OK In-Depth; Maxed Out Film

The 6th Annual Dead Center Film Festival officially opened in Oklahoma City last night. Now through Sunday, moviegoers will screen dozens of independent features, short films, and documentaries from across the country and around the world. The festival kicked off with the screening of Maxed Out, filmmaker James Skurlock's documentary about the credit card industry and the effects of debt on American society. Skurlock doesn't have any formal film training, but he did go to business school, and he says he was intrigued by the basic question of why so many Americans are unable to escape from debt. Debt was the biggest issue out there to me. You know, it affects everybody, affects young and old, rich and poor, gay, straight, black, white, liberal, conservative. It's just something that everyone in this country is dealing with on an individual basis and collectively as a nation. What were you aiming to capture and convey in making this? Originally, I thought it was going to be a really light-hearted piece, you know, where we would go out and find a bunch of $30,000 million

areas and people living beyond their means, and you know, all the cases you hear about. And there's a lot of stories out there of people being very foolish and behaving very irresponsibly. But as we really got into it, we realized what's changed over the past generation is not how consumers behave. Really, it's how the financial industry behaves. And then that slowly became the thrust and the focus of the film. How the financial industry behaves, the film argues, is to seek out people who are likely to rack up enormous debts. The most profitable customers it found are the least responsible consumers, housewives, people who declared bankruptcy, people who consume beyond their means, and college students. My son was 22 and a junior at OU, and he was making minimum wage, holding down two jobs, and he had 12 credit cards and $14,000 in debt, and he killed himself over it. Jan O'Donnell's son was one of the people whose stories were highlighted in Macstow.

He was a very smart kid. He was a national merit scholar. He was trying to go to law school. That was his dream. You know, he came home Macstow, his parents couldn't help him out because they had another son who was going to college, and he dulled his mom, he felt like a failure, and he didn't understand how he'd gotten into it. He didn't understand how to get out, he was saving up to declare bankruptcy, and he hung himself. Jan O'Donnell has spent the past seven years speaking out with another Oklahoma mother whose college-aged daughter also committed suicide after racking up credit card debt. The two women are trying to keep credit card companies from marketing to college students, who they feel are often too young to use credit cards responsibly. O'Donnell hopes the film will attract some attention to the problem. I saw the film at South by Southwest in Austin, which was at Stabiu, and I think this is the most moving documentary I've ever seen. It just makes you cry, but it also lifts up your spirits, and after Austin people came and hugged us and said, this is going to make a difference. Some reviewers have criticized Macstow for focusing on worst-case scenarios, failing to discuss the subject of personal responsibility when it comes to spending, and failing to provide any solutions to the problem of debt.

In a question and answer session after the film, producer James Skurlock agreed with an audience member that one partial way to deal with the problem would be for schools to do a better job teaching students to manage their finances in the real world. Macstow will be shown to members of Congress later this year, and Skurlock's also busy turning it into a book. I'm Keiji O.U. News Director Scott Gurion.