Sometimes, seven billion people’s global financial catastrophe is one documentary filmmaker’s piece of good fortune. Such is the case of the photographer Lauren Greenfield, whose new movie, “The Queen of Versailles,” is about to be released. The film begins by focussing on the half-finished construction in Orlando of Versailles, the largest family home in America, the design of which was inspired by the French palace of the same name, and also by the top three floors of the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. Versailles—which is projected to cover ninety thousand square feet, with thirty bathrooms, a bowling alley, and a sushi bar—is the dream home of David Siegel, a strangely endearing, if fundamentally deplorable, Florida time-share mogul, and his wife, Jackie, a winningly confidential former Mrs. Florida and mother of eight, who is thirty-one years her husband’s junior.

Jackie Siegel Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The movie turns out to be not about the house’s triumphant erection, however, but about the impact of the financial crisis on Westgate, David Siegel’s company. Westgate, like the economy at large, seized up in late 2008, forcing Siegel to lay off thousands of employees, surrender his trophy property—a blue-glass-clad slab in Las Vegas—and put Versailles up for sale. Greenfield only began filming the Siegels in 2009, but she says that she did not at first realize that her film would amount to an allegory of the housing crisis. This makes her the most unwittingly astute documentarian since Andrew Jarecki decided to make a movie about a clown and ended up getting an Oscar nomination for a movie about the conviction of a Long Island father and son for child molestation.

Last week, Greenfield was in Washington, D.C., for a screening of “The Queen of Versailles” and a discussion with Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The audience was made up mostly of HUD employees; in Beltway fashion, there was a flutter of excitement when Ray LaHood, the Secretary of Transportation, entered the room. “I never dreamed I would have an audience with the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” Greenfield, who was wearing a navy-blue dress with pearls, said as she introduced the film—although, given that she and Donovan were Harvard classmates, it was not the most far-fetched of encounters.

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The audience laughed in all the right places: at the paintings on the Siegels’ walls depicting them as figures from ancient Rome, at Jackie’s taxidermied lapdog, Chanel. They gasped in all the right places, too: when Jackie undergoes a gruesome dermatological treatment, leaving her face as rubicund and puffy as a pink Peeps; or when David claims to have engineered George W. Bush’s first Presidential election but declines to elaborate how, “because it might not have been legal.”

During the post-screening discussion, Donovan said that David Siegel could be taken as a representative of many Americans, in spite of the grotesque scale of his overreaching, which extended to having a white tiger at his children’s birthday parties. “There are ways that Lauren has captured all of us—you can put yourself in there, at a very personal level, in terms of an aspiration for family, and what home means to all of us,” he said. “You can see how it sort of became supersized.” The film, he went on, “is really about values—it’s about asking ourselves when we have enough, and what we really need, and what we want, and when we can be satisfied.”

Greenfield, who made the editorial decision that she had enough to conclude her film in November, 2011, the point at which Westgate sells its interest in the Las Vegas property, explained that David Siegel is unsatisfied with the film’s narrative trajectory. “He’s actually suing for defamation,” she told the audience. One of the film’s darker scenes depicts a grim birthday dinner held when Versailles is on the market and Jackie is pondering the possibility that they will have to give up the twenty-six-thousand-square-foot house they already occupy; Siegel says that if he has to live until he’s a hundred and fifty to get back on top he will. “I think he would have liked me to continue filming until he was a hundred and fifty and got back on top,” she said. (In his suit, Siegel contends that Westgate is profitable. A statement issued by the company says Greenfield has constructed “a self-serving ‘reality TV’ narrative rather than a true and honest documentary.”) Jackie, meanwhile, has been attending film festivals with Greenfield to promote the movie; at one, in Sarasota, Greenfield says Jackie went to a local diner and requested caviar.

Greenfield praised the candor of both Siegels; and their willingness to unburden themselves to her is impressive testament to her subtle interviewing skills. More obvious is the pleasure she takes in documenting Jackie’s stupendous décolletage, itself the product of an implausible bubble mentality. Jackie “was kind of an unusual rich person, because she didn’t have this protective veil that often comes with wealth,” Greenfield said. She had fond words for David Siegel, too. “He would always be incredibly generous with his time, and also candid,” she said. “And so, in a way, that kind of made me love him, in a subject-filmmaker kind of way.” ♦