Now that Newt Gingrich’s campaign has gone nuclear and posted online a critical documentary about Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital, “When Mitt Romney Comes to Town,” I thought it might be useful to provide a handy guide to the story—explaining where it came from and how you can find out more about it. It’s not new, of course. Over the past decade, writing about Mitt and Bain has been something of a cottage industry. But now, like one of Bain Capital’s successful investments, it has mushroomed into a much bigger business.

Where did the film come from?

Although the Gingrich campaign is promoting the video, and using slices of it on commercials, it didn’t make it. The producer was Barry Bennett, a Republican political consultant who used to work with a Super PAC associated with Rick Perry. Bennett told the New York Times he got the idea to make the film after buying an “opposition research book” from the campaign of one of Romney’s opponents in the 2008 Republican primaries. “Republicans need to know this story before we nominate this guy,” he said. According to Bennett, Jason Killian Meath, an ad man and filmmaker who worked on Romney’s 2008 campaign and George Bush’s 2004 campaign, directed the documentary.

How can I see it?

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Click on the still above for the full film, or, if you’d prefer not to watch all twenty-eight minutes, we’ve posted a clip of the highlights on The New Yorker’s Political Scene page.

What is Bain Capital and what did Romney do there?

Bain Capital is a leveraged-buyout company, which Romney helped to found in 1984 and ran as C.E.O. until 1999. In 2007, when Romney was first running for President, the Boston Globe published a series of articles entitled “The Making of Mitt Romney.” Part 3, “Reaping Profit in Study, Sweat,” by Robert Gavin and Sacha Pfeiffer, covered Romney’s career at Bain Capital in detail. It went through a number of deals in which the firm had made a lot of money while closing factories, eliminating jobs, using tax-sheltered offshore accounts, and, in some cases, driving the companies it had bought into bankruptcy. “Bain Capital is the model of how to leverage brain power to make money,” Howard Anderson, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, told the Globe. “They are first rate financial engineers. They will do everything they can to increase the value. The promise (to investors) is to make as much money as possible. You don’t say we’re going to make as much money as possible without going offshore and laying off people.”

Since 2007, dozens of well-researched articles about Romney and Bain have been published, many of them focussing on particular deals or issues. A pretty recent one which covers the entire tale, and which is particularly strong on Bain Capital’s internal culture, is “The Romney Economy,” a cover story for New York magazine last fall by Benjamin Wallace-Wells. The author interviewed a number of Romney’s former colleagues, describing how they emerged from the nineteen-seventies world of management consulting—Bain Capital was an offshoot of the consulting firm Bain & Co.—and how they viewed themselves as crusaders for economic efficiency. Wallace-Wells writes, “When I interviewed Romney’s early colleagues about the business world that they surveyed during this period, they tended to adopt an attitude of high disdain. ‘Sloppy,’ one told me. ‘Complacent,’ said another. ‘Lazy,’ said a third, ‘and out of tune with the change that was going on in the world.’ ”

What is the meaning of “leveraged buyout,” and is it the same as “private equity”?

Yes, they are the same thing. Both refer to the practice of using wads of borrowed money to buy troubled or slow-growing public companies, taking them private, and then trying to turn them around and sell them on to another corporation at a higher price, or to investors in an initial public offering. Takeovers financed by debt have been around since the sixties. But the modern private-equity industry dates back to the early eighties, when investors like William Simon, a former under-secretary at the Treasury, and Henry Kravis, the co-founder of the L.B.O. firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (K.K.R.), made huge profits buying and selling companies using debt financing. Bain Capital was another early player, and it started out small. Initially, it had just just $37 million in capital.

The L.B.O./private-equity industry has always had an image problem. In the eighties, it was associated with junk bonds and Michael Milken, the disgraced Drexel Burnham investment banker who raised money for many L.B.O. players, including Bain Capital. (“The Predators’ Ball,” a 1989 book by my colleague Connie Bruck, is an excellent account of this period.) As time went on, more and more people entered the industry, and the deals got bigger and bigger—culminating in 1988 in K.K.R.’s $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco, the food and tobacco conglomerate.

In the recession of the early nineties, some of the companies that had been taken private in L.B.O.s went bankrupt because they couldn’t meet their heavy debt payments. The industry was also tarnished by negative publicity surrounding Milken and the RJR Nabisco takeover, which Bryan Burrough and John Helyar wrote up in their 1990 best-seller “Barbarians at the Gate.” Realizing that the industry badly needed rebranding, somebody came up with the idea of renaming it “private equity.” The label stuck, and the industry gradually rebounded.

How much do we know about Bain Capital’s record? Was it as successful as Romney says it was?

From the perspective of its partners and its outside investors, Bain Capital was phenomenally successful. The best source on its financial record under Mitt is a prospectus that Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown put together for potential investors in 2000. (The Los Angeles Times unearthed the prospectus and posted it on its Web site.) The prospectus listed sixty-eight companies that Bain Capital’s private-equity funds invested in between 1984 and 1998. It said the funds made an annual return of eighty-eight per cent, which means they almost doubled their money every year. On “realized investments’’—companies that Bain Capital had sold or taken public in an I.P.O.—the investment funds did even better. Over this fifteen-year period, according to the prospectus, the realized investments generated an astonishing annual return of a hundred and seventy-three per cent.