Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

[©brad]

So excited! GT let's go see it together. Seriously.

[Stefen]

GT is going to see it by himself. He's going to buy every ticket during a showing to ensure his Oliver Stone experience isn't ruined.

I'm really excited about this. Only thing is I think Shia suffers from Dicaprioitis in that I can't take him seriously as an adult.

[Gold Trumpet]

So excited! GT let's go see it together. Seriously.

Definitely. Unlike those who suspect I want my Wall Street 2 experience to mirror what happens in a porn theater, I'm all about collecting Stone peeps to see this and then rumbling with any Boondock Saints fans we find at the bars afterward.

[modage]

The poster for this is TERRIBLE!  It (intentionally) looks like a low-res printout.  WHY?

[Gold Trumpet]

Possible Spoilers, Pure Speculation


One thing I'm noticing with new information on this film is that there could be a 9/11 theme buried underneath the story.

In the original script, Gekko gets out of jail in 2002, but in the new trailer, location shots of New York show the Twin Towers still standing. It could mean that in the finished film, Gekko got out before 2002 or the film is wanting to make a point to highlight how New York was before 9/11. Not only did the country drastically change because of those attacks, but it changed because of what the Federal Reserve Bank did at the time to loosen standards on banks when giving credit to people, which caused the economy to implode on a false sense of security with money that had no real monetary value. Wall Street 2 will highlight the Federal Reserve's involvement with numerous scenes, but..

In this screenshot of Shia Labeouf,



It shows him walking in a building complex that stands next to Ground Zero. It's a gorgeous shot unfamiliar to movies today, but a present reality in New York. I just wonder if Stone will make the allegory to the loss of humanity in Wall Street with 9/11 and how things are continuing to carry on in a soulless manner in New York. It's a possible great theme so if it is used, I hope it's done well.

Just some random thoughts. Not much substance.

[Stefen]

nerd alert!

[MacGuffin]

Oliver Stone "shocked" on revisit to Wall St.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Director Oliver Stone was shocked when he revisited the world of high finance for the sequel to his 1987 hit movie "Wall Street", describing what was happening there as the "collapse of capitalism."

"Why did I go back?...Because it's important. It's the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society. It is. Our way of life is going to change," Stone told Vanity Fair magazine in an interview.

"I was truly, truly shocked when I went back (to Wall Street)," the Oscar-winning director told the magazine in an interview for its April edition.

"A million dollars had become a billion dollars. They'd replaced people of substance with people who made money. The Volckers had become the Greenspans," he said.

But Stone said his first aim, as always, was to tell an entertaining story. "And to tell a story of financial manipulation on Wall Street is one of the hardest things you can do."

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps", which features the return of Michael Douglas as disgraced insider trader Gordon Gekko, opens in the United States on April 23.

Gekko, just out of jail, wants back in the game in a tale set at a time when the global economy is teetering on the brink of disaster.

"Transformers" star Shia LaBeouf, 23, plays the role of an analyst of alternative energy companies at two Wall Street firms -- one modeled on investment bank Goldman Sachs and the other on its collapsed rival Bear Stearns.

Stone said his late father, who worked for a brokerage firm, had encouraged him years ago to work on Wall St.

"But I wasn't any good at mathematics," Stone said, adding, "I tried hard to understand Enron. I read three books. I couldn't understand a...thing."

[Gold Trumpet]

Includes nippets from Mac's link, but original article from Vanity Fair it's based on. Really great article with good backstory and impressions of how the new film will be like.


Greed Never Left
By Michael Lewis
Source: Vanity Fair

Oliver Stone's 1987 Wall Street succeeded brilliantly in capturing a culture, and failed miserablyas a call for change. To the director's dismay, thousands of financial hotshots dreamed of becoming Gordon Gekko—and the rest is recent history. Anticipating the sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the author looks at Stone's greatest challenge: creating a hero for a corrupted, collapsing world.

One lesson that might be drawn from Oliver Stone's 1987 movie, Wall Street, is how little control a movie director has over his audience. Stone, a relentless critic of right-wing ideology, has made movies exploring the darker side of the lives of Republican presidents (Nixon, W.) and the deaths of Democratic ones (JFK), and he enjoys friendly relations with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. He first landed on Wall Street as a moviemaker in 1986, just prior to receiving an Oscar for best director, for his Vietnam War film, Platoon. "Wall Street was a fluky thing," he says, "fluky in that I was coming off probably the biggest success in my life. And all of a sudden I could do whatever I wanted to do." What he wanted to do, it appeared, was to prosecute the values underpinning American capitalism. He cast Michael Douglas as a diabolical money manager named Gordon Gekko, and Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker named Bud Fox, who, seduced by this devil, abandons his ideals, betrays his family, and is destroyed.

