Hollywood casts Wall Street as villain to tap anger at crisis

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Hollywood has found its next bad guy. Welcome back, Gordon Gekko.

Film and television studios are rushing to tap America's fixation with the financial crisis and anger at the Wall Street executives blamed for it.

News Corp's 20th Century Fox is making a sequel to ‘Wall Street,' where Michael Douglas's Gekko proclaimed, "Greed is good." NBC's ‘Law & Order' is building episodes around financial themes. The General Electric Co unit also is developing a one-hour series called ‘Outrageous Behaviour,' a battle of the sexes set in Wall Street.

"Our development is tied to what is relevant in today's world," Teri Weinberg, NBC Entertainment's executive vice president overseeing comedy and drama programming, said in an e- mail. "We hope to exemplify the foolishness of the human condition in the world of finance."

Time Warner Inc has slated ‘Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy' for 2009. The movie follows a reporter who uncovers corporate criminals by befriending the man who polishes their wingtips, according to IMDB.com Inc.

The New York-based media company will release ‘The Wolf of Wall Street' in 2010, based on the autobiography of a stockbroker involved in a 1990s securities fraud, IMDB said.

"These films may be timed just right to take advantage of the wave of interest in Wall Street and the economy," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Media By Numbers in Encino, California. "One of these movies may hope to be the next ‘Wall Street.'"

The crisis has renewed interest in Fox's original movie. As of Oct 14, demand for the two-decade-old film at Netflix Inc, the largest US mail-order movie service, had increased 11 percent since Sept 1, according to Steve Swasey, a company spokesman.

The original ‘Wall Street' ends with police collecting evidence on Gekko for securities violations. The sequel follows the character after he emerges from prison, according to the trade magazine Variety. Douglas may reprise his role as Gekko, the magazine reported.

The film is being written by Allan Loeb, whose script for ‘21' followed a group of college students who win millions by counting cards in Las Vegas. The producer is Edward R Pressman, who worked on the original, Variety said. Pressman's company didn't return calls seeking comment.

The rush to exploit the crisis may lead to films lacking nuance and depth of character, said Stanley Weiser, who co-wrote the original ‘Wall Street' and wrote ‘W.', the film about George W Bush that opened on Oct 17.

"They'll make cartoonish villains out of these people," said Weiser, who said he wrote a script summary for the ‘Wall Street' sequel, then stopped work when the original's co-writer and director, Oliver Stone, dropped out.

Not everyone may want to watch their troubles played out in movies and TV, said Jason Squire, an instructor of cinema practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and editor of The Movie Business Book.

‘The Number 1 movie in the country for these two weekends of very serious downturns is ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua,'" Squire said in an Oct 13 interview. ‘This is an example of escapism."

‘Chihuahua,' from Walt Disney Co, has grossed $69.3m in US and Canadian theaters since its Oct 3 release, according to Box Office Mojo LLC in Burbank, California, which tracks film performance. After two weekends at Number 1, it was supplanted by News Corp's ‘Max Payne,' based on a video game.

By comparison, Time Warner's ‘Body of Lies,' a political thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, has made $24.4m since Oct 10, and Stone's ‘W.,' released Oct 17, earned $10.5m its first weekend.

CW, the network owned by CBS Corp and Time Warner, attempted to capture how Gekko's mindset has permeated American life in the series ‘Easy Money,' about a family of loan sharks.

"My business is based on one simple concept: Never tell yourself no," says the show's main character, Morgan Buffkin.

"Why not buy that new flat screen, why not take that trip to the Bahamas, why not add a few carats to the engagement ring?"

Production is on hiatus. The first seven episodes will air before the holidays and the show will restart in January, executive producers Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider said in a an interview. ‘Easy Money's' two airings averaged fewer than 1 million viewers each, or 0.6 percent of US television households, according to Nielsen Co.

This article is courtesy of Bloomberg.

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