Beware of Dr. Hashimi
The Economist reports that Oliver Stone received some expert advice while filming Wall Street 2: Electric Bugaloo Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: Half-reformed after prison, Gekko is more anti-hero than villain this time. He is still dazzled by lucre, but also determined to give warning of the dangers of excessive leverage. The real baddies are ...
The Economist reports that Oliver Stone received some expert advice while filming Wall Street 2: Electric Bugaloo Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps:
The Economist reports that Oliver Stone received some expert advice while filming Wall Street 2: Electric Bugaloo Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps:
Half-reformed after prison, Gekko is more anti-hero than villain this time. He is still dazzled by lucre, but also determined to give warning of the dangers of excessive leverage. The real baddies are Bretton James and the securities firm he runs, Churchill Schwartz—perhaps the least disguised fictional name ever. Executives at Goldman Sachs are said to be unamused….
As the financial crisis unfolded, the story was reworked to cast Goldman in a more nefarious light. In the original version, the villain was a hedge-fund manager. But script advisers from the financial world persuaded Mr Stone that an investment banker would be more realistic, since it was banks and securities firms, not “alternative” money managers, that had blown up the system.
Among his counsellors were James Chanos, a well-known short-seller, Anthony Scaramucci, another hedge-fund man, and Nouriel Roubini, an economist who predicted the crisis. Each was rewarded for his efforts with a cameo. Dr Roubini appears as the suitably gloomy Dr Hashimi.
Now I respect Roubini a lot, and in this case he was correct to redirect Stone’s ire away from hedge funds and towards the investment banks.
Still, this information makes me juuuuust a bit wary of the film. The history of political economy advisors for film and fiction is pretty short and undistinguished. The only other instance I can think of in which this occurred was Daniel Okimoto‘s cameo in Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun. That novel — the first of Crichton’s to feature a bibliography, if memory serves — was written at the peak of hysteria about Japan, Inc. Okimoto’s contributions were spot-on, but the book itself was absurdly over the top in terms of Japanese nefariousness (intriguingly, Philip Kaufman’s screen adaptation of Rising Sun holds up better than the novel because it tamped down the Japan-bashing in favor of adding some film noir moodiness).
I don’t like generalizing from one case, but I do wonder whether political economy advisors are used to give film/fiction the patina of intellectual respectibility, thereby allowing the writer/director to go over the top. [What about documentaries? — ed. I’ll outsource that to Will Winecoff.]
I’m sure movie-goers will be safe in Oliver Stone’s hands — I mean, this is a guy who would never go over the top in making his point.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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