[ Helicopter blades whirring ] [ Siren wailing ] [ Traffic rushing ] Gekko: Man, I love this hot, stinking city.

I mean, there's nothing like it, is there?

You know, the best thing about New York is everything you can do here.

And the worst thing?

Everything you can't do here.

You see that building?

I bought that building ten years ago.

My first real estate deal.

Sold it two years later.

Made an $800,000 profit.

Better than sex.

At time, I thought that was all the money in the world.

Now it's a day's pay.

Wake up, will you, pal?

If you're not inside, you are outside, okay?

And I'm not talking about some $400,000 a year, working Wall Street stiff, flying first class and being comfortable.

I'm talking about liquid -- rich enough to have your own jet.

Rich enough not to waste time.

$50 million, $100 million, buddy.

A player.

I want nothing.

Let's do the story of a young trader.

He's a -- He's a young kid from Queens or Brooklyn, and he's -- he wants to make a buck, but he's cold calling.

He's basically at the bottom of the totem pole.

And he -- he admires all the big shots in the business -- these new big shots.

There's a whole new brand of them, and Gekko is one of them.

He sees him on the cover of I believe it was Fortune magazine, and he's been cold calling him for six months, I think.

One thing leads to another, and basically, Gekko hires him because he makes a few bucks on the stock.

So the beauty of the film was that he gets in, and one day he gets in, and he starts to make some money.

[ Bells clanging ] [ Indistinct conversations ] Narrator: Under contract to a major Hollywood studio for the first time, Oliver Stone directed "Wall Street," his fifth feature, in 1987.

The movie was about golden boys, the cynical, ambitious young traders obsessed with money.

Emblematic of the 1980s.

Ditch them, pal.

You gotta get out now.

Reagan: ...There will be no turning back or hesitation.

Narrator: Ronald Reagan was starting his second term as president.

Like Margaret Thatcher in Britain, he was a radical proponent of free market capitalism.

Deregulation of industry became a factor in American prosperity.

Reagan: God bless you and may God bless America.

See, when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980, there was a big up.

It was like, let's believe in America again.

Dawn in America.

Let's make money.

Take all regulations out.

Let's -- We're a wild West.

Let's rip it open.

And Reagan was a tonic, but we didn't know what he was doing underneath the surface.

When he was stripping the middle class economy out, we didn't recognize that.

♪♪♪ Narrator: Oliver Stone intended "Wall Street" as a protest against the corporate raiders, demolishing the old industrial world founded in the early 1900s.

Oliver Stone came from solid Republican stock.

He had been immersed in the world of finance even as a child.

His father, Louis Stone, to whom the film was dedicated, had worked all his life as a Wall Street stockbroker.

Stone: The old Wall Street that I knew as a kid, and my father would take me around, There was no windows.

You don't get big views.

You'd have narrow, and it would be dark in the afternoons and gloomy and kind of like a church.

Wall Street had once been anonymous.

You joined a firm, you worked for the client.

The client was loyal.

You were loyal to him till the end of his days.

You invested for someone for his lifetime.

You give me, you know, your money, and I'm going to be your man, and we have a relationship of trust.

And my father was on Wall Street since 1933-4.

He worked on many different -- for many different firms.

Never made a huge amount of money, but he did very well.

He died sort of, like, with his boots on, the expression -- like he really worked until almost he died.

He was going to the office every day.

He had to get to the office.

He got the Wall Street Journal under his arm, the hat on his head.

He had to go to work.

Without work, he was lost.

He'd wear his tie sometimes on weekends.

[ Laughs ] But he was a loving man.

He didn't see me do it, which is a shame, because he died in '85 and I did the movie in '87, and I got to know an entire new generation.

I had some friends on Wall Street.

They were young and they were making a fortune.

I had never seen that before.

[ Typing ] Weiser: Oliver had wanted to do "Wall Street" because it was very timely.

It was in the news.

He took me to Wall Street in New York, introduced me to a lot of different people, and I met them and I studied, took about a month of learning and studying, like, seeing how people behaved, seeing how speedy they were, the frantic momentum of life in New York, which is just nonstop, seeing how these brokers yelled and screamed and flailed away, and then they would go home at night and then they'd go to strip clubs and they would drink until early in the morning and then get up again and go to work.

Buddy, got tickets to the Knicks game tonight.

Go out and cruise some chicks afterwards.

This is going to be awesome.

What do you say?

No, I got to read my charts.

Oh, come on.

