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An Insider’s Review of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
One of the great things about flying first class is that you often get to meet some interesting people. During the early eighties, I found myself on a flight from Los Angles to New York sitting next to an unknown, aspiring, young director named Oliver Stone, who was on his way to pitch a new film idea to potential investors.
Over six hours I enjoyed one of the most interesting conversations of my career, covering jungle combat in Vietnam, the ins and outs of movie making, and the harsh realities of Hollywood style accounting. The movie he was pitching turned out to be the 1987 industry cult classic, Wall Street.
The film sparked one of the greatest guessing games of all time, with everyone attempting to identify the real people behind the fictional characters. The villain, Gordon Gekko, was easy. That was Ivan Boesky, a risk arbitrageur who became the target of one of the first high profile insider trading case. Other links with reality were more obscure, and many real life traders on the floor of the NYSE simply played themselves as extras.
In the sequel, it is much easier to play who’s who, thanks to the financial crash that seems like was happening only yesterday. Gordon Gekko, released from federal prison, this time turns into legendary hedge fund manager John Paulson, whose character turns $100 million into $1.2 billion in a matter of months through buying up cheap credit default swaps on subprime debt. Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner are easy to pick out in a crucial meeting at the New York Fed. The chairman of “Keller Zabel” (Bear Stearns), one “Louis Zabel” (Ace Greenberg), throws himself in front of a train on the Lexington line. Well, this is fiction, after all. The $2 dollar/share sale price gave it all away.
Many people played themselves. The whole CNBC crowd was there, their descriptions of the crash so realistic that I thought it might be archival footage. So were Warren Buffet, Nouriel Roubini, Jim Chanos, and other notables. In fact, Chanos managed to get Stone to change the original script, switching the bad guy role from a hedge fund to Goldman Sachs (GS), known as “Churchill Schwartz,” as it should be. They are easily identified as the Wall Street firm that took out a big short in housing debt just before the crash.
Shia Labeouf does an outstanding job playing Jake Moore, an aggressive, razor sharp, earnest young investment banker. I have known so many like him over the years, both working for me and at competitors, that his performance really rung true. Michael Douglas, who has aged dramatically, seemed to be simply replaying the same role that he has in countless earlier films. To understand their characters, several actors opened up online trading accounts and did quite well in the market, with Shia alone reportedly booking some $20,000 in profits.
There are a few minor flaws in the film. It could have used more editing. There is a mention of “50% leverage” of subprime debt, when the correct figure was 50 times. The Chinese government investor doesn’t act like a real person from the People’s Republic, but as an American with a bad accent. No one has yet figures out the true meaning of Eli Wallach’s repeated bird calls.
In this incredibly target rich environment, Stone seems to take aim at so many enemies, That even an insider myself got confused. However, these are trivial complaints. If you want to have a hoot, go see the film, but expect to provide a simultaneous translation about all of the different instruments and strategies if you bring any non financial types with you.
Not wanting to spoil the ending, I’ll say no more, except that you can buy the original wall Street movie from Amazon by clicking here at http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Charlie-Sheen/dp/B00003CXDB/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1285432060&sr=1-2
And thanks to Oliver’s advice, I never got involved in financially backing a film project, despite countless invitations to do. It was the best trade I never did.
To see the data, charts, and graphs that support this research piece, as well as more iconoclastic and out-of-consensus analysis, please visit me at www.madhedgefundtrader.com . There, you will find the conventional wisdom mercilessly flailed and tortured daily, and my last two years of research reports available for free. You can also listen to me on Hedge Fund Radio by clicking on “This Week on Hedge Fund Radio” in the upper right corner of my home page.
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The Frontline documentary series on these events was way the hell more interesting than this film.
Jesus Christ, is there anyone you haven't met BHFT?
Tell me about the time you played a round of golf with Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II and Henry Fonda; or the time that you and George Soros were on vacation together on his private yacht...
Name dropping is for the conceited and insecure.
Listen--it's tough building yourself into a big man on the Internets.
Especially when no one knows who you are. Gotta develop a gimmick.
I'd bet a dollar, Mortimer, that MHFT is not a trim guy with a silver mane. I'm trying to decide if he's middle aged and bald or thirtysomething and chubbly.
you can buy the original wall Street movie from Amazon (sic)
Maybe you can, but the original was 1929, not 1987:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_%281929_film%29
MHFT still a legend in his own mind...
The original felt timely, preceding the insanities of the 90's and 00's. The casting was perfect too (apart from Daryl Hannah). This is just late and lame, as a movie. Agree on the LaBoeuf comments above, very overrated actor.
i thought it was a pile of crap
I was wishing for a happy ending - where all the FIRE rentiers experienced agonizing protracted deaths from various excruciating soft-tissue cancers.
Were you just sitting next to Oliver Stone on that flight or did you actually have lunch with him?
I think this review was more about MHFT telling everyone "I *met* Oliver Stone...before everyone else (and right before Wall Street was greenlighted--I'm too humble to come out and say it, but I think I inspired him)...and recognized genius...and we were luxuriating in first class...."
Me? "I once sat next to Tyler Durden in the computer lab in the basement of Steiny-D. He was doing legit Wharton work...I was an English major reading alt.sex.stories."
LOL that was the first thing I thought too, as for not investing in movies he probably would have done all right investing in Stones films...
Boring movie. Kind of a CNBC version of the financial world - light weight. An actual honest documentary of the events around 2008 would have been 10X more gripping.
It was JPM not GS that Churchill Schwartz. They are the ones that bought Bear for $2 originally. And the movie stunk.
this movie sucked. With the great wealth of material from the crash to the prior film, all Stone managed to do was incorporate most of zh/the street's language and metaphor. Good casting, badly told story. and how fudcking long was it??? or whutz an editor for.
I read that Shia turned 20k into 650k while researching for this film (I doubt anyone actually believes this):
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/wall-street's-celluloid-heroes-brolin's-%22evil%22-addiction-labeouf's-650k-payday-535447.html
I wouldnt be surprised if he traded on insider knowledge, he was hanging out with the market makers after all, and If True SEC should be investigating him (no rookie makes 3000% in his 1st year)
THAT would be a movie I would pay to watch.
'Shia Labeouf does an outstanding job playing Jake Moore, an aggressive, razor sharp, earnest young investment banker.'
What is the deal with this actors blank stare acting? He appears to look past the actors. Do you think this was intentional or does the actor have a lazy eye?
The film was decent. Hard to compete with the 1st one. I would have more to say but I like how you aren't spoiling the film for others Madhedge and will continue in the same spirit.
I agree with you about Labeouf. He did the same wide eyed, almost deer in the headlights stare in response to what other characters were saying or doing way too often.
It seemed like there must have been a scene deleted in which Eli Wallach (playing the old man, yes?) first makes his little hand spinnning and whistling gesture. The audience is shown this gesture in a way that seems to assume we know just what this means but we don't.
Also, Labeouf's character's failure to simply tell the daughter that he wanted to bring her and her father together is extremely annoying. The scene of Gekko speaking to what looked like mostly a college age audience was also very annoying. When someone says something not particularly funny or powerful and an audience seen on film reacts as though it is hysterically funny or tremendously meaningful, it's exasperating. Stone's inability to make that scene come off better, kind of a failure to hit a medium fastball down the middle for more than a single, was a bad sign for the rest of it. The film came off like a decent first draft but that was about it. It seemed to want to comment upon and explain large phenomena but didn't know how to credibly do it. So, it half failed both as the story of its characters and as a maker of broad cultural observations.
And, holy crap, fusion?