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Warfare (2025)

OVER A DECADE AFTER THE DISASTROUS END of a heedless military misadventure abroad, one director released a film that he hoped captured in exacting detail the essence of American cruelty and hubris. Informed by real-life combat experience, he had labored to create the most authentic depiction to date of the soldier’s experience in a bloody war that Congress never officially declared. Before filming began, the young cast was made to undertake an extensive military-style training regimen; the movie was then shot, unusually, in near chronological order. The film I’m speaking of is, of course, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, but you’d be forgiven if you thought this was about Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare, the latest film to take as its subject the United States’ war in Iraq.

Platoon opens in late 1967 and follows a unit of American infantrymen along the Cambodian border. Loosely based on Stone’s experience, the young Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) is torn between competing visions embodied by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), a harsh cynic, and Sergeant Elias (William Defoe), a Christ-like figure who works to maintain moral clarity amid the violence. Stone said the aim of the film was to “make a document of a time and place,” to show “what it was like to be there” on the front lines of the war. The film, which would go on to win four Oscars, including for Best Picture, struck a nerve. “It is a rare film in that it tries to re-create the grim chaos of combat. And it is likely the first film about Vietnam to give a sense of the persistent fear, discomfort and hard labor of fighting there,” wrote Michael Norman in his review for the New York Times. Officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that there was around a 25 percent uptick in demand for PTSD treatments in the months following the film’s release, with many veterans saying it had been a trigger. Psychologists, however, said the movie was helping ex-G.I.’s process memories and speed the healing process. The American public, it seems, was ready for an ugly story of American cruelty and stupidity in Vietnam.

-Charles McFarlane, "War Stories," The Baffler, May 9, 2025

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"Just compare how an attack suffered by the American soldiers is portrayed - shot in darkness, off screen, revealed only in reaction shots - to how an attack carried out by the Americans is shown in broad daylight and far more explicitly. In a way, Stone portrays the violence inflicted by American soldiers with more intensity than the violence they endure. Maybe because that's what truly haunts him. For him, war isn't a stage for heroism. It's the exact opposite. [...] Because it's one thing to have the guts to criticize your own government when you're just starting your career. But to do it honestly, and to expose to the world a memory you're ashamed of, I think that takes an even greater kind of courage."

-Lancelloti, "When trauma becomes a masterpiece." A Youtube video essay on how Platoon's raw and personal realism separates it from other war films.

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Gangster of Hollywood

BORN IN 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker father and a French Catholic mother, Oliver Stone was raised in an East Coast tradition of button-down conservatism. Since then, he's spent much of his life in antagonistic conversation with that background: as teacher, seaman, soldier, freak, failed novelist, decorated director and screenwriter, gangster of Hollywood. Stone dedicated both Salvador and Wall Street to his father, who died in 1985, but his mother is very much alive and was hanging Christmas stockings and lighting his fire when we met at the Santa Monica home he shares with his second wife, Elizabeth, and their six-year-old son, Sean.

Stone's work tends to be loud and angry and fast, full of jagged politics and big emotions. Screen his movies in succession and you're left feeling you've survived a cinematic bar fight -- a bit dented about the head and heart by the velvet fist of his vision. From his pumped-up screenplays for Midnight Express and Scarface to the populist revisionism of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July , Stone's films again and again show the solitary man's fight for the possession of his soul in a world that seeks to steal it, corrupt it and destroy it. His current movie, The Doors , presents an exuberant and powerfully romantic picture of one of Stone's heroes, Jim Morrison. His next will deal with the JFK assassination.

Let's start at the beginning. What's your first memory?

[ Pause; big, exaggerated laugh ] Oh, boy. Beautiful women in trees in a jungle. I had erotic dreams when I was three, four. And they've always stayed with me, throughout my life. Many erotic dreams.

Were the women blond?

Yeah, primarily blondes, but there were colored women and a lot of Oriental women, some striking brunettes. Even some redheads. I would say it got liberal. My fantasy is like that Fellini film City of Women . I loved the idea of having a walled city [ laughs ] and being the only male in the whole city.

And you were a three-year-old waking up with a ``woody'' from these dreams?

Oh, yeah, my pecker used to get hard. It was great. I think that eros is the most underrated force in the universe. I think eros carries us though the darkest hours. Eros and its correspondent, love.

What did you do with this stuff as a kid?

Oh, man, it's secret stuff. It's like Viet Cong tunnels. I wouldn't reveal more than that, but it's certainly a thread in my life. Simone de Beauvoir said, ``Sex is the sixth continent.'' It's the place you can go for free. Everybody can do it. I like that idea. It's a democratic impulse. I think sex is the driving force -- the resistance to totalitarianism in our age.

You've described your dad as distant and negative --

Not at all. My dad was very loving. That's a partial description of him. He was sarcastic and distant at times, but he was very loving -- he was so proud of me, he admired me, I was the only child. He just didn't want me to get spoiled by my mom. He wanted to enforce discipline; he wanted me to learn discipline very early. He said, ``Every day you got to do something you don't want to do.'' [ Laughs ] And he made me write by giving me money. He'd encourage me to write a theme a week.

For your allowance?

Yeah, so I could buy comics. And he always would give me math problems. He was a very good writer, very intelligent. He had a warm heart, but he had difficulty -- as a lot of men did of the Depression era -- expressing his feelings. He thought it was unseemly.

Was he ``there'' for you?

He was there for me.

I'm thinking of the scene in `Wall Street' with Bud Fox and his father where Bud says, ``You've never been there for me.'' I wondered how much of that was autobiographical.

I felt that at times from my dad, because it would be very rare for him to give me any kind of compliment. I was a bum to him, especially after Vietnam, because I was dope smoking and talking black talk and I was in jail and I had no college education and I was writing these kooky screenplays. So he thought I was becoming like his brother Joe, who never did anything his whole life.

There's probably more of you in Gordon Gekko [Michael Douglas], isn't there?

Gekko's another character. It's not my dad. Gekko is a character out of my mom. Sort of flashy, flashy. My mom is more outward, external, physical, in the world -- not as abstracted as my dad. She never made enemies, she made friends. Dad would make enemies with his tongue. Mom was a charming woman: To me, she's a bit like a piece of Auntie Mame and a piece of Evita. Just larger than life. Big parties. Loved to travel, loved to tell tall tales. She'd invent anything. She was the best friend of anybody that would come into her mind that moment. She had a tremendous ability of fantasy.

Did you ever feel like a bum at home, before Vietnam?

Oh, I always felt like an outsider at school.

Why?

Just a quality of one's character. It's an existence, it's an anguish that you have.

Do you think that was nature or nurture?

I think it's nurture. I think it comes from being an only child. It comes from not having access to easy conversation, or easy living with a sibling makes you less important in a way, and you get more self-conscious as an only child. I was very self-conscious when I was young. I'd walk down the street and I would feel that people were condemning me, judging me, looking at me.

It just seemed that writing was a possible retreat from reality that would be acceptable. In the sense that the world of the imagination was a sanctuary from real life. As were movies. I loved being in the dark and seeing movies. It's an escape. My mom was very much into that.

You played hooky with her.

I'd play hooky with her; she'd take me to the movies a lot. A lot. On Wednesdays they'd change the movies; they'd have double features every week. And we'd go and see double and even triple features some days. It was great. I'd go to the movies with my father, too, and we'd see Kubrick films and David Lean films, and he was always very impressive in his analysis. He'd walk out and inevitably -- no matter what movie we'd seen -- he'd say, ``We could have done it better, Huckleberry.'' And then he'd tell me what was wrong. He'd analyze the plot for loopholes, and of course, movies always have loopholes. Why didn't so-and-so do such and such? It was quite an education.

What kind of reality were you seeking to escape?

Oh, I think the reality of schools. Rigid law, orthodoxy, oppression to some degree. I think school was rough. I went to a very strict boarding school, all boys. Had to go to chapel every morning. Four to five hours of homework every day. Five classes. Discipline. The smell of locker rooms. The dank food. How can I describe the food? It was totally Dickensian.

Perfect for someone named Oliver. You had the shock of your life when you found out your parents were getting divorced.

I thought they were very contented and that I was rich and that we had it made. And basically my father said that they were unhappy and that they were betraying each other, that she was screwing around and he was screwing around, and that he was broke, in debt. He didn't have money, he owed money. And my mother, according to him, was profligate in her expenses.

And she had a lover, she took several lovers. It was shocking. It was an interesting time. It was the onset of the sexual liberation of the Sixties, and couples from the Fifties were starting to play around on each other. It was amazing. My father had been basically with other women since the Forties, and my mother had other lovers.

You didn't know anything about this?

No, no. It was all delivered to me on a weekend in boarding school, and by phone. Nobody even came to tell me. It was delivered to me by the headmaster, and that was really hard to take. My father had talked to him, and he thought it was his obligation to tell me. My mother didn't even want to come and see me; she was hiding in Europe. And you can imagine the way the headmaster tells you these things: ``Buckle up, young man. This is not the end of the world.'' It was hard. I felt like shit, like nothing. Everything was metallic. All the surfaces were metallic. All the adults were dangerous, not to be trusted. The world was a very empty place to me.

My father moved into a hotel, where I lived with him. And my mother was moving into another kind of life, a Sixties life -- drugs, parties. I felt I was an outsider. The family was over. It just disintegrated. You don't have a brother or a sister; you don't have any second person you can still be family with. The triangle splits, and we're three people in different places, and I'm sixteen, and all of a sudden I'm on my own. Dad said to me, ``I owe this and this, I will put you through college, and then you're on your own.'' To me it was a new world.

I think that set up, basically, a period for me, from sixteen on, until thirty -- I was going through a sort of adolescent thing. Especially from sixteen to twenty-two, a sort of revolution in my life. Everything was thrown topsy-turvy. Basically, I ended up in the merchant marine, in Vietnam, going through a lot of changes. All the old rules were thrown out. I really sort of journeyed, and I wandered. And through a process of a long time, I got my existence back together.

After your first period in Vietnam, as an English teacher, you wrote a 1400-page novel that was rejected and never published. Going back to Vietnam as a soldier seems like it was an act of self-punishment, if not actively suicidal.

Oh, yeah. I was ready to die, but I didn't want to pull my own trigger. Many a time I stood in the bathroom and looked in the mirror and had the razor out. . . . Part of my book was about the eighteen ways the kid tries to kill himself. I went through all the computations of death in my head. I don't know how close I came. I certainly thought about it, and I emotionally identified with it, but I stopped myself. I said: ``Look, I'm not going to die this way. If I'm going to die, I'm going to die in combat.'' I'm either going to make it through or I'm not going to make it through.

I'm struck by how, when you failed so badly at creating your book, you turned so fiercely to destroying, going to war.

Yeah, a lot of that, that Lee Harvey Oswald thing. I saw that in this country, that's where I learned it. Going to the dark side, you really see the underside of life. Lee Harvey Oswald. I was in that world. I know that world. I know those people.

I got busted when I got back from the Nam [for carrying pot over the border]. And all those guys, such sad cases, going back to small towns, guys that knew weaponry hanging out in bus stations.

The worst years of our lives . . .

Yeah! I took the bus all the way down through Oregon, California, talking to guys in bus stations and cheap hotels. And trying to get laid with hookers in Oakland. I met a lot of Lee Harveys. I met a lot of guys who were really screwed up. The drifter mentality in American society is very interesting. But Oswald is a lot deeper than everybody thinks he is. He wasn't just a drifter; he was something else, too.

How much of your drug use was self-medicating? A lot of people in a great deal of pain ``medicate'' themselves with drugs. They don't take drugs to ``expand their consciousness'' so much as to numb themselves out.

That's a very good question. That's a tough one, because you cross that line, back and forth, through the years. Because half the time it's expansion of the mind and the other half it sort of creeps in to numbing yourself. And I certainly am ``guilty'' of both. I was doing grass on a daily basis, getting high, really high. Doing great acid in the Village. I would do acid anywhere -- in the subway, in restaurants; I didn't stand on religious grounds on it at all. I never picked environments that were particularly soothing. I'd do it for a rush.

I had some heavy bad trips. Volatile trips. And I had some great trips. Looking for a woman, man, I was looking for a woman. Peripatetic affairs. Wild affairs. Crazy women, crazy, nutty women loose across the city. One-night stands, here, there. I was just burned out, and no love in the world. I had a few friends that would do some drugs, but I didn't have any vets around New York. My vet friends went back to small Southern towns, and they would write me about unemployment and drug use and alcohol. It was depressing. I didn't have anybody. There was no network to fall back on. I was alone.

I lived in a shithole on Houston Street. I had a broken window, with the snow drifting in the winter. I'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a pile of snow in my room. [ Laughs ] I was writing, though. I wrote, it seems, for therapy: Between twenty-two and thirty, I wrote eleven screenplays. I never stopped writing. It was my only home. No matter how dissolute I got -- and I took a lot of fucking drugs, booze, bad -- I would get up each day, like my dad said: You do something every day you don't want to do. I felt an obligation to hold up my sanity, to write.

Were the drugs fueling your anger or muting your anger?

Both. The alternate expansion and contraction. I'd say acid to expand and grass -- eventually -- to numb. And music was so important. You can't underestimate that in the Sixties. Listening to Motown, hour after hour, on grass, getting into that mood. And the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone. The Fillmore East.

What gives you joy?

Optimism. A good feeling around you. Family. Love. Eros. A feeling that the world is a healthy place. I think that optimism is really necessary. I like to be surrounded by gaiety, by friends who laugh, who have a positive attitude towards life. I like to be surrounded by a lot of light bulbs, turn on a lot of lights. I like to have a TV on once in a while. I like to see movies that make me appreciate the possibilities of life, that engage the mysterious of life. I like good books, fine wine, beautiful women. Intelligent men. Daring men. I like ships that sail. I like children. I like toys. Material things. Spiritual things. What do you want, a catalog? An index? The book of joy? Joy is a mental state. You have to be healthy to have joy. The doctors are right: Life seems to me to be a cycle of pain and of pleasure. It can't all be joy.

You write from pain, quite personally, but eventually you may run out of it. Or will you have a replenishing supply?

We'll see. How can I project that?

People end up making the same movie again and again.

Nothing wrong with that. If you can make it interesting and dress it up in new clothes in a new way, what the hell. Madonna recycles herself every six months.

Are you seeking to achieve the level of Madonna with your films?

No, but if you can dress up the old story in a new way that interests you and makes it interesting to the public, what's wrong with that?

Nothing's wrong with it, but you seem to me to be a guy who wants a new story.

I think I do. I might be disillusioned, I might not be the best judge. I try to write 'em and make 'em. I admire the prolificness of Balzac and John Ford -- they just kept doing it. And Hitchcock. They didn't get too much into regret or remorse, looking back. If they missed 'em, they moved on. Don't get tripped up in your self, your own psyche or in analysis. There's something to be said about getting out there and doing it.

The dominant criticism of your work is that it's too loud in some way, that you are too much in the audience's face, that you always use the sledgehammer instead of the stiletto.

Obviously, I'm aware of that criticism. Possibly, I go sometimes for the lowest common denominator, in terms of getting the message across, in terms of getting what I want to say across. I think sometimes it's better to be wrong on the side of clarification rather than of obscurity. That's the thing my father used to always beat on me for. Because with all my earlier writing, he'd say, ``That's too obscure.'' And all my English teachers would drive me nuts: ``This is too obscure. What do you mean?'' Something you've broken your heart writing, that's so clear to you, and nobody understands. And I wrote a lot of obscure stuff. The novel was mostly obscure, it was symbolist poetry, it was Rimbaud-like. I just want to be clear. Maybe part of going the other way is trying to fight all of those earlier tendencies, where I felt like I was totally irrelevant to the human race and that I was totally obscure, and confused.

Let's talk about the position of women in your films. [Stone sighs.] It's like going to the dentist, Oliver. The world of your films is a boy's club . True?

No. I'd say the boys have been the protagonists, but the movies have been about ideas in which men were primarily concerned: Vietnam, the world of cocaine smuggling, a prison in Turkey, Wall Street, which is a men's club. But each time, there's been more women in these films, you know. I'm not trying to deny their existence.

No, but due to their marginality, it's interesting to see what position they have. Since your films are not exactly overrun by women, the women that do show up are going to ``stand for'' more, in sort of inverse proportion to their dominance in the film. Now, the women in your work tend to be prostitutes, bimbos, housewives, stick figures -- and if they're developed at all, they tend to be either emotionally cold or sort of along for the ride, as appendages to the male characters.

