While working as a house painter to fulfill his desire to pursue a career in film, CPN tribal member Jimmy Morrison observed the effects of the peak of the 2008 housing bubble. Now, after years of research, interviews and screenings, this year he will release the last in a trilogy of films covering that event.
The first film, co-written by New York Times best-selling author Tom Woods, is described as a “critical, non-partisan examination of the policies and events that shaped the United States economy into one bursting bubble after another.”
“The Housing Bubble is just the first film in a trilogy, looking back at the causes of not just the bubble leading up to 2008, but other bubbles from the past century like the dot com bubble and the Great Depression,” Morrison said.
The second and third films in the trilogy, The Fall of 2008 and The Bigger Bubble, follow, with the second releasing March 14 and the third during the summer.
How it all started
Morrison, a member of the Muller family, was studying economics and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa in 2007. However, that path was not his ultimate goal.
“I knew if I got a degree, I’d never pursue my dream of becoming a filmmaker, so I dropped out and used my house painting business to fund my early projects,” Morrison said.
Not long after, the U.S. housing crash took place, and he found himself listening to an audiobook of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Though the book was written in 1946, he described the housing bubble “perfectly.” Morrison, intrigued and hoping for insight to avoid future bubbles, sought others who might have predicted the bubble.
owever, he found a shortage of economics documentaries, so he set out to create his own.
“I drove over 35,000 miles, sometimes sleeping in my car before interviewing some of the most successful investors of the last century,” he said.
He said Ron Paul is the most well-known of the people he interviewed for the film, but he shot 15 interviews from 2011 to 2013. Among those were Peter Schiff, who appeared on cable news networks as a critic of the housing bubble; David Stockman, who was budget director for Ronald Reagan and resigned to protest deficit spending; and Doug Casey, who wrote the bestselling non-fiction book, Crisis Investing.
Finishing touches
Morrison, as he put the documentary together, previewed footage at the Warsaw School of Economics in Poland, led talks in Lithuania, Estonia, Mexico, and Canada, and did an initial test screening in New York City, with more to follow in locations such as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Reservation, Fort Peck Indian Reservation and Spokane, Washington.
“I knew I needed more time to make the film more accessible to the general public,” he said. “It had to be easy to understand so that people with no economics background whatsoever could follow every scene.”
The process was not without its difficulties, including “essentially going bankrupt” and a producer attempting a hostile takeover of the project.
However, in 2018, Morrison premiered the film at the Anthem Film Festival in Las Vegas, drawing a large audience among the attendees.
“Even after adding 50 seats, the 320-plus crowd spilled out into the hallway,” he said. “The Housing Bubble earned an Audience Award and still holds the attendance record at the festival.”
The initial premiere was followed by a tour across the U.S., a sold-out New York City premiere at the Angelika Film Center in 2019, and a digital release that was followed by a Blu-ray and DVD release.
Though Morrison said the project continued to face setbacks — including the cancellation of events during COVID-19 and Facebook banning the website until an employee overturned the decision in 2021 — they made sales in every state in the U.S. and in more than 70 other countries.
Profits from the release of the film were reinvested to finish the second and third films in the trilogy.
“The Fall of 2008 covers the responses to the financial crisis from 2008-2010 and will be out in March,” Morrison said. “The Bigger Bubble covers the following decade of permanent bank bailouts and money printing that led to the problems we are dealing with today. The Bigger Bubble will premiere this summer.”
Other projects along the way and ahead
Morrison has also worked on other projects, filling roles such as script consultant, producer and director.
He was script consultant for Grid Down, a documentary about the electrical grid that earned a Storyteller Award at the DOCLA Film Festival. He also worked with his composer/sound editor, Jake Dilley, to handle the motion graphics for the film, which was narrated by Dennis Quaid.
Morrison said he has traveled throughout the U.S. to film Dilley’s band, The Color Pharmacy, including filming the music video Aperture and a feature-length film titled Rocksteppy about “two brothers on their quest to ‘make it.’” Rocksteppy features cameos with Oscar winning directors David Lynch and Peter Farrelly and was the first of four films that Morrison made with editor Matthew Hartman.
He also premiered his short film, My Dad The Honor Flight Director, in 2023 at a film festival in Memphis, Tennessee. The film follows his father, Bob Morrison, who spent years taking thousands of veterans to see memorials in Washington, D.C., but has to “step back and refocus” after a battle with dementia.
“The film screened at the longest running movie theater in the world. My grandparents grew up in Washington, Iowa, going to that same theater in the 1920s, 100 years before they were projected on the big screen,” Morrison said.
As Morrison nears the completion of his trilogy, he said he has ideas for what he might highlight next.
One of those ideas is something focusing on alternative education. He said he started an RV School in 2019, hoping to allow children to “take charge of their education and expand it outside of the classroom,” and that his children attend a nature school called Tamarack Discovery School. With topics like this being important to him, he said it will “probably be in the mix” for what he might pursue next.
“Whatever project ends up being next, I just want to tell stories,” he said. “My company is Let Us Disagree Films, because I believe every single person has their own differing beliefs and life to live, so the only way we can move forward and grow is by sharing our stories with each other. By being willing to let others make different choices than us. We have to be able to disagree.”
Learn more about Morrison and his work at letusdisagree.com. Morrison said Tribal members could get his movies for free on his website with the code keepersofthefire.