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The Legacy of Wall Street

The legacy of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.

When Oliver Stone directed Wall Street (1987), it was a drama inspired by Regan-era insider dealing scandals.

It became famous for Michael Douglas‘ portrayal of corporate raider Gordon Gecko, who coined the term ‘greed is good’.

But the law of unintended consequences kicked in and – like Milton’s Satan – the villain of the movie somehow became the hero to a generation of stockbrokers on Wall Street.

Even later films such as Boiler Room (2000), a parable about the 90’s stock market boom, saw their trader characters quote Gecko:

Douglas himself admitted that drunken traders would come up to him in restaurants and miss the entire point of the character.

When a sequel was announced in 2007, it was presumably meant to be a milder depiction of the business (maybe even presenting Gecko as a vharming villain).

But now, given that the Western world is reeling from an economic crisis inspired by the kind of greed Gecko loved, what will the new film look like?

> Wall Street at the IMDb
> Gordon Geckoย and the sequel at Wikipedia