As social documentary, even as art, the original Wall Street was a great success. It did well at the box office, won Michael Douglas an Oscar for best actor, and remains one of the very few financial movies ever made in which financiers see anything like a realistic version of themselves.

As a vehicle for social change, however, the movie was a catastrophe. It did not show Wall Street in its best light, yet Wall Street was, by far, the movie's most enthusiastic audience. It has endured not because it hit its intended target but because it missed: people who work on Wall Street still love it. And not just any Wall Street people but precisely those who might have either taken Stone's morality tale to heart or been offended by it. To wit, not long before hedge-fund manager Seth Tobias was found dead in his Florida swimming pool, with an unlucky mixture of cocaine, Ambien, and alcohol in his bloodstream, he gave an interview for Wall Street's DVD bonus reel, in which he said, "I remember when I saw the movie in 1987. I recall saying, That's what I want to be. I want to start out as Bud Fox and end up as Gordon Gekko."

Michael Douglas often expresses his astonishment at the many Wall Street males who have sought him out in public places just to say, "Man, I want to tell you, you are the single biggest reason I got into the business. I watched Wall Street, and I wanted to be Gordon Gekko." The film's equally perplexed screenwriter, Stanley Weiser, has made the same point, in a different way. "We wanted to capture the hyper-materialism of the culture," he said. "That was always the intent of the movie. Not to make Gordon Gekko a hero."

When I visited Oliver Stone in January of this year he was in his production studio in Santa Monica, rushing to turn the 56 days' worth of film he'd shot in New York and New Jersey into a sequel to Wall Street, to be called Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I knew him only by his reputation, his reviews, his public spats, and a few of his less overtly political movies. So I assumed that, like many people who succeed in getting themselves defined by their political views, he would imagine his opinions to be a lot more interesting than they were to me, and that I would spend my time with him hearing them. But I was surprised by him, or, at any rate, by how he comes across in a long conversation: hesitant, sweet-natured, not at all strident or angry, and apparently still less certain of his ability to create a movie that would shape public perception of Wall Street than of his talent for creating a movie that people might pay to see. He admits that even though he grew up watching his father going to work for a brokerage firm he found business in general, and Wall Street in particular, difficult to get his mind around. (As if to prove the point, he keeps referring to credit-default swaps as "credit-swap defaults.")

"My dad wanted me to go to Wall Street," he says, "but I wasn't any good at mathematics. I tried hard to understand Enron. I read three books. I couldn't understand a fucking thing."

When he took his cameras to Wall Street in 1986 the explosion in financial services was still novel and largely unself-conscious: no one yet knew what, if anything, it would mean for the rest of us. "We didn't know what was coming and we didn't know this was a special period," says Stone. "People accused me of being a genius who predicted the stock-market crash of 1987. I didn't predict the stock-market crash. I had no idea."

Stone had been drawn to Wall Street not by an interest in high finance, or even by a desire to make a political statement, but by a pair of pre-political impulses. The first was the challenge of telling a story about a place that resists grand, popular narratives. Arcane subject matter, abstract ideas, unsympathetic characters, shallow motives—there are plenty of reasons Wall Street has so rarely been done well in movies or on television. But Stone is obviously an ambitious storyteller with a taste for unconventional material. (Who in his right mind would make an empathetic biopic of George W. Bush? Not only did Stone do it, it worked.)

"There are so few good business movies," says Stone, "and Wall Street is an especially hard subject. To tell a story of financial manipulation on Wall Street is one of the hardest things you can do."

The other obvious source of Stone's interest in making the movie was his father, whom he adored. Louis Stone died in 1985, and his son dedicated Wall Street to him. "We used to go to movies together," recalls Stone. "On the way out he'd always say, 'How come no one can make a good business movie? They always make the businessmen idiots.' He'd say, 'Kiddo, you and I could have done it better.'"

This time around, Stone seems to be moved by other reasons. "Why did I go back?" he asks himself for the third time in our talk, having failed to answer it the first two times. "Because it's important. It's the collapse of capitalism and the collapse of our society. It is. Our way of life is going to change."

It will be a challenge this time for the director to prevent his opinions from ruining his movie. "I was shocked, truly shocked, when I went back [to Wall Street]," he says. "A million dollars had become a billion dollars. They'd replaced people of substance with people who made money. The Volckers had become Greenspans." Then he catches himself. "But the first thing you need to do is to tell an entertaining story."

