EXCLUSIVE: Mike Fleming Jr. here. For most of the last year, my day started with a 6 a.m. call and an hour with Michael Douglas for his memoir. A hell of a ride. It was early for me, but it was still worth going to see MD somewhere in Europe, where he is enjoying the fruits of his long career as a Hollywood superstar with his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones and their family. Written by Douglas, Shane Salerno and myself, the memoir One Helluva Ride was released Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing. Douglas’ revealed details about his colorful personal life made headlines this week; we thought Deadline readers would be more interested in dissecting the seminal film that helped forge a great career.
Douglas began with a difficult task, trying to carve out an identity for himself outside of the shadow cast by his father, Kirk Douglas. Douglas got his first break as a producer, sharing the Best Picture Oscar for We flew over a cuckoo’s nestand capture the spirit of the times with The Chinese syndrome. His rise to the screen took longer. Douglas’ producer helped the actor in him by prioritizing good scripts above all. The best of these meant playing flawed characters, and Douglas came to enjoy seeing how far he could push those boundaries while still having the audience on his side.
The book tells Douglas’ story through a dozen of his most memorable films: Romance with the stone, fatal attraction, basic instinct, traffic, fall And The War of the Roses among them — and The Streets of San Francisco, the TV series starring Karl Malden that helped shape Douglas’s work ethic and prepared him to produce Cuckoo’s Nest with the late Saul Zaentz. The following excerpt focuses on Wall Street, the film that encouraged Douglas to take the kind of risks many of his acting peers didn’t dare. Relentlessly pushed by Oliver Stone, Douglas transformed corporate raider Gordon Gekko into a defining villain of ’80s films. This turning point paved the way for everything that followed.
As Michael writes in the book’s introduction, “I can’t think about my life without thinking about my films. Six of the eight decades I’ve lived on this planet have been dedicated to making films. They’ve always been my benchmarks, my way of marking time.” Here he takes us back to Wall Street, the movie that allowed him to play any role and bring audiences in on the weekends, just to see what he got into next and how he would fare.
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“I had never played the bad guy”
I had never played the bad guy. In Fatal attraction I played a guy who made a bad decision and spent the rest of the movie trying to make up for it. But it wasn’t real wicked.
Dad always thought I should play a role as cunning and manipulative as his famous character in The bad and the beautifulthe ruthless Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields. He said to me, “You’re so likable, Michael, but when you finally play a bad guy, you’re going to surprise a lot of people who think you can only do good guy stuff. I know the darkness underneath.”
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Oliver Stone had just won Best Director and Best Picture for Section. First The magazine said: “In one short year, he became the THE Hollywood’s most interesting and important director.
In the early 1980s, while researching his screenplay for Scarf In Miami, Oliver noticed not only the rise of cocaine, but also that of a young, emerging class of millionaires. Millionaires used to be men in their 60s, but thanks to Wall Street, we suddenly had all these guys – kids, actually – in their 20s and early 30s with tons of disposable income. They used it to finance a decadent lifestyle of drugs, partying and flashy materialism.
Oliver saw parallels between Miami’s drug trade and what was happening in New York’s financial world. Oliver called Wall Street “Scarf North.” He wanted to use the financial world as a backdrop to hold up a mirror to America. Oliver was eager to prove that he could transfer his intensity from the Vietnamese jungle to the concrete jungle of Manhattan’s financial district. The title of his new project was going to be either Greed Or Gekko the Great.
Wall Street follows Bud Fox, a young and ambitious stockbroker who is seduced into the ruthless and illegal world of insider trading under the dark mentorship of wealthy corporate raider Gordon Gekko. Over the course of the story, Bud faces a complex moral struggle between his blue-collar roots and the seductive, corrupting power of money.
To counterbalance his protagonist, Stone needed a villain. Someone skilled, charismatic and attractive. A ruthless corporate raider.
For the role of Gekko, the studio really wanted Warren Beatty but he didn’t commit. The role was then offered to Richard Gere, who refused it.