Forget charts, will you?

We're not fund managers here, baby.

Churn 'em and burn 'em.

I am offering you the Knicks and chicks.

God help you before you turn into poor Steeples over there.

[ Indistinct conversations ] Preferably Lou Mannheim.

Oh, yeah.

Nice guy.

Swell fella.

But he's a loser.

He lost all his equity when the firm went belly up in the recession of '71.

Do you want to be coming in here in your late 60s, still pitching?

And he said, I want to do a story somehow modeled on an older guy and a younger guy who used each other, and then they turn on each other.

Bud Fox wants to be a player in New York.

It's so important to be powerful and have money to get women.

He is someone who comes from the outside of the city where he's a small fry, and his father wants him to work for the airlines and he doesn't want to.

He has this big dream.

But as someone who's pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but can't get to the next level -- he can't get with the elephant gun hunters -- he didn't have any real idea, but he said, "Read Crime and Punishment over the weekend and get back to me."

So I read the summary on the notes, like, the Internet, where they show you the notes, and I explained why that would not work as a model for the story.

And he said, "Okay, okay, go read Great Gatsby tonight."

It's like he thinks you're supposed to do things immediately, and he's a tremendous taskmaster.

So I looked at the movie of Great Gatsby and said, "That doesn't work."

And he said, "You read it?"

And I lied and I said, "Yeah, I read parts of it.

I skimmed through it, and that doesn't really work."

Narrator: Dramatizing the Wall Street feeding frenzy, Oliver Stone tells the story of the apprenticeship of young Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, as he is broken in by the flamboyant Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas.

Gekko is one of the predators upsetting the established order by targeting vulnerable corporations undervalued on the market.

After downsizing and restructuring, the investor can make a fortune.

♪♪♪ Yeah?

[ Sighs ] Gekko: Money never sleeps, pal.

Just made 800,000 Hong Kong gold.

It's been wired to you.

Play with it.

You done good, but you got to keep doing good.

I showed you how the game works, now school's out.

Mr. Gekko, I'm there for you, 110%.

No, no, no, no, no.

No, you don't understand.

I want to be surprised.

Astonish me, pal.

New info.

I don't care where or how you get it, just get it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Lipper: Oliver Stone said, "I need somebody who knows about Wall Street and who also knows how the government institutions work, because I want to do a film about both."

I come from Wall Street.

I live in New York.

I spent my whole life down there.

I said, "If I tell -- help work on a film with Oliver and we tell the story about retail brokers who are calling up doctors while they're operating and giving them inside information as tips and the guy is leaving his scalpel on the body, I said, people are going to laugh at us.

They're going to say it's, you know, a joke.

It's going to be a caricature rather than a real story about Wall Street.

And I said -- And I had told this to Oliver before.

I said, you know, the real story to tell is about compulsion.

It's about that demonic in a person that forces them to go over the line.

I said, you know, the real story to tell is about Ivan Boesky.

Narrator: Nicknamed Ivan the Terrible, Boesky was the quintessence of ruthlessness, an unashamed speculator.

He became a several-hundred millionaire by gambling on mergers.

He made no bones about his ideas, praising greed as a virtue.

[ Coins clinking ] He shared the limelight with a few other great financial hunters at the peak of their glory, like banker Michael Milken, businessman Carl Icahn, or art collector Asher Edelman.

Edelman: Oliver came up to my office and said, "Can I hang around and get a feeling for what's going on?

Because we're going to do a movie about aggressive takeover people and so on."

And after two hours of Oliver being there, I threw him out because he's annoying.

I like him a lot, but he was very annoying, so he had to leave.

[ Chuckles ] And then Michael called me.

Michael was also -- Producer: Michael Douglas?

Yeah.

Michael was also an old friend.

And he said, could he come up?

Well, Michael's -- was less annoying.

He's a gentleman.

And he was there to study the activity and what went on in terms of action and activity.

And we also had a big trading room, which was not exactly what I was doing anymore, but it was my company.

So he got a chance to sort of get the feeling of the excitement in that room.

I think the reason that Oliver chose me to play Gekko was that I was also a producer.

You know, I produced movies -- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and "The China Syndrome" and these other movies.

And he always said that he needed an actor that had a sense of business acumen, that he understood business.

Weiser: Gordon Gekko was a cross between Ivan Boesky and Asher Edelman and Carl Icahn and a little bit of Oliver.

Gordon Gekko was a little bit of Oliver because Oliver is -- on telephone, he can be very sarcastic.

And his relationship to me sometimes was a little bit like Gordon Gekko to Bud Fox in terms of do this and do that.

Give me guys that are poor, smart and hungry and no feelings.

You win a few, you lose a few, but you keep on fighting.

And if you need a friend, get a dog.

It's trench warfare out there, pal.

Well, I forgot to mention that there was a little bit of Trump in Gekko.

Yeah, because Trump -- Trump was a Playboy at the time.

Trump was a player in New York.

He was in real estate, but he was a young guy who was really taking the city by storm.

And he was a womanizer and was brash.

♪♪♪ Trink-Rubenstein: [ Speaking French ] Interpreter: This new generation of stockbrokers were conquistadors.

There was a sort of visionary dream, a madness.

So this whole generation of financial industry pros suddenly found themselves liberated, and they began to reshape the industrial landscape according to reasoning, based on maximizing profits.

There were both good and bad sides to it.

Lots of people said yes, but what they did was detrimental to the workers in these companies.

There was also a good side, though, because to keep the company running, you had to restructure it, make it sleek and competitive.

Narrator: At the time, the whole world was watching Wall Street.

As the New York correspondent for the French Daily Libération, Dominique Nora was one of the first to investigate the practices of these new knights of finance.

Man: [ Speaking French ] Oui.

[ Speaking French ] [ Applause ] Gekko: I am not a destroyer of companies.

I am a liberator of them.

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

I'd heard the line "greed is right" from Ivan Boesky.

He'd said it, but it wasn't, like, played up.

And magazines put covers of all these rich guys on or women, and they talk about their money like they're gods.

[ Coins clinking ] So in other words, making money with money was the new game only.

Not making products.

Record company doesn't matter.

Send the product to overseas.

Send the company overseas.

It doesn't matter.

Just make money.

That was all it was about.

It was a dramatic and traumatic change in a culture.

It was -- for that culture, it turned over a hundred years of tradition on Wall Street, of what Wall Street represented, how they saw themselves, what was the purpose of it -- you know, the original purpose.

You wanted to finance industrial America.

All of this was turned upside down on its head by people that they didn't even interview to participate in Wall Street.

And finally, they -- many of them joined in by, I guess, to use Gordon Gekko's word, greed.

[ Speaking French ] Interpreter: How do you say "greed" in French?

Those words don't convey the violence of greed.

Greed is an insatiable appetite for money.

Gekko: Greed is good.

[ Applause ] I'm looking for a particular shade of blue and...I don't see it.

It's so crazy.

I read 40 pages of "Wall Street," and I went to meet Oliver.

People would say to me, "Ellen, "Why do you want to do 'Wall Street?'

It's just a bunch of men in suits."

I didn't think so.

It's interesting when you're faced with the challenge of designing a character.

Gordon Gekko, to me, was a certainly a Machiavellian character.

However, he was... seductive, handsome, manipulative, mean, um, harsh, self-serving, and... Could get what he wants from whomever he wanted to get something from because he was clever and smart.

That was a slippery character.

That was a villainous character.

So I look at it and say, "Well, I'm not going to be obvious about this."

The research on the street of the street at that time was only Ivan Boesky, really.

He was the only one that I found that had a little panache.

His suspenders were red, that's how I remember it.

So I envisioned a cross between a Golden Age Hollywood movie star, somewhat Fred Astaire, '30s, '40s, and the Duke of Windsor.

Ellen Mirojnick, a costume designer who I've worked with many times, really designed an extraordinary kind of costume that ended up making Gekko, the villain, a very attractive character to many people.

The horizontal shirts, the whole different style.

And I think as a costume designer, the wardrobe played a very important part for the character.

Mirojnick: It created an idea that he was a self-made man.

He did not care about the others.

He made his mark and so it had to look different.

And Oliver came to me and said, he said, "Nobody dresses like that on the street."

And in a very -- not concerned way, but it was an aggressive way.

And I just said, "Oliver, they're going to dress like that on the street.

Don't worry about it.

Let's go."

And buy a decent suit.

You can't come in here looking like this.

You just go to Morty Sills.

Tell him I sent you.

I call him Gordon something else.

And then Oliver changed it to Gekko, I think.

When he changed it to Gekko, he saw him as being a lizard.

[ Gecko chittering ] Treacherous creature, like a snake.

[ Gecko calling ] When I saw the name Gekko, it played an important part of what I did with my hair.

I mean, I got some grease in my hair and I decided to put my hair back in a greased, controlled manner.

But it was a great name, a great choice of name of picking this lizard that could stick to everything.

The thing about a gecko, too, is, you know, they can -- they can hold on upside down.

They hold on to everything.

[ Gecko calling ] Stone: He's not a friendly-looking customer.

I wouldn't want to be a fly.

In Vietnam, we had geckos all the time.

"F**k you, f**k you," they -- We called them "f**k yous" because that's all they -- All night, "F**k you.

F**k you."

So you're trying to sleep in the bush.

♪♪♪ [ Animals calling ] ♪♪♪ [ Woman speaking French ] ♪♪♪ Narrator: In 1967, Oliver Stone enlisted in the Army to fight the war in Vietnam.

He was 20 years old and spent 15 months on the front lines.

He returned injured, decorated, and disenchanted.

He had lost his innocent belief in America.

And I remember being very impressed by his short film.

The very first thing he did in that class, which was the Vietnam vet coming back.

And it was really quite beautiful.

I remember that.

It was really quite beautiful.

I remember -- I remember basically it was -- It was a person I could tell by the -- by the -- the aura that he gave out that it wasn't necessary to... engage him in any kind of conversation other than what we were doing with the class.

He was a person who obviously had gone through something that none of us there had underst-- could ever really understand unless we had gone through it ourselves.

♪♪♪ I met him when I was in film school at NYU, and I met him in the editing room and he was a Vietnam vet.

He was older than most of the other students.

He had been to Vietnam.

He had already been to college.

And he was a real loner and a renegade.

And he didn't get along with a lot of people.

[ Speaking French ] Narrator: Oliver Stone began his career by directing two horror movies which went unnoticed.

He then became known as a screenwriter.

Oliver is a great writer first, right?

And you look at the movies that he's written before -- "Midnight Express," "Scarface."

He's an excellent writer.

His scripts are very good.

Oliver had done so much research as he'd done in all of his pictures, and the writing was so good.

It was more an opportunity for me just to try to kind of get that rhythm that he had so beautifully written.

The one thing I learned first was my father, you know, because he was a writer, too.

He did technical manuals, business letters.

He wrote about economics.

He was very intellectual, very good writer, too.

Very proud of his writing.

So I think from an early age, he wanted me to learn something and he paid me a quarter [speaks French] to write a theme every week.

I remember that.

Every week, a theme, a small piece.

I was only 6 years old, 7 years old.

"Tell a story."

And I hated it for a while because I wanted the money.

I just wanted to go to buy the comic books.

But I grew to -- I grew later in life to appreciate it.

And when I wanted to express myself at the age of 19 excessively, I really wanted to pour out my heart.

At 19, I went back to that -- that moment, that training as a -- as a young person telling what I knew.

And it came in -- it came out in torrents.

I wrote -- must have written a huge a huge novel.

It was called "A Child's Night Dream."

♪♪♪ But that came out of me, out of pure, pure emotion and will and a need to lo-- a need to be loved.

I said that in the book.

That's where writing comes from.

Without writing, we don't have a movie.

[ Gunfire ] Narrator: After winning an Oscar for the screenplay of "Midnight Express," Stone gained fame as a director by drawing on his experience in Vietnam.

In "Platoon," Oliver Stone cast Charlie Sheen, only 21 years old, in one of the leading roles.

Woman: And the winner is... Oliver Stone for "Platoon."

[ Cheers and applause ] Narrator: "Platoon" earned Stone his name as a director, winning two Academy Awards in 1987 -- Best Movie and Best Director.

[ Indistinct yelling ] Stone: The jungle in "Wall Street" is a different kind of jungle than "Platoon," you know?

They're both vicious, but they kill people.

But they don't do it with guns on Wall Street.

They break your spirit or your wealth.

People talking -- Like, the guy in the film is talking about kill, you're damaged, you're hurt.

They're talking in visceral terms like soldiers.

[ Indistinct yelling ] We're working on the real Stock Exchange floor, New York Stock Exchange.

Huge amounts of money are being traded, you know.

To get on the floor in the first place was a big deal in those days.

Plus, to get footage with them in the middle of it is to distract attention from the big board.

Money's being made and lost.

So you have to understand we're a bit of a game.

It's just, "Hey, Hollywood's here."

You know, they come out and they do their thing, and I feel a bit like a clown when I go out into these situations.

But everyone loves Hollywood in some way, you know?

