Greed is glamourous

A while ago I thought the streets I lived in were telling me something ( my “Haunted by Philosophers” post Haunted ), now it seems as if I’m getting messages from the media. Don’t worry - I think I’m OK. :-) Recently I bought the DVD of Oliver Stone’s "Wall Street". I still found it quite powerful. I thought I might write about it, linking it to the current crisis brought on by the “greed is good” credo. A few days later “Wall Street” was shown on French TV - surely it’s a sign! :-) Then the media were full of stories about Merrill Lynch’s problems, a current film review spoke about the dangers of glamourising villains - finally I’m writing it, before the gods punish me for ignoring their encouragement.



The script by Stone and Stanley Wieser is excellent and Gekko is given a lot of good lines. As one critic put it:

If it's possible to have dialogue that's too stunning for the film's own good, that's the case with "Wall Street."

Whenever Oliver Stone's drama about powermongering in the stock market starts to sink into a theme, out pounces Michael Douglas with another audacious line to sock you sideways.

As Gordon Gekko, a reptilian fiend with an Empire State Building-sized chip on his Versace shoulder pads, Douglas leads a hostile takeover of your attention in a role that won him a best-actor Oscar. So alive is his character, you half expect him to jump out of the film and bite you.

Part of what makes Douglas so great in the film is ...

"You're walking around blind without a cane, pal. A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place."

Dang, I lost my train of thought. That's how it works in the film. Whenever you think you know the score, Gekko spits out another dose of venom. He's more than a match for his co-lead, fledgling stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), who seeks out Gekko's tutelage in order to make a better . . .

"Lunch is for wimps."

There he goes again.

http://www.azstarnet.com/accent/171697

Wall Street trailer:



The “greed is good” slogan was an improvement on Ivan Boesky’s “Greed is all right, by the way.”

Ivan Frederick Boesky (born March 6, 1937, in Detroit) was notable for his prominent role in a Wall Street insider trading scandal that occurred in the United States in the mid-1980s.
…
By 1986, Ivan Boesky had become an arbitrageur who had amassed a fortune of about US$200 million by betting on corporate takeovers. He was investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for making investments based on tips received from corporate insiders. These stock acquisitions were sometimes brazen, with massive purchases occurring only a few days before a corporation announced a takeover.
…
The character of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street is based at least in part on Boesky, especially regarding a famous speech he delivered on the positive aspects of greed at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986, where he said in part "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Boesky

Stone's DVD commentary - settling scores

One of the things I especially like about DVDs is the fact that you can get so many extras with them; documentaries on the making of the film, and the commentaries, especially by the director - often a little film school in itself. In the “Wall Street” commentary, Stone is at pains to explain that all they took from Boesky, in the “greed is good” speech was his “greed is all right”. All the rest was original.

Despite this some critics, who make it clear that they have listened to Stones’s subsequent DVD commentary (or so they say) repeat the allegation which irritates him, e.g.:

(Parts of Gekko's famous "Greed is good" speech are freely paraphrased from comments Boesky made in 1985.)

http://www.slate.com/id/2174672

Stone also points out that the speech is more complex than it’s often taken to be, and that he agrees with much of it.

He was objecting to criticism like this, by Rita Kempley:

Stone has an agenda that's all too easily read. And yet, it was his political ambiguity that proved the strength of "Platoon," a universality that let us all live through the Vietnam war.

But Stone puts us above it all in "Wall Street." Though we are meant to descend with the camera as it dives from the skyscrapers, we sit with Stone in judgment, castigating the one-dimensional money-grubbers ...

Washington Post

In fact there is ambivalence throughout the film; while Stone is clearly rather appalled by people like Gekko, he is also clearly fascinated by him, and it’s no surprise that this glamourous villain earned Michael Douglas a best actor Oscar. Stone is on the side of Martin Sheen, who plays the union leader and father to Bud, played by Martin Sheen’s real-life son, Charlie. But Gekko gets most of the best lines.



However Stone wasn’t too happy with the way Douglas was delivering them at the beginning of shooting and had a few hard words with him. He also made him do many retakes until he got angry, which clearly had the desired effect - Douglas got his Oscar. But, in becoming more dynamic and charismatic, Douglas/Gekko adds complexity and ambivalence to the general moral thrust of the film.

