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]
Posted by , Sep 24, 2007 1:27PM
dan loeb