Nicholas E. LauerMovie Fact #5 - August 22nd, 2020
For the 1987 film Wall Street, the character Gordon Gekko (Played by Michael Douglas) is said to be a composite of several people. One such example was actually an old friend of the film's director Oliver Stone, Wall Street broker Owen Morrisey who was involved in a $20 million insider trading scandal in 1985. In addition, Dennis Levine, corporate raider Carl Icahn, art collector Asher Edelman, agent Michael Ovitz, and Stone himself. Another inspiration was Ivan Boesky who once made a speech to the 1986 graduating class of the U.C. Berkeley School of Business Administration where he said, "Greed is right". This served as inspiration for Gekko's now famous line, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".