FRESH AIR
Nick Hornby has written the screenplay for the new film An Education. The movie — about a teenage girl coming of age in ’60s Britain, post-war and pre-rock — is based on a memoir by journalist Lynn Barber. This isn’t Hornby’s first foray into film; many of his novels have been made into movies, including About a Boy and High Fidelity. His novel Fever Pitch, about a soccer-obsessed English teacher, was adapted for the silver screen, then re-adapted for American audiences with a Boston Red Sox fanatic (Jimmy Fallon, playing opposite Drew Barrymore) as the protagonist. Hornby has a new novel out as well; Juliet, Naked is another story chock full of music-obsessed characters, people who embody the word “fanatic.” But this time, the vantage point from which he writes includes not just the fan, but also the fan’s girlfriend — and the musician he’s obsessed with.
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
In which we mark the anniversary of the economic collapse and the anniversary of Planet Money: recapping some of the original episode, The Giant Pool of Money, and finding out what’s happened to all those guys in the year since. Prologue. Host Ira Glass talks with NPR correspondent Adam Davidson about a black tie event he attended in the spring of 2008. The event was an awards dinner for finance professionals who created the mortgage-based financial instruments that nearly brought down the global economic system. Adam checks back with one of the men he met at that dinner and learns how his views have changed, pretty radically, over the last 18 months. (5 minutes)
We replay sections from the original Giant Pool of Money, in which This American Life producer Alex Blumberg teams up with NPR’s Adam Davidson to tell the story of how the U.S. got itself into a housing crisis. They talk to people who were actually working in the housing, banking, finance and mortgage industries, about what they thought during the boom times, and why the bust happened. We hear from a mortgage company sales manager who was making over a million dollars a year and spending his time clubbing with celebrities. We meet a man who got into the mortgage industry after getting hired away from his previous job as a bartender. And we follow a Marine who was tricked into an unaffordable mortgage as he tries to save his house from foreclosure. (30 minutes) Act Two. Fall 2009. We catch back up with the people we met in 2008, to see how they’ve fared over the last 18 months. We talk to Clarence Nathan, who in 2008 received a half million dollar loan that he said he wouldn’t have given himself; Jim Finkel, a Wall Street finance guy, who put together and managed complicated mortgage-based financial securities; Richard Campbell, the Marine who was facing foreclosure; and Glen Pizzolorusso, the mortgage company sales manager who led the life of a b-list celebrity. (19 minutes)