Wall Street (film) Totally Explained

Everything about Wall Street Film totally explained

Wall Street is 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 wasn't 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 young 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 (Martin Sheen). So caught in the middle is Bud, who pitches his father's company to Gekko with the intentions of saving it while everyone gets rich in the process. Carl is a maintenance chief at a small airline, Bluestar, and learns it'll 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.
   Fox tips off Gekko with this inside information. An appreciative Gekko takes Fox 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 blonde, interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah).
   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 Darian, who prefers money to love.
   Bud devises a plan in which he'll 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 Fox and finally decides to dump his remaining interest in the company. Only later does Gekko learn that Fox 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's 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, Fox confronts Gekko in Central Park. Gekko viciously assaults Fox, but not before mentioning several of their illegal business transactions. Fox is wearing a wire, and the police presumably will use this recording as state's evidence, although Gekko's fate is left ambiguous. The film ends with Bud arriving at the courthouse, ready to atone for his crimes and greed.

Development

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 idea that could be "Crime and Punishment on Wall Street--two guys abusing each other on Wall Street." 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 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." 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 theory that Wall Street was controlled by Jews. According to Weiser, Gekko’s style of speaking was inspired by Stone. "When I was writing some of the dialogue I'd listen to Oliver on the phone and sometimes he talks very rapid-fire, the way Gordon Gekko does." Stone set the film in 1985 because insider trading scandals culminated in 1985 and 1986. The director says that he saw "that villain quality" in the actor and always thought he was a smart businessman.
   According to Stone, he was "making a movie about sharks, about feeding frenzies. Bob [directorof 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."
   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, Beck's own star would fall. The Wall Street Journal ran an article exposing many things he'd led people to believe (that he was an heir to the Beck brewing family fortune and that he'd served in the Vietnam War) as fabrications. 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." In addition, traders were brought in to coach actors on the set on how to hold phones, write out tickets, and talk to clients.
   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". 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's 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."

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 Charlie Sheen.

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, but both Charlie Sheen and Oliver Stone will be absent from the sequel.

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