Bill Guinan’s Wall Street: The Movie

[TL/DR: Proof is excited to welcome Bill Guinan as our new head of sales! Instead of giving you the bullet points of his bio in a typical dry fashion, we decided to … well … do this ;]

Cold open on a middle-aged man in a crisp polo shirt, his face firmly set and unreadable. We hear the sounds of a chair rolling back and forth across the floor, but Bill is not moving. As the shot zooms out, we see he is sitting across the desk from a blue-haired woman, Allison, who is staring at her laptop screen as she pushes her chair back and forth with the toe of her sneaker. She looks up.

“This blog post draft — it’s not bad…” she says. “But it’s not … well, it’s not clear what you’re trying to say. Like, you hit all of the highlights of your career so far, and you explain a bit how you got here to Proof, but … I’m not feeling the why.”

Bill’s face doesn’t break. “Let me try to explain it differently…” he starts.

Cut to an almost-15-year-old version of Bill [played by a CGI-aged down Timothée Chalamet], lying on his bed as he listens to “Touch of Gray” by The Grateful Dead. A subtitle reads: 1987. Young Bill stares up at two posters on his wall — one is a picture of Wayne Gretzky with the inspirational quote: “Skate to where the puck is going”, and the other is a movie poster for “Wall Street,” centering a stern-looking Michael Douglas. Bill’s father knocks on the door. He pokes his head in. “Hey,” he says tentatively. “Can you turn it down for a sec?”

Young Bill lowers the volume on his tape player.

“Your birthday is coming up,” his father says. “What do you want as a gift?”

Young Bill shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. His eyes avert his father’s gaze and lock on the Wall Street poster. “Maybe like, a stock?”

Cut to young Bill and his father seated opposite each other at the breakfast table, each of their heads buried in a newspaper. His father reads a story about the Single European Act. “Huh,” he says, eating a spoonful of cereal. Young Bill traces his finger along the stock prices to find Linear Technology, the stock he got for his birthday. “Huh,” he says, sipping a glass of orange juice.

Cut to a hole-in-the-wall college bar where Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days is playing. A subtitle reads: early 90s. A slightly-older young Bill finishes a beer and heads back to his dorm, stepping over a neglected newspaper as he retreats to his room. His textbooks are piled on his desk, untouched. A short montage follows of Bill doing normal college things … except studying.

Hard cut to an Airforce recruitment office. Slightly-older young Bill sits across the desk from a uniformed recruiter, blinking heavily from the oppressive fluorescent lights.

“It’s a common story,” the recruiter says. “Lots of people come here just needing some structure to get back on track. This is going to be good for you. Welcome to the United States Air Force, son.” A short montage follows of slightly-older young Bill doing Air-Force-y things while wearing an Air Force uniform. This ends with a 4th-wall breaking moment as a supervisor barks: “Come on, Guinan! We don’t have a time for another montage!”

Timothée Chalamet as Bill looks straight to camera and says “Sorry guys, guess we’ll have to skip ahead a bit.”

Cut to Bill sitting in Mom & Pops’ diner, now discharged from the military but still wearing his uniform for reasons that have more to do with a limited costume budget than biographical accuracy.

“What can I get you, hon?” a waitress asks. Her name tag reads “Cindy.”

“Black coffee,” Bill says. “And a phone book.”

Cindy plops down a thick yellow phone book, which Bill begins hunting through as she pours his coffee. “Whatcha lookin for?”

“I’m going to get a job on Wall Street,” he says.

Cindy scrunches her face skeptically. “I don’t think it works that way,” she says. “But good luck.”

Bill nods and tips his coffee cup in thanks. He spills a spot of coffee on an open page of the phone book, right on an ad for Quick & Reilly, a brokerage firm. He copies down the number and leaves a generous tip. As he’s walking out of the diner, Cindy calls after him. “Hey — what’s a nice guy like you want with Wall Street, anyway?”

Bill turns back. He shrugs. “I want to be part of something,” he says. “And besides, money is too important to leave to the assholes.”

“Maybe,” Cindy says. “Or maybe the money makes the assholes.” She looks off into the distance with an inscrutable expression. [Cindy has clearly seen some shit.]

Cut to Bill sitting at a small desk in a basement office of Quick & Reilly, wearing a suit and holding a phone to his ear. “You got it, Mrs. Daugherty,” he says kindly. “Little Jimmy will get that stock certificate in the mail in time for his sixth birthday.” Bill puts down the phone.

“Another share of Disney?” another employee asks, swiveling around in his chair to face Bill. His name is Jeff. [He is played by T.J. Miller]

“Halliburton,” Bill shrugs.

