Repeat After Me: Greed Is Not Good

Not having taken an Evelyn Wood Speed Reading class, I went to UCLA and purchased the Cliffs Notes to "Crime and Punishment." On Monday, I explained to Oliver that the paradigm for that masterwork would not mesh well with the story we wanted to tell. But Oliver was in a hurry to make this movie. "OK, read 'The Great Gatsby' tonight, and see if we can mine something out of it."

The next day I rented a videocassette of the 1974 adaptation, and drew a blank. It didn't provide the right springboard.

Having no prior understanding or knowledge about how the financial markets worked, I immersed myself in books, articles, research. And Oliver and I spent three weeks visiting brokerage houses, interviewing investors and getting a feel for the Weltanschauung of Wall Street.

If any writer or director were to pitch a dramatic movie about hostile takeovers to a Hollywood studio executive today, he would be shown the door. As a matter of fact, he would have been shown the door in 1987. The reason 20th Century Fox made "Wall Street" was that Oliver was red-hot off his best picture Academy Award for "Platoon," made the year before.

In developing the character of Gordon Gekko, I formed an amalgam of disgraced arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, corporate raider Carl Icahn, and his lesser-known art-collecting compatriot Asher Edelman. Add a dash of Michael Ovitz and a heaping portion of, yes, my good friend and esteemed colleague Stone (who came up with the character's name) -- and there you have the rough draft of 'Gekko the Great.'

Gekko's dialogue actually was inspired by Stone's own rants. Listening to Oliver's early morning cajoling and sarcastic phone calls (I write at night) exhorting me to work: "Where the hell are you? Out having a gourmet breakfast, playing with the kids in the park?" Or: "The one thing you don't do is everything I tell you to do; next time write a note and pin it on your . . . forehead." Other unpublishable barbs proved to be the precise varnish with which I needed to coat Gekko.

That the movie was a modest hit was a welcome surprise.

Prior to its release, "Wall Street" was not tracking well due to low interest outside of the big cities. "Too much reality," was another studio worry, as the film was released on the heels of the '87 market crash. The fear was that moviegoers wouldn't want to revisit high-finance skulduggery right after their own portfolios were wiped out. (Oddly enough, Oliver and I now find ourselves in a similar situation with the impending release of "W.," our look at the formative events in the life of President George W. Bush, who is not exactly the most popular man on the planet right now.)