back-and-totheleft

[back-and-totheleft]

"Stop this nonsense"

Ever-honest director and author Oliver Stone stopped by HuffPost Live on Tuesday to discuss Barack Obama's presidency, climate change and his new book and documentary series, "The Untold History of the United States."

Stone is an equal opportunity critic, arguing that neither Obama nor Mitt Romney tackled climate change in a substantive way. "I was a little disappointed at the third debate when neither of them talked about climate control and the nature of the situation on Earth," Stone said. "I think there's kind of a weird statement coming right after … this is a punishment … Mother Nature cannot be ignored. That's all I thought about."

American exceptionalism is among Stone's "There's this attitude that we 'deserve' to be in charge," Stone said. "I don't believe in that … We act as if we have this right of kingship -- we act as tyrants."

"We learn the history of the victors," Peter Kuznick, a history professor at American University and partner of Oliver Stone said. "We learn this triumphant version of history, that the United States is the shining city on the hill."

Despite his criticisms of the Obama administration, Stone freely admitted that he had already pre-voted in support of the president's reelection. The filmmaker's main reasons for casting his ballot in Obama's favor were based on the president's ability to think rationally and perform "brilliantly" in the context of debates.

Though both Stone and Kuznick predicted that Obama would win, Stone humored HuffPost Live host Alyona Minkovski with a guess at what a Romney presidency would look like. "It certainly means more militarism … there's no talk of cutting back," Stone forecasted.

Stone, an ardent advocate of marijuana legalization, argued that "there is nothing harmful in marijuana" and had a clear message for anti-pot politicians: "Stop this nonsense."

When asked if the project's political tenor made it difficult to finance and produce, Stone said that while "The Untold History of the United States" is "love work," the series and book are "the most cumbersome project I've ever been involved with."

Getting the ten-hour series on television was a sizable task, Stone said, arguing that while PBS or other public stations may have once shown such a program, "they're so politicized they can't say anything -- they're scared of their own shadow." Instead, Stone argues PBS has settled for making "this Pro-American experience type stuff, where it has to be about America and America has to be the point of making the movie."

President George W. Bush also made it into the segment, albeit only as a playful aside. "I was in Bush's class [at Yale], so that tells you a bit about what we were taught at the time," Stone quipped.

-Kia Makarechi, "Oliver Stone: Sandy Is 'Punishment' For Obama & Romney's Silence On Climate Change," Huffington Post, Oct 3 2012

[back-and-totheleft]

"If I were Morgan, I wouldn't take that money"

George Clooney can rest easy - he's evidently one of the few film-makers working today that controversial director Oliver Stone doesn't have a problem with…

"I liked 'Michael Clayton', 'Syriana'," says Stone, referring to two of Clooney's recent political dramas, "but most stuff is deeply conservative."

"Even when James Cameron made that superb film 'Avatar', he was making as clear a statement as I have ever seen about the US military being the bad guy, and he said, "I don't make political films like Oliver Stone. I had no intention of criticising the empire.' Well, James, excuse me, what are you smoking? I love you as a film-maker, but don't play that game.

"My job is drama. I have to tell a story with tension and make it exciting to watch, but if I'm dealing with political content, I don't want to get on the wrong side of history, and I won't."

I mention I've just come from watching the latest America-takes-on-evil blockbuster 'Olympus Has Fallen', starring Morgan Freeman with its Korean enemies, and a big White House-based battle for victory. Stone sighs.

"Morgan Freeman sadly should not… I would not take the money if I were Morgan, whom I respect, for espousing a false enemy." And he's on a roll.

Churchill and Roosevelt's meeting changed the direction of World War II, told by Stone in his new 10-part documentary series telling 'The Untold Story' of the 20th century.

"By the way, a recent James Bond film was ridiculous too. They made Cuba the home of chemical warfare and it becomes a whole issue when they go to Cuba. And, in another film, Mr Stallone, who is an equal opportunity offender, managed to make a film that made $100m, saying that Chavez was a bad guy with a red beret.

"This is very dangerous toxic material that you're putting into the body politic. It's like you're polluting the waters. I hope to god there is some justice in this world to bring back to these film-makers some sense of what they did."

While all this money has been made in Hollywood, Stone has not been idle. Instead, he's put his back into a 10-part documentary series, telling the "untold" story of 20th century US politics. It's been a five-year labour of love, to "re-examine what you thought you knew".

Stone has apparently been longtime infuriated by what is being taught. "It's in my daughter's text books… the US successfully ended WWII with the bomb, and the Japanese had to be defeated that way. because they would never surrender."

For Stone, it's all about the atom bomb, the dropping of which ended WWII. "Once you deal with the bomb, you can never come back, it's like opening Pandora's Box. Once you start to understand that the bomb was not necessary to drop, it opens up the next question… who started the cold war? What was the bomb about? Was it about the Russians, or really about the Japanese? I think it's like a good Agatha Christie."

