The Wolf of Wall Street Collection: A Screen-Used Quaalude, an FBI Badge, a Sales Script, and the Goldfish
Martin Scorsese's 2013 film follows Jordan Belfort's career as a New York stockbroker and how his firm, Stratton Oakmont, engaged in rampant corruption and fraud on Wall Street, leading to his downfall. This collection puts four pieces of that story in one place. The sales script is the engine of the whole operation, the high-pressure pitch Stratton's brokers used to turn cold calls into cash. The screen-used Quaalude pill is the drug behind the film's most infamous sequence, the Lemmon 714 scene, the overdose and the crawl to the car, and it was Leonardo DiCaprio himself who came up with the idea of opening the car door with his feet. The production-used goldfish stand-in from Jonah Hill's Donnie Azoff, mounted in a 12x12 shadowbox display, is the film's most shocking moment of Stratton Oakmont excess, played for laughs, and it comes with a COA from Anchored Props.
Balancing all that excess is the badge. This screen-used FBI badge belonged to Special Agent Patrick Denham, played by Kyle Chandler, the prop that signals the law closing in on Belfort. Denham was based on real FBI Special Agent Gregory Coleman, who spent more than half a decade investigating Belfort and his company. Belfort pled guilty and, in exchange for cooperating with the FBI investigation, was sentenced to 22 months in prison. Together, the four pieces tell the whole arc of the film: the pitch that built the empire, the drugs and the stunts that defined the lifestyle, and the badge that ended it. For collectors of modern cinema, it's a rare chance to own a full storyline in props from one of Scorsese's most talked-about films.
Few moments in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street capture the film’s sense of unchecked excess quite like the goldfish scene. Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, furious at an underperforming broker, fires the kid and then eats his goldfish right in front of him, a moment of pure Stratton Oakmont cruelty played for shock and laughs. The scene has a real-life basis: Danny Porush, the Stratton Oakmont co-founder the Azoff character is loosely based on, has confirmed the story, recalling that he told one of his brokers he’d eat his goldfish if the broker didn’t do more business. Hill’s performance earned him an Academy Award nomination, and the goldfish moment became one of the most talked about, and most quoted, scenes in a film that earned a place among Scorsese’s most celebrated work of the 2010s.
Getting that scene on camera was its own challenge. Hill was allowed to place a real goldfish in his mouth for only three seconds at a time until the scene was perfected, and he has said he actually wanted to swallow the fish for real but couldn’t. That’s where props like this one come in. This is a production-used rubber goldfish stand-in, the kind of practical stand-in that kept the scene working without putting a real animal at risk, and it’s professionally mounted in a one-of-a-kind 12x12 shadowbox display, ready to hang. It comes with a COA from Anchored Props, giving collectors a documented piece of one of modern cinema’s most outrageous moments.
