The Crash: The Rise and Fall of Bud Fox

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Young and eager, Bud Fox snares a $50,000-a-year job at a Wall Street investment bank. But he is not satisfied. Fox dreams of scoring the big trades. He gets his chance when he meets the wealthy corporate raider Gordon Gekko. "I'm offering you rich," says Gekko. Enticed, Fox takes off into the stratosphere of high finance, only to crash-land a year later.

A tale from last week? Not quite. Fox is a character in Wall Street, a film directed by Oliver Stone (Platoon) and scheduled for December release that uncannily captures the real Wall Street's current mood. Says Kenneth Lipper, a former partner at Salomon Brothers and the movie's chief consultant: "There is a brooding omnipresence that the prosperity on Wall Street is headed toward a cataclysmic end." Stone, however, downplays the parallels. "You see the shadow of the crash, but Wall Street is the story of an individual."