'The Big Short' evokes big tears, bad memories for viewers who lived through Phoenix real-estate crash

• Metro Phoenix’s housing market is a few years into a solid recovery, but the bust is still painful
• Fraudulent moves with subprime mortgages made by Wall Street played out in metro Phoenix
• Scenes from movie featuring Brad Pitt painfully reminiscent of what happened in the Valley

In the Oscar-nominated movie "The Big Short," a hedge fund manager knocks on the door of a new Miami house bought with a mortgage that hasn’t been paid in months. The man who answers the door with his toddler son is renting the house and making his payments.

When the man finds out his landlord isn’t paying the mortgage, the man’s fear in losing a home for his family is painful to watch.

It's 2006. The Florida neighborhood is half built and nearly deserted, very much like new metro Phoenix subdivisions on the fringes during the crash that started the following year.

I teared up watching the man realize his family would probably be homeless soon. So did Arizona housing analyst Mike Orr, who was sitting next to me. The same heartbreaking scenario played out over and over in the Valley back then.

That's one of the reasons I had been putting off seeing "The Big Short," a movie about the events that led up the disastrous housing crash.

Metro Phoenix’s housing market is a few years into a solid recovery, but my angst about the moves made on Wall Street that led to the boom and bust here hasn’t gone away.

I still flinch when someone says “subprime loan.”

The movie is all about big investment houses and banks that created those bad loans. They profited grossly from them, got bailed out when the loans failed and then the bankers behind them failed to be jailed.

But I knew I needed to see the movie. So earlier this week, I asked two of Arizona’s top housing analysts — Orr of Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School and Tom Ruff of the Information Market — to watch it with me. Misery loves company, they say.

We met at a theater in a Tempe shopping center that opened at the end of the boom and struggled to find retailers to keep their doors open during the bust years when lenders foreclosed on 5,000 Valley homeowners a month.

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I talked to Ruff often during the boom and bust and relied on his knowledge and data. He detected first the huge increase in housing speculators in early 2005 and called the peak of the boom in mid-2006, months before anyone else.

Orr, who also publishes the Cromford Report, became a valued source two years later after Ruff introduced me to him. In 2009, Orr called the market bottom for Phoenix’s housing debacle. Unfortunately, we had two bottoms — the last one in 2011 — but he called them both.

I went to the movie looking forward to catching up with my viewing companions but also thinking of the many, many people I talked to during the crash who desperately tried to keep their homes and jobs and far too often failed.

When "The Big Short" started, the three of us were sitting with our arms crossed and faces hardened, almost as if we were preparing for a fight or some very bad news.

We grimaced at some scenes, nodded at others that brought back bad memories, laughed at the funny lines not related to the crash, and two of us cried.

A few scenes were the most poignant for us. A bit of a spoiler alert here.

When the inevitable scene came — the man and his family who had been renting the home in the half-built Miami subdivision end up living out of their beat-up SUV — Orr and I teared up again.

“That same scenario happened over and over ... in the Valley,” Orr said. “It was very hard to watch it then.”

For Ruff, the scene that hit home was when a group of hedge fund managers went to talk to two young mortgage brokers in Miami.

The brokers were attractive, dressed well and drinking in a hip cocktail bar. One had been a bartender before getting into the mortgage business. Both bragged about how many loans with no documentation of income they were making and how they made more money on adjustable-rate, or subprime, loans.

“A very similar scary scene played out across the Valley during the boom,” Ruff said.

Brad Pitt’s offbeat commodity-trader character had one of the best lines in the movie for me.

He was in Las Vegas with two young investors who had just done a deal to buy collateralized debt obligations, CDOs, made up of thousands of what were supposed to be non-risky U.S. mortgages. The two men were betting on the mortgages to fail and go into foreclosure, so they would make huge profits from the investment backers.

When the two young investors started dancing to celebrate, Pitt told them to stop.

“Do you have any idea what you just did? You bet against the American economy,” he said.

Then Pitt explains if they win, it would be because people lose their homes and jobs. The two young investors won their bet. But millions of people lost so much.

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A few tears then, too.

Ruff and Orr are pretty philosophical about the crash now and said the movie didn’t make them angry. Sad and reflective, but not really angry.

“From 2008 to 2011, every day brought another economic or personal blow,” Ruff said. “Friends lost homes. Clients went under. People didn’t know what the next bad thing might be. It was bad times.”

Maybe if "The Big Short" reminds enough people of those bad times, history won't repeat itself.