Documentary film director and author James D. Scurlock, 34, is on a mission to educate Americans about the life-ruining (and sometimes deadly) consequences of credit card debt. With the same single-minded passion as Morgan Spurlock, who showcased Americans’ other excess (Super Size Me, 2004), and Al Gore, who tackled global warming (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006, directed by Davis Guggenheim), Scurlock’s Maxed Out (2006) exposes practices within the financial industry that will have his audience seeing red, not green.

 

Scurlock chose to document the issue of debt because, as he explained in an April 2006  Newsweek interview, “Debt is the one issue that affects all of us—rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, liberal or conservative.” While the feature-length documentary dedicated to this issue, Maxed Out has earned well-deserved accolades, the subject matter is garnering fresh attention with the March 6 release of the film’s companion book, chronicling Scurlock’s experiences in making the documentary. It is entitled, Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (Scribner, $24), and with recent reports that 2006 personal financial savings among Americans was the lowest since the Great Depression (at negative 1 percent), it proves to be timely subject matter. 

 

Maxed Out, which began as a comical attempt by the filmmakers to analyze why so many Americans are “addicted” to debt, soon took a turn toward the tragic. With discoveries of exploitation of the impoverished and vulnerable by the financial industry and grieving mothers tearfully discussing their college-age children’s suicides over their credit card debts, the issue wasn’t so cute anymore. Scurlock describes the pain that he witnessed victims of debt—and their families—suffer: “We started out looking for stories we thought would be funny and illustrative of consumers being irresponsible…But I remember the second or third interview we did, suicide came up, and this woman started crying ... And I was shocked—but when people get trapped and they can't see any way out, suicide definitely comes to mind. Everybody we talked to who was a victim of predatory lending said they had considered suicide.” (Newsweek)

 

According to a recent Zogby poll, one in five credit card holders who owe debt are “very worried” about it and are concerned that they’ll “never be able to pay it all off.” (Zogby’s American Consumer newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 3, March 2007) Over one-third of respondents (35 percent) admitted that they do not fully read the credit card disclosure statement before applying for a card, which indicates the imposed level of interest by the credit card company.  However, while over half (61 percent) do read the fine print, over three-quarters (77 percent) of respondents indicate that they are unhappy with their current interest rates, deeming them “too high.”

 

In an effort to fight the high interest rates, over a third (35 percent) of the respondents contacted their credit card companies to try to negotiate a lower rate.  Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of them were able to reduce their interest rates “significantly,” while over half (53 percent) said that they received a “slight” interest rate reduction. Nearly one in five (19 percent) said they did not receive any reduced interest rate when they made similar efforts.

 

While the fine print of high interest may be dismissed by many credit card holders, it brings us to a salient point regarding the nature of financial institutions and their customers. Are they all capable of reading the fine print? Are they educated, literate, and emotionally stable? Is English their second language? In the past, people worried that they wouldn’t even qualify for a credit card; that’s how stringent banks were before signing up new clients. Nowadays, everyone qualifies, and that’s what has led us to this time of easy credit. And easy debt.

 

Scurlock’s discoveries while making Maxed Out were shocking, even for a savvy researcher like himself, as he told Newsweek. “If you had told me that Citigroup, which is [one of the] largest financial groups in the world, was trolling the backwoods of Mississippi for customers, I would have questioned your veracity. But they are, and they're finding people. They're going around very poor neighborhoods, in very poor parts of the country, finding people who have some home equity, finding people who've been responsible, who've saved, who have something left, and taking it from them.”