‘Wall Street’: an outsider’s movie on insiders

Press, 3 December 1987, Page 16

‘Wall Street’: an outsider’s movie on insiders

lAN BALL reports on director Oliver Stone’s view of the money markets

First THERE was Ivan (“The Terrible”) Boesky admitting his insider-trad-ing shenanigans and paying a penalty of SUSIOO million as part of his punishment Then a "Wall Street Journal” man and his cohorts were caught reaping profits from stocks he was plugging in his column. Along came Meltdown Monday on October 19, followed by three Bloody Mondays in a row, which clipped SUSSOO billion off the collective value of America’s public companies. Then 1100 floor reporters, clerks and secretaries went on strike in a bid to bring the New York Stock Exchange management to its knees. The next blow will be a celluloid one: early next month, Hollywood will be releasing a raging bear of its own. Oliver Stone, whose con-science-pricking films, “Platoon” and “Salvador,” have put an Oscar on his mantelpiece, is ready with his fictional look at the dark side of the American financial system. Its title could hardly be more direct — or more apposite. “Wall Street” is the story of an investment banker in his mid-20s being corrupted in an insidertrading scheme by an older corporate raider, a smoothie from the arena of wheeling and dealing. Stone, the son of an investment banker, says the idea came to him while he was writing the script for “Scarface,” his seamy film about organised crime in Florida.

“Its get-rich-quick Miami mentality had certain parallels in New York, where an acquaintance of mine was making a fortune in the market,” Stone recalled. "He was like . some crazed coke dealer, nervously on the phone at nights trading with Hong Kong and London, checking the telex, talking about enormous sums of money to be won or lost on a daily basis. “He had two huge Gatsby-like houses on the beach in Long Island (he couldn’t decide which one to live in), several dune buggies, cars, jeeps, a seaplane

company, an art collection, and a town house in Manhattan. Then he took a giant fall.” When Stone began scouting for locations, the Wall Street Establishment was sceptical: Oliver Stone could be interested only in doing a hatchet job on the stock market The attitude changed after the commercial and critical success of “Platoon.” He soon had unprecedented access to the holy of holies. Stone’s camera crew was allowed to film scenes on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the cockpit of trading which has been strictly off-limits to journalists and television cameras during the current turmoil. The crew was also given entree to two of midtown Manhattan’s “power” restaurants, the 21 Club and Le Cirque, off Park Avenue.

The film’s two stars, Michael Douglas, who plays a go-for-the-jugular corporate raider, and Charlie Sheen, a takeover whiz-in-training, were given a familiarisation course inside the investment banking firm of Salomon Brothers. David Brown, a reallife broker convicted for insidertrading, served as an adviser on the film.

The actors studied how Wall Streeters under pressure speak, smoke, hold a telephone, communicate with body language and scribble down multi-million-dollar trades on order pads.

In capturing what Stone talks of as "New York in its power, glory and greed,” the crew inevitably raised a few hackles. “We actually shot on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange while they were trading,” the director told the writer Peter Biskind in an interview for “Premiere” magazine. “A lot of the older traders were upset because they were trying to make money and we were creating a disturbance, but there were many more Vietnam veterans on the floor than I had imagined and they had seen ‘Platoon.’

There was also an element of catharsis for Stone in co-writing the script and getting his story

on film: “When I was working on •Wall Street,’ I felt my dad was around in a ghost-like form, watching over me and laughing, bedause here is the idiot son who doesn’t know anything about the stock market, who can barely add and subtract, doing a film with the grandiose title ‘Wall Street.’

“Dad believed very strongly in capitalism. Yet the irony of it was that he never really benefited from it. All his life money was an overriding concern. But he never owned a single thing; everything was rented, right down to the cars, the apartment and, if it had been possible, the furniture.

“There was an insecurity at the heart of our family existence. I began to resent money as the

criterion by-which to judge all things, and there grew up to be a raging battle between my father and me about it” Although Stone and his father were reconciled before the latter’s death two years ago, the paternal advice to the man who is. now among Hollywood’s most celebrated directors was bleak in the extreme: “Going into movies is crazy — you aren’t going to make a dime.” Stone’s objective in making “Wall Street” was to show how bright young spectators lose their way in the labyrinth, lose their sense of values to the point where “net worth starts to equal cpif.worth ” “I think ‘Wall Street’ is really about the urban culture of the Eighties. The pressure is enorm-

ous on these young guys to produce. I think they are perverted right off the bat Why would someone who is making $lOO million have to make another $2O million? Because he has to stay ahead of the next' guy. Money is a way of keeping score.

"You read about these kids, who are making a million bucks,; two million bucks a year — it demoralises the person making $40,000 a year. All of a sudden; everybody needs a Porsche ,or a VCR or a fishing boat. “And this is what fuels America, more and more greed. We deal with these issues by staying inside a very small Story, one fish in a Wall Street aquarium and what happens to that fish.”