I love movies. I have become somewhat a movie connoisseur over the last twenty years, examining different decades, eras, genres, etc. As I was growing up, I fell in love with the business world. The idea of working in the corporate world or working in the stock market in some fashion was always what I wanted to do. My father was a real estate developer. He was always analyzing the real estate market and business cycles trying to stay ahead of the curve. As a result, he subscripted to many of the main business newspapers and publications in the 1980s such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and The Economist. Around the age of 8 my father taught me how to read The Wall Street Journal and how to look up stocks. Back then stocks prices were reported in fractions, but that is a story for another article. My father felt at a very young age that I had a “head for business.” He recognized that he could explain complex business strategies and ideas to me and that I could understand them.
One day my father says to me, I want to show you this movie that came out recently called Wall Street starring Michael Douglas. This movie was the perfect marriage between Hollywood and Wall Street. A movie, as it turns out, that would play a major role in my life. This was not Jimmy Stewart playing the local banker in It’s a Wonderful Life. This was new, fresh, and cool. This movie portrayed the suave, sophisticated, rich, greedy, wall street money player of the 1980s. The are so many lines and scenes from this movie that just became legendary for my generation. So much so, that in another iconic wall street movie made in the late 1990s, Boiler Room, there is a scene were all the traders are sitting around watching Wall Street and quoting all the lines from the movie verbatim.
As my love of business continued to grow and my repertoire of movies expanded, I started seeking out movies that were business related or that had a business focus. That led me to the following movies: Pretty Women, Margin Call, Gold, The Founder, American Psycho, Glengarry Glen Ross, Bonfire of the Vanities, The Big Short, The Shawshank Redemption, etc. These movies all feature very colorful characters from all walks of life. They focus on many different topics. The dark side of sales culture, business ethics, entrepreneurship, and how a gentleman should conduct himself in business, to name a few. There is one name on this list that might have jumped out at you. American Psycho. You might be saying, isn’t that the movie where Christian Bale runs around killing people? Yes, it is. However, it is also a movie about working on wall street in the 1980’s. It has a classic scene where Mr. Bale is freaking out over the design of his competitions business card.
I love movies. But I really love movies that intersect with my love of business. I am looking forward to examining these movies in the years to come with my podcast audience. There are many lessons to be learned from these movies. Some of them are classics and some not so much, but each has something unique to offer. I always seem to come back to Wall Street. For me, that was the first movie that opened my eyes to a larger world. It showed me how “cool” business could be. It showed me how tough, smart, courageous, tenacious, and persistent you need to be to make it in the business world. It also showed me how it can all go so wrong. As the famous saying goes, “all that glitters is not gold.” When you are driven purely by money, with no moral and ethical compass to guide you, even if you “succeed,” you lose.
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