When Did Gekko Get So Toothless?

When Did Gekko Get So Toothless?, The crisis, he insisted, was merely meant to be the backdrop for a story about a handful of “complex” people — an older, wiser Gordon Gekko among them — who just happened to be operating on Wall Street around September 2008. “People won’t watch a business movie,” Mr. Stone said. The last “valid” business movie he could recall was “Executive Suite,” which starred William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. It was released in 1954.


Besides, Mr. Stone was being far too modest about what constituted a valid business movie. Twenty-three years ago, he himself made the most memorable business movie of all: the original “Wall Street,” which captured an era and an ethos with a gleeful precision that has been matched only by that other great chronicle of 1980s Wall Street: Tom Wolfe’s novel “Bonfire of the Vanities.”