TIME fact-checks the movie against Belfort’s books (he also wrote a sequel entitled Catching the Wolf of Wall Street) and a series of Forbes articles that have followed Belfort’s scheming.īelfort’s first boss told him the keys to success were masturbation, cocaine and hookers.Īccording to the book, a broker named Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) gave him this advice early on in his career.īelfort and his partner owned shares of a risky stock and had their brokers at Stratton Oakmont brokerage aggressively sell the stock to inflate the price. Scorsese, knowing this, portrays Belfort ( Leonardo DiCaprio) as an unreliable narrator in the film (see: the changing color of the car in the first scene and the driving while high on Quaaludes episode). After all, Belfort was a scam artist - he made a living by lying. That said, Belfort glorifies his vulgar antics in his book, so how much of his account is truly real is up for debate. But Scorsese’s film closely follows Belfort’s own memoir, also titled The Wolf of Wall Street.
Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment".Drugs, prostitutes, crashed helicopters - the debauchery in The Wolf of Wall Street is so outlandish that audiences might leave the theater thinking director Martin Scorsese took plenty of creative license in telling the story of Jordan Belfort, a New York stock broker who conned his way to earning hundreds of millions in the 1990s. Now, with 22 months in the slammer behind him, he’s working on his next book. His chronicle ends with his arrest for fraud. Belfort displays dirty writing skills many basis points above his tricky ilk. A reviewer of Kirkus Reviews added "It is crass, certainly, and vulgar-and a hell of a read. But it reports only surface events, never revealing what motivates Belfort or any of the other characters". The story is told mostly in dialogue, with allegedly contemporaneous mental asides by the author, reported verbatim. As might be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man with movie rights already sold, it's hard to know how much to believe. The firm was shut down by regulators in the late 1990s, and Belfort was subsequently jailed for securities fraud.Ī reviewer of Publishers Weekly stated "The book's main topic is the vast amount of drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort engaged in order to survive. Belfort's autobiographical account was continued by Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, published in 2009.īelfort tells his real-life story of creating Stratton Oakmont, a brokerage house engaged in pump and dump schemes with penny stocks. The Wolf of Wall Street is a memoir by former stockbroker and trader Jordan Belfort, first published in September 2007 by Bantam Books, then adapted into a 2013 film of the same name (directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort).
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