PURE GOLD
A new movie about greedy miners looking for the mother lode is strikingly similar to the Bre-X swindle of the 1990s. And as Sunny Freeman writes, the producers couldn’t believe their luck when they learned no one in Hollywood had yet told the tale.
It has all of the elements befitting a classic Hollywood tale: mystery, adventure, treasure, greed, corruption, betrayal, exotic locales, plot twists and … gold.
The movie Gold, opening in theatres across Canada on Jan. 27, is the story of a brash, chain-smoking, pot-bellied mine prospector whose dream of finding the mother lode is all-consuming. Down and out, he meets a rugged geologist, a fabled “river walker,” who convinces him to visit Borneo, Indonesia, and buy a property deep in the jungle.
They strike gold, and big-time investment bankers and multinational miners come calling. Their fortunes soar and they are the kings of the industry. That is until the dream suddenly turns to nightmare when their gold strike is discovered to be fraudulent since their samples are salted with river gold. Sound familiar? Gold just so happens to be — as the movie posters say — “based on a too good to be true story.” Most Canadians will think it’s based on the $6-billion Bre-X Minerals Ltd. stock-market swindle of the 1990s, the country’s most notorious scandal. But for legal and mass-appeal reasons, the company in the film is not Calgary-based Bre-X, but fictitious Reno, Nev.-based Washoe Mining Inc. Though Canadians have long said the Bre-X story played out like a movie script, like most Canadian legends, its juicy plot was little known outside the mining community.
To recap, David Walsh, the penny stock promoter of Bre-X, bought a property near the Busang River in Borneo on the advice of well-respected geologist John Felderhof, and then hired a project manager, Filipino geologist Michael de Guzman, who made the first glittering estimate of the site’s potential. Eventually, it was claimed the site held 70 million ounces of gold.
In the film, Walsh becomes Kenny Wells (or Kenny Walsh in early script iterations), played by a balding Matthew McConaughey, while Felderhof and de Guzman are compressed into one character, Michael Acosta, played by Edgar Ramirez.
Gold screenwriter Patrick Massett said he came across Bre-X by fluke one night while watching an episode of Canadian true crime series Mastermind that featured the scandal. He called producer/writer John Zinman, his writing partner on the modern treasure hunt film Lara Croft:Tomb Raider, to tell him of his amazing discovery.
Zinman liked the story of how the junior miner’s Busang project went from the largest gold discovery in mining history to its most elaborate fraud in little more than a year, and signed on as a partner.
“It was incredible and I called John and I said: ‘Hey, man. You re- ally should check out this story. It’s pretty amazing,’ ” Massett said in an interview. “He watched and immediately got it as well. It just kind of lays out like a great movie.”
It was so good they assumed someone would already be working on a script based on the story or a version thereof. But in Hollywood, Canada’s great stock market mystery was an undiscovered resource. They couldn’t believe their luck.
The pair did a deep dive, scouring financial publications, newspaper and magazine clippings and the handful of books written on the topic, mostly by Canadian reporters who covered the saga.
“Really no one in Hollywood knew the story, but the most sensational aspects of the story — things like de Guzman’s body being eaten by wild boars and shady government dealing, you can’t invent that kind of stuff,” Massett said.
“The most fantastical elements of the story are the most accurate. They’re the true parts!”
The partners had to pare some of their favourite details, such as de Guzman’s many wives all over the world, to focus on the point they wanted to make about the current economic climate: The perils of what happens “when people are getting rich and no one wants to look,” Zinman said.
“We thought that in the bones of the Bre-X story laid a really great parable for where we are societally. We didn’t set out to tell the Bre-X story, we were really inspired by the pathos and the greed, the corruption that was at the heart of that story and we told a story that was inspired by those events.”
Throw in some Hollywood alchemy, influenced by current economic events, classic treasure capers such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and boiler-room dramas like Glengarry Glen Ross and Bre-X is transmuted into Gold.
The metaphorical properties of gold were a bonus, Zinman said.
“Gold is so universal in its symbolic power the idea of gold being a corruptible force — you know the Midas touch, it doesn’t end well for Midas.”
The screenwriters are sympathetic to Walsh and Felderhof as entrepreneurs putting their “skin on the line” and see the behaviour of the bankers and the major mining companies as nearly as wrong as what the pair may have done.
“There was so much skulduggery in the story, so when Kenny Wells or David Walsh, depending on which story you’re telling, get the better of the big guys, it’s a victory,” Zinman said. “It’s David versus Goliath.”
In real life, both Felderhof and Walsh maintained de Guzman swindled them along with everyone else. The resulting fallout left a legacy of federal investigations, recriminations and lawsuits.
The key mystery of the true story — the controversy surrounding the death of de Guzman, who apparently jumped out of a helicopter — was the hook that made Massett and Zinman want to tell the story. They were giddy with every new detail they uncovered, such as when they discovered late into their research that de Guzman’s body had no hands, face or feet.
“This story kept giving and giving as we went along,” Zinman said.
The film’s creators had long discussions on how to portray that pivotal scene in a way that was cinematic and open-ended.
“Our thinking was: let’s at least keep the mystery alive: did de Guzman, or Acosta rather, live?” he said. “The next question, of course, is was Kenny Wells in on it with him or was he duped by his friend along with everybody else?”
The pair loved the technical details, such as the differences between gold mined from the ground and the rounded, different-coloured river gold that was dusted on the fraudulent samples, and how so many industry-types were duped.
“When it’s too good to be true, no one wants to look that close at the details because no one wants it not to be true,” Zinman said. “Even though the answer was right in front of everybody’s face — it was the wrong gold, the find was not right — no one really wanted to look, so there was a wilful ignorance that happened. We’ve all participated in that in one way or the other — not wanting to see the truth.”