Writer-director Oliver Stone came to Wall Street directly after winning an Oscar for Platoon. "I ran into a lot of Vietnam veterans on The Street, and they all told me that it's an extension of combat," said Stone. "There is a certain high to closing a deal, to taking the enemy to a raid, to a merger and acquisition. The language is brutal, violent. Everything is there but the machine gun... So Wall Street is a chance for me to wean myself away from the blood cycle and go do a more domestic, possibly more sophisticated, form of combat film."

"Taking over a company is a lot like a military action," Stone insisted. "In those raids, they stay up for weeks on end on an adrenaline high, and a lot of their terminology is war terminology -- 'We're in the kill zone here,' 'I'm going to rip his throat out.' I'm not talking about refined Morgan Stanley bankers, I'm talking about buccaneers."

Wall Street star Charlie Sheen also saw the correlation between high finance and military combat when he spent six weeks on the trading floors of Wall Street researching his role. "A lot of these guys on Wall Street consider themselves to be warriors. They say, 'I'm going off to war today,' and they're not kidding," Sheen said.

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Writer-director Oliver Stone is the son of Louis Stone, a well-known stockbroker who worked on Wall Street for 50 years. "The main motivation to make Wall Street was my father," Stone revealed. "He took me to the movies, and he would bemoan the lack of a good business movie... He always said there were no good business movies, because the businessman was always the villain."

"My dad was a very strong believer in Republican principles," said Stone. "He hated Roosevelt all his life. He really raised me with the hatred of Communists, so I very much saw the Vietnam War in that context, that it was us against the Commies."

"My father believed that America's business brought peace to the world and built industry through science and research, and that capital is needed for that. But this idea seems to have been perverted to a large degree. The Wall Street that my father worked in, the one I grew up around, is wholly different from that of today. There were no computers, they didn't trade in such volume, and there were no fixed commissions."

"I would never have cut the mustard on Wall Street," admitted the director. "I did poorly in economics - I got a C, and my mathematics were suspect. I lost on every stock I ever invested in... I began to resent money as the criterion by which to judge all things, and there grew to be a raging battle between my father and me about it. I found ways to throw away everything I had, which pissed my father off. 'Going into movies is crazy,' he would say. 'You aren't going to make a dime.'"

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When Charlie Sheen took the role of 'Bud Fox' in Wall Street, the 22-year-old actor knew little about shares, futures and commodities. "I didn't really care about the stock market. I didn't think it had any effect on my life," said Sheen. To prepare the actor for his role, director Oliver Stone asked Wall Street consultant Ken Lipper to design a six-week ''course'' that would expose Sheen to a cross section of the young traders who worked in the business.

"I had a few weeks to go on this crash course," Sheen said, "and I had to learn what these guys did in four years of business school." Realizing the impossibility of that assignment, Sheen said he shot for a general working knowledge of the financial world, "so when I spewed numbers or threw facts around, at least I could lessen my insecurity."

Charlie Sheen even wound up doing some costly "method investing" -- he sank $20,000 into the market. "It was a pretty good hunk of cash," he said. "I figured if I had something on the line, it would intensify my curiosity."

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Director Mike Nichols had a great deal of difficulty casting the part of 'Benjamin Braddock.' When he and Buck Henry were working on the script, Nichols had envisioned Robert Redford in the role, but after a screen test, he realized that Redford could never convincingly play a loser in love. "So we tested and tested and tested people and read and read and read people, hundreds of people," said Nichols. Producer Larry Turman recalled, "We were looking for someone who was sweet and goony. Sweet because he had to do some weird things, and goony because to do those weird things, he couldn't be too self-assured."

In the meantime, Nichols met Katharine Ross and was instantly smitten. "She came in to see me, and I said, 'That's it. We don't have to look any further. She's so beautiful, she's beautiful in that girl-of-your-lifetime way.' I loved her."

Then, one month after the talent search began, Nichols found his 'Benjamin.' "I remembered this guy that I saw in a play called Harry, Noon and Night in which he played, believe it or not, a transvestite German fishwife," Nichols said. "He was remarkable and very funny. So I said, 'Let's test him.'"

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Director Mike Nichols said that while filming the Berkeley scenes in The Graduate, he sensed a great deal of "hostility" from the people of San Francisco.

"To them, we represented the corruption of Hollywood and the middle class element of the United States," said Nichols. Dustin Hoffman recalled, "People that were critical of the film said, 'How can you make a film about somebody coming out of college where there's no mention of Vietnam, there's no mention of pot, drugs, the women's movement, and everything?' Mike's answer was, 'Well, because we did the book.' The book was written in '62, and he made no attempt to update it."

