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Wall Street (film)
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Wall Street is a 1987 American film directed by Oliver Stone and features Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker desperate to succeed and a wealthy but unscrupulous corporate raider (Michael Douglas) whom he idolizes.
Douglas won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Daryl Hannah's performance was not as well received and earned her a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress. The film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas advocating "greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
mbitious stockbroker, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen), is desperate to get to the top.
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Wall Street is a 1987 American film directed by Oliver Stone and features Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker desperate to succeed and a wealthy but unscrupulous corporate raider (Michael Douglas) whom he idolizes.
Douglas won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Daryl Hannah's performance was not as well received and earned her a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress. The film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas advocating "greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Plot synopsis
An ambitious stockbroker, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen), is desperate to get to the top. He schemes to become involved with his hero, the extremely successful but unscrupulous corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas).
Gekko is a ruthless and legendary Wall Street player whose values couldn't conflict more with those of Bud's father Carl (Martin Sheen). In an effort to win Gekko as a client, Bud visits with Gekko on Gekko's birthday and pitches him a series of stocks which Bud had been analyzing for some time. When Gekko turns down all of these ideas, Bud gets desperate, and provides him with some inside information which Bud had learned in a casual conversation the day before from his father. Carl is a maintenance chief and union representative at a small airline, Bluestar, and tells Bud it will soon be cleared of a safety violation after a previous crash. The ruling will bring the airline out from under government suspension, allowing it to expand its business.
An appreciative Gekko takes Bud under his wing but compels him to unearth new information by any means necessary. Bud becomes wealthy, enjoying Gekko's promised perks, including a fancy condo and a trophy blond, interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah).
As this mentor/protege relationship develops, Bud pitches an idea to Gekko. The plan is to buy Bluestar Airlines and expand the company using savings achieved by union concessions. Bud wants his father, Carl, to get union support for the plan and push for the deal. Although Carl is adamantly against the idea, and distrusts Gekko, Bud is able to coax him into it.
Things change when Gekko decides to sell off Bluestar's assets, an act that would leave Carl and the entire Bluestar staff out of work. Betrayed by Gekko and wracked with the guilt of being an accessory to Bluestar's destruction, Bud resolves to disrupt Gekko's plans. He angrily breaks up with Darien, who refuses to plot against Gekko, a former lover and the architect of her career.
Bud devises a plan in which he will manipulate Bluestar's stock value so that Gekko will decide to sell off his stock in the company. It will then be picked up at a lower price by Gekko's rival, corporate raider Sir Lawrence Wildman (Terence Stamp), who will become the airline's new majority shareholder. Gekko, realizing that his stock is plummeting, lashes out furiously at Bud and finally decides to dump his remaining interest in the company. Only later does Gekko learn that Bud engineered the entire scheme.
Bud triumphantly goes back to work the following day, where everyone is curiously in a somber mood. He enters his office where he is greeted by law enforcement officials and representatives of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bud is placed under arrest for violating federal securities laws, is handcuffed and led out of the office in tears.
Sometime later, Bud confronts Gekko in Central Park. Gekko viciously assaults Fox, but not before mentioning several of their illegal business transactions. Bud is wearing a wire, and the police presumably will use this recording as state's evidence, although Gekko's fate is left ambiguous. Bud walks to Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, where he turns the wire tapes over the federal authorities, who suggest that his sentence will be lightened in exchange for his cooperation with the federal investigation into Gekko. The film ends with Bud arriving at the courthouse, ready to atone for his crimes.
Development
Origins
After the success of Platoon, Stone wanted film school friend and Los Angeles screenwriter Stanley Weiser to research and write a screenplay about quiz show scandals in the 1950s. During a story conference, Stone suggested making a film about Wall Street instead. The director pitched the premise of two investment partners getting involved in questionable financial dealings, using each other, and they are tailed by a prosecutor as in Crime and Punishment. The director had been thinking about this kind of a movie as early as 1981 and was inspired by his father, Lou Stone, a broker during the Great Depression at Hayden Stone.
The filmmaker 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 Pilgrim’s 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". Stone asked Weiser to read Crime and Punishment but the writer found that its story did not mix well with their own. Stone then asked Weiser to read The Great Gatsby for material that they could use but it was not the right fit either. Weiser had no prior knowledge of the financial world and immersed himself in researching the world of stock trading, junk bonds and corporate takeovers. He and Stone spent three weeks visiting brokerage houses and interviewing investors.
