Imagine a world where a guy can make $12 million in three minutes, where blow jobs are a perk of the gig, dwarfs are tossed to raise employee morale, and inhaling anthills of coke, Scarface style, is encouraged. Now imagine a world where a studio would pass on a movie with a subject that titillating, even if it came tied in a Leonardo DiCaprio–and–Martin Scorsese bow. That’s the way things were looking back in 2008, when Warner Bros. dropped out of Scorsese and DiCaprio’s upcoming black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street. The two went on to make Shutter Island, then separated for other projects. But when a window in Scorsese’s schedule opened up in 2012, DiCaprio approached the director again. “I told Marty, ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to do a movie like this too many times in the future,’?” says DiCaprio. “Larger-scale, R-rated dramas, like Blood Diamond or The Departed, don’t really get financed anymore.”
An independent production company, Red Granite Pictures, eventually stepped in to finance the film (Paramount is distributing), which is based on Jordan Belfort’s memoir of the same name. The book chronicles the former stockbroker’s rise and fall as the head of Stratton Oakmont, a brokerage house he founded when he was only in his late twenties. The Long Island–based boiler room bamboozled small investors out of roughly $100 million in the nineties, the heyday of cheap money, junk bonds, and spectacularly ugly ties. In 1998, Belfort was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering, serving 22 months in prison after cooperating with the FBI.
Source: Vulture
