Tectosage

You might like the movie Boiler Room, which was inspired by Stratton Oakmont and the other penny stock shops that operated in the suburbs of NYC. Great ensemble cast and a much more grounded story.

This is a great point. "More common" wasn't the best choice of words because it implies a higher frequency, which was not the case. "More acceptable/accepted/normalized" would have been better phrasing.

This pitch worked much better in the 80s and 90s when

A) most investors had a broker not just for advice, but because there was no easy way to trade individually or get live stock quotes until the internet was widespread and matured

B) telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam (Stratton Oakmont and other boiler rooms played a large role in shifting public opinion on this)

C) The most desirable prospects (High Net Worth Individuals) were accustomed to dealing with legitimate brokers over the phone and being solicited by brokers from other legitimate firms in such a way

D) The markets were raging in such a way that everyone had FOMO and was dying to hear of a hot new tip

Almost nobody legitimate in the financial advising world acquires customers via cold call pitching anymore. Cold calling is still part of the toolkit for other sales niches (eg, tech sales) but it's a tough road with a low success rate.

The pitch was designed to elicit a 'Yes' response at every turn (the idea being that the prospective client would be conditioned to saying 'Yes' over and over and be more amenable to the final hammer swing of 'send me x dollars for y shares'). Most pitches were directed at the kind of business owners and execs who end up on lead services like Dun & Bradstreet, but sometimes also targeted individuals at their homes; in either case, the prospect is either running a business or just arrived home from work and is tending to kids/dinner/chores/etc. Ask someone in either scenario if they're busy and the default answer is yes; they're always busy. But ask them if they have a second, and they're more likely to say yes. Everyone has a second, even if they're busy, and the very wording of the question implies this will be a brief and laconic interaction that won't interrupt their day. Busy is a negative primer, have a second is a positive one.

The article contains a few rebuttal snippets, but the full "straight line" pitch had rebuttals for every step of the interaction and every possible response from a prospect. They called it the "straight line" because the idea was that at all moments of the conversation, you are constantly guiding the prospect along a straight line to the desired conclusion (a sale), and any diversion from this straight line in the form of customer protest/question/disinterest needs to be quickly and somewhat aggressively countered with a rebuttal and then followed with a slick line that elicits a return to the previous direction.

Since I'm already rambling, I'll add another detail that isn't in the article; Belfort didn't come up with this pitch himself, it was developed originally at Lehman Brothers (one of the leading firms) and was used in some form at all of the big wirehouse brokerages (eg, the original Merrill Lynch "thundering herd" or LF Rothschild, where Belfort learned it).

Belfort's "innovation" was not the script, it was taking the script out of the hands of elite white-shoe brokers (who sold legitimate stocks to clients) and teaching it to unscrupulous boiler room scammers (who made their money by tricking prospects into buying penny stocks that Stratton Oakmont then dumped).