Lunch is still for wimps: Gekko returns in 'Wall Street' sequel

Lock up your dollars and hold tight to your moral compass. Gordon Gekko, the suspender-wearing corporate raider who burst onto our screens as the take-no-prisoners poster-boy for corporate greed and consumer excess in the 1987 film Wall Street, is coming out of retirement.

Edward Pressman, the producer of the original film which starred Michael Douglas as Gekko and won him a best actor Oscar, confirmed over the weekend that he signed a deal last week with 20th Century Fox to produce a sequel. It will be called Money Never Sleeps, one of Gekko's guiding aphorisms, among which was also the still memorable, "Greed is good".

The deal comes at a time when the owner of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, already has money on his mind, as he struggles to cement his unsolicited, and so far rejected, $5bn (£2.5bn) bid for the Dow Jones Company and its prestigious newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

But in the realm of fiction, fans can look forward to Mr Douglas reprising the role of Gekko, the ruthless anti-hero who said in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit."

Mr Pressman told The New York Times that in the interim, Gekko has been in prison, after being shopped by his protégé, Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, at the end of the first film, and will emerge this time a free man once again to visit his machinations on assorted dupes in the new global era of hedge-fund finance. But we will have to wait for details of the plot.

"I don't think he is much changed," Mr Douglas told the Times from Bermuda, where he lives with his wife, the Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, with whom he has two young children. "He's just had more time to think about what to do."

The Wall Street reunion will not be complete, however. Although Mr Pressman and the new writer for the project Stephen Schiff (True Crime) reportedly tried for weeks to persuade the original director, Oliver Stone, to return to the set, they had no success. Nor, meanwhile, is the character of Bud Fox expected to return which rules out a second appearance by Sheen.

Wall Street gained an instant following from the financial masters of the universe it depicted, although the film was only a modest box office hit when it came out.

Mr Schiff, who also wrote the screenplay for The Deep end of the Ocean, hopes that the slightly more mature Gekko will set new fashion trends in the world of finance just as he did 20 years ago. "If you weren't wearing suspenders before Wall Street, you were certainly wearing them after," he said.

In one regard, however, Mr Douglas, 63, who appeared last year in the film You, Me and Dupree, is holding back his enthusiasm. A part-time resident of Manhattan also, he said he wouldn't mind if he never had "one more drunken Wall Street broker come up to me and say, 'You're the man!'"

Greedy creed

* "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works."

* "Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another."

* "I create nothing. I own."

* "What's worth doing is worth doing for money."

* "Lunch is for wimps."

* "It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation."

* "And if you need a friend, get a dog."