Yeah.

Lou, Endicott.

High buy.

Take it and bit it.

Do it again.

Endicott.

High buy.

Take it and bit it.

One more time.

Anybody gonna give me any directions here?

[ Sighs ] Yeah.

Lou.

Endicott.

High buy.

Take it and bit it.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

[ Cheers and applause ] Is, um... Man: He goes around the corner and he ends up... Where's my script?

...goes around and ends up on... [ Indistinct conversation ] So first half, these guys start their movement as soon as they can.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -We're rolling.

-Rolling.

Man: More lines.

Action.

Man #2: And action.

Narrator: At the brokerage where Bud Fox is employed, the lean, young wolves work alongside old-school investors.

It's another opportunity for Oliver Stone to point out the contrasts between old and new and another approach to the father-son theme flowing through the film.

Man: Cut.

Great.

Okay.

Stone: The old broker, Hal Holbrook, was a bit more like my father.

Take it easy, play the long game, goes up and down, up and down.

You know, don't get so frenzied.

I like the advice he gives because that's the way my father talked.

The wise epigrams, you know?

You're a part of something here, Bud.

The money you make for people creates science and research jobs.

Don't sell that out.

You're right, Lou.

You're right.

But you got to get to the big time first.

Then you can be a pillar and do good things.

You can't get a little bit pregnant, son.

And also his real father is in the movie.

Martin Sheen is playing the union guy who also tells him to be honorable in his dealings with people.

Charlie: It was interesting having my dad play my dad, but Oliver gave me two choices.

He said -- I was at his house one night and he said, "Do you want Jack Lemmon or do you want your father?"

And I said, "Well, Jack Lemmon's a genius, no question.

But my dad's my dad, and he's kind of a genius, too."

Narrator: Gripped by Gekko's insistent and increasingly diabolical demands, Bud Fox begins searching for insider tips to give his mentor, even if he has to obtain them illegally.

The point is to stay ahead of breaking news to play the market effectively, but the use of such information is a crime called insider trading.

When Bud grills his father, an airplane mechanic and union leader, for secrets, it is a betrayal because Gordon Gekko has his eye on the airline Bud's father works for.

He's using you, kid.

He's got your prick in his back pocket.

But you're too blind to see it.

No, what I see is a jealous old machinist who can't stand the fact that his son has become more successful than he has.

What you see is a guy who never measured a man's success by the size of his wallet!

That's because you never had the guts to go out into the world and stake your own claim.

Both of us had a little problem with that because Oliver loves to move his camera rather than just do still coverage, talking heads.

He moves off one to the other.

So we had to wait till the camera came on us.

You see that scene again, watch how long it takes.

And we were, "Beat.

Beat.

Get up there.

You know, boom.

Now talk.

Beat, Beat.

Get back down now.

Get over it.

You know, you talk now.

Beat --" You know, go back and forth.

Remember, there was no coverage in that scene.

So both Charlie and I were, you know, straining because the emotional life and -- and the dialogue wanted to tumble on one another.

And yet, visually, we weren't on camera until we waited, you know.

So that's what -- that's the discipline in that scene.

That's a pretty good little scene.

The father is a very important character, Martin Sheen, because he represents truly this is the end of his company.

This is a tremendous setback for him.

And he told Charlie he didn't trust Gekko.

So I love that confrontation between father and son, but the son doesn't realize what he's done.

He really doesn't get it.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Gina.

-She's right here, sir.

Call for Gekko.

Gordon Gekko, please.

Alright, Bud Fox, I want you to buy 20,000 shares of Blue Star at 15 1/8.

3/8, tops.

And don't screw it up, sport.

Socially, he's very slick.

Michael is very good with people.

Very good talker.

And he knew about finance a lot because he has -- He was, you know, he was in New York.

He hung out in New York.

So his friends were investment people, Henry Kravis and so forth.

So putting him in the movie seemed like a natural, but no one expected him.

He hadn't really been a serious actor in the way, like doing television series like "Streets of San Francisco."

So he'd done romantic leads.

He's good romantic leads, but he'd never done a lot of dialogue.

Michael had not done any heavier part.

It was a tough shoot that way because it was my first big studio shoot and I don't want to fall behind.

Actors are not learning their lines, going over budget.

I was scared of all that stuff.

Especially having won an Academy Award.

They always say, "The guy is gonna get big-headed and he's gonna fall into the, you know, fall into the arrogance trap."

