Is now the time for a Wall Street sequel?
Cometh the hour, cometh the Hollywood movie sequel. The economy is in crisis, the markets are in freefall, and rampant nationalising points the only way out of the jam. And this, it is deemed, is the perfect time to resuscitate Gordon Gekko, the slippery poster boy of 1980s Reaganomics. Certainly this puts a novel twist on the old Arthurian adage about sleeping warriors being awakened when their country is in direst need. While we're about it, why not dredge up Ivan Boesky and put him in charge of the US Treasury?
Gekko, if you recall, was last seen being led away by the feds at the climax of Oliver Stone's 1987 drama Wall Street. Now he is to belatedly return in Money Never Sleeps, which is currently being scripted by 21 writer Allan Loeb and will again feature Michael Douglas in the starring role. Asked what form the 21st-century Gekko would take, Douglas seemed oddly blasé. "I don't think he's any different," he shrugged.
But while Gekko might not have changed, Wall Street has. Stone's original movie (bracketed alongside The Bonfire of the Vanities as one of the key texts of its era) played out in a time before Enron and before 9/11. More crucially, the corporate raider that Gekko embodied turned out to be a peculiarly 80s sub-species that have since been forced into decline by a combination of a burgeoning stock market and spiralling levels of debt. Back in the day, the likes of Gekko were able to play the role of aggressive vultures, swooping in to pick off sick or dying companies. More recently, their prey have been too bullish and forbidding; pumped full of steroids and glowing with artificial good health. (or at least they were until about this time last month.)
So what sort of film can we expect of Money Never Sleeps? Undeniably there are still enough villainous roles for Gekko to fill –maybe even more than there were 20 years ago. Will he be made-over as a guru of the sub-prime lending market, or a shadowy lobbyist pushing for wholesale financial deregulation? Or will he even return to corporate raiding, with the job now reconfigured as that of a heroic clean-up operation? What do you reckon? Do we need a Wall Street 2 for the credit crunch era?..
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Gekko, if you recall, was last seen being led away by the feds at the climax of Oliver Stone's 1987 drama Wall Street. Now he is to belatedly return in Money Never Sleeps, which is currently being scripted by 21 writer Allan Loeb and will again feature Michael Douglas in the starring role. Asked what form the 21st-century Gekko would take, Douglas seemed oddly blasé. "I don't think he's any different," he shrugged.
But while Gekko might not have changed, Wall Street has. Stone's original movie (bracketed alongside The Bonfire of the Vanities as one of the key texts of its era) played out in a time before Enron and before 9/11. More crucially, the corporate raider that Gekko embodied turned out to be a peculiarly 80s sub-species that have since been forced into decline by a combination of a burgeoning stock market and spiralling levels of debt. Back in the day, the likes of Gekko were able to play the role of aggressive vultures, swooping in to pick off sick or dying companies. More recently, their prey have been too bullish and forbidding; pumped full of steroids and glowing with artificial good health. (or at least they were until about this time last month.)
So what sort of film can we expect of Money Never Sleeps? Undeniably there are still enough villainous roles for Gekko to fill –maybe even more than there were 20 years ago. Will he be made-over as a guru of the sub-prime lending market, or a shadowy lobbyist pushing for wholesale financial deregulation? Or will he even return to corporate raiding, with the job now reconfigured as that of a heroic clean-up operation? What do you reckon? Do we need a Wall Street 2 for the credit crunch era?..