The company is run by Marc Turtletaub, who inherited his father Alan's mortgage-lending company, The Money Store, which helped pioneer subprime mortgages (predatory loans given to homeowners with low credit scores and little means to pay back the loan). Suspiciously, Turtletaub sold The Money Store for $2.1 billion just a month before the subprime industry imploded; new owner First Union Corporation closed The Money Store two years later at a loss of $2.8 billion. With his profits, Turtletaub bought a home in Hawaii and started Big Beach to "make films that have some kind of redemption," as Marc wants to "touch people" and "change people."

SEED: This setup—profits extracted from predatory lending laundered into earnest 'redemption' films—is a damning and striking contrast worth an essay on the moral accounting of cultural philanthropy. DEFINE: Defines subprime mortgages as predatory loans to low-credit, low-means homeowners.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 272