Document text
'There’s an energy — they’re still buzzing’ By Nick Morgan Updated: Jun 15, 2022 03:40 PM A A 3 View all photos A Reddit known by the handle @JeffAmazon made $8 million off of $50,000 worth of GameStop stock in early 2021. He’s among the voices featured in the new MSNBC documentary “Diamond Hands: The Legend of Wall Street Bets” produced by Southern Oregon filmmaker Gary Kout. “Diamond Hands: The Legend of Wall Street Bets” produced by Southern Oregon filmmaker Gary Kout explores the major hedge funds so sure that the 90s-era, mall-based retailer Game Stop was doomed that the size of the bet against the company was 140 percent the size of the company itself. Screen grab. Southern Oregon filmmaker Gary Kout produced the MSNBC documentary “Diamond Hands: The Legend of Wall Street Bets” now streaming on the Peacock TV platform. Southern Oregon filmmaker Gary Kout's new documentary ‘Diamond Hands' explores when Wall Street and web culture collided and Reddit users got rich A local filmmaker’s documentary shown at local and national film festivals — as well as on MSNBC — is now available for home streaming. The 82-minute documentary delves into the GameStop stock short squeeze of early 2021, when hordes of individual investors taking cues from the Reddit page r/WallStreetBets made themselves millionaires by buying stock of the video game retail chain at a time when most investors at the institutional level were shorting the stock. Ashland-based filmmaker Gary Kout, who produced “Diamond Hands: The Legend of Wall Street Bets,” describes the 82-minute documentary as “a comedy, but an absurdist comedy.” Some on the forum were online gamblers wanting to use the Robinhood trading app to get rich. Others Kout described as “irreverent anarchists.” The film straddles the lines between drama and comedy, news and history as it delves into the lives of inexperienced investors who watched their life savings invested in the meme stock soar and tumble. Kout said he and directors Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper — friends and business partners of Kout since a shoot for a Super Bowl commercial more than a decade ago — worked to keep the frenetic pace of Reddit in their presentation by tracking the stock price to each voice’s timeline. They stuck to visual themes of lines trending up and rocket emojis. “People could just feel the energy of the moment, even if they didn’t understand the mechanics of it,” Kout said. Kout said his team deliberated how deeply to take people into the mechanics of complicated financial instruments such as stock futures and short selling. “At the end of the day, we didn’t want this to be an instructional film,” Kout said. “If we went too deep, it’d just get bogged down in the academia of it.” Kout said they were able to go deeper into their storytelling thanks to groundwork from NBC News, which had been keeping tabs on the WallStreetBets Reddit page when the news agency reached out. “They knew our work and our previous documentaries, and asked us if this was something we were aware of,” Kout said. Kout has production credits for documentary films that include “Flint Town, a Netflix Original Documentary Series” and “Fire in Paradise, a Netflix Original Short Documentary,” the latter of which was on the 2019 Academy Award Short List. He described NBC News as “really next level” with “wonderful collaborators” and “incredible input.” Netflix, in contrast, was “more supervisory.” “They’re a news organization that had wonderful resources that we would not have had for sure had we done this independently,” Kout said. He described making a documentary film on a still-developing topic as a challenge because “you don’t fully have the benefit of hindsight.” Striking while the iron was still hot, however, made it easier for filmmakers to capture the swings in emotion still fresh in the everyone’s minds. “There’s an energy — they’re still buzzing,” Kout said of his interviews with people, some who became millionaires and others who lost everything. “All these people were still buzzing.” Some investors bought GameStop stock in late 2020 when it was trading in the single digits. It grew exponentially to a Jan. 28 peak of $483 per share. Phrases on Reddit such as “Diamond Hands” encouraged stockholders not to sell at any price. The stock took a sharp tumble shortly thereafter when retail investor trading apps such as Robinhood and E-Trade started barring users from buying the stock. The commission-free trading platforms cited liquidity concerns as the reason for halting sales of the stock. Politicians, federal regulators and users on Reddit all cried foul at the time and in the months that followed, leading to hearings with federal regulators. “We had to watch it all and figure out which parts were appropriate,” Kout said. Filming began in May 2021and continued through September. Production wrapped in January, and the film premiered in March at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Kout said he knew going into the project that it “was also a little bit of a race in our industry,” because HBO was in the midst of its own two-part documentary titled “Gaming Wall Street.” The documentary was shown in March three times at SXSW 2022 — one of the first American film festivals to reopen to in-person audiences since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — but also was shown at Ashland Independent Film Festival. Kout also is credited as a consulting producer for the short film shot in Ashland “You Go Girl,” which premiered at Sundance Film Festival. “It was a banner year for festivals,” Kout said. Kout lived in New York and spent a decade and a half in Los Angeles before moving to the Rogue Valley 19 years ago. He said he moved to Southern Oregon “mainly just chasing quality of life.” “As a place to call home, there isn’t anything better,” Kout said. He found himself surprised to find an active film community in Southern Oregon. To bolster that energy, Kout founded the nonprofit now known as Film Southern Oregon in 2008. His film credits include “Calvin Marshall” (2009), “Rango” (2011), “Redwood Highway” (2013), “Black Road” (2016) and “Phoenix, Oregon” (2019). His advertising production work has taken him around the world with work for clients such as Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), Nike and Honda, but he also finds work here in the Rogue Valley taking on clients such as Harry & David. “There are few places that are as enjoyable and as film-friendly as in Southern Oregon,” Kout said. Kout also is an adviser to Southern Oregon University’s new “The Crew Experience” class and has collaborated for years with the university’s film school, which he said is the “most intense in the state.” “We punch above our weight,” Kout said. Kout’s film “Diamond Hands: The Legend of Wall Street Bets” is available free for streaming on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock. Sign up at PeacockTV.com. Reach web editor Nick Morgan at 541-776-4471 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MTwebeditor.