Stone has been happy to tell what he considers the 'untold story' in many of his films, including 'Born on the Fourth of July', 'JFK' and 'Nixon', but this wasn't borne out of activism - in fact, if anything, it was the other way round.

"My advocacy comes from the films. I avoided activism after Vietnam, I wasn't sure about my positions, I was muddled. I always expressed interest in it, but I never understood emotionally how I was attached to the landscape. I had gone to Vietnam because of politics, but you don't put two and two together.

The average soldier goes to fight for his country, to fight communism, you don't think too much about that, you got a couple of medals, you feel good about yourself, you feel kind of lousy because you some people got killed who you didn't think should be killed. It comes from idealism.

"My life has evolved, my knowledge has deepened, I learned a lot in the past five years, I'm grateful for that. I knew a lot, but not like this."

Does increased knowledge equal deeper anger? He shakes his head.

"Anger can only take you so far, you can't keep it up, it wears you down. I think you need consistency, intellectual curiosity, stamina, all of these things come into play. Anger is not a working emotion, it's perhaps a deep-seated feeling of conscience."

And, with all the stories he tells in 10 chapters of documentary belying the myth that America has earned its position of message-bearing to the world, is he still a patriot? This time he nods.

"A patriot is willing to dissent from his country's majority with a vigilante viewpoint, and when it's wrong, it's wrong. So, yes. We stand for speaking out and being different and saying we have sold out to the conformity and fear, and the usual suspects."

If, as Stone sees it, there are people willing to uphold the myth for their own ends, to whom does he give credit for standing up and speaking out?

"Gorbachev… Kruschev… Kennedy doesn't get enough credit for saving the world, by saying no to the military. Kennedy had deep guts to say no, and I think he paid the price for it…"

Tempting as it is to follow Oliver Stone down a labyrinth of conspiracy, I'm keen to end positively, so I ask where his beacons of hope are to be found.

"Whenever I speak to kids in colleges, I think there's a bulb going off, and I hope there's a Martin Luther King out there, willing to speak out for good in this world. You always hope that you're going to hit that button. There are a lot of smart people. Lot of dumb people, but also smart people. You've got to root for evolution."

In the case of Mr Stallone and co, too? He chuckles.

"We should make Stallone watch our series with clockwork orange eyes."

-Caroline Frost, "Oliver Stone On His New History Series, How Kennedy 'Paid The Price' And Why Morgan Freeman Should 'Not Take The Money'," April 11 2013, Huffington Post UK

[back-and-totheleft]

From the other side

How can you stand keeping yourself in the war [through movies]?

Let's say, just...I couldn't finish the war until I'd gone back and experienced it from the other side, to see what they went through, because they were victims, in many ways, of what we did. [...] It was important for me to practice compassion by going back to Vietnam and trying to tell the story through the victim's eyes.

-Oliver Stone interviewed by Bruna Lombardi, 1993

[back-and-totheleft]

Vietnam at 50: The Legacies of War

We're here tonight to talk about the legacies of war and Oliver, in your book, you talk about the problem of ideology as a kind of motivating force. And, hopefully, I'm not going to sound like Sigmund Freud here, but I wanted to start with your dad. Louis Stone served as a lieutenant colonel in World War II. He was part of Eisenhower's staff in Paris and you write how, in 1945 after the war, he was already joining - as you say - the old struggle against Communism. How did your dad's experiences and his ideological anti-communism stance affect you growing up?

Oh, very much so! It was an interesting journey he had, because he came out of the Depression with his brothers and his sister - and of course their ideas went to the left, because there was so much poverty in the United States. And he liked Roosevelt at first, that's what's interesting!

But then he became a Wall Street broker, so he saw it from the other side from 1935 on, and he liked Russia, because we'd no dispute with Russia. He didn't really understand the ideological hatred of Russia in this country, but during the war is when he changed. Well, actually, you said Paris, but he was also in Berlin, so he saw the postwar occupation and he saw the whole problem with the treasury bills: the US dollar and the money that they had to print. There was a lot of stealing and a lot of black markets and he blamed the Russians for a lot of that. Now, that may or may not be true, but certainly a lot of American guys were also doing the black market a lot, so there was a lot of corruption. 

But as that war ended, and as the United States became more and more conscious of the Russian threat, so-called - you know, we made NATO to resist this potential invasion of Europe, which made no sense because the Russians were exhausted financially and militarily, but anyway - so he joined the band, because I guess that's one way to get ahead. He was on Wall Street and pretty much everybody had to be, if not a Republican, everybody had to be a Cold Warrior. It was a mandate, like [when] we had to wear masks during Covid. It was, "You have to feel this way." I remember many of his friends were liberal Jews from the 1930s and he liked them very much, but he could no longer have that kind of relationship with them, because they were out of style.

Well, you wrote [that] he felt that he still had to feed the military industrial state.