Screenplay
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 stereotype that Wall Street was controlled by Jews.
Reportedly, Gordon Gekko is said to be a composite of several people: Owen Morrisey, who was involved in a $20 million insider trading scandal in 1985, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, corporate raider Carl Icahn, art collector Asher Edelman, agent Michael Ovitz, and Stone himself. For example, the famous "Greed is good" line was based on a speech by Boesky where he said, "Greed is right", that Stone read and it stuck with him. According to Edward R. Pressman, producer of the film, "Originally, there was no one individual who Gekko was modeled on", he adds, "But Gekko was partly Milken". Also, Pressman has said that the character of Sir Larry Wildman was "modeled on Jimmy Goldsmith". According to Weiser, Gekko’s 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".
Stone cites as influences on his approach to business, the novels of Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and Victor Hugo, and the films of Paddy Chayefsky because they were able to make a complicated subject clear to the audience. Stone set the film in 1985 because insider trading scandals culminated in 1985 and 1986.
Casting
Stone met with Tom Cruise about playing Bud Fox, but the director had already committed to Charlie Sheen for the role. Stone liked the "stiffness" of Sheen's acting style and used it to convey the naive nature of Bud who looks up to Gekko.
Michael Douglas had just come off heroic roles like the one in Romancing the Stone and was looking for something dark and edgy. The studio wanted Warren Beatty to play Gekko but he was not interested. Stone initially wanted Richard Gere but the actor passed, so the director went with Douglas despite having been advised 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". The director says that he saw "that villain quality" in the actor and always thought he was a smart businessman. 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. I’d 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". For research, he read profiles of corporate raiders T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn.
Stone gave Charlie Sheen the choice of Jack Lemmon or Martin Sheen to play his father in the film and the young actor picked his dad. The elder Sheen related to the moral sense of his character. Stone cast Daryl Hannah as Bud Fox’s materialistic girlfriend, but felt that she was never happy with the role and did not know why she accepted it. He tried to explain the character to Hannah repeatedly and thought that the materialism of the character conflicted with the actress' idealism and it really bothered her. The director was aware early on that she was not right for it. "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". Stone also had difficulties with Sean Young, who made her opinions known that Hannah should be fired and that she should play that role instead. Young would show up to the set late and unprepared. She did not get along with Charlie Sheen, which caused further friction on the set. In retrospect, Stone felt that Young was right and he should have swapped Hannah's role with hers. Stone admits that he had "some problems" with Sean Young but was not willing to confirm or deny rumors that she walked off with all of her costumes when she completed filming.
Principal photography
Stone wanted to shoot the movie in New York City and that required a budget of at least $15 million, a moderate shooting budget by 1980s standards. 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 and filming began in April 1987 and ended on July 4 of the same year.
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 Charlie’s father, where the stationary camera gives you a sense of immutable values". The director saw Wall Street as a battle zone and "filmed it as such" including shooting conversations like physical confrontations and in ensemble shots had the camera circle the actors "in a way that makes you feel you're in a pool with sharks".
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. Kenneth Lipper, investment banker and former deputy mayor of New York for Finance and Economic Development, was also hired as chief technical adviser. At first, he turned Stone down because he felt that the film would be a one-sided attack. Stone asked him to reconsider and Lipper read the script responding with a 13-page critique. For example, he argued that it was unrealistic to have all the characters be "morally bankrupt". Lipper advised Stone on the kind of computers used on the trading floor, the accurate proportion of women at a business meeting, and the kinds of extras that should be seated at the annual shareholders meeting where Gekko delivers his "Greed is good" speech. Stone agreed with Lipper's criticism and asked him to rewrite the script. Lipper brought a balance to the film and this helped Stone get permission to shoot on the floor the New York Stock Exchange during trading hours. Lipper and Stone disagreed over the character of Lou Mannheim. Stone shot a scene showing the honest Mannheim giving in to insider trading and Lipper argued that audiences might conclude that everyone on Wall Street is corrupt and insisted that the film needed an unimpeachable character. Stone cut the scene.
Stone also consulted with Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, convicted inside trader David Brown, and several government prosecutors, and Wall Street investment bankers. In addition, traders were brought in to coach actors on the set on how to hold phones, write out tickets, and talk to clients. Stone asked Lipper to design a six-week course that would expose Charlie Sheen to a cross section of young Wall Street business people. The actor said, "I was impressed and very, very respectful of the fact that they could maintain that kind of aggressiveness and drive".
