Get Me Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite
Fox hits up Hollywood A-listers to make a sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
Originally appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio February, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Gordon Gekko is an ex-con, fresh out of prison. The year is 2009. The place: New York. In Money Never Sleeps, a script floating around Hollywood, Gekko, the corporate raider from Wall Street, is back. Now barred from trading, Gekko instead reads to poor kids in Harlem by day and hosts charity galas by night. He is an avid art collector whose cell-phone ringtone plays the crashing chords from Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
In a sign of how things have changed since 1987, the year that Wall Street was released, Gekko is now adept at manipulating Russian oligarchs, Emirati sheiks, and Macanese gambling barons. He recruits a brainy hedge fund analyst to travel the globe and do deals in his stead, and he tutors his young protégé in the ways of the rich. “Get your suits made at Gieves & Hawkes. Shirts at Turnbull & Asser. And go to Trumper’s. Get a haircut,” he says in one key scene.
In this imagined future, Gekko—played so memorably by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s original—wants to gain control of the world’s richest oil field. Will he use it for good or for evil? Even if 20th Century Fox delivers on its plan to put a Wall Street sequel into production, moviegoers will never get the chance to find out.
That’s because, hewing to a tradition as old as Hollywood itself, Fox has ordered a rewrite. In mid-October, as real-world events seemed destined to disprove Gekko’s “Greed is good” mantra once and for all, Fox replaced the writer of Money Never Sleeps, Stephen Schiff, with a former stockbroker, Allan Loeb—and he got the job only after more than one A-lister said no (including Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing).
The studios love sequels, especially to movies that have struck the chord that Wall Street did. Released during the recession of 1987, the film perfectly captured a moment in American history, won Douglas an Oscar, and made Fox a boatload of cash. But delivering a sequel that lives up to a much-loved original is always a challenge, and a Wall Street sequel faces an even greater one now that a real financial crisis threatens to eclipse even the most dramatic fiction.
Two years ago, when the economy was still in overdrive, the timing seemed right to Stanley Weiser, co-writer of Wall Street. With Stone’s blessing, Weiser took an initial stab, picking up where the first film left off. It had always irked him that many viewers didn’t grasp what he had intended to be implicit: that Gekko was headed to jail. So his treatment begins outside a federal penitentiary on the day when Gekko is released. Then Weiser filled in the gaps.
Before turning himself in, Gekko travels the world as a rogue trader, à la Marc Rich, the fugitive financier controversially pardoned by President Bill Clinton. Gekko sets his sights on wringing riches out of Asia and setting up a hedge fund in China.
But the treatment was tabled when Stone had a falling out with Wall Street’s producer. Not long after, Schiff pitched Fox on an even more global approach. In his version, Gekko’s acolyte wins credibility with an oligarch named Oleg by traveling to London and buying him a Damien Hirst painting with $6 million of Gekko’s money.
Schiff’s script, which he delivered on July 22, contained some prescient details, considering he wrote most of it in 2007. It blamed the credit crunch and subprime mortgages for, in Gekko’s words, making “the gods fall off the mountain.” It even had Gekko spitballing about what might happen “if Lehman Brothers hits a rough patch.” Sources close to the project say Stephen Frears, whose 2006 movie The Queen earned an Academy Award nomination for best picture, expressed interest in directing. (Schiff declined to comment for this story.)
Yet as the financial picture worsened in late summer and early fall, Schiff’s script “suddenly felt out of touch,” says Alex Young, co-president of production for 20th Century Fox. “Stephen tried to shoehorn some things in there. But it was sort of like an ‘Oh, by the way.’ That’s no knock on Stephen: Wall Street is one of the seminal movies of all time. You don’t just casually wade back into those waters. You have to have a script that you love.”