Well, Kyra Sedgwick in Born is a girl who marches to her own beat. She leaves Massapequa, Long Island, goes to college and starts to think for herself. Ellen Greene in Talk Radio has an emotional attachment to Barry Champlain; she extends her heart once more -- against all her better judgment -- and he breaks it again. And No. 3, Elpedia Carrillo in Salvador , in some way she gives grace to Richard Boyle. And he knows it. He knows she's the best thing in his life. Those three examples are of women reaching out. And in The Doors , Meg Ryan, in a sense, makes Jim more human.

Okay, let's look at the way she's presented in `The Doors.' My understanding is that Pam Courson, Morrison's girlfriend, was a lot more independent -- less traditional, less monogamous -- and displayed a lot more freedom than the way she's presented in the movie, which is almost as the jealous ``wife'' who's horrified when she sees him with others, who only sleeps with someone else, as the ``spurned woman,'' to get back at him.

Well, that's not what I heard. I heard that she may have had affairs before but that she really was enamored of the image of a domestic life with Jim. And wanted to make a real home. And prided herself on cooking certain things for him and giving him a warm, domestic environment to his previously solitary life. He continued to live in a motel and could not stand, ultimately, domesticity. She was not screwing everything that came along. She had a crush for certain people, often in response to the way he was screwing anything he cared to. It was more of a reaction to that than her being that way from the beginning. That's the impression I got from the witnesses.

Do you feel you've done a good job with the way you've presented women in your films?

Not in Wall Street.

They're really commodities in `Wall Street.'

Yes, I think that was a failure in the writing. But I admire . . . I adore women. I've lived with many women in my life. I think women dispense grace.

I tried to make Evita , which would have been interesting. That would have been my first woman protagonist. The most hated and loved woman of her time. Meryl Streep would have been great. It would have been a wonderful movie, but it didn't happen for various reasons. And I have another project that I'm working on that has a woman for the main character. I would very much like to make that kind of movie, because it's nice to work with women. I had more women working on The Doors than on any film I've ever done, and I really enjoyed being around them.

You know, beauty is important on the screen. I don't want to belittle it. I realize that. When you see a beautiful face, you respond. We like to see models of our best-looking sides. It's as old as the world. It behooves me to use beautiful faces. I could watch Garbo for many minutes. She just fascinates me. Just her face.

When I asked you what gave you joy, at one point you said: ``Beautiful women. Intelligent men.'' So there's a dichotomy here. And even now, when you're talking about having more women in your films, the locus is one of physical beauty, enrapturement, and not of intelligence or action.

Oh, I have the appetite of an African chief! [ Laughs ] No, I, of course there's the other side. But let's say, to a man, a woman who is intelligent and beautiful is very sexy, and he gets excited by her, not only physically but in all ways -- talking to her, dealing with her in business, playing sports with her, every aspect of life becomes a playing field.

At the same time, you know as well as I do that a beautiful woman without a brain in her head can still be exciting to you. I don't know if Marilyn Monroe was smart or dumb; my impression is that she didn't have much of an education. But she turned many men on. And women think differently than men. All the signals that are given are different. You have to be a railroad man in this life to figure out all the signals. . . .

[ Pause ] I think there are some unresolved things with my mom that I always had. Because of the divorce. She was a bit of a foreign -- how do you say -- a foreign queen. She was like a queen to me when I was a kid. She was sort of living in a fairyland. She'd come and go. She was sometimes distant and sometimes very close. It was like ECUs [extreme close-ups] and long shots. It was consistent, or steady, my relationship with her, and it turned into a messy thing later on in my adolescence, and I think there are still as many unresolved problems with my mom, and, uh, as there were with my dad.

[ Pause ] I always married, I married my opposite, I mean, the opposite of my mom, which is interesting, too.

Let's talk about another major theme in your work: the dominance of death. In all of your films, save `Wall Street,' the protagonist kills, or is killed, or barely, barely escapes death. Clearly, in some very fundamental way, it's a moving force in what you do -- both obsession and wellspring.

``Death shall have no dominion.'' Who said that? You don't know? God, it was a great poem by Dylan Thomas. You should hear him do the audios of it, he does his own poetry. He was a man wracked with death, as was Jim Morrison. I admire both of them as giant men who lived in the shadow of death. I feel much less enamored of death than they did, or else I'm running from it and not admitting it. I think it's a strong force in my life. I've used it. It's there. I've thought of death, often. At the age of eighteen, I went to Vietnam as a form of death. I was ready to accept death. I saw much of it in Vietnam.

I think the Mexicans are so damn right. I have that thing in my office -- a corpse, a skeleton -- it grins at me: Keep death around as a reminder, make it part of your life. Not to mystify it or make it something horrific but to live with it on a daily basis is, I suppose, to prepare for it, to get ready for it. And probably when it comes, the ideal position is to want it: to be tired of life, to have exhausted the variations you intended to play as a human being. And then to go back to the womb. You want to be nascent again. You want to be quiet. You've had enough. You've seen enough people, you've seen enough colors, you've lived through enough lights and [ sighs ] . . .

Death is a framing experience of life and birth. Everything is seen in that light to me. I'm very aware of it, on a daily basis, driving around. Looking out the windshield, I see violent accidents in my head. 'Cause I saw a lot of that in Vietnam, and I see death around me -- quickly, obscenely, being cut off. Every time I get on a plane, I have to deal with the concept of death -- I have to redefine it for myself, for everyone, for my child, in terms of him being hurt.

So I guess what I'm telling you is that it is a steady and mundane presence in my life, and no, I haven't come to deal with it completely. But I like Dylan Thomas's line ``And death shall have no dominion.'' So that when it comes, it will come as a friend and not as a dominant master. It will come as my equal. My spirit will be equal to my death. I will be wanting and willing to die. That would be nice.

You finally found a protagonist who's as death obsessed as you are?

No, I think more obsessed. Jim lived it. Everything with Jim is death. A bottle of whiskey is death, a woman is death. Death is in every poem. Cinema of course has death in it. So do snakes, fires [ laughs ] .

Tony Montana, the Al Pacino character from your screenplay for DePalma's `Scarface,' is probably your most notorious protagonist before Morrison. I know you identify with Morrison, and I'd like to know how you identify with Montana.

Tony Montana. Well, he was an outsider to the system. He came from abroad. He jumped tracks. He was unorthodox. He was a rebel. A nonconformist who at the end of the day wanted to be a conformist. [ Laughs ] And bought into the dream of the wife with the blond hair and the mansion [ laughs, looks around ] and then started putting security cameras outside his gates to watch the cops watching him.

Tony says, ``Me, I want what's coming to me, the world.'' Ambition, too, yes?

[ Laughs ] Well, there's a little bit of a gangster in me, there's no question. I like that grandiosity of style. I like the excess, the concept of excess works in a lot of these characters. In Gordon Gekko and Jim Morrison. Jim says, ``I believe in excess.'' In the power of excess. Because through excess, I leave, I live a larger life. I inflate my life, and by inflating my life, I live more of my life; therefore, I know the world more. I have more experience of the world. I die a more experienced man.

Perhaps the ``concept of excess'' or ``grandiosity of style'' also describes your relationship with camera movement.

I never want it to be static, to watch the other. That the self and the other are moving at the same time -- that's the way I see the camera moving.

As a participant and not an observer.

Yeah, I always respected the camera as another actor. I hate the type of direction that makes the camera a slave. I always respect the camera. I walk on the set -- I don't know why -- and I see the actor, I see the camera, and I see myself. I see a triangle. So that the camera, although inanimate, is as much a human participant as I am. It's an interesting relationship. So often the camera will speak to me on the day and say: ``No, this. That.'' And it will become clear to me. So I might sit here and for days make notes on what I want to do, as I would with an actor. But when I have the actor and the camera there, they start to talk, and sing, a different kind of song. The camera is different in each scene. The camera has an eerie kind of power. It will often suggest to me a better way of doing it.

So you grant it a kind of autonomy?

Yes. Exactly. Thank you for understanding me. Whereas I've noticed some directors will treat their cameras like slaves, like fascists. And I think that's so wrong! The camera becomes an object of power , like they're wielding a gun. I've noticed that attitude on a lot of sets, it's true. But I haven't thought about it until you raised this question today. It's interesting. Because obviously all our politics, our emotions, our sex lives are all there, aren't they, in our relationship to our cameras.

Some people feel your camera movement is pushy, like they almost need to wear a seat belt watching your films.

That's their problem. The world is spinning much faster than my camera and myself. I think movies have to break through the three dimensions, close as you can get. I think you go for every fucking thing you can to make it live. We're into new technology. Use everything you can. Make it breathe, make it coil, make it live.

In `The Doors' you're rightly horrified at the notion of the band selling ``Light My Fire'' for a car commercial -- to the point of showing a TV ad that in fact was quashed by Morrison before it was ever made. But on the video of `Platoon' there's an offensively ``patriotic'' Chrysler commercial before we even get to the movie, and of course, you've posed for a Gap ad.

The Gap ad I enjoyed doing in terms of just a vanity-ego thing, I suppose. I got paid $700. I didn't do it for money. I was at a certain age, I thought those photographs are incredible, and I'd like to have a decent photograph of myself at the age of forty-three in my life. Just as a marker. I like the clothes. They're cheap. They gave off an image of playfulness, an egalitarian image. What did I do wrong [ laughs ]?

I just wonder if you consider how you commodify yourself .

I agree. Yeah. But there's some interest in doing it. I have an Andy Warhol attitude -- we're postmodernists. Look at Andy -- he sold everything. He sold his toilet paper, probably.

Do you feel the same way about your work? Selling one idea today, another tomorrow? No need for consistency, integrity? Are you really interested in the Warhol ethic?

I don't want integrity to block my creative growth. If I've worked on a film, I've put my whole being into it, and hopefully there will be some kind of consistency at the end of the day.

But I know how strongly you identify with Morrison, and I can't see him posing for a Gap ad.

That was the Sixties, too, and they were very anti. The war was on, too. There was a different feeling. We've grown up with such a corporate culture that one doesn't think twice about it. Look at the way movies are made. Who makes them? What does a filmmaker do? He goes to the highest bidder and he whores out his services -- he gives his privatest fantasies public being -- he prostitutes. So I don't have a very high self-esteem, maybe that's what you're saying. Maybe because I see myself as . . . an artist basically begging for a patron. I think there's a lot of that in me. I feel very lucky each time I get the money to make a picture.

In `The Doors,' Morrison's line ``I'm not mad -- I'm interested in freedom'' is like an epitaph for the film. He's not mad as in ``crazy,'' but he is mad in the sense of ``angry,'' isn't he? My question is, If you need to rebel, to shock authority, to piss on people's carpets, and it seems like Morrison had that emotional or psychological need, are you really free at all? Aren't you just a slave to something else -- your own rebellion, perhaps -- just as much as people who are slaves to conformity?

Contrary dependency? The role of the rebel as essentially a slave?

Maybe. I don't doubt that Morrison was interested in freedom, but he was most certainly -- at least in the sense of angry -- quite mad. There's all sorts of hostility radiating out of this guy -- that's one of the things that makes him so interesting.

He was interested in freedom from his own madness.

Maybe that's the resolution. He was very conscious of his own will to self-destruction. After Joplin and Hendrix died, he'd tell his friends, ``You're drinking with No. 3.''

Yeah. Yeah. I would like to believe that he went out smiling. He liked it; he enjoyed it as it happened because he was in love with the death experience. He wanted to experience it, and he did. He had busted the limits on sex, for himself; on drugs, he'd taken every kind of drug; on the law, he busted the law, which I think hurt him the most, the trial really beat him down and tired him out, made him more aware of orthodoxy and the inevitable triumph of orthodoxy; and I think he busted through on the concept of success. He had success, he was God on earth for a while, he had everything he wanted, and he got bored with it. I think he became enamored of failure. He went on a failure trip, too, and I think he enjoyed busting through on the failure trip by making a fool of himself in public, many times. He wanted to be an asshole; he wanted to be hated.

Because maybe then other people's opinion of him would confirm his opinion of himself?

Partly. And when he was a young lion, he had a higher opinion of himself.

Where did all his meanness come from, his abusiveness?

Meanness? Abusiveness? The only abusiveness I know of -- from all the witnesses -- was when he was drinking. The Irish-asshole side, the Dylan Thomas side, would come out, and he'd rant and rave and get into fake fights. And he got his ass busted a couple times by guys that took him seriously. He would make an asshole of himself in public to go through all forms of experience. He wasn't about reserve and dignity, like his father had represented to him.

It seems, though, that when he was sober or was on other drugs, that he would be one of the gentlest souls. Everyone would refer to how gentle he was, how sensitive, how well spoken, how shy. He certainly had two sides: He'd go from being the most sensitive, loving, caring person, who talked to everybody -- he was very democratic in his approach to life, which I love -- and then when he performed, he would go into a shamanistic, devil thing, and then when he was drinking, he would be a monster at times. I also heard that when he was drunk, sometimes he would behave very sweetly. So everybody attests to Jim's kindness. He gave away everything, you [ Cont. on 62 ] [ Cont. from 43 ] know. There was a Jesus quality about Jim. He gave of himself: his body, his life, his possessions. Nothing was his. He was a sharing person. It's the Irish dichotomy, I suppose.

Were you trying to dramatize that dichotomy in the film?

We tried, you know. That's the hardest stuff to do. To show the holy and the fool at the same time. I tried. Probably people might say I didn't get enough holy.

Do you view your task here as more demythologizing or remythologizing him?

That's a good question. I suppose my answer to that is that we were remythologizing, keeping the myth. But to me, it includes demythologizing at the same time. I don't know why, it just does. It's not like he's any less a person for being demythologized. We show, certainly, the asshole part of Jim, but to me it only makes him more mythological. So they perform the same function for me. If you try to strip away from a person, you end up making him greater by the fact that you're trying to strip. Why? You think you're taking layers away, you may be adding layers. [ Laughs ] You understand what I'm saying?

``The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom'' -- how can we be so sure?

Go. Go.

Maybe it leads to the palace of disintegration? Of psychic fracturing? Of death?

You need strong cojones to take that medicine. You risk becoming larger than life. I guess you could become grotesque. It's a road to travel warily, no question.

Are you at the palace? You've certainly lived through a lot of excess.

I don't know. I'm at my midlife journey, that's for sure. [ Laughs ] I'm in a dark wood, babe. I feel often like a neophyte on the road, I really do. I don't say that immodestly. I still feel very innocent, in many ways.

Do you feel like a great artist?

[ Long pause ] God, if I told you my true feelings about that, they'd never let go of me -- I'd just be setting myself up.

You're thinking about what ``they'' are going to think. I want to know what you think.

My true feelings? [ Pause ] I never doubted it, from day one. When I was eighteen, I just felt like I had a call. Like I had a call. And living up to that call has been the hardest part. I've got a lot of work to do on myself, on what I'm doing, on my craft, but I never had a doubt.

-David Breskin, Rolling Stone, April 4 1991

[back-and-totheleft]

Stone's altered States

As a teenager at boarding school in Pennsylvania, Oliver Stone learnt that the United States of America was a beacon of democracy, destined since its founding to be an inspiration to the oppressed. He was taught that communism was a grave threat to humanity, that American soldiers had saved the world from tyranny twice and may soon have to do so again. He accepted this to be true. Three years after graduating, he enlisted in the US Army and asked to be assigned to the infantry, knowing this meant combat in Vietnam.

His new television series, Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, is the culmination of an awakening that began in the jungles of Tay Ninh. It opens with him addressing the camera: ''I thought I received a good education … We were the good guys.'' Although this is the last we see of his Clark Gable moustache, Stone barely stops talking for the next 10 hours. Over stunning archival images he presents the US as an imperial power that has provoked needless wars, backed murderous regimes and trodden on the poor. Stone's researchers have apparently found every frame ever shot of bombs falling from the sky.

''We're always on the side of dictators, always on the side of repression,'' he says on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. ''Once we dropped the atom bomb and called it the right thing to do to end the war, we equated force with right. Now we've subverted so many Third World countries, all in the name of fighting communism, drug wars and terrorism, we have invested so much into this program, that we cannot stop ourselves.'' When he discovered that his daughter's history textbooks contained the same distortions he once swallowed whole, he decided to write his own.

Stone's acclaimed movie about the Vietnam War, Platoon, ends with his alter ego returning home ''to build again, to teach others what we know''. Stone himself came back addicted to drugs and directionless. His scripts for Scarface and Midnight Express were turned into successful movies, but most others were rejected. It wasn't until he made Salvador in 1986, about a photojournalist shaken from his cynicism when he discovers that the CIA is funding death squads, that Stone found his vocation as an auteur prepared to confront unpalatable truths about his own country.

