Movie of the Day: #315 "Wall Street"

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Michael Douglas won an Oscar for perfectly embodying the Reagan-era credo that "greed is good." As a Donald Trump-like Wall Street raider aptly named Gordon Gecko (for his reptilian ability to attack corporate targets and swallow them whole), Douglas found a role tailor-made to his skill in portraying heartless men who've sacrificed humanity to power. He's a slick, seductive role model for the young ambitious Wall Street broker played by Charlie Sheen, who falls into Gecko's sphere of influence and instantly succumbs to the allure of risky deals and generous payoffs. With such perks as a high-rise apartment and women who love men for their money, Charlie's like a worm on Gecko's hook, blind to the corporate maneuvering that puts him at odds with his own father (played by Sheen's offscreen father, Martin). With his usual lack of subtlety, writer-director Oliver Stone drew from the brokering experience of his own father to tell this Faustian tale for the "me" decade, but the movie's sledgehammer style is undeniably effective. A cautionary warning that Stone delivers on highly entertaining terms, Wall Street grabs your attention while questioning the corrupted values of a system that worships profit at the cost of one's soul. --Jeff Shannon

My Take

As a person who loves business, this is probably one of my top 15 films. Fantastic performances all around. Douglas becomes a movie icon as Gordon Gekko.

Gordon Gekko: "The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of it's forms - greed for life, for money, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed - you mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you."

Trivia
Tom Cruise wanted the part of Bud Fox, but Oliver Stone had already agreed to Charlie Sheen. Stone later promised Cruise with a role in another picture, Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

Oliver Stone gave Charlie Sheen the choice of having either Jack Lemmon or Martin Sheen play his father (Carl Fox). Charlie chose his dad.

Director Oliver Stone's first two choices to play Gordon Gekko were Richard Gere and Warren Beatty.

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Great movie. I got to watch this in a high school business class. My teacher just put a towel over the screen for the "R" parts.

 

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Oliver Stone: Life after 'Wall Street'
Fortune sits down with the Academy Award-winning director and discusses the lasting legacy of his classic film and its famous lead character.

By Telis Demos, Fortune reporter
September 21 2007: 10:18 AM EDT

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NEW YORK (Fortune) -- With buyout kings swimming in wealth, markets in turmoil, and Ray-Bans back in fashion, it might seem like Wall Street has stood still since 1987. But to Oliver Stone, the creator of Gordon Gekko and director of the epoch-defining "Wall Street," times have certainly changed.

"Gordon Gekko couldn't manipulate the markets like he did back then," he says. "It's so big, so huge, that to be a minor player, you need to be a major bank."


Director Stone was inspired by his father who felt that there were few good films about business.

Since its release in December, 1987, "Wall Street" has been required viewing for anyone working in finance and a standard way of framing the go-go '80s of junk bonds and power ties - an era that some say has returned during the recent private equity-led mergers and acquisitions boom.

With a twentieth-anniversary DVD released on September 18 and a sequel currently in development, "Wall Street" is again a topic of conversation.

The film is best-known for its lasting character, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, who netted an Academy Award for Best Actor for the role. And its most famous line -"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good," typically shortened to just "Greed is good" - is a favorite of headline writers and Wall Streeters alike.

But Stone - who won the Academy Award for best director for Vietnam-themed films "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" and was nominated for "JFK" - worries that people frequently forget the film's ending, when Gekko is charged by the SEC with insider trading.

"I'd just say anyone who took away that greed is good has missed the point," he says. "The movie speaks for itself. People who walk out of the movie and think 'he's such a great guy,' they need to think and ask themselves on what terms am I willing to do that?"

The meat of the film, as Stone sees it, centers on Bud Fox, a young stock trader played by Charlie Sheen, who gets swept into Gekko's favor with a few questionable stock tips, but eventually turns on him when Gekko attempts to takeover Bluestar Airlines, where Fox's father is a union leader.

"Really the main motivation was my father," says Stone, 61, who was raised in New York. His father worked as a broker during the Great Depression at Hayden Stone (no relation), a firm that became part of Shearson American Express in the 1970s. "He took me to the movies, and he would bemoan the lack of a good business movie. Businessmen were generally lampooned."

Inspired by the Robert Wise's 1954 film "Executive Suite," which Stone calls the best business movie ever made, he decided to tell a story that would resonate with his father, who died in 1985.

Stone and co-writer Stanley Weiser met with business tycoons like Ace Greenberg, Ken Lipper, and others to consult on the script. Real-life charcters like Carl Icahn, J. Tomlinson Hill (then at Morgan Stanley, now at Blackstone), and Ivan Boesky collectively inspired the Gekko character.

Gekko's aesthetic - the fine suits, the penthouse office - was most directly inspired by Asher Edelman, a corporate raider and avid art collector.

"When I grew up, men didn't talk about how much money they made," says Stone, "and take great pride, and swell like peacocks. I find this personally tasteless and disgusting."

The characters played by Hal Holbrooke (a broker who attempts to mentor young Bud Fox) and Martin Sheen (Fox's union-leader father) represent "the positive forces in the market," says Stone. "Especially the old stockbroker. He keeps trying to teach Bud Fox the ethics of the business. Hal Holbrooke represents my father, who always said Wall Street can do a lot of good. It is not simply a function of making money."

Although "Wall Street" was released to tepid reviews and earned just $40 million at the box office (about a third as much as that year's top hit, "Three Men and a Baby"), it enjoyed a renaissance in 1990 when the cover of Newsweek magazine asked "Is Greed Dead?" after '80s icons like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky ran afoul of insider trading laws.

Today's financial crimes, however, don't interest Stone. "The biggest dramatic story is Enron," he says. "It was a corporation that existed to do nothing. But frankly I read the books, and I still can't understand what they did. It's very hard to do a financial movie, to make stocks and bonds sexy and interesting."

Stone was approached to work on a "Wall Street" sequel for 20th Century Fox, being produced by the original film's producer Ed Pressman and written by Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker . But he backed off to pursue other projects. Stone spoke to Fortune from Bangkok, where he's researching a movie called "Pinkville" about the 1968 My Lai massacre.

"I'm on to something else," he says. "Because of the nature of the modern business world, I found it very difficult to bring this character back as a significant figure. That's not to say it can't be done, as a good writer is working on it."

Even with names like Steve Schwarzman buzzing around the street, and with players like Carl Icahn still around, Stone thinks big corporations have replaced the flamboyant tycoon as the true players.

"You just don't hear about the buccaneers anymore," says Stone. "I try to follow business to some degree, but I think there's way too much business news."