That didn't come up actually until later. I never heard that expression until Eisenhower left office. That was in 1964 or three - no, I'm sorry, 1960 - when Eisenhower made that speech. Of course, Eisenhower had done more to build up the bomb than anybody. But yet he said at the very end, as if he had a guilt complex, he said the most dangerous thing in American society - the most dangerous, he said - was the military industrial complex. I remember his exact words: that [it] is going to infect all our state houses, the whole country. He knew something was off, but he had contributed so much to it that...you understand. It's a strange speech. You watch it many times. I put it in my movie on Jack Kennedy. It is a very significant statement, because it is an old man who had been president for two terms, telling us - warning us - that there is something amiss in America and it's very serious.

Here at the Quincy Institute, you've certainly felt the pulse, and that pulse has never ceased. And it's amazing to me how strong that complex has remained. It seems to be immune to any kind of logic or attack, and the power of money continues and continues. It's just impossible to break that lock. We can talk about ways to do it. I'm sure you've thought about ways to do it.

I'm hoping at the end that you're going to give us, like, the top three ways to solve it. [laughter] If we drop it down a little bit, you also say about your father that that civilian life could not match the intoxicating time of World War II.

My father instilled in me the fear of the Russians, because when I was 10 years old, he's telling me, "They're in our schools! They're in our state house! They're all over the place! They're in journalism!" Which was a lot of nonsense. It was just people who were more liberal than he was. It was a lot of fear and, of course, that was added to by McCarthy and the whole Red Scare. But the Red Scare had come out of the old Red Scare of 1919, so it's a history in America that occurs repeatedly. 

I say that because, in my lifetime now, the Russian thing never materialized. We spent a fortune on the Cold War and, as you know, Ronald Reagan, the arch foe of Soviet communism, ended up making a deal with Gorbachev. So it shows you how history changes, because then we go for a period where it seems that we're out of that fear. It was a horrifying place to be.

So it's really interesting that this is how you're growing up, and then you're at Yale in 1964. You negotiate with the dean to take a year off to teach with a Catholic group in Vietnam. Did you think about ideology differently? Did you look at the Cold War differently, having gone to Vietnam?

No. I was a naive young man and I went along with the flow. I wasn't a genius or anything like that. I used to have arguments with a schoolmate of mine who was pro Castro. I would have vehement arguments with him! It's very funny, because he went the other way later.

And you went the other.

But no, I had to have my eyes awakened by experience. It's the only way it could work.

Did you think about the Vietnamese in a certain way while you were there, before you went as a soldier, or were you just kind of there?

No. I was there as a teacher originally, so I was teaching them. It was a very hectic job, very difficult, because I had huge classes and papers to correct. It was two semesters of hell but I learned a lot about the society. And Le-Ly Hayslip, who's here today - 

Le-Ly, do you want to stand up so we can recognize you?This is Le-Ly Hayslip, who lived in Vietnam and wrote this phenomenal memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, which Oliver then directed as a movie. And if there's one thing you do tonight before you leave, please say hello to Le-Ly. She's phenomenal.

She permitted me to do the third installment of my Vietnam saga, which is about her and - what I can call it, honestly - what the peasants were going through outside the cities. This was about the real people of Vietnam, the agricultural side that was pressured from both sides: the bombings from the Americans and the pressure from the VC, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese. It was a horrible place to be in the middle of and they suffered greatly. Estimates by Robert McNamara were as high as 3.5, 4 million Vietnamese were killed during that war. That's a huge amount for a country smaller than Europe.

So after your experience teaching there, you volunteer for the draft in 1967, and you write, "I was in a rush to get to the front lines before the war was over." Thinking back, what was the appeal? What were you hoping to achieve there?

Well, you have to be 18, 19 years old to remember that period in your life, which is very hard when you're older. But it was complex. I couldn't deal with a lot of things. I was frustrated. I didn't know things. I didn't feel like my education was complete. I had been to Vietnam, but I still was confused about what was going on, because I didn't understand all the politics. Of course, I was on my father's side, because you always listen to your father if you're a good boy, which I tried to be and [I thought] the Communists were bad. 

But then in that period, I went back because I didn't feel like I knew enough, that I wasn't complete. I didn't want to be a fraud. I wrote that book - which came out in 1997 - called A Child's Night Dream, which is a pretty honest book about being 19 years old. It's a very interesting look at the world from a 19 year old mentality, and you can understand why 19 year olds go to war, and why they're often the victims of war. Any of you who've had children who were confused at that age know what I'm talking about. It's a byproduct of our society which, in many ways, is spiritually bereft.

So Oliver directs the second film in the trilogy, Born on the 4th of July. It's based on a book written by Ron Kovic, and Ron Kovic writes in Born on the 4th of July, "like Mickey Mantle, John Wayne and The Sands of Iwo Jima, [the Marines] became my heroes." And you say he was a true believer. Did you also get a sense that military service would kind of help, maybe even turn you into a man?

They all did, but they [the military] still do that advertising, you know, become a man.

Be careful now, the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot Commander is here, so I don't want to get told off [laughter].

I know! I told him, "I don't want to go, I don't want to go." [laughter]

So, seriously, this is how good the Marine Corps Recruiting Commander is - Brigadier General Ryans is here - he literally, as Oliver Stone was walking up onto the ship, was trying to recruit Oliver and said he was going to give him a waiver [laughter]. 

I felt like I had to go to this war to understand it. I had to go back. I had already seen a bit of it from the fringes, but I went right into the heart of it in '67-68. September '67, I arrived. The Tet Offensive falls in January '68 and it's a bloody year. A lot of people get killed. The whole thing turns when Johnson, in March of '68, backs out of the war. He says he's not going to run again. We knew it was over. If you were infantry, you knew it. Infantry is very smart. They may not be the most educated people, but they know what's going on, and they figured it out right away, "Who's going to get killed for this?" So it wasn't like it's pictured in the movies most of the time.

I want to ask about that because I think this is really interesting. Looking back as a director on your younger self, did you see the gaps between what was on the big screen [and the reality]? 

Oh, yeah. We laughed at The Green Berets. It was shown outdoors, actually, at Dầu Tiếng. I saw it [there] and it was hilarious. We were laughing our heads off because it didn't look like anything we saw in combat. And John, to be honest, was a little old and fat, but what the hell, he was John Wayne.

No, it turned sour: that whole thing was a different thing. I didn't have the answers. I just came home and I was completely messed up, as many people were. But I made my way back gradually. Thank God my first wife really helped me a lot. Educating myself helped me a lot. I went to NYU Film School and made it gradually back. It took some time. It took some time. It's not like you're dramatic, it's just that you're confused, and I had to learn more. 

I learned, over the next ten years, a lot about America. I went to educate myself more. And when I met that professor you mentioned, Professor Kuznik, when I was in my late 40s - that's when I really studied history again, because he was a history professor for 30 years, so he led me in this study of American history. That motivated me to do this Untold History of the United States, 12 chapters, of which I really am proud. Because it goes from 1898 - when we first become interventionists in Cuba, the Philippines in that McKinley era - and then all the way through Obama. It ends in 2013 but we tracked a pattern of intervention, and it's an astounding story of repetition of the same problem. Whatever they say, there is a repetition.

I wonder if it relates to something you said earlier, that this is confusing as a young kid. You write in Chasing the Light that clearly [combat is] a frightening experience but it's also exciting, right? How do you explain that?

At 19, you're not thinking about dying. It's just something to be avoided. You see the guys that are dead and it's shocking, yes, but are you really considering all the spiritual values of that death and what it means to his family, to the future generation? You're not really thinking about that. You're thinking about, "Jesus Christ, fuck, I'm lucky!" You're not thinking like that. 

The interesting thing was I had a lot of sergeants who came out of World War II. They were grizzled veterans and most of them figured out ways to stay out of the field. They would stay back. But they were all canny veterans and they ran the PXs. They made a lot of money, by the way. There was a lot of corruption going on. A lot of corruption. Oh man. Le-Ly can tell you. Out of the PX, they were selling everything they could, and the Vietnamese were reselling them. It was a money war. There was a lot of money. A lot of people made big money, especially the Vietnamese. They're very smart. Very smart. What was I going to say?

We were talking about this kind of weird place where it's both frightening and exciting.

It's exciting. It's exciting to survive and exciting to kill, which happened. And to see them, to actually see them. Because you never really saw them that much. 

Our students read Karl Marlantes and what it's like to go to war and Karl writes that, "Combat is like crack cocaine, all the excitement highs with the crack cocaine costs."

Yeah, but Vietnam didn't have enough of that. The Civil War was better. If you could go through that war, you can imagine - that was really horrible, horrible, bloody. I think World War II was hard. Vietnam, in comparison, is a smaller war. My father used to make fun of it and said, "It's a police action." Well, Dad, it was a police action maybe from your point of view, but not from where I was. 

So what was your homecoming like? You write that - and this is really interesting, I think especially today - you write that you were terrified of the America you returned to. So what was your homecoming like?

Well, I was doing dope. You know, I was an E4. I didn't know officers. We never dealt with that level. My infantry unit was from the poorest parts of America and they went back to poor jobs, if jobs at all. Most of them had hard fates. They died young from overwork, or just got old because of the war. Some of them suicided. 

The Blacks - many of them couldn't get jobs. I went to Mississippi. I went to Tennessee. I saw them there. I went to the inner city of Chicago. It was tough. I talked for a class of people...that was what Platoon was about, and it wasn't about a lot of West Point people. A lot of officers got on me and I said, "It's not about the officer class." I didn't even know who my officers were! We saw them at a distance. But if you had any interaction with an officer, it was rare, because they wanted your butt in the field, and who was leading you in the field? Younger sergeants. The ones that were from my generation, but not the older sergeants, as I said, from Korea and World War II. They managed to stay out of the field as much as possible.