He has been working on his Untold History for five years with American University professor Peter Kuznick. ''I did this with the idea that my three children and their children would see it,'' he says. ''The Disney version of America is boring to most kids. They know that it's sanitised in the way that America always wins.'' The series and accompanying book are a legacy project, an alternative to a memoir. Fans eager to read Stone's account of snorting cocaine in an electric chair, punching James Woods on set or slipping LSD into his father's drink will have to wait.

The caricature of Stone - a womanising hedonist with a mouth like a pistol with no safety catch - is not as accurate as it was. He is married for the third time, meditates daily, and can't drink or pursue women as he used to. But he is still radical by the comfortably liberal standards of Hollywood: he mourned Hugo Chavez as a ''great hero'' and is an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange.

Stone has often been accused of rewriting history, a charge he deflects by pleading ''dramatic licence'' and invoking Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare. This criticism peaked with his conspiracy thriller JFK, intended as a ''counter-myth'' to the Warren Commission's improbable official account of President Kennedy's assassination. Jack Valenti, the chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, compared the movie to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda.

The director's response was to put out an annotated screenplay and ''stir the shitstorm'' at every opportunity. In a graduation address at his old school, he warned students never to trust the press: ''Greed reigns, greed fights wars, greed kills. The news media for the most part is silenced by that money. You will not get the truth in Time, Newsweek or on CBS.'' A year later, stung by polls showing that few Americans believed Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, Congress released millions of pages of confidential documents about the assassination.

Untold History frequently indulges in speculation about what might have been. Stone and Kuznick argue that having stood up to the CIA by refusing to sanction an invasion of Cuba, Kennedy would not have sent ground troops to Vietnam, illustrating their point with extracts from his correspondence. They state that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated, and that President Harry Truman and his military advisers dropped the bombs to cow the Soviet Union, killing more than 200,000 civilians as a show of force.

The series came under fire before it was even made, when Stone wondered out loud whether the Holocaust's victims are remembered more than tens of millions of Soviets who died during the Second World War because of ''Jewish domination of the media''. Billionaire entertainment mogul Haim Saban wrote to the president of CBS demanding that the series be pulled. ''They wanted to … end my career,'' Stone says.

Conservative historians have accused Untold History of regurgitating Soviet propaganda, downplaying Stalinist atrocities and taking dramatic liberties unbefitting a serious work of scholarship. Stone insists that every source has been rigorously checked. ''People can argue about our interpretations of these facts but at least they're getting a different vision of America,'' he says. ''Even if you criticise us for perhaps not showing one episode wholly correctly, all you have to do is see the repeat of the mistake.''

The last episode is an indictment of the Bush and Obama presidencies, detailing torture, targeted killings and war for its own sake. ''We talk about fear, the paranoia that can grow in America and how that leads to militarism,'' Stone says. ''It's like the Salem witch trials, a sort of mass hysteria. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.''

Stone ''detested'' Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, thinking it no more morally ambiguous than Rambo. His own film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden died in development, joining Pinkville, his movie about the My Lai massacre, on his list of unrealised scripts.

There's a pivotal scene in JFK in which a retired intelligence agent, played by Donald Sutherland, meets Kevin Costner's district attorney, Jim Garrison, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The conspiracy to kill Kennedy that he describes, between the political establishment, the military-industrial complex, the Mafia and the security services, is a microcosm of the malevolent forces at work in Stone's US. ''Don't take my word for it,'' he tells Garrison. ''Do your own work, your own thinking.''

Stone hopes one day the book is offered in schools as an alternative to standard texts: ''We're not going to be institutional history for a long time, but I'd like to get there.''

-"Stone's altered States," The Sydney Morning Herald, May 11 2013

[back-and-totheleft]

"We were counting the bodies and pretending that we were winning"

April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the capture of the capital of South Vietnam by the Communist North Vietnamese army that marked the official end of the Vietnam War — a conflict that stretched two long decades and cost millions of lives. Approximately 60,000 of them were U.S. soldiers. Among the survivors was director Oliver Stone, whose combat injuries earned him multiple decorations, including a Bronze Star with “V” Device for valor, Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster (to denote two wounds), an Air Medal and the Combat Infantryman Badge. Stone — who through landmark films like 1986’s Platoon and 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July allowed the country to process the trauma of war — reflected on his time in Vietnam, his conversion to pacifism upon his return to the U.S. and his thoughts on similar endless and deadly conflicts currently plaguing the planet.

I went to Vietnam as a teacher first in 1965. I was 18, and I taught there after I had attended Yale. I went again three years later as a soldier. I was young, and I didn’t have the conscience we all have now. It was just something that we all believed in at the time. Vietnam was all of a sudden the center of the world. It was like Ukraine is now, where people were going nuts and saying that we have to fight for Ukraine.

That mentality of militarism was born in America. It was in our blood. I grew up relatively conservative. In 1965, Vietnam was an interesting place to be a teacher. It felt like a divine mission. But as I traveled around Asia, I saw Cambodia before the war — before Pol Pot — and I ended up in Laos. And the more I saw, the worse it looked. By the time I went back as a soldier, it was depressing. All barbed wire camps.

We put half a million men on the ground and as a soldier, I could see that it was a mess. It was just this poorly run war, and we were counting the bodies and pretending that we were winning. The whole thing was based on a lie. There was a lot of other lying going on. In my book, Chasing the Light, it tells my version of Vietnam. By the time I left in December ’68, I had been wounded twice and seen quite a bit of action. I was shot in the neck and had shrapnel in my lower body. It was a miracle I survived the neck injury because that was close — about a quarter-inch from my carotid. But I went back into combat anyway.

I served most of my 15 months in the jungle, in the plains around the beaches. I was exposed to quite a bit and who knows, maybe I got Agent Orange poisoning. We used to walk through that stuff. You’ve seen the movies — Platoon, Born on the 4th of July — and then I told the Vietnamese side of it with my 1993 adaptation of the Le Ly Hayslip book, Heaven & Earth, which depicted a beautiful Vietnam before we got there.

When Richard Nixon came into the White House in January 1969, I had left already Vietnam a month earlier. For Americans, the war dragged on for another four years till 1973. And then Nixon made his deal to get the POWs out. Most of the American combat troops were out by ’73. And the amount of casualties was amazing between ’69 and ’73. I think it was rather an even split between the two regimes, Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon.

I came back to the U.S. in ’68. In 1970, I went to NYU film school. That was a very revolutionary kind of place. The student body distrusted veterans and stuff, so I kept my mouth shut. In the early 1970s my feelings about the war changed, but by the mid-’70s, I would be on the other side of the fence completely. I was more aligned with Jane Fonda. I grew to admire her after the war. When it was going on, her opposition seemed strange.

We knew it was over when Johnson refused to run in March ’68. So he wasn’t backing his policy in Vietnam. And the Army kept going. The American media had been so “rah rah” on Vietnam. It’s part of the problem that we have in our country — the media tells us what to think. The New York Times is awful. In every single war — Vietnam, Iraq, etc. — read their editorials. They were so jingoistic and pro-government. They always were the government. They were the government line, I guess you could say. At the end of the Vietnam, they changed, because they hated Nixon. Now they hate Trump. So they go after Trump all the time. But the truth is, they support the Ukraine war. So it’s the same crap. And the Ukraine war is another one that’s completely a lie. They keep lying to the American public and the public falls for it.

When Saigon fell — on April 30, 1975 — I was relieved. Everyone was. It was a wonderful moment in the sense that it was the end. There was a wave of movies that started with The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1978) and Jane [Fonda]’s movie Coming Home. All of these were noble, good movies. And then I got to make Platoon.

I made Born on the Fourth of July, a very strong, anti-military movie. It came out Dec. 20, 1989. The U.S. invaded Panama that day. It was the beginning of a change — a shift back to the use of our military and belief again in the system. It was George H. W. Bush. The next thing you know, we’re in the Iraq War, which was all based on propaganda. According to the media, we were heroes. The military had done a great job. The next thing you know, we were back in Iraq for the second Iraq War. It hasn’t stopped. As Bush 41 said, “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

There was this fear that we were becoming too pacifist, too soft. So that was why they reclaimed that sense that we had to get tough again. And we did. We got very tough. And before you knew it, by the late ’90s, we had this policy — it’s written in ink and we’ve lived up to most of it — to take out the seven countries on the NeoCon list. We hit six of them so far. The seventh one, of course, is Iran. If we go after Iran, it’s a huge mistake. We’re going to bury Bush’s bullshit in the sands of the ashes of history. But I think we’ll go. Netanyahu, he’s our leader. He’s our foreign policy. Middle East policy goes through him. I think that guy is absolutely fanatical. I interviewed him years ago, and I thought he was mad then. He really hates the Arabs. He just can’t get over it. So we’re back to learning nothing.

This country really has a problem with history, I think.

-Oliver Stone as told to Seth Abramovitch, "Oliver Stone Looks Back at the Fall of Saigon 50 Years Later: “We’re Back to Learning Nothing," The Hollywood Reporter, April 30 2025

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone builds his own myths

It’s not Vietnam, Salvador or even Dealey Plaza in Dallas, just the dubbing stage at Skywalker Sound in Santa Monica. But Oliver Stone is once again at war.

“Call me a guerrilla historian,” Stone says, munching a turkey sandwich while the last frame of the famous Zapruder 8-millimeter “home movie” showing President John F. Kennedy getting his head blown off plays over and over on the screening room wall. Stone has been holed up for 18-hour days editing his film “JFK” while fighting a rear-guard action against the intense criticism his new and most provocative film has engendered, sight unseen.

His critics resent the already controversial director poaching on the sacred land of the Kennedy assassination, rearranging the relics and breathing life into the ghosts. Some don’t like his attacks on the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald-did-it-alone conclusion. Others detest his portraying former New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison, who brought the only case to trial in the Kennedy assassination, as a hero played by Kevin Costner. And the movie’s larger-than-life thesis blaming the assassination on a secret parallel government nested in the military-industrial complex strikes some as bizarre.

Stone is alternately perplexed and angry over the critical articles and columns, which have made a free-fire zone around his movie before it finished shooting. Punching holes in his adversaries’ arguments with his rat-a-tat of ready-to-fire facts, he is apprehensive, combative and can even appear hurt. Then he suddenly flashes an impish grin and one senses he’s having a ball. With his unruly hair, still boyish good looks and eight movies and three Academy Awards under his belt, Stone at 45 evidences the outrage lightly laced with glee of one who is sitting just where he belongs.

But whatever the criticism, the film has to get done, and tossing the sandwich, Stone turns his jack-rabbit intensity back to perfectly matching sound with picture and overcoming other obstacles to getting a film done two weeks before it opens.

The Zapruder frame, taken by an amateur photographer present at the assassination, enlarged in frightening detail, is crucial to Stone’s cinematic indictment of the official Warren Commission Report. In the final scenes of the movie, Kevin Costner uses it to illustrate how the bullet forced the President’s head “back and to the left,” indicating the fatal shot came from somewhere other than where Oswald was said to be standing.

With each shot fired at the President, Stone’s head snaps involuntarily. This may be the movies, and the foreign distributors showing up for screenings remind one daily of the high financial stakes for the $40-million Warner Bros. picture (with another $15 million for promotion), but there’s no question that for Stone, “JFK” was--and is--a cause.

In an industry built on recycling pleasing myths into profit, Stone insists on doing it the hard way. His are counter-myths. Stone, a twice wounded Vietnam veteran, views “JFK” as digging deeper into what he sees as the origins of that war and nothing less than “a battle over the meaning of my generation with the likes of Dan Quayle, a battle between official mythology and disturbing truth.”

With his slept-in sports jacket and sense of easily outraged idealism, the always irreverent Stone bears the unmistakable marks of the Kennedy generation. It is not that either he or his movie exaggerate the accomplishments of the brief Kennedy presidency. Rather, like many of his generation, Stone persists on mourning an innocence lost.

The assumption of “JFK” is a forgiving one: That for Kennedy, the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and dispatching the first troops to Vietnam the same year, were merely blunders on an otherwise noble course, and he quickly recognized the error of his ways. After the October, 1962, missile crisis, Kennedy reneged on his pledge to support another invasion of Cuba, and just before his death he had signed an order withdrawing 1,000 troops from Vietnam.

Stone’s contention is that the true Kennedy is the man who agreed to a nuclear test ban treaty and initiated the Alliance for Progress economic aid program, and that hard-liners within the government and military were alarmed by this evidence of his dovishness.

The official version of Kennedy’s assassination is this: He was fatally shot Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through downtown Dallas by a lone gunman stationed at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Shortly after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the depository who fled the building moments after the shooting, was arrested and charged with the murder of Kennedy and a Dallas policeman. Oswald denied both murders under questioning; two days later, as he was being transferred from the city jail to county jail, he was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

A special presidential commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren investigated the shooting, and on Sept. 24, 1964, issued a report that stated Oswald was the lone assassin.

But “JFK” finds many candidates for an assassination team in the ranks of disillusioned Cubans and the American military-industrial complex. Kennedy was succeeded by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is portrayed in the film as the servant of the economic interests and jingoistic parties that benefited from the vast escalation of the Vietnam War.

Of course, an Oliver Stone movie wouldn’t be merely an entertaining commercial venture, even though it stars Costner as Garrison. Garrison was sharply criticized for linking New Orleans merchant Clay Shaw to the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and others in a far-ranging conspiracy to kill the President--a conspiracy that he could not prove in court.

But Garrison was also a rebel hero for some, making him a natural subject for Stone, who with movies like “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “The Doors,” has fought a battle for the soul of the ‘60s. Stone is compelled by what he self-mockingly terms a “demon counter-cultural drive” to stick his cameras into the most sensitive national wound, attempt to solve the most puzzling of mysteries, champion a widely discredited lawman and take on the CIA, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs, L.B.J., the Mafia and the Washington Post. Say what you will about Stone, he does not go gently into the success of the Hollywood night.

“So I’ve created a counter-myth to the official one--is that so bad?” he asks, with one of his trademark sucker questions designed to throw a challenger off guard. No, it’s just unusual for the business he’s in, and he knows that. This is not some low-budget rebel film like Costa-Gavras’ “Z” or his own “Salvador,” which he often brings up. This is the high-stakes holiday season, make-it-on-the-first-weekend crap game.

It’s understandable why Stone would make provocative political films, given his past experiences recounted in “Platoon” and in numerous interviews. But why would Warner Bros., united in a partnership with Time-Life, bankroll this excoriating view of the American Establishment? Is this a ruling-class death wish? Is it, as Stone puts it only half joking, that “the Establishment is obviously cracking and fissuring”?

The answer can be sought in a dinner meeting two years ago at The Grill restaurant in Beverly Hills with Stone, his Creative Artists Agency agent Paula Wagner, and the three top executives from Warner Bros.--President and Chief Operating Officer Terry Semel, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Bob Daly and Bill Gerber, a Warner production executive--who had long been interested in Stone’s work.

The ambience of that meeting marks the distance that Hollywood has traveled from the days when it was run by conservative moguls who held all the cards. What has emerged in its place, if Stone’s experience is a guide, is a less ideological and more competitive Hollywood capitalism focused more purely on making a buck. It is also a market in which successful artists, no matter their politics, abetted by the powerful agencies that represent them, can have considerable clout.

Stone was a hot director, and Warners had been courting him for some time to make a movie about Howard Hughes. That effort came to naught because Warren Beatty controlled the rights. Stone told the Warners execs he had “quietly optioned” two books on an even more important mystery. Stone, who had won an Academy Award for the screenplay for “Midnight Express,” wanted to write a script about the Kennedy assassination.

One of the books Stone optioned was “On the Trail of the Assassins” by Jim Garrison, published in 1988 by Sheridan Square Press and barely reviewed. It was a revision of an earlier book by Garrison, then a Louisiana Appellate Court Justice, in defense of his earlier case charging a New Orleans-based conspiracy that included Clay Shaw, an international merchant. The other book was Jim Marrs’ compendium, “Crossfire--The Plot That Killed Kennedy,” which covers the gamut of Kennedy assassination theories.

“My immediate reaction was ‘Wow! What a powerful and great idea for a movie,’ ” said Warners’ Semel. “Any time the assassination had come up in the last 30 years, everyone seemed to feel that we didn’t get the whole story.”

