Writers honor ‘Enron’s’ Gibney

The documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” has won the Writers Guild award for documentary screenplay.

The prize recognized writer Alex Gibney, who also produced and directed the film. It came Wednesday, two days into the much-awaited criminal trial of former Enron Corp. executives Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling in Houston.

A jury is to decide whether Lay and Skilling orchestrated the accounting scheme that crashed Enron, once the seventh-largest company in the country, in December 2001.

Gibney said he was delighted to get the award and jokingly thanked the former Enron executives, whom he called “some of the greatest fiction writers of all time.”

The film, which offers an inside portrait of the energy giant’s corporate scandal, is also nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature.