Oliver Stone

Personal

Born September 15, 1946, in New York, NY; son of Louis (a stockbroker) and Jacqueline (Goddet) Stone; married Najwa (some sources cite Majwa) Sarkis (a political attache), May 22, 1971 (divorced, 1977); married Elizabeth Burkit Cox (a film production assistant), c. June 7, 1981 (divorced, 1993); companion of Chong Son Chong (an actress and model); children: (second marriage) Sean (an actor), Michael Jack; (with Chong) Tara Chong. Education: Attended Yale University, 1965; New York University, B.F.A., 1971. Religion: Buddhist

Addresses

Home— Los Angeles, CA. Office— Ixtlan, Inc., 2425 Olympic Blvd., Suite 660, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Agent— David Styne, Creative Artists Agency, 9830 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90212; Geyer Kosinski, Industry Entertainment, 955 South Carrillo Dr., Third Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90048.

Career

Director, screenwriter and producer of motion pictures. Worked as teacher in Cholon, South Vietnam, 1965-66; wiper in Merchant Marines, 1966; taxi driver in New York, NY, 1971. Ixtlan Productions (film production company), founder, 1977. Director of films, including Platoon, Orion, 1986, Wall Street, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1987, Born on the Fourth of July, Universal, 1989, The Doors, TriStar, 1991, JFK, Warner Bros., 1991, Natural Born Killers, Warner Bros., 1994, Nixon, Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi, 1995, Any Given Sunday, Warner Bros., 1999, and Alexander, Warner Bros., 2004. Executive producer of films, including South Central, Warner Bros., 1992, The Joy Luck Club, Buena Vista, 1993, Freeway, August Entertainment, 1996, and The Corruptor, New Line Cinema, 1999. Producer of films, including Reversal of Fortune, Warner Bros., 1990, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Columbia, 1996, and S.W.A.T., Sony Pictures Classics, 2003. Cinematographer, Street Scenes (documentary), 1970; editor, Seizure, American International Pictures, 1974; and coeditor, The Hand, Orion, 1981. Has appeared in various motion pictures, including The Hand, 1981, Platoon, 1986, Wall Street, 1987, Born on the Fourth of July, 1989, The Doors, 1991, Dave, Warner Bros., 1993, The Last Party, Triton, 1991, and Any Given Sunday, 1999. Director of television movies and specials, including Comandante, HBO, 2003, and Persona Non Grata, HBO, 2003. Executive producer of television movies and specials, including Wild Palms (miniseries), ABC, 1993, Indictment: The McMartin Trial, HBO, 1995, The Last Days of Kennedy and King, TBS, 1998, and The Day Reagan Was Shot, Showtime, 2001. Has appeared in television movies and specials, including Welcome Home, HBO, 1987, The Story of Hollywood, TNT, 1988, Oliver Stone: Inside Out, Showtime, 1992, Investigative Reports, "Who Killed JFK? On the Trail of the Conspiracies," A & E, 1992, The First 100 Years: ACelebration of American Movies, HBO, 1995, AFI's 100 Years . . . 100 Movies, CBS, 1998, Twentieth Century-Fox: The Blockbuster Years, American Movie Classics, 2000, and AFI's 100 Years . . . 100 Heroes and Villains, CBS, 2003. Military service: U.S. Army, 1967-68; served in Vietnam; decorated Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster, Bronze Star.

Member

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Writers Guild of America, Directors Guild of America, Screen Writers Guild.

Awards, Honors

Award for best dramatic adaptation, Writers Guild of America, 1978, Academy Award for best screenplay adapted from another medium, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1978, and Golden Globe Award for best screenplay, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, 1979, all for Midnight Express; DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film, Directors Guild of America, Golden Globe Award for best director of a motion picture, and Academy Awards for best director and for best picture, all 1987, all for Platoon; DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film, Golden Globe Award for best director of a motion picture, and Academy Award for best director, all 1990, all for Born on the Fourth of July; Golden Globe Award for best director of a motion picture, 1992, for JFK; Emmy Award, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1995, for Indictment: The McMartin Trial

Writings

SCREENPLAYS

(And director) Seizure, Cinerama, 1973.

Midnight Express (adapted from the book by Billy Hayes), Columbia, 1978.

(And director) The Hand (adapted from the novel The Lizard's Tail by Marc Brandel), Orion, 1981.

(With John Milius) Conan, the Barbarian (adapted from tales by Robert E. Howard), Universal, 1982.

Scarface, Universal, 1983.

(With Michael Cimino) Year of the Dragon (adapted from a novel by Robert Daly), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists, 1985.

(With David Lee Henry) Eight Million Ways to Die (adapted from novel of same title by Lawrence Block), TriStar, 1986.

(With Richard Boyle, and coproducer and director) Salvador, Hemdale, 1986.

(And director) Platoon, Orion, 1986.

(With Stanley Weiser, and director) Wall Street, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1987.

