What are your favorite Wall-street themed movies?

It is interesting to see a film about something that one knows something about, and the way that media people just don't get anything which is not the media.

Wall St could really be any industry, good film, but 5 minutes search and replce could make the script do the advertising business, or computer manufacturers.

I like Trading Places more, there's some stuff that rings true, and the best finance bits are at the start and end, the train bit is crap.

People who do fraud in bank films aren't really different from any other fraudsters.

What has never really come out is banking culture, or any of the subsets of it like brokers, sales, corporate finance or of course quants.

The Brits amongst you will know of Alex, a corp finance type in a regular cartoon strip in a newspaper. That's very good, and at least once per week it hits the nail seriously on the head in the way the best Dlbert cartoons did. Alex was made into a good, and mildly commercially successful play, sadly it was sponsored by a competitor of P&D, but good anyway.
 
The Brits amongst you will know of Alex, a corp finance type in a regular cartoon strip in a newspaper.

Think it's published (or used to be) in The Independent. Pin-striped bloke.

Problem with all these Hollywood films is they pander to their audience by grossly oversimplifying or misrepresenting what happens -- instead of educating it. They sensationalise. They bring in incongruous things like romances -- which don't belong. Maybe the budgets involved are so massive they have to play it safe.
 
BBW is right I think a good example of how to do it "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure"

It introduced many people to a jargon that made them feel "insiders", if you can make your customers feel smart, you will sell to them.

As for romance...
I met my wife at IBM's labs, arguably the least romantic place on Earth :)

I think a major thing missing from bank films is the lack of research. If I were writing such a script, I'd spend real effort finding one one liners, like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent", or "the first loss is the cheapest". Note I say "finding", not "creating", to ring true they need to be part of the culture.
 
I think a major thing missing from bank films is the lack of research. If I were writing such a script, I'd spend real effort finding one one liners, like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent", or "the first loss is the cheapest". Note I say "finding", not "creating", to ring true they need to be part of the culture.
That's what that TV show producer was looking for a little while ago :)
 
Documentaries most" The Midas Formula(Black-Sholes), Smartest guys in the room (Exon).

Also The rogue trader(barrings), Gonna watch the margin call. Haven't seen it yet. Looks a good one since I saw a trailer yet.
 
More than once it has occurred to me to do a finance film...

Some of my godchildren are in that biz, and a spin out from my last firm does serious special effects such as bits of Harry Potter, etc. I have a huge stock of anecdotes from my own career and those who drink with me, all are authentic, some are even true.

Getting a real trading floor would not be all that hard, done properly the various vendors would pay good money to have their kit showcased. You think Reuters & Bloomberg would have a fight over who got to be the screens ?
There is a 'spare' empty floor in the centre of the City of London due to Citi making a bet that went wrong, some phone calls would get me one in NY/NJ.Also there a useful amount of expensively empty office space. If you were marketing terribly expensive floors, I'd bet you'd keen on a film that showed it as a glamorous location.

I'd call it "Love over Gold", a romance of mathematics & money, stealing wantonly from Romeo & Juliet, Fooled by Randomness, and Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance (and yes the theme music would be by Mark Knopfler).

The heroes work for two banks competing in a market where heads of both firms hate each other, a lot.
We have the opportunity to cut between scenes where traders shaft each other in the market, to ones where they use their fists in a bar. So we have sex, violence, money and based upon true stories, what more can a film really need to make obscene money ?
The scene where Romeo is banished for fighting can be trivially cut & paste to turn it into being sent to Frankfurt, since he'd quite rightly poison himself than move there.

It is a beautiful coincidence that "poison pill" applies to the scenes in Verona and and corporate finance.

The friar who helps the young lover / traders is of course a headhunter :)

We start with a prologue and apologies to William:
Bloomberg TV announcer (pick your favourite) :

Two corporations, both alike in dignity,
In fair New York, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
If you care to learn this foretold mess,
which two lovers fooled by randomness.
 
The scene where Romeo is banished for fighting can be trivially cut & paste to turn it into being sent to Frankfurt, since he'd quite rightly poison himself than move there.

You speak sooth. It's the dullest European city I've ever been to. Well, not quite. Oslo is even worse, Stockholm must be as bad. And I've never heard anything exciting about Zurich.

The world of money is boring: a world of lifeless abstractions, of dessicated shadows, and it's difficult to drum up interest in it.
 
I watched it. It was cast very well. I thought the ending credits were a little tough on Bush, though. It made it sound like the economy and job market crashed because of TARP and then Obama swooped in and stabilized the markets in '09 and '10. No mention of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, or its amendments, in which the government essentially forced the banks to make subprime loans. Of course banks are going to start repackaging the loans so they can control the risk. But, it's HBO, I don't expect much.
 
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