Douglas: I remember that scene.

It was an extraordinary cameraman named Bobby Richardson.

And we shot a lot of that scene in a regular limousine.

Cameras right in your face.

And you have to have really good concentration.

Okay?

Woman: We'll take five.

Bud: Alright, Mr. Gekko.

You got me.

[ Chuckles ] [ Sighs ] Oh, God, what a beautiful night.

I love this crazy city.

I mean, there's nothing like it, is there?

You got 7 million people living on each other's heads.

Kids born millionaires, dying people, praying junkies, whores, wheels, parties, sex.

F**k. Wheels?

Wheels?

Wills.

Man: Deals, parties, sex.

That's wheels, lawyers, deals.

Man #2: Still rolling.

Alright, Mr. Gekko.

You got me.

[ Chuckles ] [ Sighs ] God, a beautiful evening, isn't it?

I love this crazy city.

I mean, there's nothing like it, is there?

You got 7 million people living on each other's heads.

Kids born millionaires, dying, people praying, deals, junk-- Oh, f**k. I'm sorry.

Well, I had problems with him the first few days.

We were at each other.

I was not happy.

And I was about to fire him and -- He just couldn't remember anything, you know.

And he came into my trailer one day and he looked at me and he said, "How are you?"

I said, "What?

Okay."

He said, "You feel okay?"

I said, "Yeah."

He said, "You doing drugs?"

I said, "No, I'm not..." "Because you look like you never acted before in your life."

And Gordon Gekko went, "Blah."

[ Mumbling ] Wow.

I said, "I never like to look at film because I only see the bad stuff when I'm making a movie, looking at the bad stuff."

I said, "But -- But if there's a problem, I have to look at the movie."

So I said, "Well, I guess I'd better look at some film."

He said, "Yeah, you better look at some film."

So I went into the editing room to look at some of the scenes that we had shot.

And I'm looking, I'm looking.

I think they're pretty good, you know, I said...

So I came -- I came out afterwards, said, "Oliver, I thought they were okay."

He said, "Yeah, they are, aren't they?"

I said, "What --" And what Oliver wanted was he wanted just a little more nastiness, a little more anger from Gekko.

And Oliver was willing to stand behind the camera and have me angry at him, pissed.

Michael kind of initially interpreted the character as kind of being more Wall Street-y, you might say, more like the people he knew from Wall Street.

And I remember Oliver was getting really hot watching this.

He was really getting angry watching this.

And he kept saying to Michael, "No, get mean, get mean, get mean."

And "Gordon Gekko is mean.

You know, he's -- he's a beast, you know."

And -- and finally, he looked at Michael on the set and he said, "If I had Kirk here, I wouldn't have to be telling him this."

Referring to his father.

Michael went berserk.

He said, "F**k you, you piece of s**t. F***ing piece of s**t." And, uh, and he walked off the set.

And...maybe 40 minutes later, he comes back on and his hair is slicked back into the Gordon Gekko cut.

And I think it shook him up.

I think it shook him up because I think he took it more and more seriously right away.

He's a professional.

And I have to say, he kind of grew a step.

You know, it was like -- He was more powerful, which is what I wanted.

Oliver challenges you.

I think many times you feel like, you know, he had a pretty rough Vietnam War.

I think he looks at his actors as if he could trust them in the trenches with him.

Could they protect his back?

And so he's adversarial.

He will challenge you.

He's not -- he's not a warm and cuddly, friendly guy on the set.

He's -- he's tough.

Why do you need to wreck this company?

Because it's wreckable, alright?!

I took another look at it and I changed my mind.

If these people lose their jobs, they got nowhere to go.

My father has worked there for 24 years.

I gave him my word.

Narrator: Combining the leveraged buyout and underhanded maneuvers, Gekko breaks the rules.

That's when Bud turns against him and tries to save his father and Bluestar Airlines from Gekko's claws.

He succeeds, but only by self sacrifice.

Collared by the SEC and charged with insider trading, he exposes Gekko as the man who ordered him to break the law.

I opened doors for you.

I showed you how the system works.

The value of information, how to get it.

Fulham Oil, Brant Resources, Geodynamics.

And this is how you f***ing pay me back, you cockroach?

Arrested, he brings down Gekko with him.

They both end up in prison.

[ Bell ringing, indistinct yelling ] ♪♪♪ On Monday, October 19, 1987, two months before the movie was released, the Dow Jones recorded the most violent crash in its history.