Then Oliver sent me the script. It was long, with intense monologues, rich in industrial jargon, that took place two or three times in a row. pages single-spaced type. I was captivated by Gekko’s words:
Greed, for lack of a better word, is a good thing.
Greed is right.
Greed works.
Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary mind.
Greed, in all its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge – has marked the rise of humanity.
And greed, believe me, will save not only Teldar Paper, but also that other dysfunctional society called the United States.
This Gordon Gekko part was fantastic and exactly what I was looking for. But that didn’t mean the studio wanted me.
Scott Rudin and other Fox executives said I was too young for the role, but the truth was they just didn’t believe I could do it. In fact, they warned Oliver that I was more of a producer than an actor and told him that I would probably be in my trailer reading scripts all the time or on the phone in Los Angeles trying to get my own projects together. Why couldn’t they accept that I was capable of doing both jobs, separately or at the same time?
There was really nothing on screen that showed Oliver that I could play Gordon Gekko. Gekko was all the power, all the time. He was the puppeteer. He was mean. He was Machiavellian. He was the ultimate villain.
Rather than being discouraged by the studio’s feedback, Oliver was intrigued. In fact, the more studio executives told Oliver about me, the more interested he became. He believed in me, not only because of my acting resume, but also because of my life. He hired me because I won an Oscar producer who, like Gekko, knew how to make money. Four blockbusters in a row—We flew over a cuckoo’s nest, The Chinese syndrome, Romance the stone, Jewel of the Nile…had proven it. I was the actor who left a hit TV show to make an independent film that didn’t even have a distributor. I was the Hollywood disruptor who made an independent film that beat every major studio film, both at the box office and at the Oscars, as he himself had just done with Section. I was a maverick, an outsider, like Oliver and, more importantly, like Gordon Gekko.
Oliver told me that when we met, he found “an edge” in me that he liked and he thought I had the right mix of charisma and business savvy to play Gekko. He was convinced that the DNA I possessed as the son of Kirk Douglas, along with the skills I had acquired as an actor over twenty years, would be enough to bring out the Gordon Gekko in me. He thought there was a chord I didn’t play because I didn’t want to be compared to my father. He gave me the role.
We now had to build Gordon Gekko from scratch. Building a character begins with external elements. Establishing these details always helps me understand how my character thinks, moves, and expresses himself.
Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas on the set of “Wall Street”
Courtesy of “One Helluva Ride”
1. The name: There was nothing accidental about this name. “Gekko” was chosen to highlight Gordon’s predatory nature. He was a stealthy, cold-blooded hunter, determined to kill his prey. And geckos are survivors. The more I researched and delved into the character, the harder I worked to embody these traits.
2. Clothes: Essential to the image, the character of this man, was Gekko’s wardrobe. The suits, the suspenders, the cufflinks, the shoes, all that. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick called on Manhattan tailor Alan Flusser to help her create the outfits. They studied the power combinations of other Masters of the Universe figures like Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens and even a young Manhattan real estate mogul named Donald Trump.
3. Hair: I had a long, flowing mane of hair, still a Santa Barbara hippie at heart. But that wouldn’t work for a shark like Gekko. I needed something elegant and bold, a look unlike anything audiences had seen before. And then I thought of Pat Riley. Pat was not only one of the best coaches in NBA history, but he also looked great doing it. This was partly because he knew he represented the Buss family and the Lakers organization, but also because Pat’s father had played and managed in the minor leagues for twenty-two years and always believed in the discipline of good preparation. When his parents went to dinner, his father wore a sport coat, gabardine shirt and tie. Pat took this to heart and put Armani on the map in Los Angeles. But he was never picky about it. In fact, he wore the same Lorenzo Banfi shoes every night and would get dressed and straighten his hair in less than five minutes.
But yeah, he looked good, and I wanted Gordon Gekko to have some of that flair. I remember one day when Pat Riley and I were together in Miami, and Pat was driving his Mercury with the top down. I was in the backseat, absolutely obsessed with how her hair stayed perfectly in place despite the breeze. It was exactly the imposing look I needed for Gekko. (For years afterward, Pat teased me about stealing…
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