Jeff raises an eyebrow. “Interesting choice, Grandma,” he says.

“You know,” Bill opines, “this job isn’t what I thought it would be.”

“No?” Jeff asks sarcastically. “Selling shares of Home Depot to mom and pop and explaining that ‘Matlock’ is not a stock one can buy isn’t the glamorous Wall Street job you envisioned as a boy?”

“Is this the part where you tell me to suck it up and be realistic?” Bill asks.

“Nah, man,” Jeff says. “This job sucks. We don’t work on Wall Street. We work in Wall Street’s gift shop. I’m telling you to quit. Just no guarantee you land somewhere better.”

Cut to Bill as a clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He looks out at the bustling scene — full of flashing lights, scuffling shoes, and boisterous shouting. He turns to camera. “This is better,” he says.

A floor broker [played by Ryan Gosling] taps Bill on the shoulder. “Here you go.” He hands something to Bill, who looks at it skeptically. Bill enters the information and immediately a loud bark comes down from the desk: “What the *censored*?!” [pending studio’s decision of whether to go for a pg13 rating.] “Why are we getting murdered on this *censored* trade?

“That’s really the best price you could get?” Bill questions, peering over at the NYSE specialist who made the trade. The specialist is looking pleased and cocky [played by Christian Bale]. The floor broker follows Bill’s eyes and steps in front of him to block his view of the floor.

“No need to be suspicious of Chad,” the floor broker says. “He’s a good guy, I’m sure he’s making a fair market.”

Bill looks around the broker’s shoulder. Chad spits copiously on the floor. An intern running by slips in it as Chad points and laughs.

Bill turns back to camera. “I think I’m getting *censored* here.”

Cut to Bill on the RBC trading desk in New York, which is a sea of striped shirts and khakis. [Note to wardrobe: you may be tempted to dress traders in Patagonia vests, but that trend came later.] A subtitle reads: 2002. Bill looks up from an obscene number of monitors that he is using to trade financials and sees the fresh face of a young Brad Katsuyama [to be cast by Sony to additionally star in a belated Flash Boys movie]. “I’m Brad,” he says, shaking Bill’s hand. “I’m visiting from the Canadian office.”

An alert beeps on Bill’s screen. “Nice to meet you, Brad,” he says politely, but he is already turning back to his monitors. We zoom in on the monitors for a montage of flashing alerts and steadily moving charts, taking us quickly through the trading days of 2002 and into 2004. The sound of a hand slapping a newspaper down on the desk breaks the spell.

Bill looks at what someone has just dropped in front of him. It is an article saying that NYSE specialists have been caught profiting inappropriately off of the orders they handle and the SEC is taking action. There is a picture of Chad waving away the cameras. “Huh,” Bill says, with a look of vindication.

Cut to a trading floor at Bernstein, where a more senior person is showing Bill around the sector trading desk. “And this will be your seat,” he indicates to Bill. “You’ll be responsible for trading financials. I think you’ll be happy here. And I mean, the next 5 years — it’s going to be a great time for the financial sector.” A subtitle reads: 2005.

We zoom back into Bill’s monitor to watch a montage of the carnage of the financial crisis, with dramatic music cues underscoring the collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. The time axes in the charts takes us into 2009. We zoom out to see Bill on the phone with a sharp hedge fund manager, played by Jesse Eisenberg. “So what are you up to these days?” Bill asks. “Now that you made a killing on all those shorts…”

The hedge fund manager shrugs. “Nothing that exciting,” he says. “Just looking into this thing called Bitcoin. Gonna’ pick up some of it cheap and see where it goes.”

“Interesting,” Bill says.

Cut to Bill sitting across a desk from an executive who is sitting in a much fancier chair. A subtitle reads: 2012. Bill is now head of sector trading at Bernstein.

“So you tell me, Bill” the executive begins, holding his fingers together like an excited Mr. Burns, “why should I keep employing sector specialists when a generalist can do anything?”

Bill gestures out to the floor. “Don’t you see that?” he asks.

“See what?” The executive is clearly annoyed.

“That.” Bill gestures again. “Look closer.”

The executive sighs, but he looks. Closer. He sees a generalist salesperson with his feet up a desk, leaning back in his chair and looking bored. He sees another generalist salesperson shooting paper clips with a rubber band. He sees a sector specialist, harried, holding a phone precariously to one ear while putting up a hand to delay a person approaching him on the floor with a question.

“You see?” Bill asks.

The executive purses his lips. “Maybe.”

