<i>Boiler Room</I> Is Cautionary Tale

The last time actors Giovanni Ribisi and Vin Diesel appeared together in a film was Saving Private Ryan. Now they're re-teaming for a contemporary tale of greed in Boiler Room, which opens this weekend.

A boiler room "basically is an operation where guys -- stock traders -- come in and sell illegitimate stocks, stocks that are inflated, where they exaggerate the price. Often, a stock that represents a company that doesn't exist," explains Vin Diesel.

One of the film's achievements is that audiences empathize with the two desperate-to-be-rich guys despite their disgraceful activities.

Diesel and Ribisi researched their roles by going to real boiler rooms on Long Island and upstate New York.

"Ben Knoller had been writing the script for about four years. He knew a lot of the guys who had worked in these firms. And so we got to go meet with them and talk. They weren't working in them anymore. But they were still trading," says Ribisi.

Diesel and Ribisi found that working on Boiler Room, with a first-time director, was very different than their experience on Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.

"It was that much more of a challenge because we were creating an independent film in many ways," says Diesel. "It wasn't the huge $100 million budget. So we had about six weeks to shoot in New York."

Ribisi plays Seth Davis, college dropout and restless twenty-something, who doesn't want to save society. "I just wanted to make the quick and easy buck," Davis says in the movie.

And so Davis plunges into a job at J.T. Marlin, a fly-by-night brokerage that lures young men to join its sales force with the promise that they can become millionaires in three years. The only question, says Ben Affleck, playing the firm's recruiter, "is how many times over."

Boiler Room, the latest in a tradition of cautionary tales about Wall Street, explores the hard-sell tactics and adrenaline-fueled rush of a penny-stock trading operation.

In Wall Street, Charlie Sheen's character delves into the financial world with naivete and mostly honest intentions, but quickly succumbs to the famous mantra of Gordon Gekko, the slick tycoon portrayed by Michael Douglas: Greed is good.

Every Wall Street movie to date has been a cautionary tale, with a clear message that while money may buy power and prestige, it always corrupts. And filmmakers have dealt out harsh penalties for Wall Street villains.

Sherman McCoy ends Bonfire of the Vanities without the support of his Wall Street firm or his Park Avenue friends, brought down by an unctuous tabloid journalist. It gives away nothing about Boiler Room to say that young Seth Davis' pursuit of riches ends with him and his shoddy firm in deep trouble.

Ben Younger, the director, said filmmakers are merely giving voice to Americans' distrust of those for whom money and power come too easiy.

"The idea of making the money is so sexy, so enticing,'' Younger said. "But there is no such thing as easy money, and I guess we feel some sort of responsibility to show the other side.''

Ironically, Diesel kind of lucked into fortune and fame when Spielberg noticed him in a small independent film, Multifacial that Diesel wrote and directed.

Spielberg "wrote a place for me in his film," Diesel says.

Diesel was so thrilled to be in Saving Private Ryan that he now believes "all those Hollywood fairy tales like how Clark Gable was discovered."