Difference between revisions of "Wall Street (1987 film)"

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Wall Street is an American film released in 1987. It was directed by Oliver Stone, and features Michael Douglas in the role that won him an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. The film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas as the archetypal "Master of the Universe". Wall Street was written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone.

Plot synopsis

The story involves a young stockbroker, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen), who is desperate to get to the top. He settles on a plan to become involved with his hero, the extremely successful and wealthy but unscrupulous corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).

After succeeding in attaining an audience with Gekko, Fox gives him a stock tip based on insider information he obtained from his father, Carl (Martin Sheen, Charlie's real-life father). Carl is a maintenance chief at a small airline, Bluestar, who learns that they will soon be cleared of a safety concern after a previous crash.

Things change when Gekko decides to perform a corporate raid on Bluestar. Fox has to choose between the rich insider's lifestyle offered by working outside the law, or his father's blue-collar values of fair play and hard work. He chooses to try to preserve the latter by utilizing what he has learned from Gekko. Fox uses one of Gekko's rivals to break the deal. Fox is indicted for insider trading in the process but enjoys revenge by turning state's evidence against Gekko, although Gekko's fate is left ambiguous.

Production

After the success of Platoon, Stone began researching a movie about quiz show scandals in the 1950s. However, at lunch with a film school friend and Los Angeles screenwriter Stanley Weiser, Stone heard an idea for a film that could be "Crime and Punishment on Wall Street. Two guys abusing each other on Wall Street."^[1] The director had been thinking about this kind of a movie as early as 1981. He knew a New York businessman who was making millions and working long days putting together deals all over the world. This man started making mistakes that cost him everything. Stone remembers that the "story frames what happens in my movie, which is basically a Pilgrims Progress of a boy who is seduced and corrupted by the allure of easy money. And in the third act, he sets out to redeem himself."^[1] Stone and Weiser began researching the world of stock trading, junk bonds and corporate takeovers. They met a lot of powerful Wall Street movers and shakers. Weiser wrote the first draft, initially called Greed, with Stone writing another draft. Originally, the lead character was a young Jewish broker named Freddie Goldsmith but Stone changed it to Bud Fox to avoid the misconception that Wall Street was controlled by Jews. According to Weiser, Gekkos style of speaking was inspired by Stone. "When I was writing some of the dialogue I would listen to Oliver on the phone and sometimes he talks very rapid-fire, the way Gordon Gekko does."^[1]

Casting

Stone met Tom Cruise who expressed an interest in playing Bud Fox but the director had already committed to Charlie Sheen for the role.^[1] Michael Douglas had just come off heroic roles like the one in Romancing the Stone and was looking for something darker and edgier. The studio wanted Warren Beatty to play Gekko but he was not interested.^[1] Stone initially wanted Richard Gere but the actor passed and the director went with Douglas but had been warned by others in Hollywood not to cast him. Stone remembers, "I was warned by everyone in Hollywood that Michael couldn't act, that he was a producer more than an actor and would spend all his time in his trailer on the phone," but the director found out that "when he's acting he gives it his all."^[2] The actor remembers that when he first read the screenplay, "I thought it was a great part. It was a long script, and there were some incredibly long and intense monologues to open with. Id never seen a screenplay where there were two or three pages of single-spaced type for a monologue. I thought, whoa! I mean, it was unbelievable."^[1] For research, he read profiles of corporate raiders, T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn.

Stone cast Daryl Hannah as Bud Foxs materialistic girlfriend, who had problems relating to her character and struggled with the role. The director was aware early on that she was not right for the role and remarked, "Daryl Hannah was not happy doing the role and I should have let her go. All my crew wanted to get rid of her after one day of shooting. My pride was such that I kept saying I was going to make it work."^[1] Stone also had difficulties with Sean Young who made her opinions known that Hannah should be fired and she should play her role instead. Young would show up to the set late and unprepared. She also did not get along with Charlie Sheen which also caused friction on the set. In retrospect, Stone felt that Young was right and he should have swapped roles between her and Hannah.^[1]

Principal photography

Stone wanted to shoot the movie in New York City and that required a budget of at least $15 million. The studio that backed Platoon felt that it was too risky a project to bankroll and passed. Stone and producer Edward R. Pressman took it to 20th Century Fox who loved it and filming began in May 1987.

According to Stone, he was "making a movie about sharks, about feeding frenzies. Bob [director of photography Robert Richardson and I wanted the camera to become a predator. There is no letup until you get to the fixed world of Charlies father, where the stationary camera gives you a sense of immutable values."^[1]

Jeffrey "Mad Dog" Beck, a star investment banker at the time with Drexel Burnham Lambert, was one of the film's technical advisers and has a cameo appearance in the film as the man speaking at the meeting discussing the breakup of Bluestar. Within two years of the film's release, his star would fall as The Wall Street Journal ran an article exposing many things he had led people to believe about himself (that he was an heir to the Beck brewing family fortune and that he had served in the Vietnam War) as fabrications.

