It’s a wonder that so many large egos could fit into one room. But there they were, crammed into Cipriani 42nd Street (housed in a converted bank) for an elegant after-party following the September 20 New York premiere of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
What made this soiree so unusual was not the Hollywood celebrities, but the Wall Street heavyweights. There was Warren Buffett, swarmed by groupies; short-seller Jim Chanos, accompanied by a Lady Gaga look-alike; hedge fund impresario Anthony Scaramucci, schmoozing with folks from CNBC; and activist manager and art collector Dan Loeb (see page 8) soaking it all in from an aesthetic perspective. But then why shouldn’t they have been partying it up? All had cameo roles in the movie, a sequel to Stone’s 1987 classic Wall Street. And most were consulted on what turned out to be a movie with a not exactly pro-capitalist message.
Some Wall Streeters offered more than counsel. In the movie, Jake (played by Shia LaBeouf), the prospective son-in-law of a reprised and quasirehabilitated Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), works on a trading floor with dramatic views of surrounding Manhattan skyscrapers. In reality, the 25,000-square-foot space, though an authentic trading floor — one belonging to Knight Capital Group — is in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Knight’s CEO, Tom Joyce, says a location scout for Fox approached him in late 2008 after shots of the trading floor appeared in the Los Angeles Times. “The next thing I knew I was having lunch with Oliver Stone at the Capital Grill in Midtown,” he says.