(With Eric Bogosian, and director) Talk Radio (adapted from the play by Bogosian), Universal, 1988.

(With Ron Kovic, and coproducer and director) Born on the Fourth of July (based on the autobiography by Kovic), Universal, 1989.

(With J. Randal Johnson, and director) The Doors, TriStar, 1990.

(With Zachary Sklar, and coproducer and director) JFK (based on On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, and Crossfire by Jim Marrs), Warner Bros., 1991.

(With Bruce Wagner, and executive producer) Wild Palms (television miniseries; based on the comic strip by Bruce Wagner and Julian Allen), ABC, 1993.

(And coproducer and director) Heaven and Earth (based on the autobiographies of Le Ly Hayslip), Warner Bros., 1994.

(And coproducer and director) Natural Born Killers (based on an original screenplay by Quentin Tarantino), Warner Bros., 1994.

(With Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, and producer and codirector) Nixon, Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi, 1995.

(With Alan Parker) Evita (based on the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice), Buena Vista, 1996.

(Uncredited) U Turn, TriStar, 1996.

(With Daniel Pyne and John Logan, and executive producer and director) Any Given Sunday, Warner Bros., 1999.

(And producer) Comandante (documentary), HBO, 2003.

(And producer) Looking for Fidel (documentary), HBO, 2004.

(And producer and director) Alexander, Warner Bros., 2004.

OTHER

(With Richard Boyle) Oliver Stone's Platoon & Salvador (original screenplays), Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Zachary Sklar) JFK, the Book of the Film: A Documented Screenplay, Applause Books (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Michael Singer) Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth: The Making of an Epic Motion Picture, Tuttle (Boston, MA), 1993.

Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film, edited by Eric Hamburg, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1995.

A Child's Night Dream (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Oliver Stone: Interviews, University of Mississippi Press (Jackson, MS), 2001.

Also contributor to books, including introductions to JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness, by Jean Hill, Pelican Publishing, 1992; JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, by Fletcher L. Prouty, Carol Publishing, 1992; Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case that Launched the American Animals Rights Movement, by Kathy S. Guillermo, National Press Books, 1993; and Shut Up, Fag!: Quotations from the Files of Congressman Bob Dornan, edited by Nathan Callahan, Mainstreet Media, 1994.

Sidelights

"There is enough incense burning here to make you cough way out in the hall. There are also a meditation cushion, a stationary bicycle, and a shelf filled with . . . journals; he writes in them, he says, for at least twenty minutes every day. . . . The apartment walls are a jumble of paintings: a Warhol 'Last Supper'; a Francesco Clemente self-portrait; a fine, small Bierstadt; some awkward pieces by the Native American activist Leonard Peltier; and some even more awkward ones by . . . Sergio Premoli. The incense sticks on the mantel are surrounded by photographs: John F. Kennedy, Jim Garrison . . . , Jim Morrison. It is a kind of altar to Stone's dead," described Stephen Schiff in the New Yorker.

These photographs, and other objects in the apartment, also serve as an altar to several of the films created by writer/director Oliver Stone. One of the most controversial filmmakers working, Stone makes movies that assault the viewer at every turn as they tackle such ambitious topics as the Vietnam War, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the life of Jim Morrison and his band The Doors, the machinations of Wall Street, and the glamorization of serial killers and mass murderers by the media. "Stone's work tends to be loud and angry and fast, full of jagged politics and big emotions," maintained David Breskin in Rolling Stone. "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."

Stone's strong vision is most often derived from personal experiences and personal obsessions. Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven and Earth stem from Stone's experiences in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War; Wall Street explores morality in the high-finance world of Stone's stockbroker father; and The Doors and JFK delve deeply into the lives of two of the important icons from Stone's young adult life. Such ambitious subject matter, however, lends itself to a full range of critical and commercial reaction; both critics and moviegoers tend to either love or hate Stone's films. "These aren't wan little art films, enrobing noble themes in acute observation and good taste," pointed out Schiff in the New Yorker. "Stone's movies are pumped up, overbearing, action-packed, and loud—shot through with big emotion, big suffering, big stars. They court controversy, and not only in the ways that movies usually court controversy . . . but in the ways that political initiatives court controversy. Stone's movies grab your lapels and scream in your face: they bear messages; they raise issues; they make news."

Affluent Childhood Overshadowed by War

The only child of a stockbroker father and French mother, Stone's childhood and early teenage years were very far removed from the politics and issues that later found their way into his movies. His parents met in 1945 when his father was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II; they were married in December of that same year and sailed for the United States. A year later Stone was born into a privileged life, splitting his time between homes in Manhattan and Connecticut and spending his summers with his maternal grandparents in France. Describing himself as a somewhat impetuous child and young adult, Stone sees himself as a mixture of his reserved father and sociable mother. "My dad was very loving," he remembered in his interview with Breskin for Rolling Stone. "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." Stone's mother, on the other hand, "is more outward, external, physical, in the world—not as abstracted as my dad. She never made enemies, she made friends. . . . 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."