So looking back, do you see similarities between your dad reintegrating back home after World War II and yours? 

No. My father married a beautiful woman, my mother, in France. He picked her up on the street, actually [laughter] not what you're thinking! But he really didn't know her and he just liked her, and he went up to her on a bicycle and he bumped into her. He looked great in his American uniform, you know, 1944 or '45 Paris.  Anyway, so [when] he came back, he was an older man. He went in his 30s, so he was going back to Wall Street. 

Coming back, I was 20 years old, 21 years old. So what could I do? I had no job. I had no skills, except digging a foxhole and you know....it's not the same thing. Put it this way - you don't want to know. It's in the book. I went to jail on a federal smuggling charge right away, within ten days [of returning], here in San Diego. 

We got in the car and Oliver is like,"San Diego will always have a special place in my heart." [laughter]

San Diego was on the cutting edge of the drug war. It wasn't announced as a drug war. Nixon was coming in - this was December '68 - he was coming into office. He would come into office in March of '69, but the drug war was very much evident. You saw it in the jail. I don't know if it's still there - the county jail house or whatever they call it. I think [it held] 2,000 beds but it was 5,000 people in there. They were all black and all Hispanic. I think I was one of the few white people.

I got my eyes opened again. This was infantry. This was Vietnam. This is the war at home. Believe me, none of these people had been to Vietnam, very few of them. Why? Because they hadn't had an ounce, a dose, of patriotism in them. They had been struggling their whole lives. So it was a very "opening my eyes" kind of wake up, which unsettled me for a long time.

So how did going to NYU film school open your eyes as well?

Well, gradually. No, it was gradual. I wasn't, you know...hey, listen. I love movies. My mom took me all the time. My father liked good movies. So when you hear about this new thing called film school and you can get a college degree from watching movies - you know, why not? [laughter] Plus I got the GI Bill, which makes sense. So I went to NYU and gradually developed my talent and that took time. I like to write. I kept writing. 

I was telling a bunch of folks that I was reading Chasing the Light and I was 50 pages in, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is so well written." I was like, "Duh, he's a screenwriter."

Yeah, I wanted to be a writer originally and I thought I could be, but my fate was different. 

If we can, let's talk a little bit about directing, specifically about war stories. Your fellow Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, has written about the challenges of telling a true war story. What challenges did you face as a director for a film like Platoon: in getting, as you say in your book, the real depiction of the nightmare war that you experienced?

You can't. It's not possible. I really don't think so. It would be the most boring movie in the world because people wouldn't understand the distances. A war movie has to have some excitement, so ideally you see the enemy, and you have to have that clash to make it work, to give it the juice. You've got to personalize it.

Now, that doesn't need to be so. I've seen other kinds of war movies from Eastern Europe - very, very flat and frankly, I don't think they would work so well with an American audience. We have television we grew up with and we're used to violence. We like that. We like it and that's going to be a problem you're going to have to deal with the rest of your life - our life - the love of violence in this country. A love of action. [In reality] the enemy can kill you when you can't even see them. They're out of your range.

I thought it was so fascinating - you say as a director, you have the power to decide who lives or dies, and clearly war is so much more unpredictable than that, so there's this challenge of capturing the randomness of war in a sense, right?

But that's with actors, remember. I wouldn't want to play the god role. I'm killing actors off, you know. [laughter] Just joking!

You don't see the enemy much [in real war]. When you do see him, it's suddenly the most surprising, weird thing. I mean, for example, one day - I didn't put this in the movie - I swear they had those giant anthills in the jungle, in the 25th Infantry near Dầu Tiếng. We were in a firefight and I'm behind the anthill and I have an M79. Anybody who knows what an M79 is, it's a worthless gun. I mean, it's a shotgun shaped thing but you need to fire at least 30 yards, 40 yards, 50 yards to get any explosion. It won't go off. 

So I pop up over the hill and somehow there's a Vietnamese guy looking at me right there, across the anthill. I go down. He goes down. "What the fuck did I just see?" [laughter] He was saying the same thing to himself. He was scared. That's the kind of stupidity and weirdness that you run into. Finally, when I got the courage - I didn't have a gun - to look around, he was gone. He split. Thank God.

Has your definition of a real war story changed over time? Your worldview has clearly widened since you were a young 19 year old in Vietnam. 

What American war film do you know that really works for you? Now, I understand there's been some good war films. It's more about character. Because when you get to the actual war, you see too much killing [done] too easy. The Marine pictures were great. [The Sands of] Iwo Jima is great. 

For example, Saving Private Ryan: I still cannot believe those American soldiers would go halfway across France to find a guy that they didn't have any knowledge or investment with. That is highly unlikely and that was fictionalized. The D-Day invasion seemed very, very rough for that particular area, almost too rough. I mean, everyone gets killed, it seems. The density of the fire is a little bit heavy, but that's the nature of a filmmaker. You want to make it better. You want to make it more dangerous, more violent, so it's not really as dramatic, in my opinion.