“The specialists have info people want,” Bill explains. “They know things other people don’t know. Valuable things. If I have a question about something — I want to ask someone who knows more about that thing than I do, right? That person is a specialist. Nobody wants to ask a generalist anything. Our specialists are our value.”

“I guess I see your point,” the executive says.

We fast forward through a period of specialists rising in power within Bernstein, with some being recruited away. We see Brad Katsuyama return to pitch his new venture, IEX. After a few tries and a winding 350 seconds of film, we see him succeed, and Bernstein becomes an early IEX adopter.

Cut to Bill sitting at his new desk as the head of business development at IEX. There is a framed photo of his wife and five kids, next to a photo of his father who has recently passed away. A small inspirational plaque reads “mindset over skillset,” over a cute drawing of a tortoise and a hare.

Brad taps Bill on the shoulder.

“How was that sales candidate I sent you yesterday?” he asks. “Sharp guy, lots of skills, came highly recommended.”

Bill shakes his head no. He points to the plaque.

Brad frowns. “Oh well, we’ll keep looking.”

We fast forward as markets are roiled by the start of the pandemic, and the IEX office empties. We see a montage of scenes across the street: cleaners wearing masks and spraying down vacated office furniture, the NYSE floor close and silent. Traders setting up large monitors in home offices and guest rooms.

Cut to Bill back at his desk, but the office still mostly deserted. He logs onto a zoom interview with a woman applying for a sales position [she is played by Daisy Ridley].

“Hi!” she says. “I’m glad to have the opportunity to interview for a sales position. I haven’t really covered these kinds of clients before, but I do know how to think like a trader.”

Bill glances over to the inspirational plague and smiles. “It’s nice to meet you,” he says.

Cut to a scene of a filled out sales team buzzing around Bill [including Daisy Ridley]. A subtitle reads: 2022. Bill looks around with pride at his team, then his eyes settle for a moment on the picture of his kids.

Cut to Brad’s office, where Bill is sitting across from the desk. Brad’s face is kind and resigned. “I’m sad to see you go,” he says. “But I can certainly understand that you want to spend some more time with your family.” Bill nods. He looks suddenly aged [not too suddenly aged — careful with the CGI effects here.] The camera follows Bill as he packs up his desk and walks out, past all of the flashing monitors displaying updating volumes and prices of the active market. The noise of the exchange floor rises and then fades as he walks through it and out of the building, into the relative quiet of the street outside the World Trade Center.

We see the seasons change on the street, panning east to Wall Street and back to the World Trade Center buildings as leaves fall, snow melts, and spring blossoms form.

Cut to Bill sitting on a bench in a moment of quiet reflection.

A few tourists pass by him, a couple walking with their preteen son. “We’re pretty close to Wall Street right now, Jimmy!” the father says. “Financial center of the world!”

“Boring,” Jimmy says, still scrolling on his phone.

Bill looks up off into the distance towards Wall Street, where he started at Quick & Reilly many years ago. He is hit by a barrage of memories — tracing stock prices in the newspaper, having breakfast with his dad, clerking on the NYSE floor, trading on the Bernstein desk, the financial crisis, the recovery, the pandemic, the recovery. The inspirational music swells.

“It’s not boring,” he says to the kid, standing up in the grip of inspiration. “The stock market is how companies grow. And it’s tough — it has to be all things to all people. It’s got to be fast so prices get updated in real time, but not so fast that people get picked off by high frequency traders. It has to be electronic and automated, but still leave room for humans to intervene. It has to be reliable — but also evolving, responsive — but also robust. And when things go right, nobody notices. But when things go wrong, everything is your fault. But it’s all worth it, because at the end of the day, it’s how we invest in our future.”

The inspirational music cuts as little Jimmy sticks out his tongue at Bill. “It’s lame to believe in things,” Jimmy says. His mother [played by America Ferrera] gives Bill a dirty look and ushers the family onward.

“And that’s why you’re here?” the voice of the blue-haired woman from the opening scene cuts in. She is looking up from her laptop with her chin in her hands. “Because the financial system is something worth fighting for? Something worth rebuilding from scratch transparently so people can know that it is working for them, and not just for lining insiders’ pockets?”

Bill’s stoic face softens into a chuckle.

“Well, that — and my wife told me it was time to get out of the house again because I was driving her crazy.”

Allison smiles.

“Don’t put that in the blog,” Bill says.

“Sorry,” Allison shakes her head. “Transparency is kind of a religion around here, so it’s going in. But I don’t think it’s a blog anymore — it’s a movie.”