Inside look at auto industry bailout 'Live Another Day' opens Friday

The documentary gives an inside look at decisions made by Pres. Barack Obama's auto task force to ensure the survival of General Motors and Chrysler.Watch video

DETROIT - "Live Another Day," a film about the woes that pushed two of the Detroit Three automakers to seek a taxpayer bailout, opens in select theaters Friday (full list of Michigan locations below).

The documentary gives insiders' perspectives at decisions made by Pres. Barack Obama's auto task force to ensure the survival of General Motors and Chrysler.

As the title suggests, the film explains that leading up to the bailouts, automakers were so bloated with costs - especially from labor - that they were simply trying to survive another day in business as they bled cash. The collapse of the American economy and evaporation of consumer credit finally ensured drastic change in 2008 and 2009.

Many people may not know how close Chrysler came to completely folding. It's a pertinent part of the film and arguably one of the most interesting business wheeling-dealings of the last decade, when Fiat SpA CEO Sergio Marchionne successfully took operational control of Chrysler without paying a dime.

Marchionne argued in part that access to Fiat's small car technology was worth billions of dollars by itself. Ironically, as "Live Another Day" points out, just a few years later big vehicles such as SUVs and trucks are now driving sales in the U.S., and Fiat may have itself needed support if not for taking on Chrysler and benefiting from its Jeep and Ram brands.

While an interesting tidbit, it was just one of several pieces that fit together into the puzzle that was the auto industry bailout.  

After a screening for journalists in Royal Oak last week, the filmmakers were asked about the film seeming to lean somewhat against the UAW; plenty of time is given to executives explaining how the automakers were at the mercy of the UAW and its threat of strikes, but there is seemingly little defense from the autoworkers' union for why it needed some of the concessions it received over the years.

"We went to the solidarity house to interview (former UAW president) Bob King and it was at a time when, for whatever reason, we tried to talk about the bailout and the issues that led to it and it was always, 'We're facing the future,' and 'We're working on combined problem solving,' and it was a very frustrating interview, to be honest," co-director Bill Burke said. King did have brief speaking parts in the film, too.

Former UAW president Ron Gettelfinger, a key union official during the industry bailout, declined to participate in the documentary. Burke said an interview was also lined up with former UAW vice president General Holyfield, but he passed away in March 2015 as the film was in the works.  

"It was frustrating," Burke said. "We hoped to have more balance just in terms of voice but it was a challenge for us." 

However, co-director Didier Pietri argued that the film and its directors remained completely objective, as they both came from outside of Detroit and the auto industry without any preconceived notions.

Pietri said they approached the project out of curiosity and a desire to learn more after picking up a copy of "Crash Course," a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Ingrassia and on which the film is based. Ingrassia is interviewed throughout the documentary.

In "Crash Course," Ingrassia spells out the history of the industry from when Henry Ford was a young boy tinkering around in machine shops all the way up to the bailouts. And so it also has the time and space to illustrate the bloody struggle that gave rise to workers' rights and Walter Reuther's UAW.

But in "Live Another Day," there is limited time to explain the evolution of the UAW, even over the last five decades. The union is seen as a labor monopoly that holds a knife to the automakers' throats. Concessions made to the UAW grew bloated and unsustainable in the years leading up to the bailouts, the film shows.

One of the more glaring examples of this was the jobs bank, in which temporarily laid off workers got 95 percent of their pay, which on the surface may not be the most egregious form of unemployment insurance, but the system devolved into more senior workers deliberately getting laid off so they could collect paychecks for doing nothing. 

Even after playing such a role leading up to the auto bailouts, the UAW was spared the raw end of the deal in the Fiat-Chrysler merger. The same could not be said for Chrysler's creditors.

Overall, "Live Another Day" offers fascinating insight into the inner-workings of the auto task force and retrospect on its decisions, now a few years out from events which moved maddeningly fast in Obama's first days as president. 

For an auto journalist, this kind of stuff is like candy, and the hour-and-half (105 minutes, to be exact) documentary could have run another three more hours as far as I'm concerned. But is a film about the auto industry bailout interesting to the average movie-goer?

If you are even slightly interested in the industry that helped build the American middle class and then nearly dissolved just seven years ago, then I think the answer is yes. 

Here's where the film is being shown in Michigan: