The billionaire's building.

The opening shots of Park Avenue: Money, Power and The American Dream show the famed avenue in all its moneyed glory: idling Mercedes, impeccably coiffed society women and stern limestone facades with white-gloved doormen stationed outside like sentries. It is a vision so lofty that it is almost otherworldly—can the vast majority of Americans even conjure this up as the apex of the American dream, let alone attain it?

It’s a question that director Alex Gibney revisits repeatedly in his documentary about the growing gulf between the rich and poor and how that gulf has been widened by the political manipulations of the country's wealthiest citizens.

The press release about the film, bashed by The Observer in a previous post, was indeed misleading, but only in what it represented the film to be about: the two Park Avenues. This is not a story about the low or lowly classes. Nor is it really a story about 740 Park, the Upper East Side, the South Bronx or even New York. Those things just happen to be convenient physical touchstones.

This is a story about the richest of the rich, as it were, the residents of 740 Park—a building that is home to more billionaires than any other building in New York—and how they have managed to claim a larger and larger share of the nation's wealth, or as Mr. Gibney puts it in his opening voice-over, how they have enjoyed "unprecedented prosperity from a system they increasingly control."

As Michael Gross, the author of 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, which Mr. Gibney bought the rights to, wrote us earlier this fall: "we're both more interested in the perps than the vics." (Mr. Gross also acted as an adviser on the film and is interviewed extensively alongside New Yorker scribe Jane Mayer, Yale professor Jacob Hacker and Bruce Bartlett, a historian and adviser to presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush, among others.)

Indeed, the documentary unfurls like a crime story, with a raft of damning evidence revealing the shameful acts committed by the masters of the universe in service of accumulating even vaster fortunes than they already have.

At least, it's a crime story as told by talking heads. This is not a human interest film—partially as a matter of necessity. None of the men at the film's center—the Koch brothers, Stephen Schwarzman, John Thain, Sen. Chuck Schumer or Paul Ryan consented to an interview. Their onscreen presence is limited to archived videos from dinners and conventions and voice-over explanations from experts. Nor did Mr. Gibney manage to get inside the famed building.

We do get a glimpse into the hallowed halls (or at least the lobby) of 740 Park thanks to a former doorman, who talks about witnessing an eerie shift in the children of the super-rich: as little kids they joke and share special high-fives with the staff, but between the ages of 12 and 15, they shut off completely, emulating their parents' cool reserve. Also, David Koch is incredibly cheap, giving the doormen who regularly loaded his Hamptons-bound cars with heavy bags a $50 check at the end of the year.

Alas, Mr. Gibney uses such anecdotes to buttress one of his flimsier arguments, backed by a study by UC Berkeley professor Paul Piff: that wealth destroys empathy. The question of why the super-rich behave the way they do, and why they feel the need to claim even greater quantities of wealth, is a complicated (and fascinating) question that demands more in-depth exploration. As such, it's one which the film should have either mentioned in passing or left alone. Certainly, wealth can and does breed entitlement, but as Mr. Gross says at one point, "some people are just dicks."

The film includes trips to food pantries in the South Bronx and Wisconsin, an interview with a young social worker speaking about how early opportunity or the lack thereof begins to shape a life and plenty of shots of embattled-looking impoverished Bronx residents, but this all feels like window dressing for the takedown at the heart of the film.

Mr. Gibney is clearly most interested in illustrating how the nation's wealthiest have rigged the game, not only claiming a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth via devices like the carried interest tax rate, but using that wealth to fund groups and candidates who have by and large succeeded in turning the dwindling middle class against the the less fortunate, unions and each other. The latter accomplishment is arguably the largest battle won by the one-percenters in the wake of the financial crisis. After all, the great recession began with anger at greedy financial titans and foolhardy hedge funders, but somehow shifted to rage at greedy teachers and foolhardy middle-class home buyers.

And while the outcome of the most recent election at least proves that money is a deciding factor, not the deciding factor in a presidential election, dulling Mr. Gibney's argument slightly, he makes a compelling case that inequality imperils democracy and that the victims of the inequality include not only those who find themselves in the rapidly expanding underclass, but the American dream itself.

kvelsey@observer.com

His daughter had decided to send her Tamagotchi toy pet to work with him, and it was hungry. Mr. Calello stopped the meeting, according to Wilson Ervin, one of the other executives there, took the pet out, smiled and fed it a digital hamburger.

The financier, who became chief of Credit Suisse's investment bank in 2007, when cuts to risk and costs helped make the giant one of the few that weren't bailed out, died on Nov. 16 of non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. He was 49.

There is something about Wall Street executives who are as important as Mr. Calello--who four years ago helped arrange Industrial & Commercial Bank of China's record-setting $21.9 billion IPO--that makes them difficult. People who dominate high finance do not tend to enchant outside of it. "He's the heart of our family, center of the swirl, itchy instigator of the well spent day, pied piper of not just adventure, but intellectual curiosity and passion," one of his three sisters, the poet Cathy Staples, wrote. "Passionate engagement in the world has never been a solo adventure for Paul, he's intent upon bringing us all with him."

"He didn't sacrifice other parts in order to do what he did well," said his brother-in-law, Alex Gibney, the documentarian who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side. "He was just generous as a person, always thinking about other people. It sounds so corny to say, but that's what was so miraculous."

He was short-listed to replace Tim Geithner at the New York Fed last year. Two of his neighbors in Beaverkill, N.Y., the conservationist Laurance Rockefeller Jr. and the former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, both said he could have eventually been secretary of the Treasury.

But those neighbors also talk about the Calello house's musicales, where the executive and one of his sisters played guitar and their father sang in a self-taught operatic voice. "Uproarious fun," Mr. Rockefeller said. Others brought Dobros and 12-strings. They played songs like Lowell George's "Willin'" and John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery."

He sang with his family a few days before his death.

BORN TO SOCIAL workers, Mr. Calello was raised outside of Boston. He burst with energy, Mr. Gibney said, causing a bit of a ruckus on school bus rides. It was suggested that he and a friend run to school, which they found too boring, so they would run past it and back, ready for the day. "I'd watch him out the school bus window, running," Ms. Staples wrote, "swag of dirty blond hair crossing his eyes, stride loose and easy, and, if he saw me or my sisters, that grin." He tried to run the Boston Marathon at 11 and 12, and succeeded at age 13. He gave up marathons after that.

He met his wife, Jane DeBevoise, at Bankers Trust in Tokyo, where they bonded over a 20-year yen-dollar amortizing swap for United Airlines. Mr. Gibney was living a more bohemian life when he first met the banker. "I looked at him: tassel loafers, no socks. I thought, 'Oh, brother,'" he said. "I underestimated the depths of the man on that first encounter, but I never did it again."

Mr. Calello left Bankers Trust to co-found Credit Suisse Financial Products, a derivatives giant. "He was the first industry leader to advocate consistent, effective regulation of derivative instruments globally," a memo to staff from Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan says, "at a time when this was highly controversial."

By 2002, he'd become CEO of the investment bank in Asia. "We've been on holidays together," Ronald Arculli, the chairman of the Hong Kong stock exchange, said. "Occasionally my wife would joke and say, 'I wish you'd sound like Paul.'"

At a family trip to Mr. Weld's house in Keene Valley, the governor's wife, Leslie Marshall, woke up at 5 a.m. "There was Paul, sweeping the kitchen and making sandwiches," she said, "ready to launch everybody on the day."

"Family was paramount and work was just work, and that's not the vibe you feel with most senior executives. Some don't even talk about their families, as if they're invisible, or verboten," said Credit Suisse's Grace Koo, who heads a team that structures derivatives for clients. "He's let me scroll through his digital camera when we were on conference calls."

He came back to New York in 2007 to helm Credit Suisse's investment bank. Mr. Ervin, then the firm's chief risk officer, and now a senior adviser to Mr. Dougan, said that Mr. Calello understood the intensity of what was happening, and what was about to happen. In September 2008, as Lehman and AIG quaked, he was one of the senior executives brought to the New York Fed to work on saving the system.

In December, he and Mr. Dougan announced that executive bonuses would be paid in toxic assets. "He was one of the executives who really did lament the excesses of Wall Street," Ms. Koo said. "And really did say so."

In the middle of 2009, he mentioned to colleagues that he wasn't feeling well. "He said, 'I haven't been feeling up to my game,' which is unusual for Paul; he was one of those guys that needed about 15 minutes of sleep and was game," Mr. Ervin said. "We attributed that to the strain he was under."

In September, after his cancer diagnosis, the bank announced he was stepping down temporarily. "You could see it slow him down emotionally once or twice, briefly," Mr. Ervin said, "but then he would climb back in, and say, 'How about you? How are you doing?'"

This year, he was named chairman of the investment bank. He was still coming to Credit Suisse about a month before his death. "He was thinner, his hair was gone, but his voice was strong, his intellect was strong," Mr. Ervin said. "He'd take his Vespa in."

"What did occur," Mr. Rockefeller said, "was a very full life of great success."

