Wall Street has been the name of two movies, one released in 1929 and the other in 1987. Coincidentally, these two movies came out in December of their respective years, just less than two months after the two biggest stock market crashes in American history (Wall Street Crash 1929 and Black Monday (1987).
1929 movie
The 1929 movie was produced by Harry Cohn and starred Ralph Ince, Aileen Pringle, Sam De Grasse, Philip Strange, and Freddie Burke Frederick.
1987 movie
Rated R, the 1987 movie was directed by Oliver Stone and features Michael Douglas in perhaps his most famous role. The movie 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. It won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Michael Douglas).
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 corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Douglas).
After succeeding in meeting Gekko, Fox gives him a stock tip based on insider information he happened to come across while talking to his father, Carl (Martin Sheen, Charlie's real-life father). Carl is a maintenance chief at a small airline, Bluestar and learns that they will soon be cleared of a safety concern after a previous crash.
Gekko uses the information Bud reveals to him about Bluestar to make a small profit when the stock jumps after the verdict on the crash is released. Fox quickly learns that this is the "secret" to Gekko's success—insider information—but the illegalities and ethical conflict involved bother him only slightly as he is quickly admitted into Gekko's "inner circle". Fox quickly becomes very wealthy and gets all the perks — the fancy apartment, the trophy blonde interior decorator Darien (Darryl Hannah), and the cars.
This diffidence changes when Gekko decides to do a corporate raid on Fox's father's company. At this point he must choose between the rich insider's lifestyle offered by working outside the law, or his father's more traditional blue-collar values of fair play and hard work. He chooses to try to preserve the latter by utilising what he has learned from Gekko. To achieve this Bud uses a business rival to break the deal, getting indicted for insider trading in the process. He gets his last revenge by turning state's evidence against Gekko, going to jail himself in the process.
The movie is significant in terms of reflecting the public's general malaise with the current state of affairs in the "big business" world both in the late 1980s and in the wake of the late 1990s post-internet bubble scandals.
Carl's character represents the working class in the movie, he is the union leader for the maintenance workers at Bluestar. 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 conceit 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.
Gekko clearly represents the stereotypical corporate raider of the 1980s, whose dealings were being reported on daily. Stone was not trying to point out illegal dealings, but to illustrate the corrupt lifestyle of everyone involved in the financial system, legal or not. The system values "The Deal" more than what the deal represents, people and goods—a system Stone apparently believes is without value.
The most remembered scene in the movie 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: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge has marked the upward surge in mankind — and greed, you mark my words — will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.
His catchphrase from the speech, "Greed is good", came to symbolise the ruthless, profit-obsessed, short-term corporate culture of the 1980s and 1990s and by extension became associated with unrestrained free-market economic policies. It remains prevalent to the present day in the investment banking industry, with a highly popular Greed Is Good silicone wristband launched in 2005.
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 a 1985 commencement address at UC Berkeley, 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."
Errors
Depiction of insider trading
Despite the authenticity of its portrayal of the trading floor and brokerage houses, Wall Street makes several errors concerning the legality of insider trading. Bud's conviction under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 is incorrect; absent a provision of section 10(b) passed in 1993 concerning the liability of family members for misappropriated information, Bud would not be held liable for passing on news of his father's airline reorganization to Gekko.
Nor could Bud be held liable for disclosing information on Gekko's rival raider to Gekko; except for the documents he seized from a locked office (while in the guise of a janitor), all the information he provided Gekko was publicly observable, and therefore outside the scope of the law. Even Bud's college friend (James Spader), a lawyer who profits off of his occasional stock tips, would probably be safe from SEC investigators, much less the disbarment he fears, as he had no reason to believe that Bud's tips were anything more than the result of shrewd, legal analytical techniques.
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 on how a broker had shorted NASA stock thirty seconds after the Challenger exploded. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January, 1986, well after the events of the beginning of the film. And, of course, NASA being a government agency, it does not have any stock (the comment is probably sarcasm).
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.
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.
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 had an affair with Gekko's wife, Kate (Sean Young). As a result her 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.
While it certainly made the film more marketable, its excision may have had as much to do with Young being widely despised by many on the set. Charlie Sheen (who has also admitted drinking heavily during production) reportedly at one point slapped a paper sign on her back saying "I am a cunt"; it took several hours before Young was aware of it.
There was thus a bitter irony, critics noted, at that year's Academy Award ceremony in Young presenting the Best Editing award.
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.
It is unknown at this point whether this footage will ever be shown in a rerelease of the film or on a special-edition DVD.
Trivia
- This film won Michael Douglas his second Oscar. As a producer, he won Best Picture for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- 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.
- Also making a cameo appearance is veteran Saturday Night Live writer and sometime performer Michael O'Donoghue, as the reporter Bud phones tips into.
- Stone himself can be seen as one of the people on phones passing on tips on Anacott Steel in the split-screen montage early in the film.
- The film is dedicated to Stone's father Louis, who worked on Wall Street his entire life.
References in other films
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 ("His quarterlies aren't worth SHIT! ... If this guy owned a funeral parlor, nobody would die!!!") in unison.