Bad is attractive

The glamour of bad guys is a constant problem for film-makers who are supposed to be condemning them, cf. this review of current release “American Gangster”:

Like many moviemakers (and watchers), Mr. Scott loves his bad guy too much. And by turning Lucas into a figure who seduces instead of repels, an object of directorial fetishism and a token of black resistance, however hollow, he encourages us to submit as well. Part of this is structural and economic: blood and nihilism are always better sells than misery and hopelessness.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/movies/02gang.html

Stone did not want it to be a simple condemnation of Wall Street, after all his father had worked on Wall Street for decades. But that was another era and Stone says that while there was some corruption, there were still some principles involved and it was more of a gentlemen’s club. The mentor to Bud, Lou Mannheim, played by Hal Holbrook, was based on Stone’s father. Stone recorded the commentary years after making the film (in 1987), and, understandably, he used the opportunity to answer some of his critics. Thus some had complained that the Holbrook character spoke in an unrealistically aphoristic way, e.g.:

“Stick to the fundamentals, that's how IBM and Hilton were built...good things sometimes take time.”

"The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do."

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Wall-Street.html

However, (apart from the fact that this is fiction not journalism) Stone maintains that this was the way his father used to speak. In fact his father used to write a newsletter about Wall Street which was translated into many languages. Sadly Stone’s father died while the film was being made and Stone dedicated it to his memory. Bud, like the character played by Charlie Sheen in Stone’s earlier film “Platoon”, is torn between two father figures, in this case his own (in the film and real life) and Gekko.

The Boiler Room

Ironically Gekko has become a hero for young Wall Street traders as depicted in the more recent film “The Boiler Room”:

"Greed is good... greed works," Gekko intones famously in Wall Street, and it was meant to be a shocking pronouncement at the time. That's the attitude that feels old-fashioned now. That greed is good is a given today, when suburban ladies' investment clubs are pulling down 20 percent returns and dotcom IPOs make twenty-somethings millionaires overnight, and heroes for it. Even Boiler Room's hero starts with that assumption, and isn't punished for it. Gekko himself feels like a charming antique compared to Boiler Room's snakes. Though J.T. Marlin's brokers idolize Gekko - in one scene, they watch Wall Street and recite Gekko's dialogue like a prayer - they haven't a clue how to emulate his sense of style.

... Boiler Room may show us the fruits of what the likes of Gekko wrought, but Bud, back there in the 80s, still has a chance to escape.

... Greed, Wall Street wants us to know in the end, isn't good. Boiler Room, on the other hand, accepts the reality of greed with resignation and assigns it a neutral value - it's what we do with our sense of greed that makes it good or bad.

http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2000/02/boiler_room_and_wall_street_re.html

“Boiler Room” trailer:



Again this over-simplifies “Wall Street” somewhat, as Stone wouldn’t really disagree with that conclusion.

Even more recently British City traders have been the subject of a study by a young artist and again there are very conscious echoes of “Wall Street”:

The Hogarth of hedge funds offers a glimpse into a hidden world

Artist spends six months documenting the mysterious lives of the wizards of finance

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent, Saturday November 3, 2007, The Guardian

… Adam Dant was commissioned, appropriately enough, by Spear's Wealth Management Survey (a quarterly magazine aimed at that special breed of humans known as high-net-worths) to document the professional lives of the mysterious creatures who, behind closed doors in Mayfair and St James's, engage in abstruse activities such as short-selling and leverage.

... He saw the hedgies disport themselves at Annabel's nightclub and private gambling establishments such as Crockford's in Curzon Street and the nearby Aspinall's, founded by John Aspinall, perhaps most famous as a chum of Lord Lucan. He saw them quaff cocktails at Harry's Bar on Mount Street, and buy up art at Sotheby's, Christie's and the best contemporary art galleries.

... The walls are adorned with samurai swords and a shark's head. "It's always very aggressive, male stuff," said Dant. "And they really do regard the Art of War as their bible." He is referring to the 2,500-year-old Chinese manual on military strategy by Sun Tzu. [Quoted in “Wall Street”]
…
Over the fire is a bust of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, from the 1987 film Wall Street.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2204641,00.html

Cf.:

… one of the unexpected side effects of Wall Street: the cult of personality attached to Gordon Gekko. Douglas says he's still stunned by the number of people who tell him that his Oscar-winning role was the reason they went to work on Wall Street. "It's so depressing and sad," Douglas says.