Remembers Katharine Ross, "We were sort of still in the '50s mentality. While we were shooting in Berkeley, the Summer of Love happened in San Francisco -- and Vietnam was about to blow the country apart and change us all forever."

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Author Charles Webb wrote his first novel, The Graduate, in his final year of college. "People ask whether The Graduate was autobiographical. It was," said Webb. "There are parallels between Fred and me, and Ben and Elaine -- the young lovers in the book are battling convention, and the parents in the book have a lot in common with our parents. But the details are changed."

"We met at college," he continued. "I'd seen one of her drawings before we met, and thought, 'I have to meet this person.' Our first date was in a graveyard. I fancied myself as a connoisseur of gravestones. We were like the Addams family. We soon formed a mutual protection society."

Webb's future wife -- who later changed her name to Fred -- recalled, "We met for the first time at a Halloween party. We were both on the sidelines, and right away we gravitated towards each other. Charles had seen one of my drawings before we met. It was called 'Two Nuns in the Cold.' I had a secret way of finding out whether I was interested in someone. I'd ask them, 'Have you ever heard of Ring Lardner?' -- who I thought was the funniest writer I'd ever read. Charles was the only one who ever had. I loved him totally at that point."

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Michael Humphreys made his acting debut playing "Young Forrest" in Forrest Gump. Though he was just eight years old at the time, his performance had an enormous impact on the success of the film. Born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in rural Independence, Mississippi, Humphreys was cast from an open call which drew hundreds of hopefuls to Memphis shortly before the film went into production. His mother was inspired to bring him to audition after seeing a television commercial that said the filmmakers were looking for a boy who looked like "a young Tom Hanks, with light eyes and a quirky disposition." "That's Michael," his mother realized.

As producer Steve Starkey recalled, "Ellen Lewis, our casting director, brought this tape of his audition out to us in Los Angeles. After seeing it, director Bob Zemeckis had a big smile on his face, because he'd just seen this unique character that so far he hadn't seen anywhere." As a result, Michael Humphreys proceeded to the next phase of casting, which was a screen test in Hollywood. Starkey said, "We invited a number of boys out to actually read in front of the camera, because sometimes these children will just freeze up and won't be able to perform at all. So Michael Humphreys came out, and he was as natural as ever. He didn't have any fear at all. All he wanted was a peanut butter sandwich off the catering table."

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Author Winston Groom grew up in Mobile, Alabama, the son of a prosperous lawyer. After college and a stint in Vietnam, he attempted to make a living as a writer. By 1986, the year he wrote Forrest Gump, he was dividing his time between New York City and a friend's place in Point Clear, Alabama. Groom recalled, "I was living in New York and would come down in the winter to warm up. On Sundays, my daddy and I would have lunch. At one of these lunches, he reminisced about this fellow he once knew, a man who was slow-witted but whose mother had taught him to play the piano."

Groom continued, "My dad told me about kids in our neighborhood teasing the heck out of this retarded boy, until his mother taught him to play the piano, and when the ruffians heard this exquisite piano music wafting out of his house, they listened and quit their razzing."

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Reviewers of the novel Forrest Gump appreciated author Winston Groom's handling of Forrest's voice, a juicy Southern vernacular with a casual disregard for grammar and spelling. According to Groom, Forrest's voice just came naturally from the people he grew up with. "You hang around shrimpers or duck hunters on the Alabama waterfront, and you'll hear that voice. They don't 'throw' the ball, they 'tho' it."

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Though Die Hard employed 37 stunt men, not all of the movie's seemingly death-defying stunts were done by doubles. Director John McTiernan recalled, "The first time we got to the point in a scene where you would insert a stuntman, I told Bruce he would only have to take it up to here, and he then could go sit down. He said, 'No, I want to do it.' And all of a sudden, you saw that New Jersey street kid in him come out. It's not that he did anything dangerous, but it was a side that he had not shown us before."

Since Die Hard was Bruce Willis' first action role, the stunts were more challenging than any he had attempted before. Nevertheless, Willis was game. "First off, I think doing my own stunts whenever possible adds a lot to the production value of the film," Willis said. "John can get the camera close, because he doesn't need to disguise the stuntman. But on a personal level, it satisfies the little boy who still lives in me who gets to shoot guns, kill the bad guys and be a hero while doing jumps and falls and swinging from ropes."

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