in the same vein as like the Donald subreddit, but this is pushing a different direction, a wealth-and-power transfer direction.
There’s a few big challenges with this as a documentary. The first, of course, is it’s a complex subject. I now understand, after watching, what a short squeeze is. But how did you approach having to explain the ins and outs of what happened?
Zack Canepari: That was the biggest challenge. Once you unpack it, there’s so many layers to it. So I think for us, at least in the edit, it was really about exploring the the pieces of the puzzle that were most important, right? What do all these financial terms even mean? We realized there’s a fine line between too much information and not enough information, and we’re constantly trying to calibrate that. And I think for us, it was about focusing on the Wall Street Bets subreddit and a cultural ethos of millennial/Gen Z financial angst that has bred this risky behavior, a YOLO mentality — “I got my stimulus check; maybe I could roll the dice on this and make something out of it.” That opened the door for the more complex stuff that came along, and we were constantly trying to weave it into the story of our characters.
A second obvious challenge — and this is something I really liked about the film — was how you tried to capture the very specific vibe and personality of Wall Street Bets in a cinematic way without falling back on just showing a flurry of memes.
Canepari: From the very beginning, we wanted this to be told in the voice of that subreddit. Memes and emojis were the starting point, but memes are not very cinematic, and emojis are very static. So we worked hard in the edit to create a tone for what it must have felt like for these characters to be inside of the internet. There’s that feeling that everybody has when they go down a rabbit hole, and they’ve lost track of time. That was a big part of what we’re trying to do.
And then there’s the other obvious challenge: There were all these competing projects announced at the same time. How did that make this more challenging?
Canepari: Our creative producer, Erica Fink at NBC News, had been researching Wall Street Bets for almost a year before the GameStop short squeeze. She said, “Something really interesting is going on with the retail user during the pandemic; I’m following this subreddit, and I’m meeting them, and I’m creating relationships.” So once we came on board, she already had deep relationships with 10-plus characters, almost all of which appeared in the film. So that helped.
Cooper: It’s a new world we’re entering into in the documentary space, where headline stories are getting much more attention and getting immediate roll-of-the-dice funding opportunities. This is going to continue to happen in the nonfiction space. But there’s something to be said for having various points of view on a historical and cultural event. Let’s see how different people interpret the story and present it
I couldn’t help but notice you guys didn’t reflect the more toxic side of WSB. I’m sure you know there’s a lot of slurs that are part of their slang — or at least were at the time this was happening — and their defense of that is: “We’re just making fun of ourselves; we’re not literally making fun of the groups those words have historically applied to.” But I was curious about the editorial decision to not go there.
Cooper: We tried in the first 15 minutes of the film where [investor “Alicia” says] that it was kind of like a bros club, and she describes a bit of the language and attitude. There’s another [investor] saying, “I was saying things I probably would never say real life.” So we tried to touch on it. There were earlier versions where we were way more explicit about exactly what was being said.
But let’s just be honest: This is landing on MSNBC prime time. There were certain limits. To their credit, this film is pushing all those explicit boundaries for them in its current iteration. I don’t think they’ve ever had as many f-bombs in a film. So I give them credit for allowing us some room to express the natural language. We could try to spend 5 to 7 minutes unpacking this “toxic” way to act, or just say that Wall Street Bets doesn’t give a fuck, and they talk shit, and leave it at that and not go down the dark road of, for instance, how they refer to each other as “autists.” That was in there, but NBC was like, “Guys, this is really offensive to the general public these days.” So we either had to over-explain it or pull it out. It was tricky. We were trying to express enough to the audience that this is an “anything goes” environment without dragging it totally to the mud.
What, ultimately, did this all mean? And does it matter?
Canepari: We talked about that; we still debate that question. I don’t think we know. This is a bit of a time-capsule film. It’s a pandemic story. It wouldn’t have happened without very specific elements coming together. It could happen again, in a different way, where retail investors take on Wall Street, but they might use a different tool or take a totally different format. I hope 20 years from now, the film still holds up as a way to understand what was happening in 2021. I also think it showed that our entire system is vulnerable to populism movements, and they can come in many different shapes and forms. And I also think what really came through was this generational angst between the boomers and the millennials/Gen Z that we really found to be super consistent across our characters. I think that tension will continue to play out as we get deeper into things like climate change and wealth inequality.
Cooper: I think the biggest takeaway from our cast of subjects is this idea of generational angst. You can longer draw a straight line from “do well try to get to college” to “land a good job, make some money” to
“get a house and retire” — that narrative no longer exists. Some argue that narrative was getting knocked off its pedestal even in the late ’90s. The cost of living is going through the roof and to buy a house is insanely expensive. … Now the retail investor is becoming much more commonplace. [The number of investors] are growing daily.
The piece of the story that isn’t done is the idea that these hedge funds and some big powerful players were completely manipulating the system to short a stock by more than 100 percent — more than the shares that were even available — and nobody has a clear answer as to why that’s even possible. Obviously, the system is broken. So something needs to be done. There’s a lot shit behind the curtain that our film didn’t have an opportunity to go into. But there’s some work to be done to try to level the playing field, so we don’t end up in these nefarious situations with crazy short squeezes that ultimately could have brought down the financial system. I mean, literally.
Source: Hollywood
