HOW do you dramatize a complex story like the Enron scandal for a TV movie?

Keep it simple.

In CBS’s upcoming made-for-TV dramatization of the events leading up to one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history, keeping it simple means boiling Enron’s very complicated business activities down to a metaphor involving the making and selling of paper coffee cups to a newly created coffee-shop chain that suddenly loses steam and goes under.

The coffee-cup analogy – offered by an Enron executive early in the movie – is meant to encapsulate the entire risk-taking world of Enron. Among its interests: developing and promoting a portfolio of so-called “virtual assets,” forming new commodities markets for trading in electricity, and selling bankruptcy-protection packages to other firms.

I think.

Look, it’s all very complicated and I don’t possess an MBA. And neither do many of the viewers who are likely to watch “The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron,” the first TV movie on the alleged financial wrongdoings and corporate failures of the past year that made headlines.

CBS’s Enron movie – scheduled for Sunday, Jan. 5 – is based on “Anatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth From an Enron Insider” by Brian Cruver, who joined Enron in 2001 at the age of 30 (in the movie, he’s 26) to work in the bankruptcy-protection unit.

And that’s another way to make a complicated financial scandal come to life on TV – focus on the mid-level employees whose lives were ruined by greedy execs.

As for the bosses – Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling – they’re on hand too (Mike Farrell plays Lay). But their dialogue is based almost primarily on the available public record.

Better to do that, one assumes, then to put words in their mouths and risk lawsuits. For what the Lay and Skilling characters don’t say in the movie, there’s a fictionalized exec to fulfill that purpose named Mr. Blue, played by Brian Dennehy.

And in the end, he gets off the best and simplest explanation of what happened: “It was the globalization of stupidity,” he tells Cruver, “that was the real Enron way.”