While Wade and Wick were working on the project that would eventually become “Working Girl,” Ivan Boesky, a Wall Street speculator, was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Boesky, who had made a fortune betting on corporate takeovers, was accused of insider trading in one of biggest stock trading scandals in history. It was revealed that investment bankers had been illegally feeding Boesky information that guided his decision-making, and in 1987 he was fined $100 million and sentenced to three years in prison.

Boesky served as inspiration for the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987’s drama “Wall Street.” Directed by Oliver Stone, the film follows Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), a junior stockbroker who gets tangled up with Gekko (Michael Douglass), a shady, prominent Wall Street investor and corporate raider. The film is an ambitious, yet simple exhibit of human consumption, greed and the corporate crimes that happen on Wall Street. 

Douglas’ portrayal of Gekko received critical acclaim. He won the Oscar for Best Actor at the 19988 Academy Awards, and Gekko is perhaps one of the greatest human villains in movie history. The American film institute ranks the character no. 24 on its top 50 movie villains of all-time list, and his “greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” line remains infamous. Oliver Stone, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Staley Weiser, took a real-life scandal and developed a masterpiece. The fallout of the Ivan Boesky case would have a not so positive impact on “Working Girl.”