There is another new problem Stone faces: for all sorts of reasons a movie about Wall Street set in 2008 cannot simply replicate the milieu and characters of a movie set on Wall Street in 1985. Wall Street people, on the surface at least, were a lot more colorful in 1985 than they were in 2008: decades of trying to disguise offensive financial behavior has made them expert in avoiding offensive behavior of other sorts. In 1985 it was plausible that an old guy might manipulate and ultimately corrupt a young guy. In 2010, after entire Wall Street firms have been destroyed by young men running out of control, it seems far more likely that a young guy would run circles around an old guy. The character of Gordon Gekko doesn't really even exist anymore. Or, rather, he has become so ordinary—the hedge-fund manager—that he blends in with the landscape. In 1985, cold-calling ordinary people in the phone book and trying to sell them stock—Charlie Sheen's character's chosen road to riches—was still a plausible thing for a truly ambitious young man to be doing with his time. In 2008, the mere fact that he deals directly with ordinary people would cause anyone who works on Wall Street to pity him. Wall Street, for that matter, is no longer located on Wall Street: even as the effects of high finance have become more terrifying, the setting for it has become far less visually arresting. For the new movie, Stone filmed his trading scenes in New Jersey, at a firm called Knight Capital Group. ("When Oliver called, I'd heard about the Hugo Chávez stuff," says a Knight Capital executive. "I thought, Oh, here we go again. But the stuff they did here that I saw was sort of straightforward.")

But the biggest obstacle to creating a Wall Street sequel may be that the storytelling device Stone used in 1985 is, in 2008, rusty and ineffective. The original Wall Street story, Stone points out, "was not the story of Gordon Gekko. It was the story of the boy." That was Stone's solution to the problem of finding someone on Wall Street for the audience to care about: he used a character who had just arrived on the scene and could not be blamed for what had happened up to that point—the ingénue. To some extent Stone is hoping to use the same trick again. Having spent the last 23 years in jail—the longest term ever for insider trading—Gordon Gekko is once again a free man. He emerges not as a player but as a guy with $9 million, which is to say he is, from the Wall Street point of view, as good as penniless. He seems chastened and reformed, but he is of course not. He wants back into the game. His tool for doing so is his daughter's boyfriend, Jacob Moore, played by 23-year-old Shia LaBeouf, whose character works as an analyst of alternative-energy companies at a pair of Wall Street firms—one modeled on Bear Stearns, the other on Goldman Sachs.

In his delightful 1983 memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, the screenwriter William Goldman famously distinguished what is true-to-life from what audiences will swallow. "Truth is terrific, reality is even better," he wrote, "but believability is best of all." There may in fact have been some naïve and innocent young man still wandering around Wall Street in 2008, but no one will believe it. On Wall Street, youth and innocence have long since divorced. In 1985, Bud Fox came to Wall Street hoping to get rich; his equivalent in 2008 came assuming he would get rich.

Allan Loeb, the screenwriter of Money Never Sleeps, is a trained stockbroker who admits to watching CNBC more than is good for him, so he was well aware of the problem. "Bud Fox wouldn't exist in 2008," he tells me. "Or if he did, he'd be 15 years old." Loeb dealt with it by drawing a far more complicated young man than the one played by Charlie Sheen. "The Shia character already comes to us a little wiser and a little corrupted," says Loeb. "There may be an idealist in him, but he won't admit to it."

Which is funny because Shia LaBeouf himself is something of an ingénue. When he got the call telling him he had a shot at a part in Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel he freaked and raced down the block to the local Charles Schwab office: "I ran down the street to this big-ass green building." At the Encino branch of Schwab, LaBeouf found a stockbroker to teach him how financial markets work. "I had to get my shit together," says LaBeouf, "because I'm just this dude from Transformers. So I opened an account with 20 grand and started trading. I figure, Fuck it. If I lose it, I can deduct it, because I'm preparing for a movie."

The absence of innocent ambition and youthful idealism on Wall Street obviously causes some very large, if hard-to-define, problems in the real world. But it presents a very specific problem for the moviemaker: it's difficult to tell a story about the corruption of character when everyone in it is already corrupt. Having seen only 20 minutes of a rough cut of Money Never Sleeps, I cannot say if the movie is a success or how it will end, but I can say this: it's a very different movie from the original. It's more ambitious. And it's not dull. Who knows? Oliver Stone may yet persuade a new generation to abandon medicine and art and public service and even charitable work for careers on Wall Street.

Michael Lewis is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

[MacGuffin]

Fox bumps Oliver Stone film
'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps' due in fall, not April 23
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Fox is bumping Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel to the fall.

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" will be released on Sept. 24 instead of April 23 as previously planned. Michael Douglas reprises his role from the franchise original, with Shia LaBeouf co-starring in the sequel.

[Gold Trumpet]

Bump-a-mother-fucker

It's actually good news and shows Fox's trust in the film because reports say the film is likely going to debut at Cannes now and a late August/September is a release date dead zone, but late September may mean for an award show push.

Still, suck my dick. I already lined up 5 friends to go see this.