Affected by the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, other markets worldwide fell like dominoes.

Nora: [ Speaking French ] Interpreter: If you go back to the macroeconomics ideology, it's Reagan and Thatcher.

It's deregulation.

It's getting rich is good, entrepreneurship is good and high finance is good because it's an instrument driving the economy.

But instead of driving the economy, finance was preying on it.

All of the financial instruments they invented to reduce exposure to risk -- future markets and so on -- actually increased the risk and went wild.

They started as a tonic but became a cancer and metastasized.

Narrator: Years of intensive speculation had created a huge stock market bubble.

The courts went to work to clean up Wall Street.

A few of the stars of high finance who had engaged in illegal behavior found themselves in the dock.

♪♪♪ Stone's film coincided with breaking news.

The day "Wall Street" was released, headlines announced Ivan Boesky would serve three years in prison and pay a $100 million fine for insider trading.

I do have to talk about our first premiere in New York City, where we invited -- I remember Donald Trump was there and a lot of masters of the universe, major Wall Street players.

And we shared -- It was one of the great experiences.

But they had this premiere and there was the afterparty and all these billionaires -- Well, this is 1986.

So back then, it was multi-millionaires, maybe a couple of billionaires, not quite as much as now.

And they all were like, shocked, because we got them.

We -- You know, they thought they were untouchable and yet the movie captured their life, their day-to-day, their existence.

And they were shocked that it really did.

What a wonderful feeling it was for these people to be so taken back by how exactly right the movie was in terms of the corruption that was going on and the cheating.

When I saw the film, which was the opening, of course, I was exceedingly embarrassed to be part of that character.

Man: Really?

Yes, of course.

I mean, the guy was a crook.

He was a fraud.

He was a bully.

He was many things that you really would not want to be identified with.

Carl Icahn found it very funny.

And I think Ivan Boesky was in jail, so he couldn't see it.

Weiser: Wall Street became even bigger.

It was just on every newspaper, everywhere.

But 20th Century Fox was afraid that people would be so put off by Wall Street, they were afraid that this would have a negative effect and would keep people away from seeing the movie.

But, fortunately, people went and they wanted to see it because it was timely.

Narrator: In an unforeseen twist of fate, the movie that was supposed to condemn a corporate raider escaped from its writers.

Is this Michael?

Yours?

Uh-huh.

Which one is this?

This is the famous blue of the Gekko blue-white collar shirt.

The movie opened in December.

In January of that following December, I remember being called by the Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles Times was doing a big spread about young men wanting to be Gordon Gekko.

The public identified with Gordon Gekko.

They loved him.

They were seduced by him.

They wanted to be him.

Women wanted to be with him.

Men wanted to be him.

But Fox did support him.

But he stood at the center of the film.

He was the villain.

You know, the villain.

And all of a sudden, wherever I went, "Hey, Gordon Gekko!

Oh, you're the man, man!

You're the man!

I got into business because of you!"

I said, "You did?

I went to jail.

I was -- "Aw, no, no, no."

And they loved -- They loved the showbiz, the color, the quality, and all those elements that went to together with your costume design and your look and how well -- and being master of the universe, the power.

It was so seductive.

And I love parts like that, because evil -- evil is attractive, right?

Somehow I made a mistake by making him too engaging and -- and -- and too captivating.

For -- For people to say they want to be like him, I didn't want people to feel that way.

I wanted people to be entertained by him, but I didn't want people to feel that he was a character that they admire.

So, um, that's how things turn out.

[ Chuckles ] Narrator: Nominated for the 60th Oscar award ceremony, Michael Douglas was vying with some of cinema's finest actors -- Marcello Mastroianni, William Hurt, Jack Nicholson and Robin Williams.

[ Cheers and applause ] Douglas took the trophy.

Gekko, the supporting role, had upstaged the lead.

I'm very happy for him.

I was surprised because the role was always a second role.

You know?

It was a flashy role.

But it won the Oscar, so that shows you the way the film business works sometimes.

But Michael is Michael in that movie.

I'm not saying he's only that, but a part of Michael is in that movie, for sure.

And I think of his father, Kirk Douglas, because he did so many films like that, in the sense of being aggressive, of being hungry for money.

And it was nice to see Michael break through and get his father's strength back.

He had to use a bit of his father to do that.

[ Cheers and applause ] So, when his father saw him win the Oscar, Kirk Douglas never won an Oscar in his life.

I don't think so.

