Now that Anthony Scaramucci has become the new White House communications director, suddenly splashed all over TV screens while doing his talking-head duty for the president, it’s probably time we looked back at what was, perhaps, the hedge-fund manager’s greatest personal and professional accomplishment: appearing in a few seconds of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Remember that 2010 curiosity? Nobody was really clamoring for a sequel to the Oscar-winning 1987 cult hit, but then the whole world financial collapse thing happened, and Stone figured it was a good enough time as any to do another musing on the amorality—and the excitement!—of big-money financial wheeling and dealing. So he brought back Michael Douglas to reprise his Academy Award-winning turn as Gordon Gekko, brought in young buck Shia LaBeouf to play the new whiz-kid jerk, and assembled a bunch of real-world finance and media types to pop up in the picture to add verisimilitude. (Including our own dear leader, Graydon Carter.)
One such real-world finance type was Scaramucci, an acquaintance of Stone’s who is said to have consulted on the film, while also paying $100,000 to have the logo of his hedge fund, SkyBridge Capital, appear in the film. We saw the movie when it first came out, but, of course, back then we didn’t know to be looking for Scaramucci. So, we recently gave the movie another look (a skimming, really) to see just how much a personal relationship with the director and a hundred grand can get you in this world. Or, at least, could get you in the world of 2010.
Turns out, it didn’t get you all that much. From what we could tell, Scaramucci only appears twice in the movie, in brief interstitial scenes featuring split-screens of people talking on phones about plot developments as if they’re real news. One could call them a Greek chorus of sorts, but that’s a bit grandiose for what only amounts to probably under a minute of screen time in total. But, hey: there Scaramucci is, looking slick and serious. At one point, around the 43:00 mark, he even says “yuge”—just like his future boss! In terms of the actual content of his dialogue, it’s all just finance industry jibber-jabber, nothing that requires any real acting. As cameos go in a film laden with them, Scaramucci’s is pretty unremarkable.
At least the SkyBridge logo is featured a bit more prominently. It appears in a big party scene, when Gekko runs into his old frenemy Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen’s character in the original) and gets into a little tête-à-tête with Josh Brolin’s villain. (Super-publicist and friend to V.F. Peggy Siegal also pops up as a party guest.) A SkyBridge sign hangs over a stage while people dance in one not terribly long shot, and then we see it once again on some random wall. It can also be seen in the distance in many other shots during the party sequence.
It’s not exactly the two kids playing Super Mario 3 at the end of The Wizard, or the big rock McDonald’s in The Flintstones (a brand tie-in that briefly brought back the McRib!). But it’s a decent enough product placement, albeit a financial services product placement in a movie that’s sort of about how awful and corrosive capitalist ideology is for the country and most of its people.
All told, Scaramucci and his firm don’t make much of an impression in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Then again, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps didn’t make much of an impression itself. On a hurried rewatch, Stone’s film remains clunky, overstuffed, and not nearly as sharp as it should be. Still, it was certainly a more defensible job than the one Scaramucci’s got now.