He is survived by Ms. DeBevoise, a daughter, triplet sons, three sisters and his parents.

mabelson@observer.com

But Mr. Rumsfeld was in a good mood, so he smiled and posed for a photograph, and didn't think too hard when Mr. Gibney said his film was about Abu Ghraib.

Here's Stone, who also takes objection to Gibney's assertion that Ken Langone had Spitzer followed by private investigators:

Azi
 
Seriously ----- "An attendee heard Mr. Stone saying the filmmaker and movie organizers could "eat shit." 
 
I never said this.  I did say BULLSHIT   out loud when I learned that "Angelina" the Hooker in the movie was an actress and that the movie nevers reveal the name or visage of a resal hooker who actually banged Spitzer. The unamed hooker is the source of the the claim that Spitzer did NOT wear black socks- a contrivance ! a device ! Gibney has NO on record source for that  claim OR the claim that Langone hired a PI to "get the goods ' on Spitzer none at all. That is because he has prrof of neither.
 
Never said Gibney could "eat shit". He is not a bad fellow at all- just an idelogue with an agenda.
 
Stone

They found instead a lone Mr. Gibney. "There are a lot of lessons to be learned, not just about Eliot Spitzer," he said of his movie, "but about all of us. How do we judge our elected officials? What of it is important to us? What of it doesn't matter?"

Dressed in a black blazer, white open-collar shirt and blue jeans, Mr. Gibney stuck his hands in his pockets and ventured that Mr. Spitzer may not be any worse, or different, than lots of people in politics.

"President John F. Kennedy had prostitutes in the White House-we don't talk about him as the scandal president," he pointed out.

Perhaps fearing queries on the same topic, political bigwigs who attended skipped the red carpet and headed right for their seats: Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, in neck tie, got there early. What brought him here, asked the Transom?

"My wife," he said.

Mr. Kelly flirted with a run for mayor previously, and could possibly throw his hat back into the ring one day. Any lessons he thinks he could learn from Mr. Spitzer's saga?

"I hope not," Mr. Kelly said with a laugh.

The two-hour movie gave generous room to conspiracy theories about unfair treatment in Mr. Spitzer's prosecution, and a number of people headed for the exits immediately afterward, including Roger Stone, a Republican operative who specializes in the dark arts of political combat. An attendee heard Mr. Stone saying the filmmaker and movie organizers could "eat shit."

Attempting to flee through the wrong door, Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman was loudly redirected to a proper exit by a female usher. Asked if the movie might have an impact on Mr. Spitzer's possible return to elected office, Mr. Zuckerman, who flirted with a run for Senate against Kirsten Gillibrand, said, "I don't think the movie will affect it one way or the other. I don't see how he comes back."

A few Democratic operatives said afterward that they were impressed with how disciplined Mr. Spitzer appeared in the movie, sticking to his favorable talking points. If only he had been that disciplined while in office, they lamented.

Walking down the street, the man who made Mr. Spitzer's memorable television ads, Jimmy Siegel, flashed a smile, a blond woman hanging on to his arm. "I don't think it'll hurt him," Mr. Siegel said. He said he'd work for Mr. Spitzer "in a New York minute!"

The new documentary (still unnamed) about Eliot Spitzer opens with a commercial from his 2006 campaign for governor, in which the booming voice of Mr. Spitzer says that he walked, as attorney general, into the "buzz saw" of Wall Street's corruption guided by one question: "I simply asked if it was right or wrong."

Seconds later, the film cuts to Times Square, where a giant screen shows the press conference at which Mr. Spitzer resigned as governor of New York, days after news broke that he had been patronizing prostitutes. Cars whirl by, pedestrians are a blur, and Mr. Spitzer's face looms over streets with a frozen grimace that has since become the icon of the scandal.

The film's writer, director and narrator, Alex Gibney, has created a two-hour retrospective of Mr. Spitzer's rollercoaster career, from his contentious fights with leading figures on Wall Street--Hank Greenberg, Ken Langone--to his style of governing Albany with name-calling. And, of course, there are the hookers.

It's a pretty good examination of how a political star veered head-on into a brick wall.

After the opening scenes, Mr. Spitzer appears on camera, sitting in the middle of a fluffy couch with one leg slung over the other and his arm stretched over the back of the couch. He does not look nervous.

Mr. Gibney's interview, for the most part, is safe territory for Mr. Spitzer. Were you too tough on Hank Greenberg of AIG? ("It is the big lie," Spitzer said, "The books were being cooked.") Did you really threaten the venerable businessman John Whitehead? ("I hope I didn't say that.")

At times the film feels like a modern take on the famed Frost-Nixon interviews, in which Mr. Nixon defended himself thoroughly through 12 sessions, before Mr. Frost asked the former president why he did what he did. Mr. Nixon's eyes water, the camera zooms in, and the earlier interviews are mostly forgotten.