But could Stone attract top-drawing actors to the project? It helped that Stone was accompanied by Wagner of CAA. Stone has had a close working relationship with Wagner since 1985, when she helped put his movie “Salvador” together. At that time, she secured the services of James Woods, who was also represented by her agency. She would subsequently get Stone together with CAA clients Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe for “Platoon,” Michael Douglas for “Wall Street,” Tom Cruise for “Born” and Val Kilmer, who starred in “The Doors.” “So,” Stone laughs, “I guess Paula and I have a relationship.”

In short, Stone came to the meeting holding quite a few of those cards that would have been solidly in the hands of the studio in the old days. The only one he was missing--which they had--was the money. But he didn’t think that was a major obstacle with this property and was confident of successfully shopping it around.

Stone says that “better deals could have been made in the international market” but that he preferred selling the whole thing to Warners because “I didn’t want the script going all over the world to be bid on and read. I knew the material was dangerous and I wanted one entity to finance the whole thing and the history of Warner Bros., given Terry Semel’s record of political films, was my first choice.”

Warner Bros. under Semel produced “All the President’s Men,” “The Parallax View” and “The Killing Fields.”

Dinner that night around a table in the front room of The Grill was “like a bunch of guys sitting around in Las Vegas saying, ‘Hey, I want to build this thing and people will come,’ ” Stone says. “I told them I wanted ‘JFK’ to be a movie about the problem of covert parallel government in this country and deep political corruption. Here’s the story. I laid it out in 15, 20 minutes. They were all ears. I said I want to tell the story as it was first understood in 1963 and then tell it over and over so it unravels and by the end you see it in a totally different light.”

Semel remembers Stone saying “lots of things like ‘Are you concerned politically? Would it affect your company? Are there negative reasons why you wouldn’t do it?’ My immediate reaction was ‘No, we should do it.’ If it’s entertaining and it’s intriguing, a great murder mystery about something we all cared about and grew up thinking about, why not? To me, it took two minutes to be totally ensconced in the whole idea.”

By the time cappuccino was served, they had a handshake deal. The details took months of bargaining to work out, but the commitment to a film for around $20 million was made and Stone knew “my movie had a home.” CAA client Costner was signed to play Garrison in January, 1991, (two months before Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” swept the Academy Awards). The budget doubled to $41 million when Arnon Milchan, an Israeli representing German and French money, became executive producer, and Stone was able to afford an impressive cast of supporting actors as well.

The presence of Joe Pesci, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Donald Sutherland, Jack Lemmon and the others was important to Stone’s strategy: “The supporting cast provides a map of the American psyche; familiar comfortable faces that walk you through a winding path in the dark woods. Warners thought it was too costly to have them but those actors all waived their normal fees to help the picture.”

Despite rumors that Mel Gibson and others were candidates to play Garrison, Stone insists that Costner was his preferred choice. “It helped that (CAA President) Mike Ovitz was a strong fan of the movie,” Stone says, and was strongly urging Costner, his client, to be in it. An obstacle was the actor’s promise to his wife that he would take a year off from work. But, as Costner says, “after she read the book, she said, ‘You have to do it.’ ”

Costner, who pointed out he comes from a conservative Republican background, researched the material carefully before agreeing to play Garrison. “I met with his critics as well as people on the street who still love him. He’s a complex character and both Oliver and I wanted him played that way,” says Costner, who credits Stone with exposing him to a full range of Garrison’s critics.

Stone adds: “I wanted Costner to get both sides, to witness the hatred and extremism that Jim engenders and as an actor to look into the eyes of his enemies and know what he was up against back then. These were tough people and they’d come in a parade in front of Costner with their New Orleans accent saying that Jim’s a snake--that he liked boys and was angry that Shaw stole his lover and a lot worse.

“Kevin read the script several times, saw back-up material and it was not easy for him to do. Kevin took some chances--he’s going to make some enemies with this movie but I’m proud of him.” Stone feels signing Costner was a crucial break for the film and not just because of the actor’s box-office appeal. “Kevin was the perfect choice for Jim Garrison because he reminds me of those Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart qualities--a moral simplicity and a quiet understatement. He listens well. He anchors the movie in a very strong way. He guides you through it because you empathize with him and his discoveries become yours. Through Kevin playing Jim you get on the 50-yard line for the Kennedy assassination.”

But while Costner is quintessentially believable, the real-life character he plays, Garrison, is not. Flamboyant, ambitious, carousing and quick of mouth, Garrison burst into the national media with a series of wild charges. When he brought Clay Shaw to trial in March, 1967, on charges of conspiracy to kill Kennedy, after many delays, two years later a jury took only an hour to declare Shaw innocent.

Garrison picked up enemies in the news media along the way that have now risen in outrage at the thought that, decades later, Stone has cast this fellow in a heroic role.

“Dallas in Wonderland: How Oliver Stone’s Version of the Kennedy Assassination Exploits the Edge of Paranoia” is how the Washington Post headlined a piece by its national security correspondent, George Lardner, who had crossed swords with Garrison while covering the original trial. Lardner hadn’t seen the movie but, basing his criticisms on an unauthorized early draft of the script, proceeded to challenge what he considers “the absurdities and palpable untruths in Garrison’s book and Stone’s rendition of it.”

Lardner points out that Garrison lost his case linking New Orleans merchant Shaw to an assassination conspiracy and therefore might be presumed to have defamed an innocent man. He adds that Garrison embellished a weak case by picking on the man’s homosexual relations to prove guilt by possible association.

Not so, says Stone, who documents Shaw’s connection with the CIA, which had been denied on the stand, and then goes on to provide photographs and eyewitness accounts linking Shaw to the assassination. “He was in the CIA according to (CIA director) Richard Helms, spotted by numerous witnesses with Lee Oswald and David Ferrie (the man Garrison thought was the getaway pilot for the Dallas assassins), whom he denied knowing. So don’t give me this jive about his being an innocent man. He was a perjurer at the very least.”

He adds that members of the jury when interviewed said they did believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

It is true that the case against Shaw was weak. The movie itself contains powerful voices, including that of Sissy Spacek, playing Garrison’s long-suffering and eventually divorced wife, arguing persuasively at one point in the movie that Shaw’s rights are being violated in a witch hunt. The defection of a key Garrison staffer, shown in the movie, is supported by a strong criticism detailing the failure of the enterprise.

“Even paranoids have enemies,” Stone answers, decrying the fact that the Washington Post’s Lardner “has not seen the movie and is unconscionable in criticizing a work in progress, including scenes in the early script that are not even in the movie.”

But Lardner was only one critic. In an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, former Garrison researcher Tom Bethell, who concedes that he turned over Garrison’s witness list to the Shaw defense team, says “many students of the assassination are concerned that glamorizing someone as reckless as Garrison might undermine legitimate skepticism about the official findings.” Time magazine observed that “Garrison is considered somewhere near the far-out fringe of conspiracy theorists, but Stone appears to have bought his vision virtually wholesale.”

On the other hand, Semel of Warner Bros., who read Garrison’s book at Stone’s suggestion, was “blown away by the fact that clearly something else happened” than the Warren Commission reported.

“If people are upset or uptight about the fact that they don’t agree with some of the premises of the movie, I think that’s one of the great things about our country,” says Semel. “We are allowed to express all these things. We are presenting possible scenarios that many of us feel in our gut have real threads of possibility.”

Stone himself is even more sympathetic to Garrison than the movie he has made. In interviews, he defends Garrison’s “courage” in bringing the indictments, points out that Garrison went to trial only after a three-judge panel and a grand jury said he had sufficient evidence and that Garrison was thwarted at every turn in his investigation by much of the American legal and political Establishment. “His subpoena against (CIA Director) Allen Dulles, Charles Cabel (Dulles’ deputy) and Richard Helms (who succeeded Dulles as CIA director) were all quashed, four governors in four different states would not honor his extradition requests, his files were copied and passed on to the defense by several traitors on his staff and his office was tapped. He was also bribed with a federal judgeship and his witnesses were threatened, cajoled and also bribed.”

But the movie is compelling not because it makes the case against Shaw or for Garrison but because it presents in exhausting detail the conflicting accounts that indicate that something very different from the official version happened. We and Garrison still are not sure what it proves, except that the Warren Commission got it wrong.

“No one really knows exactly what happened, who did it or how,” Stone concedes, “but we have some pretty good clues and we reach some conclusions in the movie that I hope will shape a counter- myth to the one the Warren Commission put out that will exist in the minds of the next generation. Mythology is not a child’s fairy tale; it’s a true inner meaning of an event.”

But why hang a plausible case against the Warren Commission on the controversial theories of Garrison--why did Stone pick this book for his “JFK”? Stone had not thought much about the assassination until 1988, when the Garrison book was pressed upon him by Ellen Ray, publisher of Covert Action Information Bulletin, which delights in exposing the CIA, and publisher of the book, on a creaky elevator when they met by chance, or so it seems, in Havana’s old Nacional Hotel. Stone was in Cuba to accept a Latin American Film Festival award for “Salvador” from Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Stone at first thought Ray was “just another sandal-wearing advocate of a cause,” but he took the book with him to the Philippines, where he was completing shots for “Born on the Fourth of July.” “It was a great gumshoe story. This pistol whipping occurs on the night of (Nov.) 22 on a rainy night in which this guy, Jack Martin (an FBI informant), gets his skull laid open by his boss, Guy Banister, (a former FBI bureau chief) and out of that little Raymond Chandler kind of incident, Garrison spins this tale out with international intrigue--a hell of a trail. As a dramatist, that excited me.”

After also buying rights to the Jim Marrs book, Stone teamed up with Zachary Sklar, the editor of Garrison’s book, to write a script based on the books and a massive amount of other information gathered by Jane Rusconi, a recent Yale graduate he had hired as a researcher. The material, gathered over two years, “allowed me to use Garrison as a vehicle for a larger perspective than was available to him in 1967-69.”

The “use” of Garrison and the other real-life characters in this docudrama raises a host of questions about a dramatist’s use of history. Stone thinks it is the dramatist’s right to form composite characters as well as the things they say.

Most startling is the character called Mr. X, played by Donald Sutherland, whom Garrison meets on a park bench in Washington and who spells out the grand theory of the CIA and military intelligence as a secret government. Garrison did meet some potential witnesses on park benches but not Mr. X, who in real life is Fletcher Prouty, a former aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Stone met Prouty in Washington while he was writing the script. “We took the liberty of having Garrison meet the X character because I met X, who stunned me with his revelations, and I incorporated what he told me into a meeting between (Costner as) Garrison and Sutherland. I feel that was not a violation of the spirit of the truth, because Garrison also met a Deep Throat type named Richard Case Nagell, who claimed to be a CIA agent and made Jim aware of a much larger scenario than the microcosm in New Orleans.”

Another melange involves Garrison’s closing argument in the Shaw trial, which includes much of the actual argument from the trial’s transcript, but half of which was written by Stone to get in the points, he says, learned since that time.

“I wanted to make it better, to bring up the man’s whole life into the summation about his feelings and my feelings, which crossed in there.

“The dramatist takes license to composite events and characters into a condensed space; moving fact around. For example, I take three homosexual characters who spotted Oswald with Ferrie and Shaw and made them into one character played by Kevin Bacon. This is hardly unusual for a dramatist; ‘Killing Fields,’ ‘Reds’ and ‘Missing’ come to mind as elastic but accurate interpretations of our history. I’m not hiding what I’m doing; we’re putting out a screenplay which is highly footnoted as to our choices and sources so it can be studied and picked apart.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember who’s who when you’re finished with the movie. You become part of the character, but I will never regret having visited Jim Garrison’s soul; it made me a better man. How do you like that quote? It will really get the haters out.”

Most of the critics attacking Garrison nevertheless seem to share Stone and Garrison’s view that there was more than one gunman and that the Warren Commission was therefore wrong. Stone, who has often been accused of using a sledgehammer when a scalpel will do, this time carves out detail after mysterious detail to rebut the single-assassin theory.

The improbable angle of fire from the book depository. The “magic bullet” said by the Warren Commission to have hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally in three separate places. Oswald’s cheap Italian rifle, incapable of getting off the requisite accurate rounds. Mysterious deaths. Contradictory sights. Witnesses the Warren Commission refused to question.

Costner says it was the “magic bullet” that turned him against the lone assassin conclusion of the Warren Commission. It will likely have the same effect on many viewers of this movie, not because of any new facts, but as a tribute to Stone’s skill as an agitprop filmmaker. Employing the skills of the cinematic technician, he uses the Zapruder film to fullest advantage to establish that Kennedy and Gov. Connally were shot no more than 1.6 seconds apart.

The Warren Commission and virtually everyone else accepts that Oswald’s rifle could not have fired twice in that time period. How they solved the problem is described by Costner in a courtroom presentation. The commission concluded that a single bullet found on a stretcher at the hospital had entered the President’s back and exited through the front of his throat and then proceeded to enter Connally behind his right armpit, coming out in the front of his chest, breaking a rib and then entering and breaking his right wrist, exiting and smashing into the governor’s left thigh. Most miraculous of all, the bullet emerged virtually unscathed. This explanation was accepted by the Warren Commission despite FBI tests shooting similar bullets into human cadavers and animals that resulted in major distortions of the bullets.

This and other evidence led the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 to conclude after a two-year investigation that “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” Most of Stone’s critics seem to also believe that there was more than one killer, as do most Americans. That suspicion has been largely latent in the public psyche, but if Stone has his way it may bubble up to the surface.

“I just want to get the people to smell a rat. I want people to be moved by it and have their consciousness shifted. I want a movie that works. All the words in the world don’t add up to jack if the movies don’t work--a movie is a seat-of-the-pant experience.”

At the film’s conclusion, the fact that many of the government’s records on the assassination have been sealed until the year 2029 is an end title on the screen. If the audience leaves the theater with an apprehensive and questioning buzz and heightened suspicion of official truth, why blame Oliver Stone?

It’s not Vietnam, Salvador or even Dealey Plaza in Dallas, just the dubbing stage at Skywalker Sound in Santa Monica. But Oliver Stone is once again at war.

“Call me a guerrilla historian,” Stone says, munching a turkey sandwich while the last frame of the famous Zapruder 8-millimeter “home movie” showing President John F. Kennedy getting his head blown off plays over and over on the screening room wall. Stone has been holed up for 18-hour days editing his film “JFK” while fighting a rear-guard action against the intense criticism his new and most provocative film has engendered, sight unseen.

His critics resent the already controversial director poaching on the sacred land of the Kennedy assassination, rearranging the relics and breathing life into the ghosts. Some don’t like his attacks on the Warren Commission’s Lee Harvey Oswald-did-it-alone conclusion. Others detest his portraying former New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison, who brought the only case to trial in the Kennedy assassination, as a hero played by Kevin Costner. And the movie’s larger-than-life thesis blaming the assassination on a secret parallel government nested in the military-industrial complex strikes some as bizarre.

Stone is alternately perplexed and angry over the critical articles and columns, which have made a free-fire zone around his movie before it finished shooting. Punching holes in his adversaries’ arguments with his rat-a-tat of ready-to-fire facts, he is apprehensive, combative and can even appear hurt. Then he suddenly flashes an impish grin and one senses he’s having a ball. With his unruly hair, still boyish good looks and eight movies and three Academy Awards under his belt, Stone at 45 evidences the outrage lightly laced with glee of one who is sitting just where he belongs.

But whatever the criticism, the film has to get done, and tossing the sandwich, Stone turns his jack-rabbit intensity back to perfectly matching sound with picture and overcoming other obstacles to getting a film done two weeks before it opens.

The Zapruder frame, taken by an amateur photographer present at the assassination, enlarged in frightening detail, is crucial to Stone’s cinematic indictment of the official Warren Commission Report. In the final scenes of the movie, Kevin Costner uses it to illustrate how the bullet forced the President’s head “back and to the left,” indicating the fatal shot came from somewhere other than where Oswald was said to be standing.

With each shot fired at the President, Stone’s head snaps involuntarily. This may be the movies, and the foreign distributors showing up for screenings remind one daily of the high financial stakes for the $40-million Warner Bros. picture (with another $15 million for promotion), but there’s no question that for Stone, “JFK” was--and is--a cause.

In an industry built on recycling pleasing myths into profit, Stone insists on doing it the hard way. His are counter-myths. Stone, a twice wounded Vietnam veteran, views “JFK” as digging deeper into what he sees as the origins of that war and nothing less than “a battle over the meaning of my generation with the likes of Dan Quayle, a battle between official mythology and disturbing truth.”

With his slept-in sports jacket and sense of easily outraged idealism, the always irreverent Stone bears the unmistakable marks of the Kennedy generation. It is not that either he or his movie exaggerate the accomplishments of the brief Kennedy presidency. Rather, like many of his generation, Stone persists on mourning an innocence lost.

The assumption of “JFK” is a forgiving one: That for Kennedy, the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and dispatching the first troops to Vietnam the same year, were merely blunders on an otherwise noble course, and he quickly recognized the error of his ways. After the October, 1962, missile crisis, Kennedy reneged on his pledge to support another invasion of Cuba, and just before his death he had signed an order withdrawing 1,000 troops from Vietnam.

Stone’s contention is that the true Kennedy is the man who agreed to a nuclear test ban treaty and initiated the Alliance for Progress economic aid program, and that hard-liners within the government and military were alarmed by this evidence of his dovishness.

The official version of Kennedy’s assassination is this: He was fatally shot Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through downtown Dallas by a lone gunman stationed at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. Shortly after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the depository who fled the building moments after the shooting, was arrested and charged with the murder of Kennedy and a Dallas policeman. Oswald denied both murders under questioning; two days later, as he was being transferred from the city jail to county jail, he was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

A special presidential commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren investigated the shooting, and on Sept. 24, 1964, issued a report that stated Oswald was the lone assassin.

But “JFK” finds many candidates for an assassination team in the ranks of disillusioned Cubans and the American military-industrial complex. Kennedy was succeeded by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is portrayed in the film as the servant of the economic interests and jingoistic parties that benefited from the vast escalation of the Vietnam War.

Of course, an Oliver Stone movie wouldn’t be merely an entertaining commercial venture, even though it stars Costner as Garrison. Garrison was sharply criticized for linking New Orleans merchant Clay Shaw to the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans and others in a far-ranging conspiracy to kill the President--a conspiracy that he could not prove in court.

But Garrison was also a rebel hero for some, making him a natural subject for Stone, who with movies like “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “The Doors,” has fought a battle for the soul of the ‘60s. Stone is compelled by what he self-mockingly terms a “demon counter-cultural drive” to stick his cameras into the most sensitive national wound, attempt to solve the most puzzling of mysteries, champion a widely discredited lawman and take on the CIA, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs, L.B.J., the Mafia and the Washington Post. Say what you will about Stone, he does not go gently into the success of the Hollywood night.

“So I’ve created a counter-myth to the official one--is that so bad?” he asks, with one of his trademark sucker questions designed to throw a challenger off guard. No, it’s just unusual for the business he’s in, and he knows that. This is not some low-budget rebel film like Costa-Gavras’ “Z” or his own “Salvador,” which he often brings up. This is the high-stakes holiday season, make-it-on-the-first-weekend crap game.

It’s understandable why Stone would make provocative political films, given his past experiences recounted in “Platoon” and in numerous interviews. But why would Warner Bros., united in a partnership with Time-Life, bankroll this excoriating view of the American Establishment? Is this a ruling-class death wish? Is it, as Stone puts it only half joking, that “the Establishment is obviously cracking and fissuring”?

The answer can be sought in a dinner meeting two years ago at The Grill restaurant in Beverly Hills with Stone, his Creative Artists Agency agent Paula Wagner, and the three top executives from Warner Bros.--President and Chief Operating Officer Terry Semel, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Bob Daly and Bill Gerber, a Warner production executive--who had long been interested in Stone’s work.

The ambience of that meeting marks the distance that Hollywood has traveled from the days when it was run by conservative moguls who held all the cards. What has emerged in its place, if Stone’s experience is a guide, is a less ideological and more competitive Hollywood capitalism focused more purely on making a buck. It is also a market in which successful artists, no matter their politics, abetted by the powerful agencies that represent them, can have considerable clout.

Stone was a hot director, and Warners had been courting him for some time to make a movie about Howard Hughes. That effort came to naught because Warren Beatty controlled the rights. Stone told the Warners execs he had “quietly optioned” two books on an even more important mystery. Stone, who had won an Academy Award for the screenplay for “Midnight Express,” wanted to write a script about the Kennedy assassination.

One of the books Stone optioned was “On the Trail of the Assassins” by Jim Garrison, published in 1988 by Sheridan Square Press and barely reviewed. It was a revision of an earlier book by Garrison, then a Louisiana Appellate Court Justice, in defense of his earlier case charging a New Orleans-based conspiracy that included Clay Shaw, an international merchant. The other book was Jim Marrs’ compendium, “Crossfire--The Plot That Killed Kennedy,” which covers the gamut of Kennedy assassination theories.

“My immediate reaction was ‘Wow! What a powerful and great idea for a movie,’ ” said Warners’ Semel. “Any time the assassination had come up in the last 30 years, everyone seemed to feel that we didn’t get the whole story.”

But could Stone attract top-drawing actors to the project? It helped that Stone was accompanied by Wagner of CAA. Stone has had a close working relationship with Wagner since 1985, when she helped put his movie “Salvador” together. At that time, she secured the services of James Woods, who was also represented by her agency. She would subsequently get Stone together with CAA clients Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe for “Platoon,” Michael Douglas for “Wall Street,” Tom Cruise for “Born” and Val Kilmer, who starred in “The Doors.” “So,” Stone laughs, “I guess Paula and I have a relationship.”

In short, Stone came to the meeting holding quite a few of those cards that would have been solidly in the hands of the studio in the old days. The only one he was missing--which they had--was the money. But he didn’t think that was a major obstacle with this property and was confident of successfully shopping it around.

Stone says that “better deals could have been made in the international market” but that he preferred selling the whole thing to Warners because “I didn’t want the script going all over the world to be bid on and read. I knew the material was dangerous and I wanted one entity to finance the whole thing and the history of Warner Bros., given Terry Semel’s record of political films, was my first choice.”

Warner Bros. under Semel produced “All the President’s Men,” “The Parallax View” and “The Killing Fields.”

Dinner that night around a table in the front room of The Grill was “like a bunch of guys sitting around in Las Vegas saying, ‘Hey, I want to build this thing and people will come,’ ” Stone says. “I told them I wanted ‘JFK’ to be a movie about the problem of covert parallel government in this country and deep political corruption. Here’s the story. I laid it out in 15, 20 minutes. They were all ears. I said I want to tell the story as it was first understood in 1963 and then tell it over and over so it unravels and by the end you see it in a totally different light.”

Semel remembers Stone saying “lots of things like ‘Are you concerned politically? Would it affect your company? Are there negative reasons why you wouldn’t do it?’ My immediate reaction was ‘No, we should do it.’ If it’s entertaining and it’s intriguing, a great murder mystery about something we all cared about and grew up thinking about, why not? To me, it took two minutes to be totally ensconced in the whole idea.”

By the time cappuccino was served, they had a handshake deal. The details took months of bargaining to work out, but the commitment to a film for around $20 million was made and Stone knew “my movie had a home.” CAA client Costner was signed to play Garrison in January, 1991, (two months before Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” swept the Academy Awards). The budget doubled to $41 million when Arnon Milchan, an Israeli representing German and French money, became executive producer, and Stone was able to afford an impressive cast of supporting actors as well.

The presence of Joe Pesci, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Donald Sutherland, Jack Lemmon and the others was important to Stone’s strategy: “The supporting cast provides a map of the American psyche; familiar comfortable faces that walk you through a winding path in the dark woods. Warners thought it was too costly to have them but those actors all waived their normal fees to help the picture.”

Despite rumors that Mel Gibson and others were candidates to play Garrison, Stone insists that Costner was his preferred choice. “It helped that (CAA President) Mike Ovitz was a strong fan of the movie,” Stone says, and was strongly urging Costner, his client, to be in it. An obstacle was the actor’s promise to his wife that he would take a year off from work. But, as Costner says, “after she read the book, she said, ‘You have to do it.’ ”

Costner, who pointed out he comes from a conservative Republican background, researched the material carefully before agreeing to play Garrison. “I met with his critics as well as people on the street who still love him. He’s a complex character and both Oliver and I wanted him played that way,” says Costner, who credits Stone with exposing him to a full range of Garrison’s critics.

Stone adds: “I wanted Costner to get both sides, to witness the hatred and extremism that Jim engenders and as an actor to look into the eyes of his enemies and know what he was up against back then. These were tough people and they’d come in a parade in front of Costner with their New Orleans accent saying that Jim’s a snake--that he liked boys and was angry that Shaw stole his lover and a lot worse.

“Kevin read the script several times, saw back-up material and it was not easy for him to do. Kevin took some chances--he’s going to make some enemies with this movie but I’m proud of him.” Stone feels signing Costner was a crucial break for the film and not just because of the actor’s box-office appeal. “Kevin was the perfect choice for Jim Garrison because he reminds me of those Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart qualities--a moral simplicity and a quiet understatement. He listens well. He anchors the movie in a very strong way. He guides you through it because you empathize with him and his discoveries become yours. Through Kevin playing Jim you get on the 50-yard line for the Kennedy assassination.”

But while Costner is quintessentially believable, the real-life character he plays, Garrison, is not. Flamboyant, ambitious, carousing and quick of mouth, Garrison burst into the national media with a series of wild charges. When he brought Clay Shaw to trial in March, 1967, on charges of conspiracy to kill Kennedy, after many delays, two years later a jury took only an hour to declare Shaw innocent.

Garrison picked up enemies in the news media along the way that have now risen in outrage at the thought that, decades later, Stone has cast this fellow in a heroic role.

“Dallas in Wonderland: How Oliver Stone’s Version of the Kennedy Assassination Exploits the Edge of Paranoia” is how the Washington Post headlined a piece by its national security correspondent, George Lardner, who had crossed swords with Garrison while covering the original trial. Lardner hadn’t seen the movie but, basing his criticisms on an unauthorized early draft of the script, proceeded to challenge what he considers “the absurdities and palpable untruths in Garrison’s book and Stone’s rendition of it.”

Lardner points out that Garrison lost his case linking New Orleans merchant Shaw to an assassination conspiracy and therefore might be presumed to have defamed an innocent man. He adds that Garrison embellished a weak case by picking on the man’s homosexual relations to prove guilt by possible association.

Not so, says Stone, who documents Shaw’s connection with the CIA, which had been denied on the stand, and then goes on to provide photographs and eyewitness accounts linking Shaw to the assassination. “He was in the CIA according to (CIA director) Richard Helms, spotted by numerous witnesses with Lee Oswald and David Ferrie (the man Garrison thought was the getaway pilot for the Dallas assassins), whom he denied knowing. So don’t give me this jive about his being an innocent man. He was a perjurer at the very least.”

He adds that members of the jury when interviewed said they did believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

It is true that the case against Shaw was weak. The movie itself contains powerful voices, including that of Sissy Spacek, playing Garrison’s long-suffering and eventually divorced wife, arguing persuasively at one point in the movie that Shaw’s rights are being violated in a witch hunt. The defection of a key Garrison staffer, shown in the movie, is supported by a strong criticism detailing the failure of the enterprise.

“Even paranoids have enemies,” Stone answers, decrying the fact that the Washington Post’s Lardner “has not seen the movie and is unconscionable in criticizing a work in progress, including scenes in the early script that are not even in the movie.”

But Lardner was only one critic. In an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, former Garrison researcher Tom Bethell, who concedes that he turned over Garrison’s witness list to the Shaw defense team, says “many students of the assassination are concerned that glamorizing someone as reckless as Garrison might undermine legitimate skepticism about the official findings.” Time magazine observed that “Garrison is considered somewhere near the far-out fringe of conspiracy theorists, but Stone appears to have bought his vision virtually wholesale.”

On the other hand, Semel of Warner Bros., who read Garrison’s book at Stone’s suggestion, was “blown away by the fact that clearly something else happened” than the Warren Commission reported.

“If people are upset or uptight about the fact that they don’t agree with some of the premises of the movie, I think that’s one of the great things about our country,” says Semel. “We are allowed to express all these things. We are presenting possible scenarios that many of us feel in our gut have real threads of possibility.”

Stone himself is even more sympathetic to Garrison than the movie he has made. In interviews, he defends Garrison’s “courage” in bringing the indictments, points out that Garrison went to trial only after a three-judge panel and a grand jury said he had sufficient evidence and that Garrison was thwarted at every turn in his investigation by much of the American legal and political Establishment. “His subpoena against (CIA Director) Allen Dulles, Charles Cabel (Dulles’ deputy) and Richard Helms (who succeeded Dulles as CIA director) were all quashed, four governors in four different states would not honor his extradition requests, his files were copied and passed on to the defense by several traitors on his staff and his office was tapped. He was also bribed with a federal judgeship and his witnesses were threatened, cajoled and also bribed.”

But the movie is compelling not because it makes the case against Shaw or for Garrison but because it presents in exhausting detail the conflicting accounts that indicate that something very different from the official version happened. We and Garrison still are not sure what it proves, except that the Warren Commission got it wrong.

“No one really knows exactly what happened, who did it or how,” Stone concedes, “but we have some pretty good clues and we reach some conclusions in the movie that I hope will shape a counter- myth to the one the Warren Commission put out that will exist in the minds of the next generation. Mythology is not a child’s fairy tale; it’s a true inner meaning of an event.”

But why hang a plausible case against the Warren Commission on the controversial theories of Garrison--why did Stone pick this book for his “JFK”? Stone had not thought much about the assassination until 1988, when the Garrison book was pressed upon him by Ellen Ray, publisher of Covert Action Information Bulletin, which delights in exposing the CIA, and publisher of the book, on a creaky elevator when they met by chance, or so it seems, in Havana’s old Nacional Hotel. Stone was in Cuba to accept a Latin American Film Festival award for “Salvador” from Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Stone at first thought Ray was “just another sandal-wearing advocate of a cause,” but he took the book with him to the Philippines, where he was completing shots for “Born on the Fourth of July.” “It was a great gumshoe story. This pistol whipping occurs on the night of (Nov.) 22 on a rainy night in which this guy, Jack Martin (an FBI informant), gets his skull laid open by his boss, Guy Banister, (a former FBI bureau chief) and out of that little Raymond Chandler kind of incident, Garrison spins this tale out with international intrigue--a hell of a trail. As a dramatist, that excited me.”

After also buying rights to the Jim Marrs book, Stone teamed up with Zachary Sklar, the editor of Garrison’s book, to write a script based on the books and a massive amount of other information gathered by Jane Rusconi, a recent Yale graduate he had hired as a researcher. The material, gathered over two years, “allowed me to use Garrison as a vehicle for a larger perspective than was available to him in 1967-69.”

The “use” of Garrison and the other real-life characters in this docudrama raises a host of questions about a dramatist’s use of history. Stone thinks it is the dramatist’s right to form composite characters as well as the things they say.

Most startling is the character called Mr. X, played by Donald Sutherland, whom Garrison meets on a park bench in Washington and who spells out the grand theory of the CIA and military intelligence as a secret government. Garrison did meet some potential witnesses on park benches but not Mr. X, who in real life is Fletcher Prouty, a former aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Stone met Prouty in Washington while he was writing the script. “We took the liberty of having Garrison meet the X character because I met X, who stunned me with his revelations, and I incorporated what he told me into a meeting between (Costner as) Garrison and Sutherland. I feel that was not a violation of the spirit of the truth, because Garrison also met a Deep Throat type named Richard Case Nagell, who claimed to be a CIA agent and made Jim aware of a much larger scenario than the microcosm in New Orleans.”

Another melange involves Garrison’s closing argument in the Shaw trial, which includes much of the actual argument from the trial’s transcript, but half of which was written by Stone to get in the points, he says, learned since that time.

“I wanted to make it better, to bring up the man’s whole life into the summation about his feelings and my feelings, which crossed in there.

“The dramatist takes license to composite events and characters into a condensed space; moving fact around. For example, I take three homosexual characters who spotted Oswald with Ferrie and Shaw and made them into one character played by Kevin Bacon. This is hardly unusual for a dramatist; ‘Killing Fields,’ ‘Reds’ and ‘Missing’ come to mind as elastic but accurate interpretations of our history. I’m not hiding what I’m doing; we’re putting out a screenplay which is highly footnoted as to our choices and sources so it can be studied and picked apart.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember who’s who when you’re finished with the movie. You become part of the character, but I will never regret having visited Jim Garrison’s soul; it made me a better man. How do you like that quote? It will really get the haters out.”

Most of the critics attacking Garrison nevertheless seem to share Stone and Garrison’s view that there was more than one gunman and that the Warren Commission was therefore wrong. Stone, who has often been accused of using a sledgehammer when a scalpel will do, this time carves out detail after mysterious detail to rebut the single-assassin theory.

The improbable angle of fire from the book depository. The “magic bullet” said by the Warren Commission to have hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally in three separate places. Oswald’s cheap Italian rifle, incapable of getting off the requisite accurate rounds. Mysterious deaths. Contradictory sights. Witnesses the Warren Commission refused to question.

