The China Hustle Movie Script

I'm worried that the numbers don't hold up from China.

Well, I never got asked that.

No one ever asked that.

Roth is a second, third-tier boutique investment bank from California.

Someone else had described it as a frat house.

Roth Capital would get behind small companies and push them out into the market.

They definitely were heating up 2010, 2011.

Roth was well known for doing China deals at a time when we were looking.

We went to a couple of Roth conferences.

It was a good time.

Roth Capital Partners has been organizing conferences for years in Orange County, California.

This has got to be the best conference in America.

Company after company you may have never heard of before makes pitches to people with money.

And their business model was kind of simplicity itself.

They'd have a three-day extravaganza-- 100, 150 companies-- and these CEOs would be saying, "For these six or seven or eight or ten reasons, we think we're gonna grow revenues 75 percent next year." China has gone, in the last few years, from interesting to important.

And then it turns into entertainment time.

Snoop Dogg, Billy Idol, dancers, ice sculptures, Trojan theme night, buses, trains, planes-- and then baijiu, which looks like motor oil in a can.

You drank and you drank.

You ganbei, you cheers to somebody, and then they have to cheers to somebody else, and it goes on and on and on.

The Chinese wanted to see what kind of a person you were, and some of them felt like the more drunk you got, the more of your natural persona would come out.

The master of ceremonies at these conferences was often the bank's stage-diving chairman, Byron Roth.

I wanna rock and roll All night Get him up!

And party every day, I wanna rock and roll You know, this is a guy who started out in the commodities business when he was 16 years old.

His dad had a feedlot business, and they'd bid on cows at auctions and stuff like that.

I mean, this is not an unsophisticated man.