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Michael Douglas is nonplussed at the popularity of his Gordon Gekko character, “Greed is good,” in Wall Street, too.
Was Gekko really popular? Viewers liked his pithy catch phrase, but did they really like or admire him?
Maybe it was more that people thought of the movie as entertainment rather than as a political statement and Douglas's character as a caricature that one couldn't take wholly seriously as either a hero or a villain.
“The idea that Gekko was this shiny, beautifully dressed, magnetic, charismatic superstar suited a lot of people in the business world very nicely,” says screenwriter Stephen Schiff, who’s writing a sequel to the movie.
Although Bud Fox ultimately turns against him and Gekko heads to jail, the character’s charisma undercuts the film’s moralizing.
“What do you want to be coming out of the movie? Do you want to be Bud Fox, broken and downtrodden and never having quite made it?” asks Schiff. “Or do you want to be Gordon Gekko, who, yeah he’s going to jail, but what a swashbuckler he was until the very last moment?”
Both Douglas and Stone have said that a lot of young people they meet see Gekko as a role model.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19105520