Wall Street has been the name of two movies, one released in 1929 and the other in 1987. Coincidentally, these two movies came out in December of their respective years, just less than two months after the two biggest stock market crashes in American history (Wall Street Crash 1929 and Black Monday (1987). 1929 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... December is the twelfth and last month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar and one of seven Gregorian months with the length of 31 days. ... Black Monday (1987) on the Dow Jones A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic loss of value of shares of stock in corporations. ... The 1929 stock market crash devastated economies worldwide The Wall Street Crash refers to the stock market crash that occurred on October 29, 1929, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, leading eventually to the Great Depression. ... Dow Jones (19 July 1987 through 19 January 1988) FTSE 100 Index (19 July 1987 through 19 January 1988) Black Monday is the name ascribed to Monday October 19, 1987. ...

1929 movie

The 1929 movie was produced by Harry Cohn and starred Ralph Ince, Aileen Pringle, Sam De Grasse, Philip Strange, and Freddie Burke Frederick. Harry Cohn (July 23, 1891–February 27, 1958) was the founder of Columbia Pictures. ... Aileen Pringle Aileen Pringle (July 23, 1895 - December 16, 1989) was a highly successful and popular stage and film actress during the silent film era. ... Samuel Alfred De Grace (June 12, 1875 - November 29, 1953) was a Canadian actor. ...

1987 movie

DVD cover

Rated R, the 1987 movie was directed by Oliver Stone and features Michael Douglas in perhaps his most famous role. The movie has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas as the archetypal "Master of the Universe". Wall Street was written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone. It won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Michael Douglas). Image File history File links Wall Street DVD cover This image is of a DVD cover, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by either the publisher of the DVD or the studio which produced the movie in question. ... Image File history File links Wall Street DVD cover This image is of a DVD cover, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by either the publisher of the DVD or the studio which produced the movie in question. ... Motion picture rating systems are issued to give moviegoers an idea of the suitability of a movie for children and/or adults in terms of issues such as sex, violence and bad language. ... Oliver Stone William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946 in New York City) known simply as Oliver Stone is an Academy Award-winning American film director. ... Michael Douglas Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA) is an Jewish American actor and producer. ... Although he never won an Oscar for any of his movie performances, the comedian Bob Hope received two honorary Oscars for his contributions to cinema. ... The Academy Award for Best Actor is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; nominations are made by Academy members who are actors and actresses. ...

The story involves a young stockbroker, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen), who is desperate to get to "the top". He settles on a plan to become involved with his hero, the extremely successful corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Douglas). A stock broker or stockbroker or stock brokerage is someone or a firm who performs transactions in financial instruments on a stock market as an agent of his/her/its clients who are unable or unwilling to trade for themselves. ... Charlie Sheen Charlie Sheen with Julie Strain , January 1993 Carlos Irwin Estevez, whose stage name is Charlie Sheen, (born September 3, 1965) is an American actor. ... Gordon Gekko is a fictional character from the popular movie Wall Street. ...

After succeeding in meeting Gekko, Fox gives him a stock tip based on insider information he happened to come across while talking to his father, Carl (Martin Sheen, Charlie's real-life father). Carl is a maintenance chief at a small airline, Bluestar and learns that they will soon be cleared of a safety concern after a previous crash. Martin Sheen as President Josiah Jed Bartlet Martin Sheen (born August 3, 1940) is an American actor. ...

Gekko uses the information Bud reveals to him about Bluestar to make a small profit when the stock jumps after the verdict on the crash is released. Fox quickly learns that this is the "secret" to Gekko's success—insider information—but the illegalities and ethical conflict involved bother him only slightly as he is quickly admitted into Gekko's "inner circle". Fox quickly becomes very wealthy and gets all the perks — the fancy apartment, the trophy blonde interior decorator Darien (Darryl Hannah), and the cars. There are two kinds of trading that are referred to as insider trading or inside dealing: Usually illegal: Trading of a security of a company (, stocks, bonds or stock options) based on material non-public information. ... Interior decoration is the art of decorating a room so it looks good, is easy to use, and functions well with the existing architecture. ... Daryl Christine Hannah (born December 3, 1960) is a popular American actress. ...

