Talk about a tough crowd.
Andrew Kline, founder of Century City investment bank Park Lane, spent weeks arranging a private screening of Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” for 200 colleagues and financial professionals from across Los Angeles.
The recent event, proceeds of which benefited non-profit Project Play, started out nicely. Then the movie was shown.
“Every single person walked out of there just shaking their heads because they thought the movie was so bad,” Kline said. “It made it look like the institutions were corrupt as opposed to just one guy.”
Kline, 34, said he has seen the original “Wall Street” about 100 times. The film portrayed the rise and fall of Gordon Gekko, whose “greed is good” philosophy became symbolic of the 1980s.
But the sequel, Kline said, was a condemnation of not just an individual’s excess, but of the entire financial services industry.
“I don’t think there was ever a group of people rooting for a movie to be good as much as our group,” he said. “It was a good event, bad movie.”
Riverside Relaxation
Think anybody could need a vacation from gaming?
For video game attorney Patrick Sweeney, it seems that way. Sweeney spent a week in Cologne, Germany, in August for GamesCom, the European equivalent of over-the-top L.A. video game convention E3. With more than 250,000 attending GamesCom this year, Sweeney said it was worth a trip.
“When 95 percent of my client base gathers in one city, I should probably be in that city,” said Sweeney, 41, a counsel with Century City firm Reed Smith.
The trip might look like a vacation, but Sweeney needed one after several days of back-to-back meetings.
So after visiting Reed Smith’s London offices, he decided to take a day off to attend a music festival in Henley-on-Thames, a small town best known as a center for rowing.
“I spent the day down by the river,” Sweeney said. “After a week at the trade show, I was looking to relax a little bit.”
Staff reporters Richard Clough and Natalie Jarvey contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
