Belfort, the man said, “I tracked this guy for 10 years, and everything he wrote is true.”Īs it happens, Mr. And while I was inclined to view this as an exaggeration as well, Terence Winter, the screenwriter, told me that when he interviewed the F.B.I.
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET MOVIE
Belfort makes Stratton Oakmont sound like the most debauched brokerage that ever existed - and the movie takes full advantage, with scene after scene of drug-addled nights and sexcapades in the office during trading hours. He and his fellow executives took copious amounts of drugs and employed prostitutes almost daily. By the time he was 26, he was worth tens of millions of dollars. He had several homes, a yacht, a helicopter and a trophy wife. Belfort, for his part, “lived the life” (as he puts it in his book) and then some. Belfort’s scripts, they became fiercely loyal to their boss. What does Goldman Sachs do if not sell? It’s just a different product.Īs the Stratton Oakmont brokers got rich by following Mr. In the early 1960s, a man named Bernard Cornfeld used to draw people into his financial empire by asking, “Do you sincerely want to be rich?” And they say Charles Ponzi was a pretty good salesman, too.
And he’s hardly the first such type in finance. DiCaprio) is that he is an extreme example of the smooth-talking, I-can-sell-anything, salesman. As the saying goes, “Stocks are sold, not bought.” What is mesmerizing about Mr.
The brokers (or traders in the case of Goldman) are, at bottom, salesmen. Still, while those two firms are worlds apart in most respects, there is one important way in which they are alike, and why using Stratton Oakmont as a proxy for Wall Street is not such a stretch. It is much easier to convey on screen Mr. It is easier - and in many ways more sensible - to do films like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “ Boiler Room” (the 2000 drama that was also said to be modeled after Stratton Oakmont). It’s just that movies don’t do well describing what really happens day to day on Wall Street, not even Oliver Stone’s two tries. But the rise and fall of Stratton Oakmont in the late 1980s and ’90s has nothing to do with the events that brought the financial system to the brink. When “The Wolf of Wall Street” hits screens, there will inevitably be a temptation to connect it to the financial crisis of five years ago. Everything I’ve just described is illegal, as Mr. Inevitably, the stock would fall back to earth, leaving the investors holding the bag. Belfort and several of his fellow executives would buy up stock in a particular company and then have his legions of brokers (using a script he had written) sell that stock to unwitting investors - which would cause the stock to rise, allowing Belfort and company to sell their shares at a nice profit. Stratton Oakmont was a classic “pump and dump” operation: Mr.
They called it Stratton Oakmont, mainly because the title sounded high-toned, which they were most certainly not. He was such a good salesman that he soon went out on his own, founding a brokerage house with his friend Danny Porush. He found a job pitching penny stocks - that is, stocks that are too small to be listed on any exchange, many of which are fly-by-night companies - and realized he had found his calling. It was Long Island where Belfort picked up the pieces. Rothschild, the crash of 1987 wiped out the firm and took his job with it. Given Rothschild’s stodgy reputation, I tend to think this story is an exaggeration, an act of salesmanship intended to lure in Hollywood. Belfort claims, among other things, that a successful Rothschild broker (played by Matthew McConaughey on screen) took him to lunch on his first day and told him to masturbate often if he hoped to be a good broker himself. In his memoir - upon which the movie is based - Mr. It was his first job in the business, and he was given the assignment of cold-calling “prospects” that he would then turn over to a broker. If you want to know the truth, the Wolf of Wall Street - the person, that is, not the Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio movie that opens on Christmas Day - spent only a fleeting few months on the actual Wall Street.
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