Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin‘s The Last Party was a 96-minute doc about Robert Downey, Jr. surveying the political-cultural landscape of 1992. It opened on 8.27.93 — almost exactly 30 years ago — when Downey was 28.
The film wasn’t about ravenous Wall Street hustlers but that’s what this clip examines. One immediately thinks, of course, of Stratton-Oakmont and the real-life Wolf of Wall Street guys (Jordan Belfort, Danny Porush, Brian Blake) who were riding high at the time. Stratton-Oakmont closed in ’96.
The Wall Street section of the film begins around the 33-minute mark.
“The more one looks into the origins of the [2009 financial] disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years. For Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.” — from Paul Krugman‘s “Reagan Did It,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 5.31.09.