Wall Street and Hollywood have at last one thing in common: a lack of prominent roles for women.
And when the two industries get together, like in “Wall Street,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” women are more likely to be naked in a bubble bath or portrayed as the weepy wife than as an investment banker putting together a deal.
Until now.
“Equity” — the first project of Hollywood insiders Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas — is set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 26.
It is the first female-driven Wall Street film, according to the two actors, who last year formed Broad Street Pictures.
The film stars Anna Gunn from “Breaking Bad” as Naomi Bishop, a 40s-ish investment banker who, while fighting to get a promotion, leads a controversial tech IPO.
It’s being billed as the first post-financial crisis Wall Street film — where the regulations are new but the pressure to succeed is old.
“We wanted to create a female Wall Street movie where the women aren’t hookers or wives but real bankers,” Reiner, of “Orange Is the New Black,” told The Post.
“We wanted to find a subject that no one had looked at,” Reiner said. “We saw the opportunity to make a female Wall Street movie, post-economic crisis, about social media, which is very different from real commodities, and we hope that the movie can help move the needle to create change in the workforce.”
The film’s screenwriter, director and many of its investors are also women.
“We love Wall Street movies,” added Thomas. “This movie is a fun ride, but when you leave, we want you to still be talking about the movie.”
Reiner and Thomas interviewed about 100 Wall Street veterans, both women who are on the front lines in power positions and some top-notch male bankers, like the late Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase, to get as real a take on the business as possible.
What they came up with is a story about women, power and corruption on Wall Street.
““We wanted to create a female Wall Street movie where the women aren’t hookers or wives but real bankers.”
- Alysia Reiner
Gunn’s character, according to the film’s outline, untangles a web of corruption, which forces her to re-examine the rules of the cutthroat world she has always loved.
Investors in the film include Linnea Roberts, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, who helped take Zipcar public in 2011, and her mentor, Barbara Byrne, the vice chair of investment banking at Barclays.
Many of the high-tech companies that go public are founded by young men, and for that reason, Roberts said, female bankers play a variety of roles, “from adviser to mother to friend.”
Clearly, male and female bankers have different strengths and weaknesses — and even, perhaps, a different moral compass.
“I’d love to think that women have a higher or better moral code, but these are issues of power,” Roberts said. “Men get into more insider trading and personal scandals. Women think more about consequences more and take less risks than men who get hooked on the adrenaline. Didn’t they think they’d get caught?”