Schooling was a serious part of Stone's early life; he attended an elite day school in Manhattan before beginning at Hill School, a college prep academy in Pennsylvania. It was during his junior year at Hill that Stone shockingly learned of the impending divorce of his parents. "I thought they were very contented and that I was rich and that we had it made," Stone told Breskin in Rolling Stone. "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." The news was not even delivered in person; Stone's parents called the headmaster, who was then the one to convey the news. From that point on, Stone's world changed and the downward spiral that eventually led him to Vietnam was set in motion."I felt I was an outsider," Stone revealed to Breskin in his Rolling Stone interview. "The family was over. It just disintegrated....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. . . . 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." Going on to college during this period, Stone spent only a year at Yale before dropping out in 1965 to join a teaching program that landed him in Vietnam; he wanted to experience things so he could write like Hemingway and Conrad. Teaching, like school, though, lacked something. Stone next joined the Merchant Marine. "I was seeing a side of the world I'd never seen," he related in his interview with Schiff in the New Yorker. "I did live a bit of Conrad. I was thinking I was getting material for a really big book."

This material did eventually end up in a book, but only after Stone quit the Merchant Marine and moved to Mexico to write it. The result was a fourteen-hundred-page autobiographical novel that Stone finished back at Yale, dropping out again as soon as it was complete. "After the book was rejected by two or three publishers," Stone explained to Schiff in the New Yorker, "I took a blind drive up the East River Drive and I threw some of it in the East River, out the window. I felt like I was worthless. I had spent all this time looking inside and writing about myself, and I had just gone too far. I needed to get out of my head and back to reality, and Hemingway told me in his writings about going to war and being part of war. So I enlisted. I was ready to die."

Along with Hemingway, patriotism and a desire to crush communism propelled Stone to enlist in the U.S. Army and request combat duty in Vietnam. "I was ready to die, but I didn't want to pull my own trigger," Stone observed in his Rolling Stone interview with Breskin. "Many a time I stood in the bathroom and looked in the mirror and had the razor out. . . . 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." Unable to take his own life, Stone left it up to Vietnam to decide his fate. "I was either going to commit suicide in Vietnam or get killed there," he told Schiff in the New Yorker, adding: "I felt I couldn't be an honest human being until I knew what war and killing were."

Stone knew the meaning of war and killing by the time he finished his tour of duty, having been wounded twice and receiving a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster for his courageous acts. Discharged from the Army in 1968, Stone returned home to a strained relationship with his father that only worsened when he was thrown in jail on a marijuana charge in San Diego; he stayed in jail for three weeks until his father could raise the bail. "Before that time," Stone told Schiff in the New Yorker, "I knew emotionally that Vietnam was rotten and corrupt, but politically I was not ready to question authority. I was a private—I was not an officer. I was not a leader. Seeing that prison—there were five thousand kids in it. Seeing that radicalized me."

Radicalized by Vietnam

The radical and rebellious streak that began in prison followed Stone as he moved back to New York City and eventually enrolled in film school at New York University (NYU). Stone continued his heavy drug use and his writing in a dumpy East Village apartment, while studying under Martin Scorsese, among others. "I had a broken window, with the snow drifting in the winter," Stone recalled in his interview with Breskin in Rolling Stone. "I'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a pile of snow in my room. 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 . . . 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."

In the midst of all this writing activity, Stone married his first wife, Najwa Sarkis, a Lebanese woman who worked for the Moroccan Mission to the United Nations. She helped support him after he graduated from NYU in 1971 until he sold his first screenplay, Seizure, to a Canadian distribution company two years later. Seizure also marked Stone's directorial debut; this horror story of a fantasy writer whose fictions come to life went virtually unnoticed, however. Although discouraged and angry, Stone continued to write. And in the summer of 1976, he faced the demons that haunted him and hammered out the script that would be used ten years later to make Platoon. In the meantime, Stone made the move to Los Angeles, where he soon after acquired both a divorce and an agent. Using his script for Platoon as his calling card, Stone discovered that the nation was still too close to the conflict to face the grim truth about Vietnam. The script did open doors for him, though, and a few short months after moving to Los Angeles, Stone jumped at the chance to adapt Midnight Express, Billy Hayes's tale of his imprisonment and escape.

In Midnight Express, Stone, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay, interprets the memoirs of Hayes. An American college student vacationing in Turkey, Hayes was arrested for trying to smuggle hashish out of the country. First sentenced to four years in prison, Hayes was then resentenced to thirty years before escaping to Greece. The extraordinarily brutal prison system is exposed in the film, as are the atrocities committed against Hayes. Many critics question the graphic violence that dominates Midnight Express; Films in Review contributor Rob Edelman, however, wrote that the director, Alan Parker, and the screenwriter, Oliver Stone, "make you cry, make your stomach knot up, make you shiver at the needless brutality."