This diffidence changes when Gecko decides to do a corporate raid on Fox's father's company. At this point he must choose between the rich insider's lifestyle offered by working outside the law, or his father's more traditional blue-collar values of fair play and hard work. He chooses to try to preserve the latter by utilising what he has learned from Gecko. To achieve this Bud uses a business rival to break the deal, getting indicted for insider trading in the process. He gets his last revenge by turning state's evidence against Gecko, going to jail himself in the process. A corporate raid is a business term, sometimes also referred to as breaking a company. ... In the common law legal system, an indictment is a formal charge of having committed a serious criminal offense. ... Immunity confers a status on a person or body that makes that person or body free from otherwise legal obligations such as, for example, liability for damages or punishment for criminal acts. ...

The movie is significant in terms of reflecting the public's general malaise with the current state of affairs in the "big business" world both in the late 1980s and in the wake of the late 1990s post-internet bubble scandals. // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... // Events and trends The 1990s are generally classified as having moved slightly away from the more conservative 1980s, but otherwise retaining a similar mindset. ...

Carl's character represents the working class in the movie, he is the union leader for the maintenance workers at Bluestar. The conflict between Gekko's relentless pursuit of wealth and Carl Fox's leftward leanings form the basis of the film's subtext. This subtext could be described as the concept of the "two fathers," one good and one evil, battling for control over the morals of the "son," a conceit Stone had also used in Platoon. In literary terms, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. ... Platoon is a 1986 Vietnam war film, written and directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen and Forest Whitaker. ...

In Wall Street the hard-working Carl Fox and the cutthroat businessman Gordon Gekko represent the fathers. The producers of the film use Carl as their voice in the film, a voice of reason amid the destructive actions brought about by Gekko's unrestrained greed.

Gekko clearly represents the stereotypical corporate raider of the 1980s, whose dealings were being reported on daily. Stone was not trying to point out illegal dealings, but to illustrate the corrupt lifestyle of some involved in the financial system, legal or not. The system values "The Deal" more than what the deal represents, people and goods—a system Stone apparently believes is without value.

The most remembered scene in the movie is a speech by Gekko to a shareholders' meeting of Teldar Paper, a company he is planning to take over. Stone uses this scene to give Gekko, and by extension, the Wall Street raiders he personifies, the chance to justify their actions, which he memorably does, pointing out the slothfulness and waste that corporate America accumulated through the postwar years and from which he sees himself as a "liberator": For other uses, see Wall Street (disambiguation). ... Corporate America is an informal phrase describing the business world of the United States. ...

The point is, ladies and gentlemen: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed works, greed is right. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all its forms, greed for life, money, love, knowledge has marked the upward surge in mankind — and greed, you mark my words — will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

His catchphrase from the speech, "Greed is good", came to symbolise what some simplistically decribe as the ruthless, profit-obsessed, short-term corporate culture of the 1980s and 1990s and by extension became associated with so-called unrestrained free-market economic policies. It remains prevalent to the present day in the investment banking industry, with a highly popular Greed Is Good silicone wristband launched in 2005. Investment banks assist corporations in raising funds in the public markets (both equity and debt), as well as provide strategic advisory services for mergers, acquisitions and other types of transactions. ... Greed Is Good - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... 2005 (MMV) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

The inspiration for the "Greed is good" speech seems to have come from two sources. The first part, where Gekko complains that the company's management owns less than three percent of its stock, and that it has too many vice presidents, is taken from similar speeches and comments made by Carl Icahn about companies he was trying to take over. The defense of greed is a paraphrase of a 1985 commencement address at UC Berkeley, delivered by arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, (who himself was later convicted of insider-trading charges) in which he said, "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." Carl Celian Icahn (1936-) is an American billionaire financier. ... Paraphrasing is the act in which a statement or remark is explained in other words or another way, as to clarify the meaning. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ... In economics, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a state of imbalance between two (or possibly more) markets: a combination of matching deals are struck that exploit the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. ... Ivan Frederick Boesky (born March 6, 1937) was notable for his prominent role in a Wall Street insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States in the mid-1980s. ...

Ultimately the "Greed is Good" speech is a bastardization of what Adam Smith concluded about human nature. He believed that in general honest people freed to pursue their own interest would fare better then they would under a system that dictated what was "good." In the process persons pursuing their own interests would eliminate inefficiencies and allocate commodities where they would benefit the greater society. For other people named Adam Smith, see Adam Smith (disambiguation). ...