Costner says it was the “magic bullet” that turned him against the lone assassin conclusion of the Warren Commission. It will likely have the same effect on many viewers of this movie, not because of any new facts, but as a tribute to Stone’s skill as an agitprop filmmaker. Employing the skills of the cinematic technician, he uses the Zapruder film to fullest advantage to establish that Kennedy and Gov. Connally were shot no more than 1.6 seconds apart.

The Warren Commission and virtually everyone else accepts that Oswald’s rifle could not have fired twice in that time period. How they solved the problem is described by Costner in a courtroom presentation. The commission concluded that a single bullet found on a stretcher at the hospital had entered the President’s back and exited through the front of his throat and then proceeded to enter Connally behind his right armpit, coming out in the front of his chest, breaking a rib and then entering and breaking his right wrist, exiting and smashing into the governor’s left thigh. Most miraculous of all, the bullet emerged virtually unscathed. This explanation was accepted by the Warren Commission despite FBI tests shooting similar bullets into human cadavers and animals that resulted in major distortions of the bullets.

This and other evidence led the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 to conclude after a two-year investigation that “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” Most of Stone’s critics seem to also believe that there was more than one killer, as do most Americans. That suspicion has been largely latent in the public psyche, but if Stone has his way it may bubble up to the surface.

“I just want to get the people to smell a rat. I want people to be moved by it and have their consciousness shifted. I want a movie that works. All the words in the world don’t add up to jack if the movies don’t work--a movie is a seat-of-the-pant experience.”

At the film’s conclusion, the fact that many of the government’s records on the assassination have been sealed until the year 2029 is an end title on the screen. If the audience leaves the theater with an apprehensive and questioning buzz and heightened suspicion of official truth, why blame Oliver Stone?

-Robert Scheer, "Oliver Stone Builds His Own Myths," The Los Angeles Times, Dec 15 1991

[back-and-totheleft]

"I don't like bullies"

Few American filmmakers have careers as wild and successful as three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone. And even fewer do it on their own terms as Stone did — forging an unapologetically left-wing cinema right in the heart of Reagan-Bush-Clinton Hollywood.

Now that cinematic scourge of the powers that be has a new memoir out. Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game recounts the writer-director’s life and career, from Stone’s childhood in New York City up through his classic and controversial work in Hollywood in the mid-1980s. And for the first time ever, Stone delves into his personal experiences as a combat soldier in Vietnam, out of which exploded movies that joined the ranks of the silver screen’s greatest antiwar masterpieces.

In 1979, he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express, his first of three Academy Awards. But it was in 1986 — the year Stone turned forty and where his memoir ends — that the filmmaker truly came into his own as an auteur. It was the year Stone directed two of his own original screenplays, Salvador (co-written by Richard Boyle) and Platoon. The scripts for both films were nominated for Academy Awards in the same year, but Stone instead won the Oscar for Best Director for Platoon, based largely on his own experiences as an infantryman in the Vietnam War.

As the Purple Heart winner observes in his memoir, Platoon — which also won the Best Picture Oscar — had “power, vitality, originality, and something not seen often in American film . . . a radical and dramatic political commitment reminiscent of some young playwright of the 1930s or 1940s, a Clifford Odets or an Arthur Miller, bursting to tell a truth in a blunt, dynamic way.”

Jacobin contributor Ed Rampell recently spoke with Stone to discuss Fidel Castro, Edward Snowden, Vietnam War movies, and his cinematic legacy.

ED RAMPELL

Scarface opens with newsclips about the Mariel boatlift that brought thousands of Cubans to America, including shots of Fidel Castro, whom Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, repeatedly disparages. This seems to prefigure your documentaries about Fidel, 2003’s Comandante and 2012’s Castro in Winter, plus 2009’s South of the Border.

OLIVER STONE

And there’s Looking for Fidel in 2004. You missed that one! [Laughs.]

ED RAMPELL

What do you think about Fidel?

OLIVER STONE

Listen, what I wrote in the screenplay for Scarface are not my views of Fidel. The only way you could make it in Miami, which is a highly right-wing, anti-Castro society — as you know, [Florida’s] Senator Marco Rubio is one of the biggest war hawks that we have — so, at that time, especially in 1980, my god, the hatred for the Castro experiment was extremist. And I don’t share at all those views.

On the contrary, I think that Castro brought great change to Latin America. He’s a huge symbol of reform — land reform, and all ways of reform. And, of course, he’s always attacked, and we still have an embargo from those years. It is insane. The unpopularity from the people of the world — the world community has condemned that embargo at the UN for years now. No one in the United States seems to hear it, to pay attention. I think we have two or three allies that vote with us [at the United Nations] every year on that embargo.

[As far as perceptions of Cuba,] there are a lot of elites who come to this country who are corrupt and running away from revolutions in their own countries. Whether it be Vietnam or Cuba . . . many of them become terrorists in their own right and try to go back and screw their own countries.

ED RAMPELL

In making and releasing Castro documentaries did you encounter any censorship issues from Cubans or Americans?

OLIVER STONE

Yes, I did. Comandante was about to air on HBO, and they took it off, without even telling me. They did it abruptly, in response to the Cuban extremist right-wing letters that they said came in promising to cancel — it was cancel culture — their subscriptions to HBO. There was a huge influx of that, they said. Nobody had seen the film, except at the Sundance Festival, where it had been shown a month before. It went very well, but the word got out that it allowed Castro to speak. It wasn’t taking editorial sides at all; it was simply a platform where I interviewed him for several days, and he gave a lot of interesting comments. He gave Castro’s Cuban Revolution side of the argument, which we never hear here.

ED RAMPELL

Why do you often take the side of underdogs who are sometimes unpopular in the United States, like Castro and Edward Snowden?

OLIVER STONE

Because that’s my nature. I don’t like bullies. I don’t like people to be bullied by governments and others. I’ve always been like that. I feel it strongly, I don’t know why. I think a lot of people are like me, too. I just don’t think it’s fair. When something’s not fair, it brings out some gene in me that wants to fight.

ED RAMPELL

In your 2009 documentary South of the Border, one of the Latin American leaders you cover is Hugo Chavez. What do you want to say about Chavez?

OLIVER STONE

He got 70 percent of the people in Venezuela out of extreme poverty. He gave them an education, he gave them hope, he gave them a sense of participation in the governance, he gave them a safety net — none of which they had before. Venezuela was one of the poorest, worst-run countries in South America. By example, he of course influenced so many other countries to change. Under him, there was a tide of change. You saw it in the movie — I visited some six or seven other presidents in different countries to show the influence that he had. It’s like Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Of course, the United States is trying to turn back the tide, and it has effectively done so in some of those countries. As in Roosevelt’s New Deal, the people will never be the same again. They were raised up by Roosevelt and Chavez and these other presidents.

ED RAMPELL

Why did it take so long for films about the Vietnam War to find an audience in America?

OLIVER STONE

They’d seen some movies before my movies, which were the Sylvester Stallone version [the Rambo franchise] and the Chuck Norris [the Missing in Action] version. There was The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Coming Home (1978). Coming Home was very realistic but didn’t do very well. Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter were very successful but at the same time not very realistic. They were strong, metaphoric films. The other films that were notable were jingoistic and garbage.

ED RAMPELL

In the push to get Vietnam on the screen, did it have unintended consequences in depicting the war as a kind of “brutal” coming-of-age cinematic tradition, pushing the politics and the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese to the side in favor of focusing on American GIs’ struggles?

OLIVER STONE

Yeah, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, they do not take into account the Vietnamese point of view. I think I did in Platoon — there was a big issue about killing villagers told from that point of view. The same issue appears in Born on the Fourth of July. But in Heaven & Earth, I go fully into the Vietnamese point of view. There’s a Vietnamese heroine. But the film did not do well in this country. I think it’s one of my best films. It’s very emotional. The story of a woman, Le Ly Hayslip — she ended up experiencing almost everything, like being on both sides, and finally ending up in America, married to an American, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who brought his problems home.

ED RAMPELL

In Chasing the Light you mention Costa-Gavras a lot. Do you think of yourself as the American Costa-Gavras?

OLIVER STONE

Well, I admire him greatly. Z (1969) was one of the most evocative films for me at film school. It told me this could be done, this kind of editing could be effective on the screen. He showed me the way. His movie, if you look closely, in some ways has a structure that resembles JFK (1991). He came to our school, one of the highlights of my years there at NYU. I think Missing (1982), too, was a very good film, very effective. But it didn’t make a big impact either. All films about Latin America have been ignored, haven’t had a big success. But Costa-Gavras is certainly a hero, yeah.

ED RAMPELL

Did you always have such political aims with your films?

OLIVER STONE

No. I always had a political bone in my body because my father talked about it. Learning the craft of film — learning how to write screenplays, drama, that’s really crucial stuff. For me, that’s really what my education was about. I made two horror films [1974’s low-budget Seizure, 1981’s The Hand starring Michael Caine], and then I wrote Midnight Express, Scarface, Year of the Dragon. I was a screenwriter and wanted to be a director. But it wasn’t until Salvador and Platoon — those two back-to-back — that I really felt like a writer-director.

But that was not my intention. Platoon was not about politics — it was just about showing the day-to-day drama of what it’s like. Same thing with Salvador. It does have a scene where he [James Woods’s character Richard Boyle] preaches at the CIA. I agree. But he’s an interesting journalist who’s kind of nuts. You approach the story from a Hunter Thompson point of view, not a political point of view.

Hey, I’ve tried in all of my films, including JFK, to keep it entertaining, keep it moving, keep it tense — those are my objectives. If we come to any kind of political skeleton, it should be coming out of the story, not imposed on the story.

-"Filmmaker Oliver Stone Talks to Jacobin About His Life and Politics," Jacobin, Sept 25 2020

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He Communicated with Forces that Were Not in the Norm: Oliver Stone on Directing Val Kilmer

Val Kilmer died last week of pneumonia after a long struggle against the cancer that took his voice. He left behind an extraordinary body of work and a reputation for being a difficult, sometimes volatile performer. Kilmer attempted to address both facets of the legend in “Val,” a documentary-apologia that sanded off a few of the actor’s rough edges but shone a spotlight on others.

Writer-director Oliver Stone might have been the director who was most on Kilmer’s wavelength. Their first pairing was 1991’s “The Doors,” in which Kilmer acted and sometimes sang the role of Doors frontman Jim Morrison, opposite Meg Ryan as Morrison’s wife Pamela. Thirteen years later came “Alexander,” Stone’s biopic of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great; Kilmer played King Philip opposite Colin Farrell as his son Alexander and Angelina Jolie as Olympias, Alexander’s mom (and the ex who hates Philip’s guts). Both Kilmer performances are raw, earthy, emotional, audacious, and to some viewers’ eyes, a bit too much to take (though others think them brilliantly in tune with the films).

I spoke to Stone about the qualities in Kilmer that led to his being cast in both roles, as well as Kilmer’s unconventional, sometimes antisocial, occasionally worse-than-that approach to building a character, which belatedly came to light a few years ago when an actress who had auditioned for “The Doors” in 1990 accused Kilmer of injuring her during an audition. “His personality was not easy to get along with,” Stone told me. “Creative people are often self-involved, and there was a fair amount of stuff you’d expect to see from an eccentric young actor in Hollywood—although, even by those standards, Val was pretty out there.”

How did your paths cross?

He was a very eccentric individual, and I had a very eccentric introduction to him. He did a strange audition for [the role of Sgt. Elias in “Platoon]”, taped it himself and sent it in, and it was pretty wacko—all kinds of strange postures and poses and dialogue of his own invention. I can’t really remember too much about it, but I would have watched it in probably 1984, right before the movie was made.

Did you follow his career prior to hiring him for “The Doors”?

Oh, yeah. I very much liked “Top Secret!” and he was great in it. And I loved the other one he made that was so funny: “Real Genius,” was that the title?

You saw “Real Genius”?

Oh, yeah! I liked him in it. He was a very good actor. When he came in for “The Doors,” the first question was whether I could do it, meaning, whether I could handle him. Then it came down to the question of his voice. Could he play Jim Morrison as a singer? I mean, we could have used all of Morrison [for the singing portions of the movie], but with Val, we knew we wouldn’t have to. The actor playing Morrison didn’t have to have a singing voice, but really, at the end of the day, we knew it would have been a hell of a better arrangement to have someone with a voice, and Val had a very good voice. An excellent voice. I put him with Paul Rothschild, who was the real life producer of Jim Morrison, and they did some work together and came in, and we recorded a lot of the songs. Val was very impressive. I would say that in the end, he was the only choice.

Who were some other actors you were looking at?

There were a couple of others. There was a group that was around at that time—I don’t remember their name—who were the imitators. You know, they would come out to clubs and play The Doors and be The Doors, you know? The guy doing Morrison was not bad. He could sing, but he wasn’t as good an actor as Val, by far. And the other fellow was Jason Patric, who really started to hate me because I put him through a couple of [exercises]. He didn’t get the role. You know, these were all pretty young guys, they were all competitive, and there was a lot of volatility to their emotions, so I don’t think Jason took it well.

Was Val considered problematic or difficult to work with at that time?

He was considered by many people to be, I guess, an asshole, you know? But I liked him. He was rocky. He was stormy. Tumultuous.

I heard about that as well. During the making of “The Island of Dr. Moreau” in 1994, there were stories. He was said to have burned a cameraman’s sideburn with a cigarette. Did stuff like that happen during the shooting of The Doors?

No. But we got into trouble once later, years later, when these actresses were calling out [harassment and mistreatment] during #MeToo, and one of these women made accusations that were insane about us.

[This is referring to the actress Caitlin O’Heaney, who auditioned for Pamela Morrison, and told Buzzfeed that during a performance of a domestic argument scene, Kilmer punched her and then threw her to the ground. The matter was settled out of court with an NDA attached.]

I remember the casting director, Risa Bramon Garcia, completely dealt with it. [Garcia told Buzzfeed that the actress had “a very extreme reaction to a situation that to me was not extreme at all.”] But there was all this kind of nonsense about how I was the director and he was the actor and I should have controlled it. Risa dealt with it, but the accusations hung in the air. It was bullshit. Val was just annoying, he had an edge to him, and he played it in rehearsal to the edge, and that was what I needed from the role. Val was a very strange guy in the sense that he communicated with forces that were not in the norm. And he alienated [people] during the casting process. He alienated certain actresses, But we [continued to audition] because we had to find a Pamela Morrison, and then we had to find Kathleen Quinlan’s character [named Patricia Kennealy after the journalist who had an affair with Morrison and married him in a private ceremony, although Stone later said the character was a composite of several people], and there were other roles that were, you know….We had sex acts in the story!

What other delayed fallout came out of the “Doors” auditions?

I remember it was Melissa Gilbert who had the accusations about her audition, right? She was the head of the Screen Actors Guild. [Gilbert accused Stone of humiliating her during her audition as payback for a perceived social slight elsewhere.] It was all bullshit. Nothing like that happened. And the girls [who auditioned]—some of them, you know—they understood that it was a very risque movie for its time. Kathleen Quinlan, I have to say, was mature, and handled it the best of all, because she had some of the toughest scenes with him, if you remember.

Yes—she and Kilmer have a five-minute nude scene where they’re having simulated sex and doing drugs and running and dancing around.

Meg Ryan dealt with it very well. That was a challenging role for her, as Pamela. She contributed a lot, and [critically] she was very underrated compared to Val in his role.

You know, I didn’t know Val was so problematic until I started working with him. I was challenged by him. He was moody. Very moody. But the results are on film. It was an exhausting performance for him. You have to sing, really sing, for hours and be very physical on the stage. And Val put so much into his acting, too. It wasn’t like we were making any extra demands on him and being unreasonable. We weren’t doing a David Fincher and having him do fifty takes of something. But it was an extremely wearying process and he would get very tired. And he was a young man!

He’d turned thirty a little while before shooting.

He would get so tired playing Jim that he couldn’t come out of the trailer.

What was the relationship like after “The Doors”?

We finished the movie on a poor note. He did a great job, but he was not happy with me or himself, and he was very troubled in many ways. He was not grateful. He was not grateful to have [gotten] the role. And although he became allies in making the movie, at the end of the movie, he hurt me by saying things to me that were not kind. It was a bitter experience in a sense, you know: “Goodbye.” “Go to hell.” That kind of thing. He didn’t say very nice things to me because he didn’t like me in the end.

The movie did not perform as expected at the box office. It was long, and it was a dark movie. I’d written the script that way: it was going to the dark side. Remember, that was really what Jim was about.