The controversy that surrounded Midnight Express served to make the film a commercial success and opened up even more doors for Stone. Still determined to relate a Vietnam story to audiences, and now a screenwriter in demand, Stone wrote Born on the Fourth of July, an adaptation of the memoir of the paraplegic Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. When the financial side of this project fell apart, however, Stone contracted with Orion to direct and write another horror/suspense movie— The Hand. More successful than Seizure, this 1981 film focuses on Jon Lansdale, a cartoonist whose hand is severed in an accident. The hand comes to life, follows Jon around, and commits murders on his behalf. Vincent Canby, reviewing The Hand in the New York Times, maintained that the screenplay "is tightly written, precise and consistent in its methods," adding that the film suggested Stone to be "a director of very real talent."

The next few films Stone focused on, however, did not utilize these directorial skills. First came the screenplay for Conan, the Barbarian, an adventure fantasy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role. Next was Scarface, the saga of the rise and fall of Cuban refugee Tony Montana, who finds his American dream in the world of cocaine smuggling. Just escaping an "X" rating because of excessive violence, Scarface, starring Al Pacino, became a commercial hit in large part because of the notoriety surrounding it. Although writing that Scarface "lacks the generational sweep and moral ambiguity" of The Godfather, Richard Corliss concluded in Time: "The only X this movie deserves is the one in explosive." Canby similarly stated in the New York Times that "the dominant mood of the film is anything but funny. It is bleak and futile: What goes up must always come down. When it comes down in Scarface, the crash is as terrifying as it is vivid and arresting."

Stone began working as an independent writer/director in the mid-1980s. The first project he under-took was based on the experiences of his friend Richard Boyle (a freelance photojournalist) during the Civil War in El Salvador. The script Stone wrote with Boyle follows the photojournalist, and his friend Doctor Rock (a DJ), as their excessive lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, and women slowly fades away and they become involved in the Civil War surrounding them. The political indictment of U.S. policy in El Salvador made the script a hard sell, though, and Stone eventually directed the film for free in order to obtain financial help from the British film corporation Hemdale.

Salvador, released in 1986, was partially shot with a hand-held camera on a very low budget in some of the rougher areas of Mexico. The audience, and the distribution, were limited; critics cited Stone with manipulating history to serve his purpose and with creating two unlikable, farcical main characters. "A sprawling blend of gripping action and simplistic characters, of skillful photography and awkward editing, Salvador frustrates," pointed out Patricia Hluchy in Maclean's, concluding: "It is the victim of an artistic war—between repugnant farce and historical tragedy." David Denby, on the other hand, related in New York, "In everything he does, Stone pushes things to the limits. He puts mounds of corpses on the screen, and children with missing limbs, and he provides so little information and political context that the atrocities feel like high-minded exploitation, a way of showing off how bloody tough he is. Yet he has talent, and has made a disturbing movie."

Wows Critics with Platoon

The most important thing Salvador did for Stone's career was to bring him the money needed for Platoon, the script he had been trying to make since the beginning of his career. Hemdale agreed to produce the film, and Stone began shooting in the Philippines immediately, finishing just fifty-four days later. The first in Stone's trilogy concerning the Vietnam War, Platoon attacks the subject from a soldier's point of view, from Stone's view as a member of the 25th Infantry Division. "Vietnam messed a lot of guys up because it put us out of step with our own generation," explained Stone in an interview with Chuck Pfeifer for Interview. "There was such a dogtired, don't-give-a-damn attitude over there, such anger and frustration and casual brutality. I remember being so tired that I wished the North Vietnamese Army would come up and shoot me, just to get this thing over with."

Authenticity, gleaned from these personal experiences, is what makes Platoon so gripping; numerous Vietnam veterans praised the film for its realistic portrayal of the conflict and all of its minute details. The young actors were even put through two weeks of boot camp by Stone and a former Marine drill instructor. The young hero of the film, Chris, is a college dropout who volunteers to go to Vietnam, much as Stone did. His thoughts and experiences are revealed through letters home that are read in voice-overs, a technique criticized by many reviewers. The war presents numerous moral decisions and ambiguities for Chris, who must in essence choose between two sergeants: Barnes, a ruthless killing machine, and Elias, an equally courageous fighter who maintains his values and morals at the same time.

"Platoon captures the crazy, adrenaline-rush chaos of battle better than any movie before," cited David Ansen and Peter McAlevey in Newsweek, adding: "Stone is ruthless in his deglamorization of war, but not at the expense of the men who fought there." Pat Aufderheide, writing in Cineaste, also praised the film's grasp on reality. "It's brutally honest, a grunt's-eye, mud-level view," she asserted. "Part of its honesty is its unabashed romanticism—its reverence for ancient war cliches and heroic war archetypes, its vision of Vietnam as a staging ground in the war for America's soul." Stone himself told Ansen and McAlevey how important the authenticity of Platoon is to him: "I was under an obligation to show it as it was. If I didn't, I'd be a fraud." Ansen and McAlevey concluded: "After nine years of waiting, Stone has made one of the rare Hollywood movies that matter."

Picking up where he left off with Platoon, Stone tackles the story of Ron Kovic, a Vietnam vet, in his 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July. Coauthored by Kovic, the film begins with his youth and the events leading up to his Vietnam experience; from the beginning, he is primed with patriotism, war, and God to be the all-American hero. The war scenes seem horror-filled until Kovic returns home to a V.A. hospital in the Bronx. The atrocities here and his injuries—which leave Kovic paralyzed from the chest down at the age of twenty-one—begin the vet's descent. He goes from believing he did his duty, to a period of despair filled with drinking, and finally emerges as a writer and respected activist for his work with Vietnam Veterans against the War.

"Stone has become as unrelenting as Kovic," stated Denby in his New York review. "From his earlier films, . . . we understood that he was enraged by the softness of American mythmaking—the lies, the evasions, the Reaganite media scam that turned greed into public virtue and the disaster of Vietnam into an illusion of noble endeavor undermined by weak-hearted liberals. But Platoon was almost consoling in comparison with Born on the Fourth of July." Although Stanley Kauffmann, writing in New Republic, found the screenplay "fuzzy" for failing to focus on the transformation of Kovic from patriotic volunteer to famed activist, he concluded that "the heat in the film is almost palpable as we sit before it. Stone, Kovic, . . . and all the others reached deep inside to make this picture, and it earns something more than respect." Nation contributor Stuart Klawans similarly described Born on the Fourth of July as a movie "which shoots off the screen like pressurized steam. Directed with furious, relentless energy by Oliver Stone, the film keeps hitting moments that feel like climaxes and then pushes them further."

The final film in the trilogy, Heaven and Earth, based on the memoirs of a Vietnamese woman, offers a different perspective. Released in 1994, this is Stone's first film to feature a female protagonist. Born in Central Vietnam in the early 1950s, Le Ly Hayslip leads a quiet life in her farming village until the war begins. She joins the Vietcong, only to be captured and tortured by the South Vietnamese. Upon returning home, she is greeted with hostility by the Vietcong and raped next to her own grave. It is while working as a bar girl in Saigon that Le Ly finally meets and marries Steve Butler, a U.S. Marine who takes her back to the States. This new country offers very little to Le Ly, who ends up with no identity, even when she returns home several years later. Received harshly by critics, Heaven and Earth was also less commercially successful than its predecessors. Pointing out that Stone attempts to use Le Ly to lessen the guilt of the U.S., Jonathan Romney concluded in New Statesman & Society: "It's too much, as if an overeager Stone had pledged to his subject to use all the resources at his disposal to tell her story. The result is neither heaven nor earth but the big, dumb banging of purgatory."

Revisits Hippie Youth with The Doors

In between his Vietnam films, Stone also focused on other important figures and events of the 1960s and 1970s; Jim Morrison's life and the story of his famous rock band are interpreted by Stone in his 1990 film The Doors. Beginning with Morrison's college experience, during which he studied film, the movie follows the young poet's epic rise to stardom and ends with his death of a drug overdose in 1971. The prominent drug abuse and other excesses in the film assault the viewer, as do Stone's interpretations of the myths surrounding the famous performer. "The Doors is an Oliver Stone movie all the way, big and brave and foolish," contended Robert Horton in Film Comment. "It's broad, juicy, cheerless, by turns exhilarating and embarrassing, always ready, indeed eager, to let passion eclipse good judgment," continued Horton, adding: "Morrison's story had bounced around Hollywood for years, and we are fortunate that it eventually rolled in Oliver Stone's direction. Both Stone and Morrison are/were unruly talents, not consistent or reliable or without their vulgar undersides, but good to have around. In some ways, Stone's The Doors may be the movie Morrison never lived long enough to make."

President John F. Kennedy, another icon whose life was cut short, and the events surrounding his death are the subject of Stone's JFK, released in 1991. The film is the director's most controversial; it offers a conspiracy theory that involves the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon in connection with the assassination. Based on books by Jim Marrs and Jim Garrison, a New Orleans district attorney who believes the Warren Report to be a lie, JFK is attacked by many critics because of its interpretation of history, not because of its actual qualities as a film. Mixing fact, through the use of newsreels and photos, with fiction, through reenactments among other things, Stone makes the line between what really happened and what did not very fuzzy. Garrison, the main character of the film, attacks the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and sets out to prove his theory. The movie ends with the trial of Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman accused of conspiracy in connection with the murder. Garrison loses the case but is still convinced that powerful forces are keeping the truth hidden. JFK "is a cunning, often mesmerizing piece of filmcraft and—make no mistake—it is propaganda, shot through with all the perils and pitfalls of that most troublesome genre," described People contributor Mark Goodman. Maintaining that all of Stone's films, no matter what the subject matter is, have something factually wrong in them, Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone: "Even when his intentions are worthy and backed with skilled technique—as they are in JFK—Stone will fudge any fact, hype any situation, pull any stunt to make his case. JFK is the best and worst of Stone in one volatile package." Also referring to Stone's manipulation of the truth, Ansen pointed out in Newsweek: "He manages to pack in an astonishing amount of information while maintaining suspense and narrative clarity. Quasi documentary in style, JFK shifts between color and black and white, fact and speculation, newsreel and staged re-creation, so that you can't always tell what's real footage and what's not, never mind what's true and what's not." Kauffmann in New Republic viewed JFK as much more than a mixture of fact and fiction. "Very few Hollywood people today make films primarily out of conviction, particularly political conviction. Admittedly, its easy to overvalue JFK because it's a rarity that way, but it's also easy to undervalue it cinematically because of its political and historical garishness." Kauffmann went on to conclude: "First, JFK is a fine piece of filmmaking. Second, it is a passionate work in an art that is mostly treated as an industry."

