BEFORE: I've got five documentaries left after this one, and as I predicted, the docs have really shaken up the stats for the most appearances of the year. Richard Nixon has come out of nowhere to tie Robert De Niro for the lead, they've both got 8 appearances. That's what I get for watching so many docs set during the 1970's, like "Attica" and "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali" and also docs about politics, like "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists" and "Where's My Roy Cohn?". Presidents are always cheap cutaways during documentaries, so they tend to do well in my counts. Case in point - George W. Bush carries over today from "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time".
Currently tied for second, with 6 appearances each, are Bill Clinton, Walter Cronkite and MLK. Next with 5 appearances each are Muhammad Ali, Dale Dickey, Sean Penn, Anya Taylor-Joy and Malcolm X. Too many people with 4 appearances to mention them all, but thanks to my focus on Black History in April, Arthur Ashe, Sammy Davis Jr., Spike Lee, Barack Obama and Jackie Robinson are all on the board.
THE PLOT: A documentary that follows a billionaire couple as they begin construction on a mansion inspired by Versailles. Over the next two years, their empire, fueled by the real estate bubble, falters due to the economic crisis.
AFTER: This is a film that confirms what we've long suspected - that being rich doesn't make you classy, there are garbage humans at all income levels, it seems. In 2008 David Siegel and his trophy wife Jackie were riding high due to his successful Westgate Resorts time-share business. They were so wealthy that they set out to build the largest single-family private home in the country on one of their many plots of land, instead of just putting up another timeshare resort. John Oliver's HBO show did a scathing segment just a couple weeks ago about what an enormous scam the time-share industry is, how they use manipulative tactics to get people to sign up, how they then make it nearly impossible for the buyers to even spend time at the property they co-own, and how they don't allow the buyers to sell back their properties, EVER, and instead force them to be handed down to the next generation as part of the buyers' estates, so their children then are on the hook for the monthly payments for the rest of THEIR lives.
I guess this makes sense, I mean, you want to believe that if you die owning property, that property is going to then belong to your children or other heirs, unless they're in default, but your kids can always just SELL that property, they don't HAVE to live there and take care of it for you, anyway, you won't really care, you'll be dead, but with the timeshare space your children only own a PART of the property, like two weeks out of the year, and so maybe it's fine that someone inherits the time-share, but they should be given the chance to sell back their share, if they're not into the vacation resorts thing, or they wisely don't ever want to go to Florida. But instead it's like the old Wheel of Fortune prize showcases, once you buy something, it's yours to keep, even if you spin "Bankrupt" on the wheel later on.
So the real estate bubble burst - because that's what bubbles do. If you've got a piece of property and the value's going up, you can take comfort in knowing that your house or condo is worth more now than it was when you bought it. But to take advantage of that increase in value, you have to sell it, and now you don't have it. So, umm, where will you live then? I still feel like I pulled off a fast one back in 2004, when I sold my Brooklyn condo for FOUR times the price it was when I bought it in 1993 for $105K. (There was still $85K due on the mortgage, so I had to first pay off the bank with part of the $420K I got when I sold it.). We borrowed a quick $10K from my parents to cover the down payment on a house, then after the sale paid back my parents, covered legal fees, points, moving expenses and new furniture, and that left $280K to put toward the new house, which coincidentally also cost $420K. Still had to get a mortgage for the difference, but overall we went from owning 2/5 of a small condo to owning 2/3 of a three-story house. If I never make another real-estate deal in my life, I'll be happy with that one.
Now I feel like I'm in the same spot, though - according to NYC's assessment, the house is worth twice as much as it was when we bought it almost 20 years ago, but that's phantom money. We'd have to sell the house to get that money and then, umm, where would we live? But I can see that it's easy to think you're richer than you are once you start calculating the potential value of the house you're sitting in. But then, you're only rich on paper, not in the real world, and we have to live in the real world. And if that bubble bursts, all bets are off, and all plans go out the window. We kept hearing in 2003 that the bubble was going to burst, so we sold in 2004, and I think the bubble DID burst a couple years later. That made me feel like somebody who got off the Titanic before the iceberg hit.
The Siegels were caught in the "rich on paper" trap when the U.S. economy declined in 2008 - remember that the whole thing started with real estate, cheap credit and lax lending standards, and banks were holding trillions of dollars of worthless investments thanks to subprime mortgages. So then the banks needed a bailout, but who told them to invest in such shitty properties in the first place? Who made them loan money to people who couldn't pay it back? OK, a few people maybe can be in default, but if everybody's in default, then can take down a whole bank, or a series of banks. And then people can't get their money, so they can't keep their houses, so more evictions, more foreclosures, more layoffs, more unemployment. By then we're in the dark spiral of a recession, and the government has to step in, bailout the banks, facilitate a few mergers and basically stimulate economic growth again. And who's to say it won't happen again? Like, maybe next month?
