Shia LaBeouf was escorted out of the LA opening of The Box nightclub by security Friday night after a confrontation with a pal of shock rocker Marilyn Manson [after LaBeouf “picked up a water bottle...and started spitting it all over his tablemates, including Marilyn Manson"]. The “Transformers” star “exchanged terse words with a friend of Manson’s, who lunged over the table at Shia, and Shia lunged back. “Two security guards led Shia out holding his hands behind his head. Outside, he fell onto a barricade. Swearing, he picked himself up and ran off.” Despite numerous witnesses at the party, also attended by Jon Hamm, Lindsay Lohan and Chelsea Handler, Shia’s rep said: “[He] actually left the club early as planned … he went to see one of the bands performing in the showcase and left after they finished … exiting through a crowded room was apparently misinterpreted. No altercation occurred.” [NYP, earlier]
Money Never Sleeps
“I don’t think LaBeouf’s character [who attempted to raise capital for an alternative-energy company] was unrealistic from a personality standpoint. More Wall Street people than you’d think have that kind of beneath-the-surface idealism.“– Anonymous Goldman analyst, in a conversation with Dealbook discussing how “real” things are in Money Never Sleeps. The same financial services employee noted that “there were too many ties” and said he thought “the percentage of scenes that Jake wasn’t in the office was way off.” [Dealbook via DI]
The culture of the employees, the trading floor [as depicted in Money Never Sleeps]…I thought all that was pretty good, though some of the machines looked funky. And those equity guys were portrayed very accurately, like the lugheads that that know their stories on a couple of [stocks]. At Lehman the difference between equity floor and the fixed income floor was like night and day. It’s like the Harvard, MIT crowd in fixed income and then it’s like UMass on the equity floor. So many equity guys totally got blind-sided. They didn’t understand credit derivatives, and they just were so wrapped up in their own little stories.– Lawrence McDonald, managing director at Pangea Capital, previously VP of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers, and guy for whom the Wall Street sequel was “hard to watch” because it “brought back a lot of bad memories.” [TDB]
Financial Services Employees Offer Words Of Wisdom, Tepid Enthusiasm For Money Never Sleeps, Night Of Love And Desktop Wallpaper
By Bess LevinIggy Ioppe. Colin Butler. Greg Hold. Three “finance powerhouses” who “play hard” for “the thrill of the game itself.” Somehow they managed to find time in their schedules to help promote Money Never Sleeps. This involves telling us their favorite Wall Street quotes, of course, but also their relationship statuses (all singles, ladies!), and market musings. (For instance, Greg, founder of Hold Brothers, appreciates that “The markets are fair. They don’t care who your daddy is.” Colin, VP of institutional trading at Caris & Co has learned that “You’ve got to come to work each morning ready to bite the ass off a bear.” Iggy, a prop trader at Credit Suisse loves the confluence of “society, economy, politics.”) There’s also this: Continue reading »
Daily Intel Jessica and I saw a screening of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps last week. We haven’t shared our thoughts on it until now because we haven’t wanted to/been ready to talk about it. I’m not going to say it’s so bad you shouldn’t see it, but that’s just because it’s so bad it needs to be seen to be believed and we want more people to be able to share in our collective trauma. Like being stripped naked, covered in honey and sewn ass to mouth to your fellow members of the incoming Goldman Sachs analyst class, you can’t truly understand unless you’ve gone through something like that yourself. Continue reading »
Guests at a Sunday night screening of Money Never Sleeps included hedge funder Jeffrey Epstein, who was greeted warmly by guests after he completed a prison sentence in June. “It was the first time he has been out in two years, but nobody blinked he was there,” a witness reports. “He was chatting to Jonathan Farkas, Wilbur Ross and Leon Black. He was sitting right near Rudy Giuliani.” Also there were moguls Stephen Schwarzman, Pete Peterson, Teddy Forstmann, Peter Brant and Martha Stewart, as well as TV journalists who cover them, including ABC’s Chris Cuomo, Bloomberg TV’s Gigi Stone and CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. [NYP]
