US Film-makers Seek to Return to Wall Street

It may seem an unlikely time to revisit the notion that "greed is good", but plans are advancing to film a sequel to the 1987 film Wall Street.

Titled Money Never Sleeps, the film meets Wall Street's iconic trader Gordon Gekko as he leaves prison. Michael Douglas, who won an Oscar for the part in the original, has not signed to reprise the role, although he has not dismissed the possibility.

The script is being written by Allan Loeb, a former Chicago stock broker and gambler who wrote the gambling film 21 and Things We Lost in the Fire.

The original film's director Oliver Stone, who envisaged it as "Crime and Punishment on Wall Street", is not involved with the sequel. The film, being made by 20th Century Fox, is scheduled for release in 2010.

Wall Street, which was released in 1987, shortly after the last major cash in the financial markets, captured a moment in the popular imagination. Although the film tells a highly moral tale, with Gekko going to prison for his misdeeds, it is remembered as a paean to greed.

Douglas has been dogged by the character, with the recent financial turmoil prompting some to ask him for Gekko's opinion on the state of the markets.

After taking part in a United Nations panel on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last month, Douglas was asked by reporters to compare nuclear Armageddon to the "financial Armageddon on Wall Street".

"Are you saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?" he was asked.

"I'm not saying that," Douglas replied. "And my name is not Gordon. He's a character I played 20 years ago."

Although Douglas is not Gekko, the character was based on several notorious financial figures, including insider trader Ivan Boesky and corporate raider Carl Icahn.

Wall Street's writer, Stanley Weiser, recently collaborated with Stone on W, the George Bush biopic due to be released in the US on Friday. Writing in the Los Angeles Times last week, he noted that the original message of the film had been misconstrued.

"I never could have imagined that [the Gekko] persona and his battle cry would become part of the public consciousness, and that the core message of Wall Street ? remember, he goes to jail in the end ? would be so misunderstood by so many," Weiser wrote.

"Gordon Gekko has been mythologized and elevated from the role of villain to that of hero."

As for what Gekko would make of the current financial crisis, his creator said that the corporate trader would point out that he had warned of the dangers of a lack of oversight of the markets more than 20 years ago.

"He'd remind everyone how he warned us of this very lack of corporate accountability years ago; how it came home to roost," Weiser wrote.