Tell me it's not true - is Enron the movie coming out soon

asks Dogbreath:
A. Oh yes, you haven't heard the last of this one. According to Variety, the trade paper of the film industry, there are currently four separate film ventures to record the multi-billion pound collapse of the energy company, but there may be more.

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Q. What's the attraction
A. It's a great story - full of subterfuge and corruption, villains and heroes, death and drama. It's not every day that Hollywood gets handed a tale like that.

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Q. What about the love interest
A. Well, when the Enron scandal first broke, there wasn't enough of the usual fiom formula of drama or love interest for movie-makers to take it seriously. It was all about suit jobs in corporate land - pretty dull stuff for cinema audiences.

However, everything was spiced up by the suicide of former Enron vice-chairman J Clifford Baxter in January. At 43, we was a millionaire who'd recently retired.

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The love interest come from the women involved, who seemed to be the only ones to question what was going on in the company.

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Q. Can we expect an Erin Brockovich-type movie
A. Very likely. One of the films is likely to be based on the story of Jan Avery, a former accountant with Enron. She spotted that something wasn't right in the accounts department as long ago as 1993. Her first job with the company was to justify a loss on the books of $142m, and , like Erin Brockovich, she is a single mother.

And a forthcoming book, Power Failure by Mimi Swartz, has as a hero the whistle-blower and Enron executive Sherron Watkins.

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Q. Will all the films have women as heroes
A. No, not all. Linda Lay, wife of Enron's chairman and chief executive and friend of George W Bush, famously made a broadcast saying that her husband didn't know anything about what was happening at Enron, and they had lost everything - everything, that it, except a few pay-offs totalling $40 million.

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By Sheena Miller