[Ads-l] Origins of "Greed Is Good"

[Shapiro, Fred]

It seems that in the film "Wall Street," the Gordon Gekko character says "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good," but in the trailer Gekko says "Greed is good," which is the way the saying is usually remembered.  Does anyone have any idea of how the pithier version made its way into the trailer?  Was the trailer scene taken from an earlier cut of the film?  Was "for lack of a better word" spliced out, a kind of concision that I think often happens in trailers where every second counts?


Fred Shapiro


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