‘Wolf of Wall Street’: Boiler Room Antics on the Big Screen

Before he went to prison, Jordan Belfort amassed a net worth of more than $100 million while still in his mid-20s, with a mansion in Southampton, N.Y., and a 167-foot yacht.

This fall, Mr. Belfort’s financial shenanigans are set to be represented in a movie adaptation of his 2007 memoir, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” A trailer for the movie, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, with a screenplay by Terence Winter, was released over the weekend.

From the looks of it, the film, which also stars Matthew McConaughey and Jonah Hill, features some familiar financial tropes, including fast cars, debauched partying and large bills thrown in the air. The trailer also includes a scene of dwarf-tossing, an activity with a notorious reputation on Wall Street.

“Was all this legal? Absolutely not. We were making more money than we knew what to do with,” Mr. DiCaprio, who plays Mr. Belfort, says in the trailer.

As head of Stratton Oakmont, a now-defunct Long Island brokerage firm, Mr. Belfort oversaw a seven-year scheme to manipulate stocks, he admitted in 1999. One prosecutor called the firm “the most infamous boiler-room brokerage firm in recent memory.”

“Jordan Belfort in the 1990s was like Ivan Boesky in the 1980s,” Ira Lee Sorkin, the lawyer who represented Mr. Belfort, told The New York Times in 2007. “He was a brilliant salesman carried away with hubris.”

The movie will be the latest finance-themed romp to appear in theaters since the financial crisis. The 2011 film “Margin Call” depicted an embattled brokerage firm, while the 2010 release from Oliver Stone, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” was a follow-up to his 1987 classic, “Wall Street.”

“The Wolf of Wall Street” isn’t the first time Hollywood has found inspiration in the scandal-ridden boiler room culture of the 1990s. The 2000 film “Boiler Room,” directed by Ben Younger, centered on the rise and fall of a young man working for a fictional firm called J.T. Marlin. It was both an homage to, and a critique of, Mr. Stone’s 1987 film, A.O. Scott wrote in his review in The New York Times.

Mr. Belfort â€" the real-life one â€" was inspired to tell his tale after reading Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” so many times that he was able to quote long passages, according to The Times’s Landon Thomas Jr.

Though Mr. Belfort’s book was released amid a spate of industry tell-alls, it stood out for its unvarnished revelations, The Times said. Mr. Belfort, for example, wrote that he once crashed his helicopter on the front lawn of his estate, too stoned to find the airport.