One hour into Mr. Gibney's movie, we come as close to the seeing Mr. Spitzer have his Frost-Nixon moment, though it's not nearly as good, and the reason he offers up for his actions that unlikely to elicit sympathy from anyone.

The exchange:

Mr. Gibney: One question is, 'Why, why hookers?' particularly when that's illegal.

Mr. Spitzer: Again, I don't want to delve in, certainly don't want to speak for others. Even in my own case, I don't want to speak to that issue except to say that [I] caved in to temptations in a way that perhaps is secure, perhaps it's, in some very twisted way, less damaging."

"Less damaging how?"

"Than having affairs or relationships that take on a different tenor."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Than relationships that take on a different tenor."

"You mean have some sort of emotional --"

"Perhaps, yeah."

And there it is. Mr. Spitzer chose the better of two ways to cheat on his wife. Not that endearing.

That's as far the audience gets inside Mr. Spitzer's mind, but what Mr. Gibney shorts the audience on catharsis, he makes up for on the legal aspect of the events.

The film suggests that Mr. Spitzer was the victim of a Republican administration that singled out him.

As the story goes, the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District, who prosecuted the case, was Michael Garcia, whom Mr. Gibney notes is "a Republican." (Neither Mr. Garcia nor any law enforcement officials appear in the movie.) According to the film the FBI "naively" asked the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, if men who solicit hookers are ever prosecuted. They aren't. Prosecutors were "suddenly spending enormous resources" busting prostitution rings.

The prosecutor's complaint against the escort service Mr. Spitzer patronized has a few short entries on eight anonymous clients, followed by "five riveting pages" on "Client 9," with enough details about the Washington rendezvous for any intrepid news outlet to track down the man's identity.

"Was the writing meant to convict the accused or embarrass the client?" Mr. Gibney, as narrator, asks rhetorically.

One call girl who met frequently with Mr. Spitzer claims that prosecutors asked her if she and this client used any sex toys. The woman, identified in the film as "Angelina" says she took umbrage with the questions and declined to provide such details. (Angelina is actually a petite, strawberry blond actress who was hired to "perform" the words of the real hooker who met with Mr. Spitzer. The woman agreed to speak to Mr. Gibney so long as her name, image, and voice were not revealed.) Angelina said an FBI agent that interviewed her "wanted to get some kind of information about some kinky sex stuff," about her famous client. There was none, she said.

Federal prosecutors may have been aided by Mr. Spitzer's powerful enemies on Wall Street, Mr. Gibney speculates. The likely culprit, Ken Langone, denies the charge. "I didn't have any private [investigators] on him." But footage of Mr. Langone's interview on CNBC describing a "friend" waiting on line behind Mr. Spitzer as he purchased an unusually large amount of money orders undermines Mr. Langone's denial.

Ashely Dupre, who was part of the encounter detailed in the court documents, did not participate in the movie after she requested editorial control, and Mr.  Gibney declined.

A former co-worked of Ms. Dupree, Cecil Suwal, dismissed the idea that Ms. Dupre was Mr. Spitzer's favorite call girl, calling their trysts a "one night stand," (several night stands, as we understand it). There are a few cuts one of Ms. Dupre's opportunistic media appearances, with is footage of Giraldo Rivera's show on Fox News where he describes her as an aspiring singer and hands her a microphone, after which she belts out a few tunes. (Apparently Ms. Dupre is talented in other ways. In one of the more tawdry moments of the film, a former co-worker, Ms. Suwal, says Ms. Dupre was a popular girl in the agency, speculating that the young lady from New Jersey may just indeed have "perfect coochie." OK!)

If Mr. Spitzer stonewalls, and Mr. Langone unconvincingly denies, it is Ms. Suwall, a bubbly, almond-eyed girl who arranged many of Mr. Spitzer's encounters, who is the most witty interview in the film--and provides interesting tidbits of information. For example, the fee for having an all-day encounter was the girl's hourly rate, plus one zero.

The movie leaves the impression that Mr. Spitzer is guilty of impolite efforts to wage war against scrupulous greedy business men, and for having a libido. Mr. Garcia's prosecution of Mr. Spitzer is questioned by the film, which also implies that Mr. Langone's wrath has punished all New Yorkers by depriving us of Mr. Spitzer's governance, which is certainly a new perspective.

One thing missing in the movie is, arguably, the one thing everyone came to see: Mr. Spitzer giving something of himself. At times, Mr. Spitzer stares into the camera, his deep voice a stuttering command of his flaws. But Mr. Spitzer's tie is as tight as ever, and his eyes are as dry and as challenging as ever.

