![]() ( MORE: The Wolf of Wall Street: Scorsese and DiCaprio Fall for the Big Con)Īt the time, I was a new reporter and recent college grad, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with my college friend Phyllis, who had landed a prestigious investment-banking job at Lehman Brothers. You won’t see the female point of view represented in The Wolf of Wall Street - where most of the women onscreen are hookers or strippers - or for that matter in any of the other of the major Wall Street films so far. Women then were just starting to infiltrate the boys’ clubs of finance and financial journalism - a milestone, though one now remembered mostly for its tragic fashion choices of big hair, giant shoulder pads and sneakers with suits. Solid-gold toilet seats were totally considered cool. Public-company shareholders happily footed the bill for executives’ private jets, chauffeurs and champagne-soaked trips to London on the Concorde. Black stretch limousines idled on every corner. ![]() This was a time, after all, when the 1% was lionized, not demonized. The concept of “political correctness” hadn’t yet been invented. So was the definition of acceptable behavior, and the perception of right and wrong. ![]() The culture was wildly different than it is now. It’s hard to put yourself back into that mind-set, and I’ve yet to come across any film or book that truly captures it. We didn’t even notice enough to be offended. Yet the incidents barely registered at the time because they were so … normal. The experiences my female Wall Street friends and I had would be considered outrageous today. But in other ways, for those of us who were there in the 1980s, especially women, the film doesn’t begin to capture the absurdity of that era. In many ways the film is over the top - an orgy scene on the trading floor, which for no particular reason includes a marching band, comes to mind. Much of the conversation and coverage around the film has revolved around the same questions: How real is it? Did stuff like that really happen? I was reminded of that long-ago encounter while watching The Wolf of Wall Street, the Martin Scorsese epic about penny stockbrokers in the 1980s and 1990s binging on women, Quaaludes and sports cars, with some dwarf-tossing thrown in for good measure. ( MORE : The Wolf of Wall Street: The True Story of Jordan Belfort) ![]() Follow a rookie reporter at the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s, while working on one of my first articles, the businessman I was interviewing locked his office door, leered at me and stripped down to his underwear.Īlarmed but not knowing what to do, I kept asking my questions, jotting notes in my reporter’s pad. ![]()
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