[Pubrick]

call me cynical and possibly crazy but here's my theory on why this was pushed:

IF the studio thinks the movie is that good why didn't they give it a september release date to begin with, or even later? you could say that they hadn't seen a cut of the film until recently and that's probably true and valid. my theory is that it was pushed not cos the movie is necessarily good or worthy of award recognition, but that michael douglas has been granted a free pass with his son's arrest for drugs. INSENSITIVE! i hear you say, but hear me out. the best thing the movie had going for it was its contemporary topic and sequel status.. the first might translate to something "arty" or at least meaningful, but the second thing cancels it out in my view and positions it as primarily a money maker.

but then the studio realises it has a good dramatic story on its hands. not the film but the plight of the has been actor. who the hell is michael douglas these days? he pretty much fell off the radar after he got snubbed for Wonder Boys (along with the whole movie apart from bob d.), so now he's got this great story of adversity which sort of mirrors his character. he has repeated that he sort of blames himself for his son's transgressions, that he was always career first family second. which explains why he had to start over with CZJ (whose new movie looks SHIT btw).. this mirrors his mistakes in sheperding the new flock in the first film versus his new underling. ok that's crap but it's good enuff to place his troubles with his son.. oh let's give him an award or at least a nomination cos dammit, he might die any day now and he is so much like the rest of us career-obsessed freaks!

unless the movie sucks and they just need time to get stone's head out of his ass.

[modage]

September is as much as (more of) a dead zone than April even.  There will be no awards.

[Gold Trumpet]

call me cynical and possibly crazy but here's my theory on why this was pushed:

IF the studio thinks the movie is that good why didn't they give it a september release date to begin with, or even later? you could say that they hadn't seen a cut of the film until recently and that's probably true and valid. my theory is that it was pushed not cos the movie is necessarily good or worthy of award recognition, but that michael douglas has been granted a free pass with his son's arrest for drugs. INSENSITIVE! i hear you say, but hear me out. the best thing the movie had going for it was its contemporary topic and sequel status.. the first might translate to something "arty" or at least meaningful, but the second thing cancels it out in my view and positions it as primarily a money maker.

but then the studio realises it has a good dramatic story on its hands. not the film but the plight of the has been actor. who the hell is michael douglas these days? he pretty much fell off the radar after he got snubbed for Wonder Boys (along with the whole movie apart from bob d.), so now he's got this great story of adversity which sort of mirrors his character. he has repeated that he sort of blames himself for his son's transgressions, that he was always career first family second. which explains why he had to start over with CZJ (whose new movie looks SHIT btw).. this mirrors his mistakes in sheperding the new flock in the first film versus his new underling. ok that's crap but it's good enuff to place his troubles with his son.. oh let's give him an award or at least a nomination cos dammit, he might die any day now and he is so much like the rest of us career-obsessed freaks!

unless the movie sucks and they just need time to get stone's head out of his ass.

Michael Douglas has already been in the press talking about his son's situation and his role as a father and how that has been tough on him. Shia Labeouf has even been forward with how Douglas is doing and there has been no attempt to stop him from talking. Shia went into some explicit detail.

The main teller for me is Cannes. If it plays there, it's a sign that the position of the film has changed. The original release date of April was that because it was the soonest they could get the film released. Since Stone was re-writing while they were filming, I don't think the studio had a real idea of what to expect. Then they looked at April 23 and saw two other major films being released on that date so chose to switch it up, but reaction so far from Wall Street has been very positive so I think they believe it could have some critical legs to it.

Late September/early October is fine for Oscar consideration. American Beauty was released then and if Wall Street debuts at Cannes, it will be a lengthy separation to allow the Cannes screening to build some buzz.

[Gold Trumpet]

Probably the best explanation to why it's been delayed 5 months. Goes against my theory, but I was guessing/hoping anyways. Stone also plays huge in international markets so the final reason does make sense, plus Fox has all their summer dates booked up domestically anyways.


"Wall Street" Sequel Delayed Five Months
By Garth Franklin
Source: Dark Horizons

In a surprising move, 20th Century Fox has pushed back Oliver Stone's anticipated sequel "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" several months from its scheduled April 23rd bow to an early Fall opening on September 24th.

According to Screen Daily, the move gives Stone time to polish the film (he's expected to trim it a little more) and allows for a gala screening of the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in May and possibly a North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

One of the other big reasons though is one that we'll likely hear several other films use in coming weeks - avoidance of clashing with the FIFA World Cup in South Africa which runs from June 11th to July 11th.

The event means many international Summer release schedules have already been locked down tight. Thus, had the film begun its international rollout after Cannes, it would've likely hurt the box-office in territories where the football/soccer is expected to have a major negative impact on cinema ticket sales.

In the much quieter September slot, I'm guessing the film has more of a chance of getting a day-and-date release in many global markets.

[RegularKarate]

I guess Money DOESN'T Never Sleeps