Word: wizard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Many correspondents painted a benign picture of the financial wizard whose acumen, and sometimes shady practices, powered the 1980s takeover wars. While Milken earned more than $1 billion as the guru of the now defunct Wall Street firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, friends argued that accumulating vast wealth was never his main goal. Wrote CBS president Laurence Tisch, who said he has known Milken for almost 20 years: "I have rarely dealt with a more dedicated and faithful professional or one more sensitive to the needs and goals of his clients or more mindful of the needs of society at large...
Mull is a financial wizard. "I buy this for one year," she says, cradling a half-gallon jug of Palmolive liquid soap. She ducks back into the kitchen and brings out a half-gallon jug of molasses. "This is for six months. You make pancakes with it. I buy everything big." Her monthly budget is tightly knotted around fixed costs: $400 goes for rent, not including gas and electric bills; Lorena's school, Immaculate Conception, is $80 a month; $15 goes to Mervyn's department store for clothes bought earlier; food takes $40 a week; Mull's bus pass...
...loses his head, literally and spectacularly, in a bank heist. To Barry Gifford's source novel Lynch adds a murder plot, an Elvis impersonation, a few torture scenes, a drug cartel, some cockroaches and a happy ending complete with deus ex machina. Not to mention frequent references to The Wizard of Oz, with which Wild has precisely nothing in common...
...know what it's like to be billed a "financial wizard" and to have a portfolio of stocks with names like Sleepy, Dopey, Crashful, Crappy? When I'm asked my worst-ever investment, I can't decide. "Choose me!" shout my shares in a company with an asbestos problem. "Choose me!" shouts my ill-fated "TED spread," a bet in May that the unusually narrow spread between Treasury bills and Eurodollars would widen. (It narrowed even further. My cost in brokerage commissions alone was enough to buy a couple of Congressmen.) "Choose me!" shout all my expired-worthless puts...
...about obsessive imagery and compulsive behavior: half the people walk on crutches, and just about everybody chain-smokes, sometimes two cigarettes at a time. And, aptly for a film shown in the living movie museum of Cannes, Wild at Heart is Lynch's fond homage to The Wizard of Oz. Lula clicks her red slippers to get out of a jam. Her mom (played with lubricious abandon by Dern's mother Diane Ladd) is the Wicked Witch, all long nails, daft cackles and unquenchable vengeance...