Greedy Gordon Gekko to Make a Comeback in 'Wall Street 2'
Remember Gordon Gekko? Famous for his philosophy that greed is good, the once-mighty corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street has been released from prison just in time to appear in a new Oliver Stone movie that has just begun filming.
How Gekko continues to survive in the shark tank will be a major theme of Wall Street 2, Stone tells Reuters. However, Gekko’s game has changed and now is expected to focus on banking-related schemes such as collateralized debt obligations.
The movie is set in 2008, when the sudden collapse of Lehman Brothers set the stage for the real-life financial debacle of the past year. In the original, the trading activities on the stock exchange were featured; this time around the Federal Reserve is expected to get more play, reports a New York Times article on the movie.
Although intended to be an antihero in a morality tale, Gekko is seen as a sympathetic figure by many viewers despite his disregard for securities and, presumably, banking law as he shamelessly seeks the luxuries in life that big money can buy.
“It is mystifying to me to see people lionize this crook who went to jail,” Stanley Weiser, the co-author of the Wall Street screenplay with Stone, tells the news agency.
To prepare for his new role as Gekko, the Times reports, Douglas has met with Samuel Waksal, the founder of ImClone Systems. Waksal spent five years in federal prison for securities fraud.