Errors

Depiction of insider trading

Despite the authenticity of its portrayal of the trading floor and brokerage houses, Wall Street makes several errors concerning the legality of insider trading. Bud's conviction under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 is incorrect; absent a provision of section 10(b) passed in 1993 concerning the liability of family members for misappropriated information, Bud would not be held liable for passing on news of his father's airline reorganization to Gekko. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 was a sweeping piece of legislation in the United States regulating the participants in the financial markets. ...

Nor could Bud be held liable for disclosing information on Gekko's rival raider to Gekko; except for the documents he seized from a locked office (while in the guise of a janitor), all the information he provided Gekko was publicly observable, and therefore outside the scope of the law. Even Bud's college friend (James Spader), a lawyer who profits off of his occasional stock tips, would probably be safe from SEC investigators, much less the disbarment he fears, as he had no reason to believe that Bud's tips were anything more than the result of shrewd, legal analytical techniques. James Spader James Todd Spader (born February 7, 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an actor best known for his eccentric roles in movies such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape (for which he won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival), Stargate, and Secretary. ... The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, commonly referred to as the SEC, is the United States governing body which has primary responsibility for overseeing the regulation of the securities industry. ... Disbarment is a penalty for lawyers. ...

In fact, the most clear-cut illegal behavior shown in the movie occurs earlier, when Gekko and Sir Lawrence Wildman (Terence Stamp) appear to negotiate a price for Gekko's Anacott Steel holdings above his tender offer to the rest of the market. Terence Stamp Terence Stamp (born July 22, 1939 in Bow, London, England) is a British actor. ... Tender offer is a term typically used in corporate finance to mean a public, open offer by an entity to buy stock from the existing stockholders of a publicly traded corporation under specific terms in effect for a specific period. ...

Anachronism

In the first shot of the film, showing the large expanse of the a trading floor, the year is noted as 1985. Moments later a character comments on how a broker had shorted NASA stock thirty seconds after the Challenger exploded. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January, 1986, well after the events of the beginning of the film. And, of course, NASA being a government agency, it does not have any stock (the comment is probably sarcasm). In finance, short selling is selling something that one does not (yet) own. ... NASA Logo Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-09-01, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Space Shuttle Challenger (NASA Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-099) was NASAs second Space Shuttle orbiter to be put into service, after Columbia. ...

Stone later explained that the "1985" title at the beginning was added after production was finished, to locate the film in a time before the mid-'80s insider-trading scandals began to break.

Other

In real life, someone in Bud's position would not be arrested on the trading floor (although that did happen in a few cases) but instead would be quietly brought in away from work, in order to keep the news from spreading if, as in this situation, they wanted the arrestee to cooperate in order to get to the investigation's ultimate target. It is thus highly unlikely that Gekko would talk to Bud after his arrest since word travels fast on Wall Street and he would naturally assume that Bud would be wearing a wire.

In the film's final shot, Bud is shown walking up the steps of the state court building in Foley Square to his sentencing. Insider trading is a federal charge, the investigators chasing after him have been from the federal SEC, and thus he should be going into the adjacent federal court building. In law, a sentence forms the final act of a judge-ruled process, and also the symbolic principal act connected to his function. ... The term federal court, when used by itself, can refer to: Any court of the national government in a country that has a federal system such as that of the United States (United States federal courts) or Mexico In some countries, a particular court, for example, the Federal Court of...

Original cut

The first version of the film had a 160-minute running time, as opposed to 120 minutes for the theatrical release.

Most of the 40 minutes cut involved a subplot in which Bud had an affair with Gekko's wife, Kate (Sean Young). As a result her appearance in the film is greatly diminished. It does, however, explain why Gekko is so angry with Bud in their confrontation at the film's climax. Sean Young Mary Sean Young (b. ...

While it certainly made the film more marketable, its excision may have had as much to do with Young being widely despised by many on the set due to the kind of bizarre behavior that would become more public several years later. Charlie Sheen (who has also admitted drinking heavily during production) reportedly at one point slapped a paper sign on her back saying "I am a cunt"; it took several hours before Young was aware of it.

There was thus a bitter irony, critics noted, at that year's Academy Award ceremony in Young presenting the Best Editing award. Adolf Hitler: layered visual irony? Irony is a form of expression in which an implicit meaning is concealed or contradicted by the explicit meaning of the expression. ... 60th Academy Awards Hosts Preshow: Show: Crew Producer: Director: Duration Network The 60th Academy Awards were presented April 29, 1989 at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, Los Angeles. ... The Academy Award for Film Editing was first given for films issued in 1934. ...