Despite the fact that his co-star Shia Labeouf has the accumulated wisdom of several lunches with top brass at the Encino branch of Charles Schwab, sitting in on rounds 17-23 of the Goldman Sachs interview process, and months of studying for the CFA’s Level I exam only to come down with a stomach virus the day of the test, it was retired investor Mike D who will be talking shop at CLSA’s investor conference in Hong Kong this September. For those who question whether or not Douglas knows anything about investing in real life, and why he and not another I don’t know– THE GUY WHO HAS BLOOMBERG ON SPEED-DIAL– was invited, rest assured, MD knows what he’s talking about here. Continue reading »
“Don’t go expecting a movie that will give you some great intellectual or emotional insights into the Wall Street crisis. Sure, there are the obligatory “life on the trading floor” scenes and quasi-faithful recreations of arguments between Treasury and Wall Street at the oak-paneled New York Fed. And there are lots of cameos of CNBC anchors and Nouriel Roubini (as “Dr. Hashimi”) to give the movie “authenticity.” But the authenticity is as phony as Bernie Madoff’s investment returns. How many Fordham-educated prop traders with the last name “Moore” speak fluent Mandarin?” [WSJ via BI]
Josh Brolin’s Mouth-Running Threatening To Overshadow Shia LaBeouf’s Wall Street Career
By Bess Levin
As you undoubtedly know by now, during the course of his preparation for Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Shia LaBeouf became a master trader. He worked with the guys at Encino Charles Schwab office, Citi and John Thomas Financial, he turned $20,000 into almost half a mill, he’s thisclose to becoming a Chartered Financial Analyst and he knows exactly what it takes to get hired at Goldman Sachs. He’s spoken of his pedigree many, many times, under the guise of promoting the movie all the while communicating to Wall Street that there’s a new Josh Birnbaum in town and so far, things have been coming together quite nicely. He has offers coming out the ass, he senses that Lloyd is just waiting for the right moment to can Viniar and offer him the gig and re: Shia LaBeouf Capital Management, all I’m going to say is that it’s been communicated from Stamford that the seed money is there for the taking. And up until this point, the plan has gone off without a hitch, because his co-star, Josh Brolin, has kept his trap shut. You see, kids, because he achieved none of the theatrical success young Shia did at an early age, brolin had to start day trading in order to pay the bills. He achieved a tiny modicum of success but nothing like LaB. Did he trade on his cell phone? No! Did he have Bloomberg on speed-dial? No! And yet this prick is now going around telling people how fucking great he is at making it rain. Continue reading »
“You just had the flash-crash on Thursday. Here we are at Cannes. It’s almost like Rupert Murdoch made it happen,” said co-star Shia LaBeouf, referring to the chairman of News Corp., which owns 20th Century Fox, the studio releasing the film. “You’re down 1,000 points on Thursday, you’re up 300 points on Monday,” LaBeouf, who plays Gekko’s new protege, said in an interview. “You literally, just as I’m speaking to you, just went through the most tumultuous 30 minutes to ever hit the market in the history of Wall Street, and here we are promoting a movie. It’s wild that our movie’s taking place in this landscape. This is a firefight in the middle of the craziest money storm that has ever happened.”
Also, while you’re giving them props, feel free to inform Goldman Sachs and RBS that shouldn’t hesitate to S a D.
Because his 1987 hit attacked the personal ethics of financiers — and the director is pals with Hugo Chavez — it’s not surprising that several banks didn’t want Stone to shoot scenes inside their New York offices. The director notes that the “conservative banks would not deal with us. Goldman sealed their floors to us.” But an unlikely knight saved the day: “Our biggest break came when the Royal Bank of Canada called back, and they were extremely gracious, they said, ‘By all means, we’d love you to shoot here.’ The Royal Bank of Canada was one of the few banks that behaved impeccably in this period and made a profit and continued on. And everyone applauded Canada’s behavior because they had different rules. Europe was going down, the whole world was affected. But here was the Royal Bank of Canada — unlike the Royal Bank of Scotland, which was a disaster — the Royal Bank of Canada was impeccable!
