Broker, Trader. Single Engine Pilot. Warship game player. Night runner. Pizza eater. Hope is not a strategy. I hate everyone and everything. I love my 2 sons
me: my thermostat broke
honeywell: we got you
me: also need avionics for my small plane
honeywell: yeah np
me: weird q but where do i find uranium enrichment centrifuge components
honeywell: buddy ur not gonna believe this
Kevin Spacey had two Oscars when he signed on. Jeremy Irons had one. Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto. Every one of them took the lowest wage their actors' union allows because they read this script and said yes on the spot. The whole movie cost $3.5 million.
The Wolf of Wall Street cost $100 million to make. The Big Short cost $50 million. Margin Call cost $3.5 million and still grossed close to $24 million.
The director, J.C. Chandor, wrote the script while sleeping on a couch in a borrowed office. Couldn't afford an apartment. His dad was a career banker at Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest firms on Wall Street. Chandor sat down to write in the days after Lehman Brothers, another massive bank, went under and helped trigger the 2008 financial crash. The CEO in the movie is named "John Tuld," a mashup of two real bank CEOs from that era: John Thain at Merrill Lynch and Richard Fuld at Lehman Brothers.
80% of the movie was shot on the 42nd floor of One Penn Plaza in Manhattan. The offices had just been cleared out by a real trading firm. They made a movie about Wall Street collapsing inside a building that Wall Street had already walked out of.
Chandor could have had more money. Investors showed up with bigger checks, but they wanted the ending rewritten. The CEO hauled off in handcuffs, the good guys walking out in protest. Chandor turned them down. He wanted the version where everyone compromises and goes home. That refusal is why the budget stayed at $3.5 million.
He had his own close call with the crash. A bank handed him and some friends $10 million to buy a building in New York before 2008. Almost no questions asked. A former banker he knew told them to sell fast. They got out right before the bottom dropped.
The film hit theaters in October 2011. That same week, Occupy Wall Street protesters were camping out a few blocks from where the crew had filmed.
The producers put it on iTunes and cable the same day it opened in theaters. Around 500,000 people rented it for $6.99 each. That was roughly $5 million that a traditional release would have left on the table.
Matt Levine at Bloomberg called it the best finance movie in 2022. David Denby at The New Yorker said the same thing when it premiered in 2011. A movie about a bank pulling the coldest trade of its life turned out to be one of the coldest trades indie film has seen.
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Stanley Druckenmiller on quickly taking losses:
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