Oliver Stone

by D.K. Holm

Born: 15 September, 1946, New York City, New York

Films as director and producer, unless otherwise noted:

here are very few directors now working whom you can imagine happier doing something else. Instead of making movies, Spielberg could just as joyously run an amusement park. Tarantino would be content to manage a video store or head a small film study center. George Lucas is at heart a corporate executive, Sidney Lumet would make a fine New York City police commissioner, and Woody Allen could easily own and operate a sports team. Altman should lead a band of traveling players, and James Ivory could produce Masterpiece Theater. Among contemporary young American directors, only Martin Scorsese and the Coens spring to mind as evincing a palpable need to make films and nothing else.

And then there's Oliver Stone.

Stone has evolved into the most daring, most radical, and yet still mainstream movie director. In collaboration with cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Joe Hutshing, he has created a new cinematic style, in which everything cinematic—fast editing, unpredictable angles, fluctuating colors, non-stop music, and a blend of documentary and artificial settings—serves to create a complex and allusive cinematic tapestry. It's a style that is both liberating, and constricting, in that only certain subjects and a certain tone benefit from it (Stone probably wouldn't be able to make a musical in this style). Yet it is flexible enough to accommodate serious, sweeping drama (JFK) and black comedy (comedy U-Turn).

Throughout a diverse career, Stone has managed consistently to address the issues—American foreign policy, pop culture—and signature thematic elements - the indian-in-the-desert motif- that obsess him. Almost all Stone's films are about a naif entering a new, unexpected world that he doesn't understand, be it Bill Hayes in the Stone-scripted Midnight Express, or Stone's version of Richard Nixon, presented as a savvy politician who encounters a meta-level of manipulation that even he can't combat. Often this innocent meets two men who represent contrasting attitudes to life, either soldiers such as the competing Elias versus Barnes in Platoon, or Gekko versus the hero's father in Wall Street. And Stone has his blind sides. Until Heaven and Earth, his women were abject clichés, the irritated and unsupportive wives of JFK and The Doors. Yet Stone has persisted and evolved.

tone began as a screenwriter, but always with the goal of directing, of creating movies in the auteur sense, and like James Ellroy in detective fiction, he has revolutionized his art. But of course, his revolutionary style is rarely acknowledged. Instead, he's branded a paranoid conspiracy nut, and basically isolated and disparaged.

There's a moment in Dave, the comedy about a guy hired to impersonate an ailing president, in which Oliver Stone, playing himself, appears on CNN to indicate that the President has suspiciously changed physically in the course of the last few months. Everyone in the audience laughs, of course, 'cause it's conspiracy freak Stone saying this, and we're all glad that he can laugh at himself, given that all he can talk about is conspiracies. But the fact of the matter is that, in the context of the film, he's right! There is a "new" president. So why do people laugh? Because the media have done a superb job of demonizing Stone.

The most shameful aspect of this wholesale attack on Stone is the media's rewriting of even more recent history. Performing the very act they accused Stone of committing, editorialists pretend that JFK was a flop (it wasn't) and filled with nothing but lies (yet the source material for the film ranged from declassified CIA documents to National Security Action Memoranda and House Select Committee on Assassinations). One journalist even noted that because Stone had received such a drubbing over JFK, he has released an annotated screenplay of Nixon (Applause Books, 568 pages, $14.95, ISBN 0.7868.8157.7) to prove its contentions, the writer apparently forgetting that Stone in fact did issue an annotated script for JFK as well.

What do all these people fear? What is it about Stone that leads to such overkill? Obviously if the media truly believe that Stone is wrong or careless with the facts that's one thing. But Stone shows restraint in ignoring some of the more interesting theories about Watergate, such as Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin's theory in Silent Coup that Watergate was a scheme by John Dean to protect his wife's exposure as a hooker, a scheme that grew disastrously out of hand.

But Stone has aligned himself with some outré characters, mainly J. Fletcher Prouty, a former intelligence agent who has promoted the "secret team" theory of big government, and has contributed to the right wing Liberty Lobby and its publication The Spotlight (a newspaper that Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt sued when it accused him of being in Dallas on the day of the JFK assassination - he lost a second trial). Could it be that Stone tainted himself by association with Prouty, and that the right and left elements in the mainstream media, united in its hatred of all the Spotlight stands for (conspiracies, anti-semitism), determined that Stone was really a crackpot, and an easy target for censure? Far be it from me to suggest a conspiracy; I'm just wondering.

The fact of the matter is that Stone is not a crackpot. One of the few filmmakers in Hollywood who allows himself to be seen thinking in public, he has amassed a body of work over the years whose complexion changes with each new addition. And JFK led eventually to the release of many (but not all) previously locked up Kennedy assassination documents.

tone has suffered from comparisons to Stanley Kramer, the softly liberal director and producer of such works of easy protest as The Defiant Ones and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?. The virtually illiterate Quentin Tarantino (who in Jane Hamsher's book—see bibliography below—is caught out spelling legs "leggs," like the product) has called him the "Stanley Kramer of our generation." I have called him that myself, in connection with Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, movies of shallow bombast.

