Thirty years after the release of the now-classic movie “Wall Street,” Wall Street itself is totally different. Or it hasn’t changed at all, depending on who you ask.
To mark the Dec. 11 anniversary of the opening of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, which starred Michael Douglas in an Oscar-winning, career-defining role as corporate raider Gordon Gekko, The Associated Press spoke to a group of Wall Street professionals, writers and film experts about how the movie reflected the reality of the financial world, and how little or much that world has changed in the decades since the movie’s release.
“The culture is the same. It’s all driven by greed. You don’t go into any of these businesses if you want to save the world or save puppies. It’s all about making money. If anything, I think the enormous explosion of wealth since then has made people greedier.” — Michael Lewitt, investment manager and former trader at Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment firm that was prosecuted for illegal activities in the junk bond market and later filed for bankruptcy.
The movie “dramatized the ethical and moral collapse of high finance during the Reagan Era. Regrettably, Gordon Gecko, Stone’s iconic symbol of unrestrained greed, would undoubtedly thrive in today’s madcap bull market. Indeed, we might even put him in the White House.” — Raymond Arsenault, John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg and author of “Stoned on Wall Street: The Stockbroker’s Son and the Decade of Greed.”