So is there a central argument for a film like Platoon and, if so, what is it?

Look. No film is going to change people if they don't want to be changed. A lot of people saw that movie and said, "I want to sign up." A lot of them went to the Iraq War. 

Same thing with Full Metal Jacket, right? It's an anti-war film, in a sense -

You can't say that. You can just say, "Here it is. Now realize what you're getting into." It's a bigger issue, though, why do we keep going back to war? After the war in Vietnam, I thought, "Maybe this is over. Maybe we're not going to be intervening in these countries anymore. Maybe." And certainly when Reagan makes a deal with Gorbachev, it seemed like, "Okay, the Cold War is off. Russia's back to where it should be." Unfortunately, too many people are invested in the war industries in this country. Too much money is at stake. We need an enemy. We need it. If we don't have it....it's the same argument [as] in '45. My father was an economist. We need an enemy, otherwise we're going to have a massive depression again. They were scared about going back to the '30s. They hated Roosevelt at that point, too. Everything turned, but they thought it was a full employment economy with a war. And, as a result, that kind of [mentality] set in and it's been there. It's still in the neoconservative circles. It's a Bible. They feel it. It's religious more than reason. It's an indoctrination of the soul.

Part of it, too, I wonder is - do you get a sense that we as Americans are uniquely susceptible to fear mongering? 

No. I think the English help us a lot [laughter]. I think the English are the most martial people I've ever seen. They really have a science of it, but everyone in the world to some degree has that warrior in him. 

Not everyone, but you know what I'm saying. There's always that element in society, but society exists to civilize that: to curb it, to restrain it. But it seems that we're getting closer to it all the time, where the advertisements on television are more realistic, more brutal, preparing for war. It seems to me that the American people have accepted too readily the proposition that Russia is out to get us. It hasn't ever been really debated. The people who debated representing the Russian point of view - many intellectuals, many academics - they don't get the time. They don't get the space. This was more and more evident during this Ukraine period. I was working with Stephen Cohen of NYU, who's one of the leading scholars of Russian history in America. He knows his stuff. He speaks Russian. He's been doing it for years and he couldn't even get a booking. He had to go on the offbeat radio shows, because he said the truth on CNN one time to somebody and they no longer booked him.

We know that that happened earlier, too, in the first Iraq war. There were people like Don A. Eubuen (sp?). You couldn't say these things. So there seems to be some corporate control of television, and the media that is pushing for war, and it's a very subtle thing. It's not necessarily a conspiracy, but it is a drive towards profit.

So, as someone in the business, do you feel that popular culture products like films also promote this neoliberal interventionist foreign policy? Like what products?

Films, as an example. Oh, sure. After 2001, which—oh, God forbid — the whole world changed. The whole world changed because all of a sudden it became alright to adopt a war posture at all times. It became alright. We have the right to do anything now, because they've done this to us, which was a very self-righteous point of view, represented by a guy I went to school with who was a real moron: George [W.] Bush. [laughter] I mean, he was in my class. He got the C's; I left.

[Laughter] He got the C's, and you left!

Well, he was entitled. He had a father. [laughter] Anyway, I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, we decided that our enemies were everywhere, that there’s no limit on this thing. We talked about 60-some countries and we went basically to war with the world, and it never changed. We never came back. As much as I’d hoped for better things with Obama, it never happened. He just kept going with the same Patriot Act. Read the Patriot Ac! It pisses me off. If you’re a real patriot, it should piss you off. And now, the censorship—all the censorship in the world—is going on. This is really sick. As several candidates have pointed out, free speech is our right, it's not a privilege. You hear some of these people like Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton tell you that it's a privilege we have to respect, a privilege to speak freely. No, it’s not for you to give us the right to speak freely. We have the right. Fuck you [laughter, applause]. I hate their presumption.

As we get a little closer to the end so we have some time for the audience, I’d like to talk briefly about legacies. What has been the most important legacy the Vietnam War has left for the United States, in your opinion?

Obviously nothing. Nobody paid attention and we kept going back to war. It's a repeat, a redux. Come on. We’ve made one mistake after the other in foreign affairs. We’re not a very smart country diplomatically. If we’d [have] been a little bit cooler, we could have gotten along with everybody in this world. Everybody, maybe except with one or two exceptions. There’s no reason why we can’t be partners with Russia and with China. We can have economic competition; we don’t need a war.

You brought this up earlier. I’m going to hold you to it now. How do we provoke Americans to think more critically about the use of military power overseas? That’s your job [laughter].

Wait, I’m going to pass the buck to Laura. Laura, that’s your job. 

What you’ve got to do is take risks. The risk-takers are going to push it to the level. The  neoconservatives are there in this administration, as well as in the last one. They’re not going away. They’re still around, those people, and they’re very dangerous because they think a certain way. They’re really indoctrinated. But they will eventually push this thing to where it hits home. Put a couple of missiles into America and we’ll see if people can handle it. That’s the only way. We have to experience it with our own. It won’t be a 9/11. It’ll be worse, I think.