... "I recall looking at that film and saying, 'That's what I want to be,' " recounts the late hedge-fund manager Seth Tobias in one of the Wall Street DVD featurettes. Somehow, an oleaginous villain meant to embody the worst excesses of his era became a folk hero and highly persuasive career counselor.

http://www.slate.com/id/2174672/pagenum/2/

Greed has consequences

But now we are seeing once again the results of the “greed is good” ideology, with no redeeming principles to channel it and when there is inadequate regulation, and they are quite frightening:

On the way home, I sat with a very engaging and smart retired Austrian arts dealer who told me he believes that the economic system is on the edge of collapse but says he wonders why Americans are in denial about these problems. He thinks there is a lag between the news reports we are reading now and when most Americans will be inpacted by the crisis. He says the most Americans will face the reality in 2008 - which, of course, just happens to be an election year.

... The Financial Times published in London, went further in editorial titled "CREDIT SQUEEZE-THE DISASTER MOVIE."
...
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest broker, on Tuesday reported its first loss in about six years, saying bad judgment and weak risk management strategies forced it to write down almost $8 billion of mortgage and related assets, well above its own previous estimate.

Merrill shares fell almost 8% to a near two-year low of $62" . Note: Merrill did another write down a week later of $4.5 billion. The Financial Times commented: "The sense that valuation is still matter of 'pick a number and divide by the chief trader's golf handicap' seems to be pervasive." Can you believe this? Even Hollywood couldn't make up something as flip as that.

News Dissector

But even when they screw up, the greedy make obscene amounts:

Mr. O’Neal [CEO of Merrill Lynch] would be entitled to a payout worth more than $274 million if he left after a deal, according to a pay analysis by James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm, using yesterday’s closing price.
… Just last year, the board paid Mr. O’Neal $48 million, making him one of Wall Street’s highest paid chief executives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/business/27merrill.html

But then it’s not hard to achieve that if you choose the people who decide how much you get:

Like the Morgan Stanley board, Mr. O’Neal’s board is largely handpicked. He has recruited people like John D. Finnegan, the chief executive of Chubb and a friend for more than 20 years. The two men worked together in the General Motors treasury department. Mr. O’Neal is also close to another director, Alberto Cribiore, a private equity executive who runs his own firm, Brera Capital.

Ibid.

As Stone emphasised, there was much he agreed with in Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech, e.g. Gekko condemned this kind of rapacious cronyism:

You own Teldar Paper, the stockholders, and you are being royally screwed over by these bureaucrats with their steak lunches, golf and hunting trips, corporate jets, and golden parachutes! Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over $200,000 a year. I spent two months analyzing what these guys did and I still can't figure it out.

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Wall-Street.html

Gekko also pointed out the general economic problems facing the US - which have got worse since the 80s and after Bush’s disastrous regime:

...well ladies and gentlemen, we're not here to indulge in fantasies, but in political and economic reality. America has become a second rate power. Our trade deficit and fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions.

Ibid

Update: "Money Never Sleeps"

There are plans to do an update, but without Stone as director:

… Douglas's Gekko is the brand in his own right - and one that is likely to sell more these days with business enjoying a wider audience than 20 years ago. Schiff says: "The first film was a moderate hit at the time [it took about $60m at the box office and cost $16m], but Gekko became a household name."

Pressman [producer of “Wall Street”] denies that "Money Never Sleeps" [another of Gekko's lines] is an attempt to cash in, but the marketing potential is impossible to ignore. "It will be fun to do a film about this and it is an area certainly worth exploring," he says.

Pressman and Schiff talk convincingly about their determination to maintain the standards of the original and not just churn out an imitation to clean up at the box office, probably in 2009.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/08/28/cngekko128.xml

But with the current dire warnings about the global economy, perhaps this will not be the time to bring out another film glorifying greed.

Seven years ago, the bursting of the dot-com bubble triggered a collapse in business capital spending that took the US and global economy into a mild recession. This time, post-bubble adjustments seem likely to hit US consumption, which at 72% of GDP, is more than five times the share the capital spending sector was seven years ago. This is a much bigger problem - one that could have grave consequences for the US and the rest of the world.

http://www.fxstreet.com/futures/market-review/outside-the-box/2007-10-23.html

As the hero of another recent film would say: "Good night, and good luck."