Enron bags award

Alex Gibney's documentary on the energy giant's corporate scandal has won the Writers Guild award.

The documentary

HT Image

Enron

:

The Smartest Guys in the Room

won the Writers Guild award for documentary screenplay.

The prize recognised writer Alex Gibney, who also produced and directed the film. It came two days into the much-awaited criminal trial of former Enron Corp executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in Houston.

A jury is to decide whether Lay and Skilling orchestrated the accounting scheme that crashed Enron, once the seventh-largest company in the United States, in December 2001.

"I'm delighted to get this award," Gibney told The Associated Press after accepting his prize in a ceremony yesterday night at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

"I also think that with the trial beginning, I hope it will shed some light on the kind of morality tale that Enron has become in the late part of the 20th Century," he added.

He jokingly thanked the former Enron executives whom he called "some of the greatest fiction writers of all time."

The film, which offers an inside portrait of the energy giant's corporate scandal, is also nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature.

The Writers Guild award honours non-fiction writers who "collect images from reality and shape them into a story, not only to document the human condition, but to illuminate and inspire the world we live in.