But the years went by, and the movie was met with tremendous enthusiasm. Everyone liked Val’s performance more than they liked the movie! And he got tremendous credit for it. And he gets back in touch with me, and he just tells me how much he likes working with me. And I guess he’d had some reversals of fortune? Then I wanted Val.

For “Alexander”?

That’s right. I wanted Val to play the father, Philip. I had a hunch that he would be good for it, and he did it perfectly. He did it really well! I thought he was a very grand Philip. And it’s funny because the conventional choice would have been Liam Neeson, who was available and with whom we’d had a good meeting.

He probably would have been very comfortable in that role, having played so many fathers and mentors.

Yes! But we just saw something, I thought, only in Val that excited me. Although he was closer in age to Colin [Farrell] than to Liam, Val gave what I thought was a very strong performance. I’ll defend it! He was good for me in both of those films. He gave me what I wanted. Val died a little ahead of his time, right?

Yeah, he was 65, which is not that old for an actor now.

I saw him here and there during those later years. As you know, he got very sick, and he didn’t look good. He invited me to come see him in this and that. Then he got sicker, and he could barely talk, but we still talked here and there. He was kind to me.

I was a tough director for him, but I never really felt like I was his enemy. He was a handful. You move on and let the years go by.

-"He Communicated with Forces that Were Not in the Norm: Oliver Stone on Directing Val Kilmer," RogerEbert.com

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A fresh hit with Savages

Oliver Stone’s new movie “Savages,” based on the Don Winslow novel of the same name, centers on marijuana trafficking and the bloody fights it inspires. But the filmmaker believes it isn’t a classic crime tale like his 1994 picture “Natural Born Killers” or 1983’s “Scarface,” whose remake Stone wrote for director Brian De Palma. Nor, Stone says, is it a drug tale akin to 1978’s “Midnight Express,” which he wrote for filmmaker Alan Parker.

“There are so many drug movies, so many gangster movies,” said Stone. “So it’s crucial to create freshness, and the book was absolutely vivid. It didn’t fit into any one genre. And it was really something I had never done before. It’s a ride — that’s the easiest thing to say — and you don’t know what is going to happen next.”

Opening Friday, “Savages” follows two successful Laguna Beach entrepreneurs, ex-military man Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and the peace-loving Ben (Aaron Johnson), whose small business involves growing and selling marijuana. Thanks to their hybrid plants, the duo have cornered the market on high-octane reefer. The product has drawn the unwelcome interest of a sadistic Mexican drug cartel, headed by a fierce woman named Elena (Salma Hayek), whose stateside muscle is supplied by Lado (Benicio del Toro).

“It’s a classic Wal-Mart against a high-end boutique,” Stone said. Except the boutique owners aren’t interested in selling, and Wal-Mart won’t take “no thank you” as an answer.

When the cartel kidnaps Chon and Ben’s shared girlfriend O (Blake Lively, who replaced Jennifer Lawrence on the eve of filming) to force the deal, the two men decide to fight rather than capitulate. The turn not only makes Ben reconsider his pacifist tendencies, but also draws John Travolta’s crooked Drug Enforcement Administration agent into a plot that quickly turns bloody (“Savages” is rated R in part for “strong brutal and grisly violence”). As Lively says in a voiceover at the film’s start, “Just because I’m telling you this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it.”

Although Stone calls the movie “a hypothetical fiction, a situation that might happen” and says he never “intended to make a ‘Traffic’ kind of movie where we are commenting on the drug wars,” the director — who favors legalizing marijuana — hopes the issues raised by the film are real, and thought-provoking.

The Universal Pictures movie was filmed partly in a Pacific Palisades mansion last summer. The estate’s indoor pool was converted into a massive hydroponic marijuana farm for the film’s production, with about 300 high-octane pot plants jamming the covert nursery. In one corner stood a cluster of lab equipment used to test the weed’s chemical power, while an array of fluorescent lamps, oscillating fans and irrigation lines kept the herbage bright and green.

The 3-foot-tall foliage tended that August night by Kitsch and Johnson was photo-realistic but phony. “I wanted to use real plants and had them all ready to go,” said production designer Tomas Voth, who toured actual Southern California pot farms for research. “But it was some legal thing. Universal told us to use fakes.”

The movie makes a number of departures from Winslow’s free-form book, particularly toward the tale’s conclusion. In addition, Lively’s character has been cleaned up a bit — she’s a little more Orange County in the movie than she comes across in the book (partially out of concerns that O would remind moviegoers too much of Lisbeth Salander from “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”).

Stone said he was intrigued by the kinds of bright, beach-side colors “Savages” suggested — no sleek steel and dark concrete like his recent New York stories “World Trade Center” (2006) and”Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”(2010).

But “Savages” did mirror some of Stone’s recurrent themes — of personal change, sometimes for the worse, and redemption. “My movies are often about people who come to other definitions of themselves — it’s a classic theme,” the 65-year-old director said.

It wasn’t an easy movie to sell. “They said it was too tough,” Stone said of those who rejected the film. “It was too much of an R-rating. It was risky.”

But Universal saw an opportunity, believing that “Savages” recalled an earlier, rabble-rousing Stone. The studio financed the $45-million shoot, and once it was complete, took the bold step of moving the film up from September to square off against”The Amazing Spider-Man,”which opened Tuesday.

“It was a movie that we thought was reminiscent of some of Oliver’s best work,” said Donna Langley, Universal’s co-chairman, citing “Natural Born Killers,” “Scarface” and “Salvador.” “It has all of the tropes of gangster films, but the story is told not through caricatures but real characters. We think it’s an elevated genre film.”

Stone, who freely admits to smoking the occasional joint, hopes people will watch “Savages” and think about the war on drugs and the violence it has sparked, especially in Mexico. Decriminalizing marijuana, he said, is a good first step.

“Prohibition never works — if it’s sex or drugs or alcohol,” Stone said. “So let’s get it under some sort of medical control, rather than criminal control.”

-The Los Angeles Times, July 4 2012

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Executive producer Oliver Stone said what drew him to the project was “the power of malice, the power to destroy reputation. The madness that can grow out of rumor and, if it finds the right wind, can become a forest fire. These people went through hell. It can happen to anybody.”

-The Los Angeles Times, May 18 1995

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Asked whether the recent seizing by financial backers of Spike Lee’s film “Malcolm X” for going over budget was tantamount to Hollywood censorship, director Oliver Stone said: “Spike did enter into a contract--a legally binding agreement that you will make this movie at such-and-such a price. Now, rightly or wrongly, (film financiers) didn’t see a ‘Malcolm X’ movie being as popular around the world as ‘JFK,’ ” Stone said. “I don’t call that censorship. I call that a legal dispute over a contract.” Stone’s comments came Monday night at UC Irvine, three nights before fellow director Spike Lee was to speak on “Malcolm X” and other aspects of his career at the campus’s Bren Events Center.

-The Los Angeles Times, Apr 29 1992

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A liberal turnout of activists

It was a night for activists who call themselves and their causes liberal to stand up and be counted as the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action held its annual Eleanor Roosevelt Awards dinner Sunday at the Airport Hyatt.

About 500 people came out to honor “JFK” director Oliver Stone, feminist philanthropist Peg Yorkin, peace activist Marvin Schachter, former Santa Monica mayor and current Santa Monica City Councilman Dennis Zane and, in absentia it turned out, law professor Anita Hill who held America spellbound last fall with her allegations of sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

There was a reception at 5 p.m. and dinner at 6, and one look at the lengthy program spelled out why things got started early.

It looked like a long night with no guarantee morning would ever come: Besides remarks by awardees and the presenters, there was a speech by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, a welcome from ADA chapter president Aris Anagnos and two entertainment breaks--one for a comedy routine by the local ADA’s home-grown talent, the other for the Cambodian Family Dance Group and actress Jude Narita. Plus Bill Press as master of ceremonies.

Honoree Marvin Schachter commented, in recalling a lifetime of activism in civil rights, civil liberties, peace and disarmament, sometimes it is the interminable, unruly meetings that are the greatest challenge of all.

Deja vu? Not at all as it turned out. Anagnos, speaking while people started their salads, promised an early evening, and Bill Press appointed a timekeeper--Ben Bycel, head of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission--who really did issue several warnings from his table.

Things were a little unruly. Activists do not sit still, and the table-hopping and buzz of private conversations occasionally rivaled what came from the stage.

Politicians skidded in for pit stops, got introduced, then split for the next event.

ADA members scurried around changing mikes and stage props for the entertainment.

“I feel like I’m in my living room here and don’t want to be too formal,” Oliver Stone, said, smiling fondly at the group as he came to receive his award.

“You all know what I’m going to say anyway.”

Maybe so. They were ready for it, anyway.

Calling the Kennedy assassination and the mystery that continues to surround it “our Reichstag fire,” Stone chronicled the “induction of a Nazi frame of mind into the country” to responses from the audience of “That’s right.”

He promised to oppose it, saying “It’s a battle I’ll continue to fight.” Judging by the heavy applause and cheers, so would the rest of them.

-The Los Angeles Times, Apr 14 1992

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The genius's lonely penchant

After reading a screenplay about Lee Harvey Oswald written by the young Robert De Niro, the writer-director Paul Schrader is said to have told the actor that his script was a metaphor for the talent he carried inside him, ready to explode. One has similar feelings about “A Child’s Night Dream,” Oliver Stone’s autobiographical novel, begun when Stone was 19 and finished when he was 20. Everywhere within it one catches fleeting glimpses, and in the instance of the book’s longest section, “The Boilers of the Moon,” sustained evidence of the sturdily demonic talent behind such films as “Salvador,” “Platoon,” “JFK” and “Nixon.”

The son of an American father who was a success on Wall Street (the narrator remarks ruefully at one point that his father makes approximately 100 times what the average American worker makes), and a seductive French mother, who, it should be said, emerges in these pages as his most memorable female character to date, Stone grew up in Manhattan and France, an only child of privilege who attended prep school and wanted so badly to go to Yale that, he tells us, “I thought if I didn’t get in, life would be over and I would be damned.”

Yet oddly, and unlike many of his generation, the generation of the 1960s, Stone responded to the war in Vietnam by being clearly magnetized to it, evidently sensing that half way around the world lay the crucible of his destiny. “When I first went out to Vietnam in 1965,” he writes in the introduction, “it was as a teacher at a Catholic private school in the Chinese quarter of Saigon. I had taken a year’s leave of absence from Yale.” Then after returning from this first foray of a year or so, undertaking this novel, dropping out of Yale a second and final time and, with grim ceremony, throwing “several sections of [his] manuscript into the East River one cold night,” Stone in 1967 turned down officer’s candidate training and insisted on “rifleman status in a front-line combat unit as soon as possible--in case the war might end before I could participate.”

Heavily laced with adolescent sexual solipsism and often written in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness of unrelieved earnestness, “A Child’s Night Dream” yet tells a fairly straightforward story, and one notes gratefully that even in this fledgling effort, Stone shows an instinct for keeping on a narrative track. We are told of a young man’s Vietnam War experience and his return to America as the wiper in the boiler room of a merchant marine vessel. Somewhat gratuitously Stone confides in the introduction that “everything described in the novel was prior to my actual combat experience and is imagined by the author based on his peripheral knowledge of the war in Saigon and his travels to the interior.”

In other words, this is a novel, albeit one in which the protagonist’s name is Oliver Stone. Well, fine, but do we really need this apologia? Then again, Stone, the writer, understandably may be wary of the reliable storm of outrage and literal-mindedness that greets each film in the mode he pioneered: the cinematic equivalent of the nonfiction novel. While some find fascination and healing in the vision Stone brings to the screen in “Nixon” and genuine exhilaration in having the mazes of conspiracy theories given human focus in “JFK” (whatever the literal facts may be), others grow as huffily proprietary as relatives who are left out of the scrapbook shots of the picnic.

In the early ‘60s, Truman Capote made the dual discovery that art was henceforth going to have a hard time keeping up with life and that the best way to tell a story was to get into the characters’ own shoes. The tumult has yet to subside. Stone has had the savvy and artistry to take both perceptions to heart, and on the evidence of “A Child’s Night Dream,” he was already rehearsing that direction before he found his true medium. Evidence this scene of near cinema verite:

“I killed a man the other day. . . .

“I shot him out of a tree at thirty yards. I picked him and fired seven rounds in mad succession, until I was assured that he would utterly cease to breathe, to move, to exist; whereupon, as if in pointed irony, I heard the cracking sound of breaking wood. He was tumbling from his nest like an unseen falling coconut and came to a quiet halt on the firm intersection of two thick branches; a tangle of shrubbery hid all the emotional parts of his body.”

In “The Boilers of the Moon,” Stone depicts the journey home aboard the merchant ship and proves himself a strong storyteller in the mode of Conrad and the early Melville. Here is the narrator speaking of a fellow seaman who had left him to die after a boiler room explosion:

“By the code of the sea, he had violated his bond with me, and by that same law I would not be respected as a man until I confronted him with what he’d done. And in his cold red-green snake eyes, I felt my own fear. Having been raised a polite considerate boy from Manhattan, I knew I would never confront Red MacGuiness and in that knowledge lay my own corruption, my own sense of worthlessness and shame.”

Here is a young man of the Upper East Side, then, on a brave and unlikely journey, as if determined to test himself in the precincts furthest from his father’s world. While many of his social contemporaries were bringing letters from their psychiatrists to their draft board physicals, Stone was toughing it out according to the rules of the parent culture. While envisioning more than one Oedipal dalliance with his mother, with whom Stone feels both frustration and tenderness, the young artist is out of touch with the home-front story of his generation, many of whom were watching time--and, one might say, the empire--melt in a retinal psychedelic wonderland that stretched for a time from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to the Haight Ashbury.

Later, Stone the filmmaker would take up this story, too, in “The Doors,” finding on the evidence of this book a kindred spirit in Jim Morrison, who screamed in the final cut of the band’s first album: “Father, I want to kill you! / Mother, I want to . . . Agggghhhhh!” But while his best films brace us with the sense of passing through the bedroom doors of the American power elite, Stone seems off his game when he covers the more elusive corners of his own generation’s passage. He misses the communal essence of the stateside ‘60s, giving, for example, short shrift to Ray Manzarek, the band’s keyboardist who, while Morrison provided the lyrics and the rock star charisma, gave the Doors the sound that made it a great rock ‘n’ roll band.

Indeed, one feels in this book the slow ache of a young man determined to take on the hierarchical terms of the powers-that-be--as opposed to his own generation’s communal ones--and to triumph within them. “I travel alone,” the narrator says in a passage that evokes the stalwart poignancy Stone later found in Nixon, “and I am so blind that I am not able nor willing to differentiate between people, for they are all the same to me, creatures to be met, interrogated, and left behind. . . . [T]here are times it’s as if I were literally starving.”

In the end, we ask of our artists, even those who utilize public history, not that they provide perfect accuracy, but that they suggest avenues of comprehension, that they give us a vision that enlarges and enlivens our world. By this standard, Stone has long since emerged as one of the great filmmakers of this period. This book shows us the seed and reminded me of what Robert Lowell said of Ezra Pound. Lowell said that Pound--given all the errors of his ways--was still right to immerse himself in the broad political drama of his time because without it he would have been only another poet in an ivory tower. From the beginning, as we see in “A Child’s Night Dream,” Oliver Stone had an artist’s loner penchant. His genius has been his ability to take that sensibility abroad in the larger world.

-The Los Angeles Times, Sept 7 1997

[back-and-totheleft]

'I'm not there to prove myself a tough guy' 

Over the course of a three-decade directing career, Oliver Stone has built a reputation as a political provocateur. In narrative and documentary films, he’s presented unorthodox takes on John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Richard Nixon’s presidency, and humanized foreign leaders including Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

His willingness to contradict the accepted narrative of American history has led some to dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist. His latest project, Showtime’s “The Putin Interviews,” seems similarly fated to provoke controversy.

In the four-part documentary series beginning Monday, Stone sits with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a dozen conversations filmed over two years. The topics range from “Dr. Strangelove” to Russia’s track record on LGBTQ rights to Putin’s passion for judo.

Oh, and that whole hacking-the-election thing.

At a moment when much of the country is fixated by the unfolding Russian saga, “The Putin Interviews” represents a massive get for Stone and for Showtime, which has been investing heavily in politically themed documentary programming.

(By contrast, Megyn Kelly’s much-touted interview with Putin, which aired June 4 on NBC, lasted for about 10 minutes.)

But while some might be hoping for a tense showdown — especially given the show’s title, which consciously evokes David Frost’s Watergate-era “The Nixon Interviews” — Stone’s goal was understanding, not grilling.