Alright, so one final question before I've got a surprise for you. We have a lot of students in the audience tonight. Fred, Oliver's only guidance for the speaker series was - that he gave me a few years ago - was that it be student-centric, and we've tried to have that as our guiding light, which is why every table has got an SDSU student here with you.

It's interesting San Diego State is doing this thing and not UC [University of California] San Diego [cheers, applause]. 

So we actually have a couple of UC San Diego [alumni], so I apologize [laughter]. 

The state universities are always better. They do better. They're more open. They're more liberal [applause].

Looking back on your career - we have all these students in the audience - what is the one key lesson you’ve learned about the relationship between war and American society that you want to share with them? Let people talk. You should hear the other side before you go to war [applause]. We always censor it, and the press is one of the worst: the media in this country, the mainstream media. And thank God for the internet, there are other people saying other things. We’ve got to listen to them. You've got to look for that stuff, because you’re not going to get it from the top seven media companies. You're just not. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want controversy. They just want to sell you stuff.

All right, thank you [applause]. Before I turn it over to the audience, I’ve got a lightning round for you. Ready? What’s that?

I’ve got a lightning round. You ready? Best actor or actress you’ve ever worked with? No way [laughter]. No, I can’t say that because I’ve worked with a lot of talented people and I don’t want to single anybody out.

I’m sure you’re not going to say the worst one then right? All right, let me do this: who’s a really good one? Alright, I won't do it. Favorite movie that’s not your own? Oh, come on. I love movies. You’re talking several hundred movies. Why do I go to one? That’s what movie critics do: "Oh yeah, here are the ten best movies of the year." They bore me. They ruin movies for me. I like to discover, I like to see. There are so many good ones that are made that you never hear about. 

Okay. You’ve got to give me one here [laughter]. Best band to put on a movie soundtrack? Best what?

Best band to put on a movie soundtrack. Oh, it depends on the movie. Come, on you're asking me stupid questions [laughter]. For a professor of history, you're really asking stupid questions [laughter].

My colleague will agree with you on that one. All right, I think I’m going to turn it over to the audience now [laughter]. We have two students in the back, Katherine and Thomas. Raise your hands. We’ve got about 10 minutes or so to take Q&A from the audience. Does anyone have a question they’d like to ask Oliver? Please stand up so they can see you—and make sure the questions are better than mine that I just asked.  My name is Michael Lester and I’m currently a student at San Jose State University and I'm a film major as well. I’m a junior. My question to you is: When you were young, around my age, what was the biggest challenge to you in getting your voice heard and getting your voice out there? Well, first of all, it was learning how to make a film, because whatever they say - they say you can learn it in a day - that’s not quite true. You have to feel it. You have to feel your way and you make smaller films. I started at NYU, so the natural route was short films: one minute, two minutes. We worked our way up to three or four minutes. And it's tricky, because that was film and it was not quite digital, which is a little bit more forgiving. But anyway, we learned lighting and we learned everything at NYU we could, and making short films was frustrating. I made three: one was good, the other two didn’t make it. They fell short but they were certainly ambitious. 

And then after that, it becomes a search for a job. You have to get a job and you have to go around and you have to know people. Basically, I went through it as a writer, and that was very hard because I had to write screenplays. I didn't want to have to beg. I wanted to prove, so I wrote eight or nine, ten, eleven maybe, and they were always turned down. Always turned down. Some were not so good screenplays, some were good. Platoon I wrote in '76, it was turned down for ten years before it was made. Ten years. You know, I'm sick of rejection [laughter]. And frankly, I'm sick of the business, too, because the business went through all the worst impulses. The people who do the best - make the most money - are the most prostituted, generally speaking. They just see what they can make and they know that's going to make money and that's what they do it for. I’ve been passionately driven and unfortunately, I paid a price for that.

So probably right now - I don't know - probably I'm on a blacklist in Hollywood, or a gray list or whatever it is, because I did interviews with Putin. They're so nuts in Hollywood. They're so virtuous. You have to express your virtue, you have to wear a ribbon that says how virtuous and conscious you are: political correctness and all, whatever you want to call it. They call it "wokeness" now. I can’t stand all that stuff. That’s why I went to Vietnam, to get away from that kind of thinking. So be a rebel. That’s the best way to make films. You might not get there but you'll feel good getting there [laughter] or else you'll feel really bad. But look at what our country's becoming. 

I'm going to make a big mistake here and have a USSD professor ask a question [laughter]. I just want to thank you, first of all, for coming. It's so fascinating to see you in person and I want to thank you because, you don't know this, you gave me one of my first jobs. I worked on The Doors film. I guess you would've been in the service when Dr. King was killed and I teach African-American history. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the changes you saw in Black servicemen and women, and also their relationships with White servicemen and women, when you were in Vietnam and after?

