Norman Bell On Drinking the Subprime Kool-Aid

Norman Bell in "Subprime!" at the Voxbox Theatre.

"The Boiler Room? Have you seen that movie?" Norman Bell asked over the phone, the sound of Seattle rush-hour traffic buzzing in the background as he was driven up to the Voxbox Theatre on Capitol Hill. "Yeah, it was kind of like that. They brought us in each morning to a big conference room, and this guy, the phone room supervisor, would burst into the room each morning and he'd give us this big rah-rah speech. He'd be throwing chairs down, and saying, 'Who's a crusher? Who's a crusher?,' and get us all psyched up. He was bringing in star loan officers who were making over a hundred grand a year, and saying, 'This could be you some day.'"

This was Bell's life back in 2005, when he worked at the Kirkland-based Merit Financial as a junior loan officer. Founded in 2001 by former Huskies cornerback Scott Greenlaw, Merit Financial rode high on the subprime wave and then crashed hard. Greenlaw had only two years' experience in mortgage lending prior to founding the company, but by 2005 Merit had around 400 employees and was named one of the best companies to work for by Washington CEO, alongside Costco and Starbucks. It was also a frat-boy environment of reckless and inexperienced lenders by design. As Greenlaw told the Seattle Times in 2006, "I hired a lot of like-minded individuals—Washington State, UW graduates who'd been in fraternities and played sports. We formed a strong brotherhood."

All of which was a very strange place for Norman Bell to wind up. A 1993 communications graduate from the UW and an actor trained at Freehold Studio, Bell was more of an arts person than a cold-caller, even garnering a small role opposite Christian Bale in 2004's The Machinist. But after returning to Seattle in 2004 after several years living in Spain, he got sucked into Merit's orbit. From January to November of 2005, he was a junior loan officer manning the phone banks, trying to hook cold-called clients and then pass them off to senior loan officers. Now, Bell has transformed the eleven eventful months he spent there into Subprime!: Inside the Heart of the Mortgage Meltdown, a one-man show written by and starring Bell, that opens Friday at the Voxbox (1205 E. Pike St.; tickets $15).

"I was basically a telemarketer," he explained. "But they sort of spruced it up a little bit to make it seem like, 'This is your first step towards loan officer glory.'"

"For a period of time there, I do feel like I drank the Kool-Aid," he said over the phone. "It was just like...it was kind of a spell-binding place. When you walked in there, the energy was just a buzzy energy. And for some reason I forgot that I had this communications background, that that was where my talents normally lay, and I was like, 'Yeah! I want to do this! I want to be a loan officer, too!' And they made you feel like--and to a certain extent, I believe they believed it, too--that what they were doing was a good thing. It was all tied into this idea that the housing bubble wasn't a bubble, it was just going to keep going up and up, and that your house was a cash machine, you could just tap into that equity to pay off your debts, do some remodeling, go on vacation, and treat yourself well."

"To be clear: this company was doing shady stuff. I certainly didn't know it at the time," Bell said. "This was in 2005 at the height of the housing boom, so everything seemed really rosy there. I hadn't made the leap to being loan officer yet, so I didn't know what loan officers were doing. This is all sort of posthumously, from when I was doing research for the play, and I found out Merit was fined by the Better Business Bureau, the State Department of Financial Institutions a number of times for manipulating documents, forging signatures, harassing customers."

Merit's success stemmed from its hyper-competitive environment. Pay was by commission, in violation of state labor law, so turn-over was high but those who could sell flourished, making six-figure yearly incomes with, in some cases, no college education. The problems started in late 2005. Merit made its money by selling off the subprime mortgages to investors. By the time Bell left in November, leads were slowing dramatically and rates were rising. Everyone who'd refinanced had already done so. Greenlaw cluelessly decided that continued profits lay in ever more complex lending arrangements, but having promoted incompetents who were good salesmen over more experienced lending agents, he didn't have a skilled workforce. The loans were rejected by investors who forced the company to buy them back. With no cashflow and increasing debt burdens, Merit spectacularly collapsed.

"The place was just begging to have something written about it," Bell says of the decision to revisit his time there for the theatre. "I mean, Merit was not a typical subprime mortgage company. It was voted, in 2004, one of the top firms to work for in Washington State right alongside Starbucks and Microsoft. And then by 2006, it was the number one mortgage company on the mortgage company implode-o-meter. So it went from high heights to low depths."

As the years went by and the problems in the subprime market spider-webbed out to threaten the global economy, Bell decided to return to his experiences there and began writing Subprime! about a year ago. After its initial two-week run at the Voxbox, it returns next month at Odd Duck Studio (1214 10th Ave., Oct. 16 & 17, tickets $15), as part of Live Theatre Week.

"As far as the characters there," he said, "yeah, there's all kinds of interesting characters—'interesting' sometimes being a kind word—from the CEO of the company, who was a former college football star, to the phone room supervisor, who was just kind of a manic guy, to a lot of the people that I made those phone calls with. So, these are all fictional characters in the play, but some of them are, let's say, 'inspired' by people I met there."

"I'm not writing from a derogatory perspective, of, 'Look at those guys, look at what they did,' and that kind of thing," Bell added in closing. "It's more about how we all get caught up in this type of thing. The housing boom and bust was not just something that a few people infiltrated on the rest of us, this was something that thousands and millions of people were involved in. So I really became interested in the concept of 'Bubble Mania,' and what is that like when everything around you is telling you, 'Yes, this is great.' And then you discover later. It's like we all woke up in a cell when it crashed, and we're all like, 'Oh, wait a second—what were we thinking?'"