Douglas worked with a speech instructor on breath control and to get the used to the fast rhythm of the film's dialogue. Early on in the shoot, Stone tested Douglas by enhancing his "repressed anger", according to the actor. At one point, Stone came into Douglas' trailer and asked him if he was doing drugs because "you look like you haven't acted before", the actor recalled the director telling him. This shocked Douglas who did more research and worked on his lines again and again, pushing himself harder than he had before. All of this hard work culminated with the "Greed is good" speech.
Stone planned to use a Fortune magazine cover in exchange for promotional advertisements but Forbes magazine made a similar offer. The filmmaker stuck with Fortune and this upset Forbes publisher Malcolm Forbes, who turned down a later request to use his private yacht.
Stone switched from 12 to 14-hour shooting days in the last few weeks in order to finishing principal photography before an impending Directors Guild of America strike and finished five days ahead of schedule. Sheen remembered that Stone was always looking at the script and at his watch. He was always concerned about time and the film's budget.
Reaction
Wall Street was released on December 11, 1987 in 730 theaters and grossed USD $4.1 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $43.8 million in North America.
Reviews
The film was well-received critically. It has an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 56 metascore on Metacritic. In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Douglas' work as "the funniest, canniest performance of his career". Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and praised it for allowing "all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense. The movie can be followed by anybody, because the details of stock manipulation are all filtered through transparent layers of greed. Most of the time we know what's going on. All of the time, we know why". Richard Corliss, in his review for Time, wrote, "This time he works up a salty sweat to end up nowhere, like a triathlete on a treadmill. But as long as he keeps his players in venal, perpetual motion, it is great scary fun to watch him work out". In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott praised the performances of the two leads: "But Douglas's portrayal of Gordon Gekko is an oily triumph and as the kid Gekko thinks he has found in Fox ("Poor, smart and hungry; no feelings"), Charlie Sheen evolves persuasively from gung-ho capitalist child to wily adolescent corporate raider to morally appalled adult". 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".
Michael Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor and thanked Oliver Stone for "casting me in a part that almost nobody thought I could play".
Legacy
Wall Street enjoyed renewed interest in 1990 when the cover of Newsweek magazine asked, "Is Greed Dead?" after 1980s icons like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky ran afoul of insider trading laws. Over the years, the film's screenwriter Stanley Weiser has been approached by numerous people who told him, "The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko". In addition, both Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas still have people come up to them and say that they became stockbrokers because of their respective characters in the film. In recent years, Stone was asked how the financial market depicted in Wall Street has changed and he replied, "The problems that existed in the 1980s market grew and grew into a much larger phenomenon. Enron is a fiction, in a sense, in the same way that Gordon Gekko's buying and selling was a fiction ... Kenny Lay--he's the new Gordon Gekko".
DVD
A 20th Anniversary Edition was released on September 18, 2007. New extras include an on-camera introduction by Stone, extensive deleted scenes, "Greed is Good" featurettes, and new on-camera interviews with Michael Douglas and Martin Sheen.
Themes
The film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas advocating "greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Conflicts
Wall Street defines itself through a number of morality conflicts putting 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 anything 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 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 creative destruction brought about by Gekko's unrestrained free-market philosophy.
'Greed is Good'
Arguably 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 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.
Sequel
On May 5, 2007, the New York Times reported that a sequel, Money Never Sleeps, is currently in pre-production. Michael Douglas will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko, depending on whether he likes the script by Allan Loeb. The film will focus on Gekko, recently released from prison, and re-entering a much more chaotic financial world than the one he once oversaw. Both Charlie Sheen and Oliver Stone will be absent from the sequel.
Weiser had worked on a treatment for the sequel with the second part set in China. The film was set in the present with Gekko being released from jail. The studio felt that the material was dated and put the project in turnaround. Stone had a falling out with producer Edward R. Pressman and began work on W. with Weiser. A script has been written by Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker. According to Pressman, the new film will be based in New York, in London, in the United Arab Emirates and in an Asian country. One of the character consultants to the new movie will be billionaire Vincent Tchenguiz. Pressman said that Gekko will be a more outwardly altruistic figure but, admits, "a leopard doesn't change its spots, despite appearances".
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