“My role is really to go to him and ask him to explain how he sees the world and what he thinks,” Stone says by phone. “By listening to him, we may not agree with it, but it’s important we hear it.”

The project emerged during research trips to Moscow for “Snowden,” Stone’s 2016 narrative film about former National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. The director met with Putin to discuss the Snowden affair, and it eventually led to a series of conversations — a total of about 20 hours of footage — filmed as recently as February.

“No questions were banned, there were no need to see the questions beforehand. It was totally in our control,” says Stone, who made the series with his longtime documentary producer Fernando Sulichin.

As to why Putin, who has rarely given such access to Western reporters, agreed to participate, Stone says, “He knew who I was. I’m sure that ‘Platoon’ made quite an impact there. And ‘JFK.’” He also points to his behemoth 12-part documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States,” which offered a critical look at American involvement in World War II and the Cold War.

The series marks Stone’s second collaboration with Showtime, after “The Untold History,” and it’s another in a string of timely documentaries to land at the premium cable network. President and Chief Executive David Nevins has made a priority of political programming that offers rare access to newsworthy figures.

It’s possible to trace the bizarre tale of the 2016 election through the channel’s documentaries, beginning with “Weiner,” the Sundance favorite that cast a spotlight on scandal-prone politician Anthony Weiner and his wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and continuing with “The Circus,” Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s behind-the-scenes look at the campaign and, now, the Trump White House. July brings the premiere of “Risk,” Laura Poitras’ critical portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“People want to understand, and I think the great promise of what we bring is greater depth than you can get on a basic cable news show,” says Nevins, adding that he approaches nonfiction shows in much the same way as scripted series: “from a place of character and personality.”

“Whatever you think about Oliver’s politics,” he says, “he lets Putin speak for himself and lets you judge.”

In Stone’s portrayal, Putin emerges as a shrewd and highly disciplined leader, if also a macho showboat who makes cringe-worthy jokes about showering with gay people and women’s menstrual cycles. (He has some good lines too, as when Stone gives him a DVD of “Dr. Strangelove” as a present, only to discover the case is empty. “Typical American gift,” he says.)

In the two episodes made available to the media, Stone broaches some fraught subjects, most notably Russia’s track record on LGBTQ rights. But he also makes the case that the U.S. and its European allies are partly to blame for the increasingly frosty relations with Russia, and argues that Putin, who has been accused of ordering the killings of his opponents, has been unfairly vilified by the Western media — a point he stands by.

“Even Hitler was more popular,” he says.

Stone is also on the record as a skeptic regarding Russian interference in the election. He told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last year that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was “a great fiction” and speculated that it was an “inside job.” On social media, he has criticized the Washington Post and the New York Times for reporting that reflects a “stagnant Cold War vision ... where the Russians are to blame for most everything.” (His son, Sean Stone, also co-hosts a show for Russia Today.)

Stone’s stated aim is to provide historical perspective “so you don’t overblow the hacking issue. It’s a thing that I think happens in America, we tend to run into the headline-grabbing thing in the moment. The tyranny of now.”

Though some critics thought Kelly, NBC’s new star hire, was out of her depth with Putin, Stone thinks she erred by “establish[ing] a hostile relationship with him. If I had done that [with Putin], it wouldn’t have lasted. You have to have a relationship with your subject and a sense of trust. I’m not there to prove myself a tough guy. That’s not going to get me anywhere.”

Some have accused Stone of being a Putin apologist. Writing for the Daily Beast last week, Marlow Stern suggested the filmmaker liked “cozying up to dictators” and engaging in “hero worship.”

Stone disputes the claim.

“I just love dictators. I really do,” he says with a sarcastic laugh. “Hell, I like peace. I’d like to see the world in harmony. I think the U.S. and Russia could be great partners.… Why has it deteriorated to this point?”

-The Los Angeles Times, June 12 2017

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone teaches American history

Artists and writers have been weighing in on political matters for a long time now. But when a filmmaker as controversial as Oliver Stone announces a 10-part television series about American history, it makes you wonder: Do we really want a history lesson from a guy who thinks LBJ had a hand in killing Kennedy?

Stone laughs a little when asked how his new “The Untold History of the United States” fits into a feature film career that includes projects like “JFK,” which suggested that the Mafia, the CIA and Lyndon Johnson had roles in assassinating the president. “That’s not fair,” Stone says, “because nowhere in the film does it say that; it doesn’t actually indicate who … .” He trails off a bit but comes back saying that Johnson clearly “knew something” and participated in the official cover-up of the Warren Commission.

A conversation with Oliver Stone, 66, is a bit like the editing on his early films: a mix of choppy, passionate, intelligent and indecipherable.

So it’s striking that “Untold History,” which begins a 10-week run on a revitalized Showtime on Monday, is reasonably mainstream and persuasive. Stone emphasizes how it’s not the same kind of animal as “JFK,” “Nixon” or “W.” — films that aimed to present counter-myths or to get into the heads of their protagonists. These films, along with “Born on the 4th of July,” about a Vietnam veteran turned antiwar protester, have had their details or points of view challenged over the years.

But “Untold History,” which focuses primarily on post-World War II events, has not only been repeatedly fact-checked — including a layer of confirmation by Showtime — it’s co-written with an American University historian.

And although much of the film’s material may be familiar, the way Stone and company present the context — the emphasis on Britain’s struggle to sustain its empire during World War II, for instance — feels unorthodox. In his own education at good private schools and as an on-again, off-again Yale student, Stone says, he got little sense of the big picture.

“They never mentioned World War II in the same context as British [imperialism],” says the director, whose voice-over narration often accompanies old footage. “They didn’t say it was a three-empire monte game, with Britain, Russia and the U.S. ... So this is the beginning of a huge mushroom here. Once you get into that mushroom, it’s huge.”

The first spores of the mushroom were planted in 1996, when Peter Kuznick, whose work concentrates on the Cold War and nuclear weaponry, began teaching an American University course called “Oliver Stone’s America.” Stone came in to speak to the class, and at a dinner afterward, the historian told the director about his idea for a film, looking at Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wartime vice president, Henry Wallace, and how the road to Hiroshima might have been different if he’d succeeded FDR instead of Harry S. Truman.

The two became friends, and Kuznick sent Stone a screenplay. (The director now pronounces it “a 200-page turkey.”) But years later, Stone came up with the idea to develop the idea into a one-hour documentary. The atomic bomb, the filmmaker says, was “the beginning of the origin myth of my time — I was born in 1946.”

Stone — who begins the documentary discussing how his travels, including his service as an infantryman in Vietnam, showed him how shallow his early education had been — was fascinated by the history he dug into, and the project expanded. “This thing grew,” says Stone at the Showtime offices in Westwood, “into the monster you see before you.”

It grew, in fact, so large that Stone and Kuznick had to jettison two almost-finished sections on World War I and the Great Depression to keep the film even vaguely within budget. As it is, Stone calls his work on the project consuming — “for over 41/2 years, every chance I had, I would be in that editing room” — as well as “pro bono.”

Even with the project retooled, Wallace — an eccentric Iowan, enormously popular in the ‘30s, later forced off the 1944 Democratic ticket by the party’s establishment and often accused of being too friendly with the Soviets — has an outsized place in the first three episodes of “Untold History.”

Says Kuznick, 64, whose nasal delivery contrasts with Stone’s prep-school baritone: “We’re arguing, basically, that had Henry Wallace become president, it might have been possible to avoid not only the atomic bombing and the nuclear arms race but also the Cold War. And the world might have been — you don’t know how it would have turned out — an entirely different place. We spend so much of our global wealth on killing each other, and trying to think of better ways to kill each other.”

The first episode of “Untold History,” on World War II, begins with a bang, quite literally. After a brief introduction by Stone, in which he talks about his wish to give his children a sense of history’s complexity and to help them transcend “the tyranny of now,” we’re in the New Mexico desert. After a countdown, the atomic bomb developed by Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos detonates, and we see its fiery blast — hotter than the sun — fill up the sky.

The program then backtracks to the roots of the war. This sets the pattern for the series — old footage, especially newsreels and old movies used for context. Stone narrates throughout, although voices of most historical figures seem to be re-created by speakers with exaggerated accents.

Stalin, of course, is a major character in the project as well, and Stone’s narration emphasizes both the atrocities of the Soviet regime as well as the enormous role the autocrat and his armies played in defeating Hitler. The show attends, for example, to the siege of Stalingrad and the millions of Soviets who died in the war. (By comparison, he says, America’s Greatest Generation is, as he calls it, “a Madison Avenue mythology.” U.S. military and civilian deaths in the war are measured at around 420,000; the Soviets lost more than 20 million and the program uses the figure 27 million.)

The second installment looks at “Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace,” and by the 10th week, we arrive at an Obama White House that leaves the filmmakers substantially disappointed. The book based on the project, written by Stone and Kuznick, has already drawn attention for its treatment of the current president: The authors say he has been far too eager to extend disastrous national-security policies of the George W. Bush administration.

Stone, of course, is a man of the left who even many on his side consider a conspiracy theorist; his admiration for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has called his credibility into question. With his involvement and the documentary’s orientation, you can almost hear the right salivating to tear into it.

The neoconservative author Ron Radosh, for instance, has been going after “Untold History” for almost a year now, denouncing Kuznick as “yet another of the politically correct tenured radicals; a man of far left sympathies who considers Oliver Stone a man of great insight and profound truths.”

Disjointed though some of his conversation is, Stone comes across as more rumpled preppy — one corner of his collar sticking out of his lapel, hair mussed — than seditious bomb-thrower.

Exhausted as he may be, Stone calls this project “the most significant thing I’ve achieved” and is proud that American television has taken it on. “Whether I go to jail or into exile — it doesn’t matter. I believe the truth has a mind of its own — and will get out there.”

Stone talks like an artist on a mission — Kuznick is more a social crusader, fighting against the way a misunderstanding of the past has turned our history into myth.

“I’ve been trying to change this country since the time I was a child; I joined the NAACP when I was 12,” he says. “I see us as a species in a dangerous period. We’ve got the worldview of cave-dwellers, of Neanderthals and troglodytes, and the weaponry of an advanced civilization that could commit suicide.”

Part of what will make us avoid repeating myths of the past, he says, is if the film sparks a national conversation.

When asked about his own hopes for the project, the director of “Platoon,” “Wall Street” and “Savages” collapses onto the table as if overwhelmed. “It’s too much for me — it’s too much,” he says with a laugh. “A national conversation — that sounds great. But it’s exhausting — it’ll kill us! I’ll never get back to work!”

-The Los Angeles Times, Nov 11 2012

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone Changes Script, Backs a Republican

Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale) stands little chance of beating his Democratic rival, Adam Schiff, in the race for Hollywood campaign money but has won over one seemingly unlikely supporter: film director Oliver Stone.

The director of “Nixon” and “JFK” has given more than $10,000 to Democrats in recent years, including $5,000 in 1998 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which fights to unseat Republicans like Rogan.

But Stone threw his support behind the conservative congressman after listening to him at a June 10 fund-raiser.

From the back of a room overlooking the ocean, he listened to Rogan recall his boyhood as the son of a welfare mother and his role as a House prosecutor in the Senate impeachment trial of President Clinton.

“I was impressed by his honesty about his impeachment vote, his impoverished background and his resulting understanding of how to make welfare intelligent and work for everyone, not just throwing money at it,” Stone said through an assistant.

Rogan’s campaign says it received a $1,000 donation from Stone about a week after the fund-raiser.

Rogan, whose district includes the Burbank studios of Warner Bros., Disney and NBC, and the Glendale animation campus of DreamWorks, has accused Clinton “and his Hollywood liberal friends” of waging “destructive warfare against me” as payback for impeachment.

Indeed, a long list of celebrities on Hollywood’s A-list have donated to Schiff, a Burbank state senator: actors Michael Douglas and Richard Dreyfuss; musicians Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley; and DreamWorks titans David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, to name a few.

But Rogan is still popular with some studio brass. The Motion Picture Assn. of America hosted a fund-raiser for him in Washington on June 12, collecting $12,000 from studio lobbyists and others, Rogan campaign manager Jason Roe said.

-The Los Angeles Times, June 22 2000

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone talked to us Thursday, the day before his new film ‘Money Never Sleeps,’ hit theaters, for a story about his complicated relationship with Wall Street. This being Oliver Stone, though, he talked about a lot more than just that.

Here is an edited transcript of the conversation with his thoughts about the bailout, investment banks and Rupert Murdoch:

Money & Company: Your film is being put out by Fox. Do you get along with Rupert Murdoch?

Oliver Stone: I saw Rupert last night. He was talking to me about his politics. I always like him. I think he’s funny and very perceptive. And he has his viewpoint. At least he’s straight about it.

MC: Where did you finally come out on the handling of the financial crisis?

OS: I’m not what you think I am. You probably think I’m a communist or something, but you know I really consider myself a radical independent. I think about each problem as it arises.

The question is should there have been a socialist bailout of the system, did it do any good? Some people would argue it’s just medication and we’re on some kind of morphine.

I’m not a banking expert but I think that [former Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson and [former Treasury Secretary Larry] Summers –- especially Summers and [former Treasury Secretary Robert] Rubin helped create the mess by deregulating. And then they were the first to run to help save their buddies on Wall Street. And I wonder –- I wonder if they did the right thing that weekend in September.

[Former President] Bush himself, who is a troglodyte, was saying, ‘Look, I don’t see why we have to save AIG.’ Which is a good question.

MC: Where did you come down on the behavior of the big banks?

OS: There were vanilla banks that did good jobs and they continue –- I guess Wells Fargo got through. But still the main ones, the ones who run the show, at the top of the totem poll, they completely let us down. They should have been fired, and some of them should go to jail.

The Gekko mythology –- the behavior of Gekko morphed so to speak. It morphed into the hedge funders in the ‘90s –- and those hedge funders morphed into the bankers of the 2000s, who really lost their bearings and crossed the line. ‘Greed is now legal’ is what Gekko says.

MC: Did you have difficulty getting access to Wall Street for the new film?

OS: Certainly Goldman Sachs and [JPMorgan] Chase were not in the market to talk to us. In fact, Goldman had a sealed policy about photographs on their floor. But we got the photographs anyways from secret means. [laughs] Espionage rules the day.

They were screwed down tight –- very tight. They were going through their own thing; their pants were down and they were really running for the hills.

MC: Any people who were particularly helpful?

OS: [Former New York Gov. and Atty. Gen.] Eliot Spitzer early on was the most helpful. He said to us early on in 2009 – before it broke in the news –- look at Goldman, they are playing it both ways -- they’re shorting their clients. He called it the evil empire.

I was very influenced by Eliot. He was one of the first guys really screaming about this stuff, and he was damn right -– he was right about it. If anybody had been more like him and there had been a little more enforcement at that point, I think the whole thing could have been averted early on.

MC: Any unexpected banks who did help out?

OS: We had no quality bank –- no real high ceilings or a place with good furniture. Eventually, we lucked out and the Royal Bank of Canada let us in –- not only let us in but gave us enormous cooperation. It was so funny to see the faces of those bankers at the Royal Bank of Canada. When you think about what Canada did during the crisis, you have to realize they had nothing to hide, so there was a whole different attitude.

MC: You father was a stockbroker, right? Has that played a role in your view of finance?

OS: Oh yeah, absolutely. My father was the old school -– 1931 to 1985. Dad would always say things like, ‘There should not be a profit without production,’ and ‘The engine of capitalism — Wall Street — should be geared to productivity.’ He felt that Wall Street performed a very important function and he’d be disgusted by this concept of banks proprietary trading. No, he’d be disgusted.

MC: In your conversations did you get a sense of what it was like to live through the crisis on Wall Street?

OS: We had a wonderful series of meetings with young traders.

I remember one of the young men saying that they were scared. It was like having cancer or a heart attack and not knowing what’s happening to you. One of the kids said, ‘I turned to this old veteran who’d really seen everything, and I thought that he’d really be a captain in the storm and I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ and the guy just said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘ Those kids were like Vietnam troops getting their on-the-job training.

MC: Did you get to take any investment ideas from any of these guys?

OS: I can’t tell you I didn’t ask. I would ask Warren Buffett, sure. But you know what, these guys are very guarded and they have to be careful. I would always ask them about trends and about general movement, intellectually. But I learned a long time ago that tips don’t really work for me. Most of them don’t pan out and they cost you money.

MC: So you didn’t make any side money on this project?

OS: I didn’t make any money –- no, thank you.

-The Los Angeles Times, Sept 24 2010