When did we last see a Hollywood film with a heroic male at its center - a self-made captain (or even lieutenant) of industry, Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates, who begins with little or nothing and achieves success by virtue of his own diligence and ingenuity? In a 2005 paper titled Wall Street and Vine: Hollywood's View of Business, Larry Ribstein, a scholar of business law, surveyed Hollywood films from 1930s to present and found with rare exceptions - Tom Hanks nice-guy businessmen, for example, in You've Got Mail (1998) and Cast Away (2000) - American films have portrayed business negatively. Indeed, several archetypal Hollywood entrepreneurs whom Ribstein counts exceptions seem more to uphold his point than to refute it: Charles Foster Kane, who ends tragically corrupt and self-deluded, business empire notwithstanding, and Oskar Schindler, who redeems himself and his Jews only by renouncing both wealth and enterprise.1 Remarking on very same Hollywood rule of thumb, New York Times entertainment writer Michael Cieply offers several more unexceptional exceptions: Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), electric car visionary of Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker: Man and His Dream (1988), who ultimately falls prey to big business; and Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), amoral arms dealer of Jon Favreau's Iron Man (2008), who literally reinvents himself a prosthetically enhanced superhero.2 Much more often, Ribstein and Cieply concur, Hollywood businessmen have played heavy. The big bad businessman, writes Cieply, citing 1917 film Greed, has been a film archetype since before talkies. Both writers list such classic examples Mr. Potter, villainous banker of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and equally malevolent Gordon Gecko of Wa// Street (1987), Oliver Stone's damning portrait of Reagan-era capitalism. Cieply also includes Daniel Plainview, the oil maddened entrepreneur of Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar winning There Will Be Blood (2007).3 Then there are numerous films, from William Wyler's Best Years of Our Lives (1946) through likes of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brokovich (2000), in which evil is embodied by faceless - and heartless - corporations. Arguably, Ribstein suggests, Hollywood's most iconic, if not heroic, entrepreneurs are father-and-son patriarchs of criminal Corleone family, who represent parodies of ruthless businessmen, using literal rather than merely figurative 'cut-throat' tactics.4 Ribstein entertains several possible explanations for Hollywood's apparent anti-business bias: it is a famously left-wing town dominated by crypto-Marxists, it caters to American audience's popular prejudice in favor of the little guy, even its sour portrait of business might actually be right. But none of these addresses what he views - and one must surely agree - ultimate irony: that movies, themselves, are big business. Why, he asks, film companies attack themselves? Ribstein's own suggestion is this seeming paradox reflects internal tension between filmmakers, who view themselves artist-mavericks, and capitalists who fund their art. former resent their dependence on latter, and their films express resentment in form of an anti-capital message. Movie companies, meanwhile, do not interfere as long message does not interfere with selling tickets.5 Perhaps so. But I would argue Ribstein's solution merely pushes question one step further back: why would anti-business message sell tickets in first place, especially to American audiences? Has not myth of self-made come virtually to define American Dream? Have not American apostles of self-made man, in John Cawelti's phrase, such Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horatio Alger, celebrated economic success and virtues - industry, perseverance, enterprise - yield it? …