by Randall Lane Info
Randall Lane is editor at large at The Daily Beast. The former editor in chief of Trader Monthly, Dealmaker and P.O.V. magazines, and the former Washington bureau chief of Forbes, he is the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.
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Gordon Gekko returns to theaters today, but how will the movie play with Wall Street itself. Randall Lane, author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane, recruits a roster of financial players to analyze the good, the bad and the laughable.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps—better known as Wall Street 2, to most of America—opens today. The immediate reviews were mixed. Director Oliver Stone got credit for directing with some verve and action, but many found the plot wanting.
Film critics, however, generally don't know a bond from a stock, a call from a put. Besides the wonderfully villainous Gordon Gekko, Wall Street reached iconic status because it was embraced by the audience it meant to criticize. Everyone—truly everyone—on Wall Street has seen the original, and can recite dozens of lines—"Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel"…"money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another" far past "greed is good." That validity trickled down.
So with that in mind, The Daily Beast assembled a roster of Wall Street heavies and took them to a preview screening. Our panel of players:
• Jeffrey Leeds is president and co-founder of Leeds Equity Partners, a private-equity firm based in New York. He is a director of Education Management Corp., RealPage, and SeatonCorp, and a trustee on the United Federation of Teachers' Charter School Board in New York.
• Lawrence McDonald, a managing director of Pangea Capital Management who, until 2008, was vice president of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers, as well as the author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense.
• Nomi Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs and head of the analytics group at Bear Stearns in London, and author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.
• The Moderator: Daily Beast editor-at-large Randall Lane, co-founder of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker and the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.
Lane: Ok, did anyone like this movie?
Leeds: Early on, the screenwriter came to see me, because I know [producer] Ed Pressman, and said, "You've know, I've just been given this [earlier draft], and I'm just throwing it away because Wall Street's changed." And he basically didn't know the difference between a hedge fund and a private equity fund.
It's as if a surgeon suddenly is a psychiatrist in the morning and in the afternoon he's a G.P.
We were talking about what the plot would look like. And I don't know this first-hand, but some people just have to do too much in too short a period of time. Next thing you know, you're filming. Next thing you know, you're editing.
Prins: I liked it until halfway through, and then it was a hodge-podge bunch of events. It lost its way. It felt like he was trying to hit all his points, and throw them into a pot.
McDonald: I liked it. Especially for a sequel. But yes, it was bipolar. The crowd was really into the first hour, and in the second hour it kinda just died down a little bit. It reminds me of some of the books that were written on the crisis—you can tell the moviemakers probably changed the direction of the movie as the crisis got more severe.
Leeds: It grabs parts of narratives that are familiar to people, even if they're confused. Which one was Goldman? Which one is Lehman? Which one was Bear Stearns? They're all merged and none of it makes sense.
• Randall Lane: Gordon Gekko’s Secret RevealedAt least in the first film, it tried to at least pull the covers back a little and give you the sense of how a deal might be made. Bud Fox has an idea to do a take-over, to do a friendly deal. Then you see Gekko and his guys going behind his back. You actually get, allegedly, to go behind the curtain. In the second film, there's none of that. They give you a little bit of the architecture, you see a little bit of the trading floors, but there's no sense of how any deal is or is not getting done. They do a little bit of this crazy side-plot with this energy company.
Lane: You mean that on Wall Street, twentysomething prop traders [Shia LaBeouf] don't also have side action funding giant private equity deals involving an energy idea so brilliant that no one else in the world wants to invest in it? [Laughter]
Leeds: Exactly. I mean, what is this guy? Is he an investment bank or he is a private equity guy? Is he a prop desk guy? It makes no sense. It'd be like if a surgeon suddenly is a psychiatrist in the morning and in the afternoon he's a G.P.
You could really make a fun board game identifying all the lack of continuities in this film. It seemed as if an older, tired Oliver Stone wasn't really interested in, you know, Wall Street and greed. He was interested in the clothing. The only scene he did with interest, it seemed to me, was when Michael Douglas gets a new wardrobe.
12 September 24, 2010 | 6:34am Twitter Emails
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When I heard they were making this movie, I couldn't wait to see it - good or bad. But the hype is so unbelievable that now, I just want it to flunk out at the box office and come out on dvd. Congratulations Hollywood for making me gag on this movie. And to all these smug Wall streeters picking this movie apart. As someone who's been in the legal field for 20 years, I can tell you that any courtroom drama that was loyal to the realities of a trial, and legal proceedings and the pace of actual justice, would be so boring that the audience would immolate themselves to get out of it.
"Bears make money, Bulls make money, Pigs get slaughtered" Unfortunately, the slaughtering of the pigs can splatter blood all over us all.
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