Investment banker and former deputy mayor of New York for Finance and Economic Development, Kenneth Lipper was also hired as a technical adviser. He agreed to work on the film only after reading the screenplay and finding that it was a fair representation of Wall Street.^[3] He had input on the screenplay. For example, he argued that it was unrealistic to have all the characters be "morally bankrupt."^[3] Lipper advised Stone on the kind of computers used on the trading floor, the correct proportion of women at a business meeting, and the kinds of extras that should be seated an the annual shareholders meeting where Gekko delivers his "Greed is good" speech.^[3] Stone also had Lipper write the film's novelization.

Original cut

The first version of the film had a 160-minute running time, as opposed to 120 minutes for the theatrical release.

Most of the 40 minutes cut involved a subplot in which Bud has an affair with Gekko's wife, Kate (Sean Young). As a result, Young's appearance in the film is greatly diminished. It does, however, explain why Gekko is so angry with Bud in their confrontation at the film's climax.

Other cut scenes explain that Darien began her career as a call girl, the basis for Carl Fox telling off his son with "I don't go to bed with no whore, and I don't wake up with one," and the umbrage Bud takes at it. And yet another one explains how Bud becomes president of Bluestar without giving up his position at the brokerage firm, something that seems highly implausible in the final cut.

Reaction

In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Douglas' work as "the funniest, canniest performance of his career."^[4] Rita Kempley in the Washington Post wrote that the film "is at its weakest when it preaches visually or verbally. Stone doesn't trust the time-honored story line, supplementing the obvious moral with plenty of soapboxery."^[5]

Themes

Conflicts

Wall Street defines itself through a number of morality conflicts pitting wealth and power against simplicity and honesty.

Carl's (Martin Sheen's) character represents the working class in the film: he is the union leader for the maintenance workers at Bluestar. He constantly attacks Big business, Money, mandatory drug screening and greedy manufacturers and any thing that he sees as a threat to his union. The conflict between Gekko's relentless pursuit of wealth and Carl Fox's leftward leanings form the basis of the film's subtext. This subtext could be described as the concept of the two fathers, one good and one evil, battling for control over the morals of the son, a concept Stone had also used in Platoon.

In Wall Street the hard-working Carl Fox and the cutthroat businessman Gordon Gekko represent the fathers. The producers of the film use Carl as their voice in the film, a voice of reason amid the destructive actions brought about by Gekko's unrestrained greed.

'Greed is Good'

The most memorable scene in the film is a speech by Gekko to a shareholders' meeting of Teldar Paper, a company he is planning to take over. Stone uses this scene to give Gekko, and by extension, the Wall Street raiders he personifies, the chance to justify their actions, which he memorably does, pointing out the slothfulness and waste that corporate America accumulated through the postwar years and from which he sees himself as a "liberator":

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 its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words — will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

His truncated catchphrase from the speech, "Greed is good", came to symbolise what some describe as the ruthless, profit-obsessed, short-term corporate culture of the 1980s and 1990s and by extension became associated with so-called unrestrained free-market economic policies.

The inspiration for the "Greed is good" speech seems to have come from two sources. The first part, where Gekko complains that the company's management owns less than three percent of its stock, and that it has too many vice presidents, is taken from similar speeches and comments made by Carl Icahn about companies he was trying to take over. The defense of greed is a paraphrase of the May 18, 1986 commencement address at the UC Berkeley's School of Business Administration, delivered by arbitrageur Ivan Boesky (who himself was later convicted of insider-trading charges), in which he said, "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

Ultimately the "Greed is Good" speech could be seen as related to what Adam Smith concluded about human nature. Smith believed that in general honest people freed to pursue their own interest would fare better than they would under a system that dictated what was "good." In the process, persons pursuing their own interests would eliminate inefficiencies and allocate commodities where they would benefit the greater society.

Wall Street is not a wholesale criticism of the capitalist system, but of the cynical, quick-buck culture of the 1980s. The 'good' characters in the film are themselves capitalists, but in a more steady, hardworking sense. In one scene, Gekko scoffs at Bud Fox's question as to the moral value of hard work, quoting the example of his (Gekko's) father, who worked hard his entire life and died in relative mediocrity. Fox's stockbroker boss (played by Hal Holbrook) as an archetype old man mentor, says early in the film, that "good things sometimes take time", referring to IBM and Hilton - in contrast, Gekko's 'Greed is Good' credo typifies the short-term view prevalent in the 80s.

Errors

Depiction of insider trading

Despite the authenticity of its portrayal of the trading floor and a low-end brokerage house, Wall Street's depiction of the insider trading laws has been questioned.