The film took a look at the big by focusing on the small - one family whose income all came from the timeshare industry, and when people suddenly had no spare money to invest in the properties, there was no money coming in. This was probably a bad time for them to start building the largest house in the country. They had to move to the BACK-UP mansion, and look for other sources of income, like renting out their Rolls-Royce for weddings, and allowing one of their 27 nannies to move in to their daughter's abandoned playhouse. It's a bit odd, but this topic kind of carries over from yesterday's Kurt Vonnegut doc - as a teen Kurt remembers that his family lost their house during the Great Depression, and they also had to move to a smaller house.
The moral of the story is, to me, "Don't have kids." Kids are expensive, and you become responsible for them, you can't just leave them in the house you can't afford, you HAVE to bring them with you to the new place, legally, and then they're going to keep eating and getting sick and growing out of their clothes, what's the point? And then even if you take care of them for 17 or 18 years and they're still alive, it's time to pay for their college? Like, how do you even WIN that game? It's best to not start playing it in the first place, I think. Vonnegut had three kids and then adopted his late sister's four sons - that's SEVEN kids to feed on a writer's salary. No thanks.
The Siegels have a lot of kids, too - and being deep in debt didn't seem to keep them from splurging on Christmas presents, or buying a bunch of pets that their kids would neglect and forget to feed, or going on thrift-shop binges for a whole bunch of crap that they didn't even need. Clearly there's some obsessive behavior going on - I had an aunt who bought a lot of books when the local library had sales, but she would buy like THREE copies of the same book. Why? They were identical, and even if you read one, then you don't need the other two! Jackie also seemed to keep collecting furs and getting botox and obviously spending money they didn't have, but never once considering maybe getting a job to help pay some bills?
This stuff drives me crazy - I work for an independent filmmaker, and quite often, money is very tight. But never, ever have I seen him sit down, figure out the minimum costs per month to keep his business running, and then set that as an income target for that month. If you don't do this, you could easily be running at a loss every month, and at that point, it's only a certain number of months before you're so deep in debt, you can't climb out of it. Look, if you own a restaurant, you've got food costs, utilities, staff, rent, and maybe some local publicity, and you need to add that all up to calculate your monthly cost of doing business. It's good to know how much money you need to take in each month to reach your "break even" point, and if you're not hitting it, then you either need to take steps to fix that, or just shut the joint down. You can pay bills at random, but if you're not watching the bottom line then basically you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and it's still going down, no matter what.
Meanwhile, the tensions are running high in the marriage if there's no definite solution to their financial problems. And it's nerve-wracking to watch, because we can sit at home and watch the movie and think, "Why not just SELL the property?" "Why not just GET A JOB?" "Why not just STOP BUYING THINGS YOU DON'T NEED?" They can't stop, they're too far gone. Let's face it, you can't win, if you have some money and buy a house, now you have a house to care for, and that costs money, so you need more. So you get a better job, but you need to dress better or get a new wardrobe for it, and that costs money. Even if you start taking in more money than you're spending, you'll either find something new to spend it on, like a vacation or another car, or you'll save some money, but then get taxed on it. Yeah, it's not looking good, whoever set up this whole furshlugginer economic system ought to be taken out and shot. Roy Cohn only won because he died owing millions in taxes that he didn't pay, only he's too dead to enjoy it.
How long HAS this film been on my list? It was released in 2012, but I don't think I became aware of it until a few years later, so let's say maybe I've been trying to get to it for five, maybe six years? It was very, very hard for me to link to it, until I sort of pre-scanned through it and realized who appears in the archive footage - good ol' Dubya himself. OK, I figured I could probably work with that and finally FINALLY get this one scratched off the list. I took so long to watch this one that apparently there is now a SEQUEL TV series coming to Discovery, called "Queen of Versailles Reigns Again". This is not a commercial (although I kind of wish it were) - I'm not getting paid anything to promote this new show. (What is the opposite of an "influencer"? Whatever it is, that's me.). It looks like the Siegel's hung on to their dream house through thick and thin, they never sold Versailles on the cheap just to make ends meet, and just maybe they finished building it and decorating it, against all practical advice. Well, I guess some people will just never learn. You can watch the show, but I don't think I have the stomach for it.
Also starring David Siegel, Jaqueline Siegel, Richard Siegel, Victoria Siegel, Lorraine Barrett, June Downs, Phillip Froelich, Marissa Gaspay, Tina Martinez, Virginia Nebab, Jonquil Peed, Wendy Ponce, Katie Stam, Terry Vaughn, Cliff Wright, Alyse Zwick
with archive footage of William Baldwin (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Laura Bush (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Dick Cheney (also carrying over from "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Katie Couric (last seen in "Venus and Serena"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Alan Greenspan, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Paris Hilton (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Steve Kroft (last seen in "Sheryl"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Eraser"), Sylvester Stallone (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Fire With Fire"),
RATING: 5 out of 10 different kitchens
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