A former employee of the Wolf of Wall Street firm Stratton Oakmont has claimed one of the most memorable moments from the movie never actually happened.
Dwayne Jackson is now a stand up comic and actor, but before kicking off that career he worked as a broker at Stratton Oakmont – the company co-founded by the infamous Jordan Belfort.
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Jackson worked for the brokerage company in his early 20s and remained there from March 1994 to October 1996 – just before the company went bust after it was discovered to have defrauded shareholders.
The comic claimed he ‘didn’t know much about what [he] was selling’, but he praised The Wolf of Wall Street for the way it captured the culture and work.
He went on say DiCaprio’s performance as Belfort was ‘good’, though noted the boss ‘wasn’t there much’ by the time he started the job.
On the whole, Jackson said the movie was ‘pretty close to what [he] saw’ while working in the ‘crazy place’.
However, there was one noteworthy action in the movie that the former employee claims was entirely fictional.
It takes place numerous times in the film, and has been mimicked countless more in the years since. And it all starts with a fist beating on a chest.
We see both Matthew McConaughey and DiCaprio doing it in The Wolf of Wall Street while humming out a tune along with the action.
DiCaprio famously stands as Belfort in front of his employees and begins the chant while the workers clap and cheer – but according to Jackson, that’s all ‘movie magic’.
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“That mm-mm-mmm, nobody did that,” he said. “That was complete movie magic, that never happened at all, I’d never seen anything like that.”
One very real thing that Jackson saw while at the company was the money, and he’s previously spoken about the huge paycheques he took home while on the job.
His very first payment was around $11,000 (£9,000), which he used to buy himself a $1,000 (£800) phone and a beeper.
The former employee claimed workers were ‘pushed’ to spend it as quickly as they earned it, but obviously the earning didn’t last long for Jackson as the company soon ceased operations.