Bringing his passion into the 1990s, Stone assaults the media and all its excesses through the characters of mass murderers Mickey and Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers. The couple begin their killing spree with Mallory's father, whose abusive behavior is satirically portrayed in the form of a 1950s sitcom, laugh track and all. The Knox couple suffer no remorse as they then proceed to travel across the country and kill fifty-two strangers for various, insignificant reasons. As the number of victims rise, so does the popularity of Mickey and Mallory, so much so that they are celebrities by the time they are captured. Once in jail, the media's exploitation of the couple reaches its high when Stone's most satirical character, Wayne Gale, sets up a live interview to be broadcast during halftime of the Super Bowl. The Australian host of the tabloid television show American Maniacs, Gale becomes a hostage when the Knox couple attempt to escape during the interview. The ensuing prison riot is broadcast live, as is Gale's death when the couple make it to freedom.

Stylistically, Natural Born Killers bursts with a barrage of almost every film technique available, including photos, grainy black and white film, slow motion and strobed motion, superquick close ups, slide projection, and heavy-metal animation. Remarking upon the lack of emotion evinced by the acts of Mickey and Mallory, Owen Gleiberman observed in Entertainment Weekly that "what makes their lurid odyssey so mesmerizing is Stone's revolutionary cinematic style, a visual language at once lyrical, hallucinatory, and as deliriously assaultive as Mickey and Mallory themselves." Ansen asserted in Newsweek that Stone tries to place the blame for society's fascination with violence on the media, concluding that "what Stone can't acknowledge in his fitfully astonishing, ultimately numbing movie is that he and Wayne Gale are two sides of the same coin. Had he done so, Natural Born Killers might have gotten under the skin of the issues it tantalizingly raises." Gleiberman, however, sees Stone as accomplishing his purpose in Natural Born Killers. "Stone takes his characters right over the top," he concluded, "rubbing our noses in our own lust for excess, and some viewers are bound to say that he's gone too far. Yet this may be one case where too far is just far enough—where a gifted filmmaker has transformed his own attraction to violence into an art of depraved catharsis."

Over the course of his career, Stone has continuously used violence and other excesses to relate his messages to viewers. "The world is spinning much faster than my camera and myself," he explained to Breskin in his Rolling Stone interview. "I think movies have to break through the three dimensions, close as you can get. I think you go for every . . . 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. " And Stone's movies are alive, with controversy, debate, and criticism; the writer/director, however, explained to Schiff in the New Yorker, "I would rather not seek out a controversy; I really would not. This is something that people don't understand. Controversy just categorizes you; it's boring. I've had so many categories in my life—fascist, bloody, conspiratorial, unsubtle, barbarian, ruffian. Sometimes I don't recognize myself." One thing Stone does recognize, though, is his contribution to the filmmaking industry. When asked by Breskin if he felt like a great artist, he responded with, "My true feelings? 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."

Continues to Court Controversy

Stone returned to the political arena in 1995 with Nixon. The film, which traces the rise and fall of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, again placed Stone in the center of controversy, as critics argued over the factual accuracy of the film. Wall Street Journal reviewer Joe Morgenstern, remarked that Stone is "up to some dirty historical tricks once again," and he called Nixon a "bizarre, bloated and often fascinating psychobiography of our 37th president." In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann believed that Nixon lacked something that appeared in Stone's previous work. "What's missing is what Stone's best films have had: a subtext, a large theme evoked by the action on the screen," noted Kauffmann. He added, "This leaves the film not much more than the series of events presented—thus, in any deep sense, purposeless." Roger Ebert, however, deemed Nixon "one of the year's best films," in the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert stated, " Nixon would be a great film even if there had been no Richard Nixon."

In 1996 Stone had a hand in writing the screenplay for the musical Evita, then served as coproducer for the critically acclaimed film The People vs. Larry Flynt. Stone's next directorial effort, 1997's U-Turn, depicts the story of a drifter who encounters a town's strange inhabitants in a plot that involves sex, murder, and betrayal. It was not well received.

Stone looks at the world of professional football in 1999's Any Given Sunday. In the film, Tony D'Amato, the embattled veteran coach of the Miami Sharks, faces problems both off-field and on, clashing with the team's scheming new owner while also attempting to rein in the Sharks's brash young quarterback. "The film's fictional football league . . . aspires to be a louder version of the NFL," observed Steve Rushin in Sports Illustrated. "From the grotesquerie of team uniforms to the depravity of team owners, no turn goes un-Stoned." Time critic Richard Schickel remarked that Stone presents the players as "innocent animals, the purity of their violent athletic endeavors under constant threat of corruption by people trying to make a buck off their pain." In the New Republic, Kauffmann questioned the relevance of Any Given Sunday, asking, "Do we really need a film to clarify the elements of warfare, gladiatorial combat, corporate competition, vicarious sadism and masochism that every game lays right in our laps?"

Several reviewers commented on the film's visual style. According to Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, "Any Given Sunday is a vast and pummeling paradox—a kaleidoscopic bone crusher. The movie is edited like that disarming scissor-cut tackle, the visuals coming at you from every angle, with an ultraviolent slice-and-dice suddenness." Gleiberman noted, however, that "the film's cumulative effect is as exhausting as it is exciting." Schickel also found fault with the director's style, "all handheld shots and short, jagged cuts" that ultimately prove distracting. Kauffmann, however, praised Stone's work, writing that Any Given Sunday is "dazzlingly made."

If you enjoy the works of Oliver Stone

If you enjoy the works of Oliver Stone, you might want to check out the following films:

Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, 1978.

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, 1979.

Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields, 1984.

Five years would pass before Stone returned to writing and directing a major motion picture. Macedonian king Alexander the Great, regarded as one of the finest military leaders in history, is the subject of Stone's 2004 film, Alexander. The film was shot in a mere eighty-seven days in such far-flung locales as Morocco, Thailand, and London. According to Entertainment Weekly contributor Daniel Fierman, with "a $150 million-plus budget, and a 143-page script written by its director, Alexander promises to be one of the more fascinating historical dramas ever made."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Cook, David A., A History of Narrative Film, Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Kagan, Norman, The Cinema of Oliver Stone, Continuum (New York, NY), 1995.

Kunz, Don, editor, The Films of Oliver Stone, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 1997.

Riordan, James, Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1995.

Silet, Charles L. P., editor, Oliver Stone: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2001.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Toplin, Robert Brent, editor, Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, Controversy, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 2000.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, April 7, 1992.

American Film, December, 1987; March, 1991.

American Spectator, April, 1992, pp. 28-31.

Atlantic Monthly, July, 1997, pp. 96-100.

Chicago Sun-Times, April 25, 1986; December 30, 1986; December 11, 1987; December 21, 1988; December 20, 1989; March 1, 1991; December 20, 1991; December 24, 1993; August 26, 1994; December 20, 1995.

Cineaste, Volume 15, number 4, Pat Aufderheide, "Oliver Stone as Pulp Artist," p. 5; Volume 16, number 3.

Commonweal, May 3, 1991, pp. 294-296.

Empire, May, 1998, Adam Smith, "Round The Bend," pp. 64-65.

Entertainment Weekly, January 14, 1994; September 2, 1994, Owen Gleiberman, "American Psychos," pp. 90-92; August 6, 1999, Josh Young, "Devil's Advocate," pp. 26-27; April 3, 1998, Mike D'Angelo, review of U-Turn, pp. 99-101; November 1, 1999, Daniel Fierman, "Oliver Stone: Director Extraordinaire, Provocateur Nonpareil"; January 7, 2000, Owen Gleiberman, "Crush Groove," p. 38; February 16, 2001, Scott Brown, "Casting The First Stone," p. 77; April 23, 2004, Daniel Fierman, "Great Expectations," p. 34.

Esquire, December, 1997, pp. 38-41; June, 2003, Tom Carson, "Bray of Pigs," pp. 58-60.

Film Comment, January-February, 1987; May-June, 1991, Robert Horton, "Riders on the Storm," pp. 57-61; January-February, 1994, p. 26.

Film Criticism, Volume 25, number 1, Richard Corliss, "Who Cares."

Film Quarterly, fall, 1990, pp. 44-47.

Films in Review, December, 1978, Rob Edelman, review of Midnight Express, p. 635; March, 1987.

Flicks, May, 1998, Claire Lloyd, "Rolling Stone," p. 35.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1987, pp. 458-464.

Interview, February, 1987, Chuck Pfeifer, "Oliver Stone," p. 576; September, 1994.

Journal of Popular Film and Television, Volume 17, number 3, Jack Boozer, Jr., " Wall Street: The Commodification of Perception."

London Review of Books, February 13, 1992, pp. 6-8.

Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1982.

Maclean's, July 21, 1986, Patricia Hluchy, "Rebels and Reprobates," p. 50; March 30, 1987, Gerald Peary, "The Ballad of a Haunted Soldier"; December 28, 1987, p. 46.

