Although the story came out yesterday in Variety and other places, according to the New York Times, the idea of filming a sequel to the 1987 Oliver Stone hit Wall Street has been in place since May 2007.
The old details are that the sequel will retain its producer Edward R. Pressman, and Variety says Fox really wants Michael Douglas to come back and play a post-prison Gordon Gekko. I have to admit that while I’m not crying into my martini over the loss of the good-guy Bud Fox character or even Oliver Stone (because Steven Soderbergh seems to be picking up his mantle very nicely), if they replace Michael Douglas with anyone else as Gordon Gekko, I will start throwing Bloomberg machines out of windows.
The new details are that Allan Loeb (21) will be its writer, probably based on the fact that he used to be a stockbroker in Chicago. I cry shenanigans on that, and think that former trader-turned-poker blogger Paul McGuire would be better suited to write it because he’s got a sharper edge to him. Don’t believe me? Just read this bit, written towards the end of the World Series of Poker this year:
When the online qualifiers won their seats they thought they won a ticket to the big dance. What they really won was a one way trip to nothingness.
After the third day you get numb to the smell of donkey blood and you ignore the bottoms of your jeans stained with oodles and oodles of spilled blood so much so that a steady stream bisects the Amazon into two parts. The French media have been calling it “Une riviere remplie du sang des anes.” That loosely translated into Donkey Blood River.
You can try to repress those horrific memories of the anguish in the killing fields and stash them next to your suicidal thoughts, but they always bubble up to the surface and ambush you when you least expect it. I have a few flashbacks everyday. I can’t escape the faces of the ones we left behind. Like the young kid from that small farming town in Kansas. He barely shaved. Had a girl back home. They were fixin’ to get married. He texted her every break until… it was his time to go. He exploded into a thousand little pieces. Never saw it coming. Sucked out on the river. One moment he was smiling and excited to be at the same table as Jesus. The next moment, he was a statistic. Seat open, table 23.
Fucking brilliant.