Oliver Stone and the capitalists

As I’ve written in Wall Street & Vine, capitalists don’t get viewed very favorably in films (here's some recent examples). I’ve put this at least partly down to filmmakers' resentment of the constraints that money and capitalists place on their art. I note that even criminals and their enterprises get treated more favorably than your average capitalists. The evil is done by people who squash creativity, not by those who just kill people and stuff like that.

The relationship between filmmakers and capitalists was perhaps most strikingly evident in a film that’s getting a lot of play these days, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. I’ve published an essay, Imagining Wall Street, analyzing that film in some detail.

In a climactic scene in that film, union leader Carl (played by Martin Sheen) rejects his son Bud’s (played by real and film son Charlie) attempts to get funding from evil capitalist Gordon Gekko for the airline Martin works for. Carl says “I don’t sleep with no whore and I don’t wake up with no whore. That’s how I live with myself, Buddy. I don’t know how you do it.”

As I point out in the article, Stone’s relationship to capitalists was complex – the film is dedicated to Stone’s father, a broker, and his father is in the film in Hal Holbrook’s sympathetic portrayal of an aging broker.

So it’s particularly interesting to read in today’s WSJ about Oliver Stone’s adventures in funding his current film, W, about George Bush. The article notes that Stone had trouble getting money in Hollywood because, in Stone’s view, those evil capitalists were afraid of a movie attacking a sitting president. So he went overseas, where investors didn’t have those scruples.

The largest equity investor was a firm called Emperor. According to the article:

Emperor's chairman is Albert Yeung, a wealthy business tycoon in Hong Kong * * * who has been arrested several times and was the subject of a series of high-profile court cases, was convicted for perverting the course of justice and of illegal gambling in the 1980s. * * *

Mr. Stone says that investors don't rattle him or affect how he makes his movies. "The film business has always been full of strange characters," he says. "Who the hell gets into this business but gamblers and buccaneers and pirates? You don't get Henry Paulson as a producer in this business, that's for sure."

As the U.S. continues to face financial turmoil, Mr. Stone says, he'll welcome any sorts of investors in his films, as long as he can "keep my freedom and my content free of interference." He does draw the line at a certain point. "If you're asking if I would do a movie with a known drug dealer, no, I wouldn't," he says. "You don't want to corrupt a movie, though the nature of the film business lends itself to criminal enterprises."

And I guess Stone “don’t sleep with no whore,” either.