Monthly Film Bulletin, January, 1987; October, 1989, J. Wrathall, "Greeks, Trojans and Cubans—Oliver Stone."

Nation, January 1, 1990, Stuart Klawans, review of Born on the Fourth of July, pp. 28-30; March 25, 1991, pp. 388-391; May 24, 1993, pp. 713-715; April 12, 1999, Peter Biskind, Carl Bromley, and Jon Wiener, "On Movies, Money & Politics: Beatty, Baldwin, Glover, Robbins, Stone, and Lear," pg. 13-14, 16-18, 20.

National Review, January 22, 1988, pp. 65-66; March 24, 1989, pp. 46-49; February 5, 1990, pp. 58-59; September 26, 1994, p. 72.

New Perspectives, spring, 1995.

New Republic, January 4 & 11, 1988, pp. 24-25; February 13, 1989, p. 26; January 29, 1990, Stanley Kauffmann, "The Battle after the War," pp. 26-27; April 1, 1991, p. 28; January 27, 1992, Stanley Kauffmann, "Dallas," pp. 26, 28; September 7 & 14, 1992, pp. 72-73; February 7, 1994, p. 26; October 3, 1994, p. 26; January 22, 1996; October 27, 1997, Stanley Kauffmann, "Wait a While," pp. 26-27; July 12, 1999, Stanley Kauffmann, "Citizen Cain," p. 28; January 17, 2000, Stanley Kaufmanns, "Some Intricacies; A Farewell," p. 24.

New Statesman & Society, January 21, 1994, Jonathan Romney, "Promise Her Everything," pp. 34-35.

Newsweek, October 16, 1978, pp. 76, 81; December 23, 1991, p. 50; January 5, 1987, David Ansen and Peter McAlevey, "A Ferocious Vietnam Elegy," p. 57; December 23, 1992, David Ansen, "A Troublemaker for Our Times," p. 50; August 29, 1994, David Ansen, "The Overkilling Fields," pp. 54-55.

New York, March 24, 1986, David Denby, "In Another Country," pp. 86, 88-89; December 14, 1987, pp. 86-88; December 12, 1988, pp. 112, 114; December 18, 1989, David Denby, "Days of Rage," pp. 101-102; February 17, 1992, pp. 44-47; January 10, 1994, p. 44.

New Yorker, July 28, 1986, pp. 77-80; January 22, 1990, pp. 122-124; January 17, 1994, p. 87; August 8, 1994, Stephen Schiff, "The Last Wild Man," pp. 40, 42-48, 50-53, 55.

New York Review of Books, February 17, 1994, pp. 22-24.

New York Times, May 15, 1981, Chris Chase, "Good Fortune Has Creator of Hand Nervous"; April 24, 1981, Vincent Canby, "The Hand, Clever Horror Tale," p. C8; May 15, 1981; May 15, 1982; December 9, 1983, Vincent Canby, "Al Pacino Stars in Scarface, " p. C18; January 2, 1990, pp. C13, C20.

People, January 13, 1992, Mark Goodman, review of JFK, pp. 15-16; January 22, 1996, pp. 105-108; October 13, 1997, review of U-Turn, p. 19.

Premiere, January, 1996, Peter Biskind, pp. 62-65; January, 2000, Peter Manso, "Stone's Throw," pp. 78-81, 97.

Psychology Today, September-October, 1993, pp. 44-45, 64, 66-69.

Rolling Stone, April 4, 1991, David Breskin, "The Rolling Stone Interview: Oliver Stone," pp. 37-40, 42-3, 62; January 23, 1992, Peter Travers, "Oh, What a Tangled Web," pp. 48-49.

Sight and Sound, spring, 1991, J. Hoberman, "Out of Order," p. 7; August, 1993, pp. 60-61; Volume 6, number 3, 1996, pp. 6-9.

Sports Illustrated, December 27, 1999, Steve Rushin, "Apocalypse Sunday," p. 28.

Stills, February 29, 1987.

Time, October 16, 1978; December 5, 1983, Richard Corliss, "Say Good Night to the Bad Guy," pp. 96-97; December 23, 1991; October 6, 1997, p. 109; November 9, 1998, p. 94; December 27, 1999, Richard Schickel, review of Any Given Sunday, p. 168; April 19, 2004, Jeffrey Resner, "Ten Questions for Oliver Stone," p. 8.

TV Guide, April 11, 2004, Michele Willens, "Insider Q & A: Oliver Stone," p. 16.

Variety, June 2, 2003, Ronnie Scheib, review of Persona Non Grata, p. 51.

Wall Street Journal, December 21, 1995, Joe Morgenstern, review of Nixon, p. A10.

Washington Post, May 14, 1982.

Wilson Library Bulletin, March, 1992, pp. 51-53.

ONLINE

Conversations with History Web site,http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/ (June 30, 2004), "History and the Movies: Conversation with Oliver Stone."