And Kirk must have wanted one, because he was a fighter.

So when he saw his son win it as a Best Actor, can you imagine?

C'est bizarre.

[ Speaking German ] Man: Yeah.

C'est la vie.

If you look through his movies historically, his actors have probably given their best performances with Oliver.

You go -- You go back to "El Salvador," you go back to Tom Cruise and "Born on the Fourth of July," you go to Charlie Sheen and "Platoon," you go to Val Kilmer in "The Doors," you go to Kevin Costner, every actor, myself included, have probably given their best performances with Oliver.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Narrator: The historical realism of "Wall Street" established Stone in his special niche as a filmmaker with the power to decode the great contemporary American myths.

♪♪♪ After Gekko, Stone profiled Kennedy, Nixon, and George W. Bush, as well as the heroes of the counterculture -- Jim Morrison of The Doors and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

He had given a voice to the sharpest critics of the American empire -- Chavez, Castro, and Putin.

♪♪♪ Douglas: I call Oliver, internationally, one of, I think, one of the three greatest filmmakers in the world in the 20th century.

I think he's incredible.

I think he takes on -- I mean, he makes wonderful movies about very serious subjects, pictures that have a political message or say something or food for thought, but are really, really well-made movies.

And his politics sometimes get in the way, in terms of the general public.

But he's a -- he's a fabulous, fabulous filmmaker.

He's a great writer.

Very underrated, I think.

And just a -- just a great filmmaker.

Oliver is a very secretive person.

He doesn't let you know what's going on.

To this day, if he's going somewhere, he'll say, "I have to go somewhere this weekend."

And then you find out he's going to Russia to meet Putin.

And you're just thinking he's going, like, to Santa Barbara.

You have no idea what he's doing.

He won't tell people.

And he goes everywhere.

And when you're with Oliver, you're breathing the air of a different planet.

He's a bigger-than-life person.

Narrator: In 2010, Fox released Stone's sequel to "Wall Street."

It shows Gordon Gekko leaving prison.

The world is still reeling from the subprime crisis.

Once again, Stone's film was timed with uncanny perfection.

Stone: Fox -- about 20 years later, they come back, and they really want Douglas to do another -- a sequel.

Not me.

They want Douglas.

Douglas honorably says, "I'd like to do it with Oliver Stone."

First of all, I haven't been on Wall Street in 20 years, and then, when I went back, I was shocked at the -- the money was so much bigger.

And now the banks were doing what Gekko was doing.

Narrator: Almost prophetically, Oliver Stone cast a real-life real-estate tycoon, one of the models for the 1980s Gekko character, alongside Michael Douglas.

The redhead, still famous only as a billionaire, played himself -- The Donald.

But the scene ended up on the cutting-room floor.

The scene -- I regret not putting it in the movie.

I should have left it in.

I found a better place for it in the front.

It should have been in the front, when Gekko just gets out of jail.

It would have been good.

I didn't know he was going to be president.

The scene was not bad.

It wasn't great.

It was late in the movie, you know, It was already two hours and something -- 12 minutes or something.

I don't know, but it just seemed long at that time.

♪♪♪ Nora: [ Speaking French ] Interpreter: Then I knew him, in fact, in the 1980s, when I was a correspondent on Wall Street.

He was one of the most famous Wall Street guys.

That is, "Greed is good.

Go out and make money.

The more money you have, the more powerful you are."

He had no sympathy for his employees or for the people he evicted from the buildings he bought.

I think that, for me, somehow Donald Trump is worse than Gordon Gekko.

If you remember Gordon Gekko's speech at Teldar Paper, when he addresses the shareholders, and you have all these, as Oliver used to call them, beefy directors in the background, Gordon Gekko says, "Greed is good.

I'm going to make America great again.

We've lost our ability to trade.

We've lost our ability to compete.

I'm going to make America great again."

Now, where have you heard that recently?

♪♪♪ My whole life, I've been greedy, greedy, greedy.

I've grabbed all the money I could get, I'm so greedy.

But now I want to be greedy for the United States.

I want to grab all that money, it's true.

We were all shocked.

But, you know, I'm not surprised anymore, because the United States has changed so much.

Its concepts of values, what matters has become very public relations-oriented.

It's very hard to discern the truth when you have so many -- so many lies.

It's all illusion.

I think maybe Donald Trump got his style from that movie, maybe.

He decided that, "I got to be bigger and bolder."

Yeah, maybe that's where his incredible rashness came from.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