Just a few months ago, Lifetime Television started adapting the Candace Bushnell novel “Trading Up” into a movie, figuring an aspirational story about the entitled rich and their limousine culture nailed the cultural moment. The setting would be New York, of course — or, as it is described by Bushnell, a city where “the streets seemed to sparkle with the gold dust filtered down from a billion trades in a boomtown economy.”Time for a rewrite.Suddenly, across Hollywood, the stock market is not such a sexy subject anymore — at least not in a yearning sense. “Overnight, it was like the script had been written two years ago,” said Arturo Interian, Lifetime’s vice president for original movies. Interian is still keen on the movie, with one major revision: fewer discussions about stock, more about playing it safe with bonds. And how about throwing in a pariah chief executive?As they have watched their 401(k)’s shrivel in recent weeks, entertainment executives have started to grapple with how best to reflect the global economic crisis in movie and television story lines, or whether to bring the topic up at all.The last time Wall Street stumbled badly — when the high-tech bubble burst — Hollywood delivered movies like “Antitrust,” featuring a Bill Gates-styled villain who literally kills for profits, and small-budget efforts like “Boiler Room,” about soul-destroying stock hustlers.This time around, some television outlets like Lifetime — and the “ripped from the headlines” television series “Law & Order” — are trying to remain as topical as possible by tweaking their programming and marketing on the fly. Martha Stewart has already incorporated a new money-saving segment into her daily how-to program. Stewart said in an e-mail message that she had directed her company to develop content that would “get viewers through these tough economic times.”At 20th Century Fox, a blue-collar television comedy called “Two-Dollar Beer” is suddenly prominent, while the movie division just escalated production of a previously announced sequel to “Wall Street,” Oliver Stone’s 1987 portrait of out-of-control corporate raiders. A new writer will reshape the sequel’s story line to reflect the recent turmoil of the financial markets.