Bud is apparently charged with insider trading stemming from trading in shares of Bluestar after receiving a tip from his father about an as yet undisclosed favorable legal ruling. Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder have historically been used to prosecute corporate insiders from trading on material non public information about their company (e.g., an executive of Issuer X selling shares of X in advance of a negative earnings release concerning X). Insider trading laws later evolved to target "misappropriation" of information and tippers and tippees. Under the misappropriation theory, one who has a duty to the corporation, even if he is not an insider, cannot trade on information he learns about the corporation (e.g., a lawyer who has information about a client's pending transaction cannot trade on that information). Under the tipper/tippee theory, a recipient of a tip from a corporate insider cannot trade on that tip. As for the misappropriation theory, it was not recognized by the Supreme Court until 1997, so Bud could not have been charged under that theory. Bud probably could have been charged with knowingly trading on a tip, but usually tippee liability is not found where the tipper did not receive some type of benefit, and here it is unclear what benefit was bestowed upon the father.

Neither could Bud be held liable for disclosing to Gekko information on his rival raider; except for the documents he seized from a locked office (while in the disguise of a janitor), all the information he provided Gekko was publicly observable, and therefore outside the scope of the law. The theft of information from the law firm could serve as a basis for liability under the misappropriation theory, but as noted above, that theory had not fully evolved in 1985.

Bud's college friend (James Spader) is an attorney. Though his role is unclear, it appears that Bud convinces Spader's character to provide Bud tips in violation of the attorney's duties to his clients, which could lead to tipper liability under 10b-5. In addition, there is some indication that Bud has placed Gekko's assets in an account controlled by the attorney so as to split up the trades and avoid detection from Stock Watch, which again could lead to liability. Such activity could lead to disciplinary proceedings and disbarment.

The most clear-cut illegal behavior shown in the film occurs earlier, when Gekko and Sir Lawrence Wildman (<span class="plainlinks"most popular psychic/span>) appear to negotiate a price for Gekko's Anacott Steel holdings above his tender offer to the rest of the market. Sir Lawrence Wildman was said to be based on the real-life Sir Gordon White, later Lord White of Hull.^[6]

Anachronism

In the first shot of the film, showing the large expanse of the a trading floor, the year is noted as 1985. Moments later a character comments sarcastically on how a broker (Gekko) had shorted NASA stock 30 seconds after the Challenger exploded. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January, 1986, after the events of the beginning of the film. Stone later explained that the "1985" title at the beginning was added after production was finished, to locate the film in a time before the mid-'80s insider-trading scandals began to break.

Although the character was making a joke, NASA is a governmental agency and not a publicly traded company.

Economics

At one point Gekko is giving a speech during which point he says "money cannot be created or destroyed", which is not necessarily correct since money can be created through the deposit credit multiplier effect. The stock market is also not necessarily a "zero-sum" game. Gekko's "zero-sum" assertion ignores one of the largest drivers of wealth creation, which is increased capital or labor productivity. However, it seems likely that the statement was merely a reflection of Gekko's belief in a competitive capitalistic environment where his challenge is no longer in making himself wealthy, but in defeating his rivals.

Other

In real life, someone in Bud's position would not be arrested on the trading floor (although that did happen in a few cases) but instead would be quietly brought in away from work, in order to keep the news from spreading if, as in this situation, they wanted the arrestee to cooperate in order to get to the investigation's ultimate target. It is thus highly unlikely that Gekko would talk to Bud after his arrest since word travels fast on Wall Street and he would naturally assume that Bud would be wearing a wire.

In the film's final shot, Bud is shown walking up the steps of the state court building in Foley Square to his sentencing. Insider trading is a federal charge, the investigators chasing after him have been from the federal SEC, and thus he should be going into the adjacent federal court building.

References in popular culture

1993's Hot Shots! Part Deux had a scene where Charlie Sheen was seen on a boat going up a river, writing a letter as we heard his voiceover narration from Platoon. In further acknowledgement of that, another boat passes in the opposite direction with Martin Sheen himself reciting his narration from Apocalypse Now. As the craft pass, father and son simultaneously shout at each other, "I loved you in Wall Street!"

In the 2000 film Boiler Room, some of the young stockbrokers in that film are shown watching Wall Street on video. During the scene where Bud goes to Gekko's office for the first time and listens as he converses on the phone about the CEO of a company he is considering taking over, they turn down the volume and recite his lines ("Their quarterlies are for shit! ... If this guy owned a funeral parlor, nobody would die!!!") in unison.

Future Stock, an episode of the animated television series Futurama, takes much of its inspiration from Wall Street.

In a 2005-06 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a Professor tells Detectives Goren and Eames his alibi saying that he was screening Wall Street for his class in business ethics.

In the famous British sitcom Only Fools And Horses, main character Del Boy revamps his image and bases himself on Gordon Gekko at the start of series 6.

In an episode of The Sarah Silverman Program there is a scene in which a young girl recites Gordon Gekko's famous "Greed is Good" scene.

In the PC game Warcraft III, typing the cheat "greedisgood X" will give you Gold and Lumber equivalent to the value of X

Sequel

On Saturday 2007 May 5, the New York Times reported that a sequel film entitled, Money Never Sleeps, is currently in pre-production. Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko; however, both Charlie Sheen and Oliver Stone will be absent from the sequel.^[7]

References