Mr. Spitzer is last seen, in Mr. Gibney's film, walking down an unspecified street in Manhattan, blending into the crowd.

Based on journalist Lawrence Wright's one-man play of his best seller, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11—which you might remember as the one book Sarah Palin copped to reading when questioned by Katie Couric—My Trip to Al-Qaeda delves into the tangled web of politics and fanaticism behind not just the September 11 attacks, but how the West relates to Muslim culture in general. He even finds time to paint Osama bin Laden as the first great screenwriter of the 21st century, a monster crafting a narrative of America's coming ruin that began with the fall of the Twin Towers. It's all very Shakespearean in its tragedy.

Kudos to Gibney for taking what is ostensibly an audio book and livening things up a bit. Wright's stage play recounts his experiences researching The Looming Tower, and as thrilling as it all is, the author uses a tone and manner that's reminiscent of a Middle Eastern Studies professor: a riveting speaker and narrator he is not. But in his reporting and Gibney's meticulous editing, My Trip to Al-Qaeda comes to life. Toward the end, while Wright discusses the various atrocities that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda has perpetrated on innocents around the world—including many Muslims—Gibney cuts together a montage of news footage that recalls the heart-stopping quality of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. Like that film—and despite some inherent limitations—My Trip to Al-Qaeda is unsettling, incisive and downright scary. Just don't expect to leave feeling good about the future.

"I'm doing a project on the rise and fall, and possible redemption of Eliot Spitzer," Gibney said. He declined to say who else he'd interviewed.

Gibney told me he's not exactly sure when it's going to come out, but that he hopes to have the film on the screen this fall.

The Times Union points out that this is not the only thing being filmed right now in Albany, though Gibney's crew from Jigsaw Productions is not shutting down any highways.

Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, narrated by Johnny Depp, gets so far inside the tortured soul of its subject through his writings, musings and media sightings that it is amazing how much of the outside world breaks in to illuminate the political and social convulsions Hunter both reported and embodied. Indeed, Gonzo turns out to be the most absorbing film, fiction or nonfiction, I have seen this year. Thompson was certainly no plaster saint. Aside from his manic consumption of drugs, liquor and many forms of hallucinogens, he was a proud member of the National Rifle Association and the possessor of more than a score of firearms, one of which he used to kill himself in 2005.

Still, Tom Wolfe, who coined the terms “radical chic” and “the Me decade,” called Hunter “our greatest comic writer.” Mr. Wolfe is one of 19 admiring A-list interviewees, ranging from former Nixon speechwriter and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan on the right to George McGovern on the left. Sandy Thompson (now Sondi Wright), his first wife, and Anita Thompson, his second wife, are both on hand with compassionate comments on the often outrageous, but never boring, man in their lives.

I must confess at this point that the journalistic legend that was Hunter Thompson never clicked for me. Too much fear and loathing in Las Vegas and everywhere else for my repressed taste. Yet I was moved in the film by young Hunter’s taking his admiration of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the extreme, copying down every word of those exquisite sentences so that he could learn to write. The crucial biographical subtext for Hunter was that he, in Kentucky, like Fitzgerald in St. Paul, Minn., was on the outside looking in on all his rich classmates and their upper-class frolics, but whereas Fitzgerald pathetically pressed his nose against the window, Hunter resolved to blow up all these bastions of privilege.

What I didn’t know before I saw Gonzo was how much influence Hunter exerted in the 1972 nomination of George McGovern over Edmund Muskie, whom he loathed with such a strange passion that he spread a rumor that Muskie was taking an exotic Brazilian drug that supposedly explained his often bizarre behavior on the stump. If that isn’t a dirty trick worthy of Karl Rove, I don’t know what is. Less strange was Hunter’s post-Bobby Kennedy disgust with Hubert Humphrey and Mayor Daley’s broken-bones brokered 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, which led to the election of Richard Nixon. I have always been a lesser-evil type myself, and so I cannot empathize with Hunter’s unending and unyielding purity of purpose.

I was more on his side in his decisive efforts to place Jimmy Carter in the White House. I never knew Hunter, but after Mr. Gibney’s insightful melding of Hunter’s eloquent words with the heartfelt tributes of everyone who knew him—especially his son, Juan Thompson, and his two wives—I feel that I have learned enough about him to like him enormously, if only in retrospect.

There is a loony freeform look to the film that is fitting for the surreal spasms of the Nixon and Bush years. Mr. Gibney and all his collaborators have surpassed even Gibney’s much-honored Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side. Gonzo is a must-see for everyone.

asarris@observer.com