Why is Oliver Stone sitting idly by while someone else makes his sequel? Old boy doesn’t much care for the Street, in its current form. For one thing, it’s no longer a place where a little guy can earn himself some ill-gotten gains on his own two feet. “Gordon Gekko couldn’t manipulate the markets like he did back then,” Stone says. “It’s so big, so huge, that to be a minor player, you need to be a major bank.”
Also, even though he has Google Alerts set for “greed,” “CEOs and secretary hos,” “Schwarzman + crabs,” and “Wall Street + movie ideas,” nothing’s jumping out at him. Plus, stuff’s harder to “get” than it was twenty years ago. “The biggest dramatic story is Enron…But frankly I read the books, and I still can’t understand what they did. It’s very hard to do a financial movie, to make stocks and bonds sexy and interesting.”
Though one of Wall Street’s original consultants, Carl Icahn, has yet to kick it (a Snapple fact the director may not have been aware of), Stone feels “the flamboyant tycoon” has been displaced by big corporations, and thus renders a Part II of his own making impossible. This may be for the best, considering Stone’s opinion of the behaviors of these men, which he compares to peacocks swelling, and characterizes as “tasteless and disgusting.” And though in doing so we may simply be creating a crib sheet from which Stone can carry out his hate-crimes, just for fun, let’s see if we can name any flamers with some material ripe for the taking. You start.
Oliver Stone: Life after ‘Wall Street’ [Fortune]
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Oliver Stone Is Disappointed In, Flummoxed By, Disgusted With Wall Street
By Bess LevinComments (10)
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dan loeb
big flamer= tim sykes
Well it’s very difficult to write a story about anything of significance when your goal is to entertain the dumbest common denominator.
I thought Cramer was the original consultant and who gecko was based on
yes, you are wrong, am i wrong.
no no, that was a joke, it had to be
But you could do a movie on Bear/Goldman trying to rip off the hedge funds & their own hedge fund investors at the same time…the uberrich vs. the uberrich, have a girlfriend on the dealer side, a boyfriend on the hedge fund side, and a parent trying to get the money out on the client side…and have them all go down in flames….tm(trademark)
the Internet
Stone’s right — finance’s a tough story to show on screen, as opposing to telling it on the printed page.
Trading desks, spreadsheet monkeys, lawyers and bankers in conference rooms marking up documents — can anything be less exciting if you see it on screen?
Watch Wall Street again and notice how little of the movie had anything to do with how people in finance actually spend their days.
I don’t know what Stone means when he says finance is now all about big corporations.
Private equity and hedge funds ought to offer lots of opportunities for him to find interesting characters doing things that work well on screen.
The rise and fall of Thomas R. Hudson Jr. Seriously.