Wall Street (1987)

Directed by

Oliver Stone

Genre

drama film, crime film

Country

United States

Runtime

2h 02m

Rated

R

Rating

7.2 of 10 from 2,273 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A young, ambitious stockbroker gets involved with a powerful and unscrupulous corporate raider. He climbs the ladder of high finance but faces difficult choices about his values.

tensefast-pacedcynicalmorally complexslickambitiouscoldaspirational

What happens

Wall Street is a 1987 American crime drama film directed and co-written by Oliver Stone, which stars Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, and Martin Sheen. The film tells the story of Bud Fox (C. Sheen), a young stockbroker who becomes involved with Gordon Gekko (Douglas), a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider. Stone made the film as a tribute to his father, Lou Stone, a stockbroker during the Great Depression. The character of Gekko is said to be a composite of several people, including Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, Michael Milken and Stone himself. The character of Sir Lawrence Wildman, meanwhile, was modelled on British financier and corporate raider Sir James Goldsmith. Originally, the studio wanted Warren Beatty to play Gekko, but he was not interested; Stone, meanwhile, wanted Richard Gere, but Gere passed on the role. Wall Street was released by 20th Century Fox on December 11, 1987. The film was well received among major film critics. Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas' character declaring that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good." It has also proven influential in inspiring people to work on Wall Street, with Sheen, Douglas, and Stone commenting over the years how people still approach them and say that they became stockbrokers because of their respective characters in the film. Stone and Douglas reunited for a sequel titled Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which was released theatrically on September 24, 2010. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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