Wall Street is a 1987 American film directed by Oliver Stone and features Charlie Sheen as a young stockbroker desperate to succeed and a wealthy but unscrupulous corporate raider (Michael Douglas) whom he idolizes.
Douglas won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Daryl Hannah’s performance was not as well received and earned her a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress. The film has come to be seen as the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess, with Douglas advocating “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”.
Legacy
Wall Street enjoyed renewed interest in 1990 when the cover of Newsweek magazine asked, “Is Greed Dead?” after 1980s icons like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky ran afoul of insider trading laws. Over the years, the film’s screenwriter Stanley Weiser has been approached by numerous people who told him, “The movie changed my life. Once I saw it I knew that I wanted to get into such and such business. I wanted to be like Gordon Gekko”. In addition, both Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas still have people come up to them and say that they became stockbrokers because of their respective characters in the film. In recent years, Stone was asked how the financial market depicted in Wall Street has changed and he replied, “The problems that existed in the 1980s market grew and grew into a much larger phenomenon. Enron is a fiction, in a sense, in the same way that Gordon Gekko’s buying and selling was a fiction … Kenny Lay–he’s the new Gordon Gekko”.