But of course he isn't the equivalent of Kramer. Stone has distinct visual and editing styles which make him one of the most interesting of all major Hollywood directors. And he resists the public's quest for easy answers and pleasant subjects, delightful romances and brainless actioners.

Like Kramer, Stone is often accused of courting controversy. Of course, as a Hollywood figure, he will always be suspected of exploiting events for publicity. But regardless, he is also a director wants to discuss important things, and he has - or had - the rare clout to do it. And that scares the hell out of people.

As a screenwriter, Stone gravitated to the work of bombastic filmmakers such as Alan Parker, John Milius, Michael Cimino, and Brian De Palma. The real source of Stone's flamboyant style may be found not in any natural inclinations, but rather in tutelage he received from these masters of the large visual statement and the courting of controversy.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Stone's career is his subsidirary interest in producing the work of others. His filmography, laid end to end, is almost as long as that other profligate producer, Steven Spielberg. Stone's productions, such as Freeway, are not the cozy crowd pleasers Spielberg is prone to producing And in his producing mode, Stone has shown himself to be loyal to collaborators, such as James Woods. Their alliance has produced at least two films of merit on difficult subjects, one a TV movie about the McMartin trial, and another a sensitive docudrama about a real life serial killer.

If U Turn, a Hot Spot-style film soleil, seems a retreat from social outrage, it also out-Tarantino's his rival with a great cast enacting a tale of sublime black humor.It features a story somewhat along the lines of John Dahl's Red Rock West, but it's based on the book, Stray Dogs, by John Ridley, and has elements that hark back to Stone's first directorial effort, Seizure. U Turn may bog down a bit in the middle, but sustains interest with the lively technique that Stone started experimenting with in JFK. Seeing this style applied to a film soleil makes one realize two almost contradictory things about Stone. First, his quirky style both does and doesn't suit that lavish and "important" projects he usually undertakes, a style which in one way trivializes the content, but at the same time allows him to pack in much more information in one second of screentime than any other director, and second, that Stone was born to make serious and important films, not trifles.

Bibliography

Links to many other Oliver Stone oriented sites include one on his filmography, along with information from the IMDB database.

A measure of Stone's success is that there are at least two critical studies of the director, Norman Kagan's collection of plot summaries, The Cinema of Oliver Stone (Continuum, 286 pages, $24, ISBN 0.8264.0817.6) and Susan Mackey-Kallis's Oliver Stone's America (Westview Press, 166 pages, $21, ISBN 0.8133.2662.1), which at least tries to take Stone seriously as a thinker and finds Jungian and classic underpinnings for his images.

ut perhaps the most fun book is Jane Hamsher's Killer Instinct (Broadway Books, 276 pages, 25, ISBN 0.7679.0074.X). Hamsher was the co-producer of Natural Born Killers, and her book is a production history of that movie, in which she tells several tales out of school about both Stone and Tarantino, and the various odd characters who surround them. That the book is self-serving and self-mythologizing is part of its odd charm, and that she wrote it at all is probably both an illustration of the charges and counter-charges surrounding that movie, and a strange sense of imperviousness that Hamsher must feel. The most vile portrait is of Quentin Tarantino, whom she accuses of stealing all his screenplays from other men. She tries to turn Stone into a villain as well, but what she ends up with is a lively portrait of a hedonist and artist of integrity, whose only objective flaw is office politics manipulativeness, schadenfreude at the problems he creates for others (a quality that anyone who has worked for editors of major metropolitan weeklies finds familiar). The book is also a helpful collection of every single cultural trope we use in place of thinking ("He's history," "What part of 'no' don't you understand," and so on). Lexicographers in the next century will find this volume invaluable for its anthropological record of easy phrases that define a culture.

As Jane Hamsher suggests, the great thing about screenwriting is that, technically, you don't have to be able to write. Few people actually see your work before it is converted into a movie, and there are many lackeys along the route to fix the spelling and turn the thing into the properly formatted, all cleaned up text a director and production manager need to work from. And the skills that screenwriting require are not the same as a novel or journalism. You don't need to know grammar,and it helps if you are funny, but what you need most of all is a sense of story structure on the order of a pop novelist. That screenwriters need not be very good writers is is proved by a bit of juvenilia called A Child's Night Dream (St Martin's Press, 340 pages, $21.95, ISBN 0.312.167989) that Stone has seen fit to publish. It's a terrible book, meandering and childish, written in 1966 and partially destroyed, and one wonders what the book was like before it was heavily edited. The most interesting thing about the novel is the introduction, which basically rehashes the same information contained in James Riordan's through, hagiographic biography Stone (Hyperion, 574 pages, $15.95, ISBN 0.7868.8201.8).

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