NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 17, 2012
A recent review in Futures Magazine of the screenplay Robber Barons of the Big Board, suggests that a former Merrill Lynch stockbroker may have played a key role in bringing “this titan of Wall Street to its knees and into the unwilling arms of Bank of America.”

The script, currently being pitched to the film industry, could be the next chapter in revealing Wall Street’s egregious role in tanking the U.S. economy by knowingly cheating millions of trusting investors out of their life savings.

According to reviewer Patrick Kelly, the script written by Chandra Niles Folsom, “cleverly and entertainingly charts one man’s crusade against Merrill Lynch & Company.”

The story’s protagonist Keith Schooley, wrote his book Merrill Lynch: The Cost Could Be Fatal – My War Against Wall Street’s Giant to expose an astonishing litany of wrongdoing and downright illegal acts perpetrated by the firm’s management from top to bottom.

Writes Kelly: “Ms. Folsom, in full cooperation with Schooley, takes his book, adds lesbian sex, marital discord, prominent financial movers and shakers of the go-go 1990s, investors such as Martha Stewart, media commentators of the day, an investigative Wall Street reporter, symbolic bulls at a cattle ranch, ruthless Wall Street brokers and their spiteful wives to the catastrophic events of 9/11 where, she claims, stockbrokers fleeing the carnage wreaked on lower Manhattan by the fly-by-day suicide bombers stopped at nearby ATM machines to withdraw oodles of cash in case of a stock market crash.”

The narrative weaves together its protagonists and antagonists geographically and is replete with flashback scenes.

An interesting part of the screenplay depicts Schooley before he was a star stockbroker, as a young millionaire oil wildcatter in Texas and Oklahoma. Also present in the script is Harold Hamm — the billionaire Oklahoma oil tycoon recently in the headlines as Mitt Romney’s top energy adviser and Super Pac contributor. His wife Sue Ann was Keith’s wife Donna’s BFF and several scenes in the script take place on Hamm’s ostentatious ranch.

As more details about the incestuous nature of politics and big business come to light, Folsom’s screenplay will undoubtedly become an increasingly valuable chapter in the history of Wall Street. Time will tell if Robber Barons joins the ranks of Money Never Sleeps, Margin Call and Too Big to Fail.

Veteran entertainment attorney Jay Shanker is representing the screenplay.