History 120: #12 Group Post: "Wall Street"

December 2004

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Wall-Street dealt with a lot of socio-economic and business morality issues, the film also focused itself on some important historic events that occurred during the early nineteen eighties. Issues such as unemployment, economic recession and scandals were all visible in this movie.
The issues of this movie may have been broad but the plot resembled an actual historic event. This film may have been based on a similar historical event of stock scandals involving Ivan Boesky and Michael Milkin. Ivan Boesky and Michael Milkin admitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that he had used confidential information about upcoming corporate takeovers to illegally play stocks in his favor. Milkin, his associate sold junk bonds and discovered a method of reaping astronomic profits from buying weak firms as tax pay offs for the rich to be merged and sold again; this scandal is directly associated with mass unemployment throughout America at the time. These selfish gains in personal wealth directly contributed to the stock market crash of 1987. [1] What can be learned from watching Wall Street was that proper conduct of fair business affairs will always benefit citizens more than the selfish greed of the capitalist tyrant.

[1] Frauger et al, Out of Many. Page 615.

In the beginning of the movie Charlie Sheen, who plays Buddy Fox, was seen drinking at a bar with his father. They conversed about Buddy’s financial situation and how bad the economy has been for both father and son. Buddy then concludes the scene by asking his father for three hundred dollars to pay for his debts as a Broker.

Buddy’s father was pessimistic about his future and wondered why Buddy didn’t just stay in a stable blue collar customer relations job at Blue Star airlines (notice the movies hidden puns). Buddy retaliated by saying that stock-broking was an easier and quicker way of making more money; “I can make money in one year as a broker than I can in five years at this airline”.

His father wondered why $5,000 dollars wasn’t enough for Buddy to survive and make it big at Wallstreet. His father’s generation did not understand why property values were so high in his son’s generation compared to the Great Depression.

Buddy revealed that the living expenses in Manhattan near Wall-Street were more costly: “A 5 percent mortgage rate was in Queens. Manhattan costs more to live in.”

Buddy’s father later talked of his frustrations with new mandatory drug testing policies that were now being passed into work places in the early 80’s.

Buddy’s dad seemed upset with the new workplace policies that were being enforced; however, he was relieved that he wasn’t blamed for a massive airplane crash incident that would have left him jobless.

Buddy’s dad started to speak of an airplane accident that occurred in which mechanics were suspected of causing the accident until the manufacturers were investigated the blame was put on the working class first.

“The FAA is going to rule that it was a Manufacturing error in the door latch mechanism. I knew it all along! I told them it wasn’t me that did it! It was those god damn greedy manufacturing companies in
Cincinnati.”

Group Summary:

Everyone gathered at the Johnson center to view Wallstreet. We then later gathered all our inputs about what the movie's theme was about and then went home and started to work on the assignment.
Anh and Justin collect information about the 1980's, Shannon found more information about the movie and sent a script to Nhat for closer examination. A draft was formulated and thanks to GMU's reliable mail server that had to crash at the final steps of our project we quickly perservered and scraped together the blog.

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History 120

December 2004

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#12 Group Post: "Wall Street"

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