Other cut scenes explain that Darien began her career as a call girl, the basis for Carl Fox telling off his son with "I don't go to bed with no whore, and I don't wake up with one" and the umbrage Bud takes at it. And yet another one explains how Bud becomes president of Bluestar without giving up his position at the brokerage firm, something that seems highly implausible in the final cut. A call girl is a prostitute who is not visible to the general public, like a street walker, and who does not usually belong to an institution like a brothel. ...

It is unknown at this point whether this footage will ever be shown in a rerelease of the film or on a special-edition DVD. DVD is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ...

Trivia

• This film won Michael Douglas his second Oscar. As a producer, he won Best Picture for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

• Jeffrey "Mad Dog" Beck, a star investment banker at the time with Drexel Burnham Lambert, was one of the film's technical advisers and has a cameo appearance in the film as the man speaking at the meeting discussing the breakup of Bluestar. (Within two years of the film's release, his star would fall as the Wall Street Journal ran an article exposing many things he had led people to believe about himself (that he was an heir to the Beck brewing family fortune and that he had served in the Vietnam War) as fabrications.

• Also making a cameo appearance is veteran Saturday Night Live writer and sometime performer Michael O'Donoghue, as the reporter Bud phones tips into.

• Stone himself can be seen as one of the people on phones passing on tips on Anacott Steel in the split-screen montage early in the film.

• The film is dedicated to Stone's father Louis, who worked on Wall Street his entire life.

Michael Douglas Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA) is an Jewish American actor and producer. ... Although he never won an Oscar for any of his movie performances, the comedian Bob Hope received two honorary Oscars for his contributions to cinema. ... The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the awards are voted on by other people within the industry. ... One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest is a 1975 film directed by Miloš Forman. ... Drexel Burnham Lambert was one of the most profitable Wall Street investment banking firms during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s. ... Martin Scorsese appears briefly in an uncredited role in this scene from Taxi Driver, the first scene in which Cybill Shepherd appears. ... The Wall Street Journal is an influential international daily newspaper published in New York City, New York with an average daily circulation of 1,800,607 (2002). ... The Vietnam War or Second Indochina War was a conflict between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam), allied with the National Liberation Front (NLF, or Viet Cong) against the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), and its allies—notably the United States military in support of... Saturday Night Live (SNL) is a weekly late-night 90-minute comedy-variety show from NBC which has been broadcast virtually every Saturday night since its debut on October 11, 1975. ... Michael ODonoghue (January 5, 1940 – November 8, 1994) was a 20th century writer and performer noted for his dark and destructive style of comedy. ...

References in other films

1993's Hot Shots! Part Deux had a scene where Charlie Sheen was seen on a boat going up a river, writing a letter as we heard his voiceover narration, an obvious spoof of his father's role in Apocalypse Now. In further acknowledgement of that, another boat passes in the opposite direction with Martin Sheen himself. As the craft pass, father and son simultaneously shout at each other, "Loved you in Wall Street!" 1993 (MCMXCIII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ... Hot Shots! Part Deux is a 1993 comedy spoof film, and a sequel to Hot Shots!. It starred Charlie Sheen, Lloyd Bridges, Valeria Golino, Richard Crenna, Brenda Bakke, Miguel Ferrer, Rowan Atkinson, and Jerry Haleva. ... A voice-over is a narration that is played on top of a video segment, usually with the audio for that segment muted or lowered. ... Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American film directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a script by John Milius (rewritten by Coppola) which was inspired by Joseph Conrads classic novella Heart of Darkness. ...

In the 2000 film Boiler Room, some of the young stockbrokers in that film are shown watching Wall Street on video. During the scene where Bud goes to Gekko's office for the first time and listens as he converses on the phone about the CEO of a company he is considering taking over, they turn down the volume and recite his lines ("His quarterlies aren't worth SHIT! ... If this guy owned a funeral parlor, nobody would die!!!") in unison. This article is about the year 2000. ... Boiler Room DVD cover Boiler Room is a 2000 U.S. drama / thriller film, written and directed by Ben Younger, and starring Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel and Nia Long. ... Shit is a vernacular word in Modern English denoting feces, the byproduct of digestion. ...

External links

• Wall Street (1987) at the Internet Movie Database
• Wall Street (1929) at the Internet Movie Database