Bringing Back That Year 2000 Greed Feel

Boiler Room slaps harder 25 years after its release

I didn’t think I’d find myself nostalgic for 25 years ago, but lately I’ve been thinking about how much time I spent in movie theaters during the first year of this century. The Coens had a new movie, Best in Show came out, High Fidelity had been filmed right down the street from where I was living in Chicago, and I made the mistake of seeing Dancer in the Dark while I was reeling from a rough breakup. I know I saw The Beach the week it was released since a friend was obsessed with the Alex Garland novel it was based on, and I vividly recall sitting in an almost totally empty Biograph Theater with two friends singing along with the cast of Almost Famous to “Tiny Dancer.” I also very specifically recall seeing Boiler Room and American Psycho at a dollar theater a few months apart, the price of entry an important fact since both of those movies deal with the world of finance and also because I don’t know if dollar theaters even exist anymore.

Jesus, I sound so old saying this, but it’s wild to think of how much a dollar meant 25 years ago. There was a place near my apartment where you could buy a jumbo slice of pizza and a pop (not soda, this was Chicago, after all) for a buck and a quarter, and it would fill you up for two meals. The debate raging then was how Bush or Gore would get gas prices would get back below a dollar (spoiler: they never did), and I was drinking a lot of Jones Soda. I wasn’t especially fond of it, but there was a store by my place where you could get a bottle of it with a bag of chips and a candy bar for two bucks. Maybe that’s why movies about stockbrokers seemed quaint in 2000, even if Patrick Bateman was spending his free time decapitating people. I was 19 for the bulk of the year and felt like I’d really dodged a bullet with the whole Y2K meltdown not happening, so I wasn’t thinking much about money except how little of it I was making and how to make sure I could pay rent. I’d read American Psycho and was curious to see how they’d make it into a movie, and only paid my dollar and change (taxes…always taxes) to see Boiler Room because it was raining out and I had nothing better to do. I retain all of those little facts because out of all the movies I saw that year, besides never wanting to see Dancer in the Dark again and never being able to erase hearing that creepy old guy in Requiem for a Dream (another film I don’t know if I can put myself through again) go “ass to ass,” the movies about finance bros are the ones that have stuck with me the most this past quarter-century.

The odd thing is that I’ve seen American Psycho multiple times over the last 25 years since it was released, but last night was the first time I’d watched Boiler Room since my dollar theater days. Maybe it’s because of that gulf between viewings, but it’s rare that a movie I saw then is better now. It’s also eerie how even though the two films take place in different eras, Boiler Room and American Psycho both feel like they were telling us about the future we had in store.

The young bro obsession with Patrick Bateman thing has been beaten to death. Guys with incredibly shady and flimsy political views love him as much as menswear dudes do. His creator, Bret Easton Ellis, has never missed an opportunity to mention his fictional creation’s spiritual connection with our current president, and watching all these young guys get their jaws sculpted and hair implants put in makes me think maybe they didn’t read the book or any interviews with the author, and would have missed some of the themes even if they had because…literacy is dying. For what it’s worth, I wrote a little about Ellis for GQ a few years ago. I thought that was funny since he repeatedly mentioned obsessing over getting a GQ look was a big inspiration behind Bateman.

American Psycho grew into something bigger than I’m certain anybody imagined it would have at the time, spawning a terrible sequel, a musical, and a remake coming in the future. Boiler Room, on the other hand, has lived these past 25 years as one of those IYKYK movies, the sort you bring up to somebody in the “YK” camp and they’ll say something like That movie fucking rules. And yes, it does. It did well at the box office, Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 out of 4 stars, and I remember saying something like I doubt that guy’s Christian name is Vin Diesel, but I like him, when I first saw it. It also has that particular feel a handful of movies or early seasons of Sex and the City or The Sopranos have of a very specific New York City in the last few years (and sometimes months or weeks) before 9/11. 13-years-later, Scorsese would put his own spin on the outer-borough penny stock pump and dumpers with The Wolf of Wall Street, another film that younger guys have picked up on for all the wrong reasons, and maybe that shadowed over the legacy of Boiler Room a little. It also is worth pointing out Marty’s movie came out after Enron, the 2008 financial crisis, and the internet ushering in a whole new era of Masters of the Universe and people looking to get rich quick by any means possible. Boiler Room is about greedy people, but today feels almost like it’s a relic from our last age of innocence.

But it’s not. It’s actually a beast. My viewing reminded me of the feeling I got rewatching 1993’s Falling Down during the pandemic, and how Joel Schumacher really had a finger on where all the middle-of-the-road white man rage was headed. Except Boiler Room had me thinking about something an Uber driver recently told me. He was a Muslim guy originally from Afghanistan, and he mentioned that of he had three daughters and two sons. His kids were raised in American and all the daughters were either in college or had graduated from NYU and Rutgers. The sons were lazy he said, adding that “All young men are these days. They don’t want to work. They only want to make money.”

I hate generalizing, especially because people are forever looking for the quickest path to striking it rich no matter what generation they’re part of. I don’t like saying everybody from a specific age cohort is a specific thing because we usually judge these things using a very small sample size. That said, there are so many avenues for people to do the least amount of work to make money these days that I had to wonder if the Uber guy was right. The difference between today’s crop and the ones portrayed in Boiler Room is the brokers of J. T. Marlin actually hustle for their dollars. There will always be hustlers, but I worry the art of the hustle as portrayed in the film has been watered down. Either that, or maybe it’s that everything is a hustle now.

It’s hard to say, but as I listened to the the opening monologue narrated by Giovanni Ribisi, I found myself not having a difficult time putting it in a modern context. It’s all something I could hear a younger person telling me today. Maybe it isn’t becoming a stock broker, but you could swap just about any modern hustle in and the words would still be apt:

I read this article a while back, that said that Microsoft employs more millionaire secretaries than any other company in the world. They took stock options over Christmas bonuses. It was a good move. I remember there was this picture of one of the groundskeepers next to his Ferrari. Blew my mind. You see shit like that, and it just plants seeds, makes you think its possible, even easy. And then you turn on the TV, and there's just more of it. The $87 Million lottery winner, that kid actor that just made 20 million off his last movie, that Internet stock that shot through the roof, you could have made millions if you had just gotten in early, and that's exactly what I wanted to do: get in. I didn't want to be an innovator any more, I just wanted to make the quick and easy buck, I just wanted in. The Notorious BIG said it best: "Either you're slingin' crack-rock, or you've got a wicked jump-shot." Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee's, honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slinging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.

Besides relevance, there’s something I love about how writer/director Ben Younger nods and winks at two of his most obvious influences: 1987’s Wall Street and 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross. In one early scene, Ben Affleck—who is just getting into his Hollywood leading man position at this point in his career—gives a very Alec Baldwin “ABC” speech. The film is actually mentioned a little later, and at some point we watch as the traders sit in an empty McMansion watching Oliver Stone’s film, saying Gordon Gekko’s lines along with him. The acting is solid throughout, and the soundtrack is a stone-cold classic. I think maybe one Black person speaks throughout the movie and it’s Nia Long as the firm secretary/protagonist’s love interest. Besides that, I can’t think of anything with so many white dudes and so much hip-hop working so well in the year of our lord 2025. But, then again, I also can’t see anything from 2025 maturing over a quarter-century into something better and even more relevant like Boiler Room has.