Wall Street is a 1987 American drama film directed by Oliver Stone and features Michael Douglas as a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider and Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker desperate to succeed.
Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor. 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's character advocating that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Tagline : Every dream has a price.
Plot synopsis
A stockbroker at Jackson-Steinem, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), is desperate to get to the top. He wants to become involved with his hero, the extremely successful but unscrupulous corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a ruthless and legendary Wall Street player whose values could not 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 his birthday and pitches him stocks which Bud had been analyzing for some time. However, Gekko is unimpressed, calling the stocks Bud analyzed "dogs", and Bud realizing that Gekko may not do business with him 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. Gekko tells him he'll think about what Bud has told him. A dejected Bud returns to his office where Gekko places an order for Bluestar stock and Bud has "bagged the elephant" (made Gekko a client).
An appreciative Gekko takes Bud under his wing but compels him to unearth new information by any means necessary, including becoming a partner in a cleaning company to gain access to confidential files in the offices of the clients of the cleaning company. Bud becomes wealthy, enjoying Gekko's promised perks, including a corner office with a view, penthouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side and a trophy blonde, interior decorator Darien (Daryl Hannah). Gekko asks Bud to buy large quantities of stock in a paper company, Teldar, in which Gekko plans to raid and sell off the pieces. Bud does this by enlisting his friends as straw buyers of the stock and giving them a cut of the proceeds. It is at the Teldar annual stockholder's meeting where Gekko gives his infamous "Greed is good" speech.
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 does not like Gekko, Bud is able to coax him into it. Things change when Bud learns that Gekko plans to sell off Bluestar's assets, an act that would leave Carl and the entire Bluestar staff unemployed, but would make Bud extremely rich as Gekko made him the president of Bluestar and as virtue of being president, he would get a "golden parachute". Angered by Gekko's decision and wracked with the guilt of being an accessory to Bluestar's destruction, Bud chooses his father over his mentor and 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 creates a plan in which he will alter 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, finally decides to dump his remaining interest in the company. Gekko learns 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 the police and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC became suspicious of Bud when they detected when he placed an unusually large buy order of Teldar stock, which was picked up by StockWatch. Bud is placed under arrest, 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. Following the confrontation, Bud walks to Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, and it is revealed that he was wearing a wire to record his encounter with Gekko. He turns the wire tapes over to the federal authorities, who suggest that his sentence will be lightened in exchange for his help with the federal investigation into Gekko. The film ends with Bud arriving at the courthouse.
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 cha
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