The Perfomances Save The Day in Wall Street : Money Never Sleep

Gekko’s still seeing dolar signs. William Goldman remembers to write a great part for Michael Douglas in The Ghost and The Darkness: a fearless big-game hunter modeled on cowboy Shame  and stepped in mystery. But Douglas wanted him to have a past – a history that would get the audience rooting for him.

We have no idea if similar pressure was exerted on Money Never Sleeps writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff. Yet there’s no doubt the Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s long awaited sequel is a very different proposition from the one that won Douglas an Academy Award in 1988. Back then, Gekko was a ruthless master of the universe, a corporate shark who feasted on the carcasses of unwary businesses. Having done an eight-year stretch for securities fraud, though, the GG we meet at the start of Street 2 is a humbled outsider, as redudant as the brick-sized mobile he collects on his 2001 release.