MOVIE NEWS – It’s hard to picture Oliver Stone’s 1987 crime classic Wall Street without Michael Douglas lighting up the screen, isn’t it? But before Douglas ever got near Gordon Gekko, the Platoon director had two heavyweight names at the top of his list. Those early targets were Bonnie and Clyde legend Warren Beatty and American Gigolo leading man Richard Gere.
Douglas recently brought up this odd bit of Wall Street casting history at the TCM Classic Film Festival in New York, telling Alicia Malone he had no clue about it for decades (as reported by People).
“I’ll say this – we were just chatting and doing a little prep, because I honestly haven’t sat down and watched the whole movie in something like 40 years… and then I saw a piece recently saying Oliver went to Warren Beatty first and he passed, then he went to Richard Gere and he passed, too. I never knew any of that, because you always want to believe you were the first and only choice.”
As the surprise “third name” on that wish list, Douglas said he was thrilled and eager to bring some emotional weight to Gekko, the shark who takes Charlie Sheen’s young stockbroker Bud Fox under his wing.
“I think when Oliver talked about it, he wanted someone who could plausibly carry a sense of business savvy – and I had that producer background, plus I grew up in New York City, went to Allen Stevenson, and then to prep schools. So I knew the East Coast world and that kind of life. I also had friends from those early school years who were headed toward Wall Street, so I wasn’t living it day to day, but I understood the lifestyle. I’m guessing that’s why he landed on me.”
Oliver Stone Got Inside Michael Douglas’ Head
In the same chat, Douglas also described the director’s brutal approach early in production on Wall Street. The story goes that about two weeks into shooting, Stone showed up at Douglas’ trailer and asked if he was on drugs, implying he looked like someone who’d never been on a set. Stone then pushed him to watch the dailies with him, even though Douglas typically avoided doing that throughout his career.
“I’m watching them really closely, picking everything apart, and they looked pretty solid to me. I kept saying, ‘I think it’s good,’ and [Stone] goes, ‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it?’ He was prepared for me to hate him for the rest of the shoot if that’s what it took to get that extra push. His track record with actors speaks for itself. So I’m incredibly, incredibly grateful – for the role, and for the way he forced me up another level.”
At the 60th Academy Awards, Douglas won Best Actor in a lineup that included Robin Williams (Good Morning, Vietnam), Jack Nicholson (Ironweed), Marcello Mastroianni (Dark Eyes), and William Hurt (Broadcast News). Would the performance have hit quite the same without Stone’s psychological warfare? Hard to say, but they clearly valued the collaboration enough to reunite for the 2010 sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Forrás: MovieWeb
