Packer teams up with Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort for TV series

JAMES Packer will team up with the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, to produce a Mad Men-style television series.

Jordan Belfort near his home in Los Angeles. Picture: Jeff Katz

JAMES Packer will team up with the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, to produce a Mad Men-style television series about the excesses of the New York finance industry in the 1980s.

Belfort’s best-selling novel about his high-octane Wall Street career — which included defrauding more than 1500 investors — was turned into the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role.

Belfort, who served 22 months in jail, is forging a new career as a motivational speaker and writer.

The new TV series, by Mr Packer’s two-year-old entertainment company RatPac, plans to capitalise on the success of the Martin Scorsese-directed movie and marks a further step in his growing interest in entertainment. Mr Packer spends much of his time in the US, where his former wife Erica Baxter and their three children live.

He is pursuing film and TV investment opportunities for RatPac following his company’s initial investment in the box office and critical hit Gravity.

Belfort, who is coming to Australia on a speaking tour next month, pitched the series idea to Mr Packer’s partner, filmmaker Brett Ratner, and then to Mr Packer, who had been intrigued by The Wolf of Wall Street movie, watching it repeatedly.

“From RatPac’s perspective, we are extremely excited about teaming up with Jordan on this project,” Mr Packer told The ­Weekend Australian.

“I respect Jordan for his tenacity. Like many people he has made mistakes and he doesn’t hide away from it. Jordan is now working hard to build a new career and this venture is an important part of his journey.”

Belfort said he came up with the idea because many people were fascinated by Wall Street’s bull market of the 1980s when, as the movie character Gordon Gekko declared, “greed was good”.

“It was an amazing time, right when the first bull market started,” Belfort told The Weekend Australian in an exclusive interview at his home in Los Angeles. “Before that, Wall Street didn’t resemble the way it is today. You can trace back everything about the way Wall Street is today to when the first bull market started in 1982 when (president Ronald) Reagan cut interest rates.

“The idea was to come up with a show about that period with really interesting characters, and so my manager pitched the idea to (RatPac’s) Brett Ratner, who fell in love with it.”

“Brett said, ‘I’ll talk to my partner James Packer about it’, and I’m like ‘Oh yeah, I know James’ and that’s how I have hooked up with James.

“He’s doing great in the movie business now and with his ­casinos.

“We’re doing these shows together and it’s really cool.”

Belfort plans to co-write the series.

RatPac will make its own movies and TV as part of a $450 million deal announced last year, in which RatPac co-finances all of Warner Bros’ films, operating out of Frank Sinatra’s old office on the Warner Bros lot.

The company’s name combines Ratner and Packer’s surnames and references Sinatra’s famous Hollywood circle that included Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin.

Belfort is in dispute with the US government about how many millions of dollars he must pay back to the victims he defrauded while running his ‘‘pump and dump’’ brokerage Stratton Oakmont in the early 1990s.

Belfort says he has given up his previous indulgent lifestyle .