Wall Street (film)
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- This article refers to the 1987 movie. For the 1929 movie, see Wall Street (1929 movie).
Plot
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 quite nasty corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael 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". Gekko takes Fox under his wing and he 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.
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 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.
Corruption
The movie is significant in terms of reflecting the public's general malaise with the state of affairs in the business and financial world in the late 1980s.
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 some involved in the financial system, legal or not. The system values "The Deal" more than what the deal represents: people. This is a system Stone apparently believes is without value.
Wall Street therefore focuses more heavily on the moral corruption induced by wealth than corruption in the legal sense, though the latter is of course the basis for the main plotline. Through the cartoonish character of Gekko and the naivety of Bud, the film holds a mirror to 1980s America in a similar fashion to the books The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho; in this way the film implies, in an ironic echo of Gekko's 'Greed is Good' speech, that the moral bankruptcy infecting Gekko and Bud Fox is widespread throughout American society.
'Greed is Good'
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 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.
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."
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.
It should be noted that 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 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 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; in the absence of the provision of section 10(b), only passed in 1993 and concerning the liability of family members for misappropriated information, Bud could not be held liable for passing on news of his father's airline reorganization to Gekko.Neither 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 disguise 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 and 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.
In fact, the most clear-cut illegal behavior shown in the movie occurs earlier, when Gekko and Sir Lawrence Wildman (Terence Stamp) appear to negotiate a price for Gekko's Anacott Steel holdings above his tender offer to the rest of the market.
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 (Gekko) 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 is a government agency and does not have any stock (the comment is 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.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.
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 due to the kind of bizarre behavior that would become more public several years later. 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.
- This film is the one being watched by the stockbrokers of J.T. Marlin in the movie Boiler Room.
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 , a Professor tells Detectives Goren and Eames his alibi saying that he was screening Wall Street for his class in business ethics.
External links
| Films by Oliver Stone |
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