Well, the killing of King was in April [1968 and] that was a very big moment. Very big. Because Johnson had just pulled out of the war in March. That was a getaway. As I said earlier, we knew in our gut that we were not going to go for the victory here. It was over. It was going to be a stalemate or something like that. When he got killed, it got worse because the Black soldiers, who were always very outspoken - you saw Platoon, that was the situation. They had their own worlds. They had their own music. They had their places to smoke dope in the infantry units. After that, a lot of them - not all - became bitter. There was a bitterness toward the white [soldiers]. I felt it. It was a very bad time.

Then, if you look at the figures, there were more prison sentences. There were more insurrections. There were mutinies that started: "Fuck you, I'm not going to go out there." It became a wilder place. By 1969, I think that's when the Defense Department - or was it '71, they put out that famous memo saying, look, what's happening in Vietnam is [like] the French mutinies in World War I. That's what they said. I think it was '71. You would know. If you thought of the Kirk Douglas film Paths of Glory - beautiful film - that was about those French mutinies. They were slaughtering those troops. It was not like that in Vietnam, but still. People didn’t want to die for that. Life was valuable.

I think we have time for one last question. Yes, sir? In your opinion, what is the main reason that this country actually hasn't won a war since World War II?

Well, neoconservatives would answer, “We’re gonna win the next one!" [laughter] and that'll be World War III. Kennedy said it the best: if the generals get their way, we’ll never know who won. There's no point in fighting. It's just so monstrous an idea now. The generals still believe that they can win a “limited nuclear war.” That's doctrine. Read the Pentagon stuff. It's amazing. They still believe it. Although the Russians now - thank God for the Russians - they have improved so much their nuclear [capabilities] that they're probably more dangerous than we are. So either way we're losing. It's going to be everybody loses. Our economy, which is the second richest in the world, is going to be devastated from any limited war even, and who knows the dangers of nuclear winter. That one has never been factored in here. 

Well, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Oliver Stone. [Applause]

-Gregory Daddis interviews Oliver Stone, "Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America's Forever Wars," San Diego State University, Dec 12 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

"Anora was the most surprising new film to me and really hit me hard. I liked it very much, so I’d say it’s one of, if not, my favorite film for 2024, but I haven’t had time to see many of the new movies yet."

-Oliver Stone, "65 Directors Pick Their Favorite Films of 2024," IndieWire, Dec 30 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

"Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America's Forever Wars," featuring a vital discussion with America's foremost director of films on the Vietnam War - Oliver Stone.

To mark Veteran's Day, the fifth anniversary of the Quincy institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war, the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University and the Quincy Institute invited Stone aboard the USS Midway in front of 250 guests to discuss how America's relationship with war influenced his work over the past 30 years.

[back-and-totheleft]

World War III may be inevitable

Iconic director Oliver Stone is not optimistic.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, and nearly 35 years since his film "Platoon" debuted, America is still hopelessly enamored with violence, and Washington, encouraged by the tandem power centers of Wall Street and the media, is still engineered for war.

“Our country is sabotaging itself. Why do we keep going back” in search of a necessary enemy? He asked. “We track a pattern of intervention, there is a repetition” that will eventually lead us to another world war.

Grim thoughts, given in a conversation moderated by (Ret.) Col. Greg Daddis, Iraq War veteran and director of the Center for War and Society at San Diego State University. Daddis is also USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History (Thursday’s event was held on the USS Midway museum) and a board member at the Quincy Institute, which partnered in the event.

Stone’s own experiences as a 20-year-old Army infantryman during the most tumultuous years in Vietnam (and politically, socially, back home in the U.S.) — 1967-1968 — formed the basis for Platoon, which won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director in 1987 and is considered one of the most important and viscerally impactful Vietnam War films in Hollywood history. It is the first in his Vietnam War trilogy, which includes "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), and "Heaven and Earth" (1993).

As a young man inspired by the tales of mythological Odysseus and a father who had served in World War II, he was driven to war by wanderlust and the frenetic unfocused energy youth. His time in combat there, in his words, took the scales from his eyes and upon returning to an “country he no longer knew” set him on a course of discovery, his mind and creativity coalescing around a burning skepticism of the government, social convention, and conformity.

This is all detailed in his excellent 2020 autobiography, “Chasing the Light” which charts Stone’s youth, his time in Vietnam, and his screenwriting/directing career though “Platoon.”

He didn’t directly mention the recent elections or the current conflict in Ukraine on Thursday night, but insisted that the “strong compulsion” to use war not only as a driver of industry but as the first tool in the box for resolving foreign disputes, still fueled Washington policy. Despite all of the failures of the last 50 years, “it’s impossible to break that lock” that war has on the collective psyche, he said. Even “Platoon” which is a searing indictment of the what he calls the Three Lies of the military and war, has failed to turn the society against interventionism.

“No film is going to change people if you don’t want to be changed,” he said, charging that military recruitment had actually gone up after the film was released.

In recent years, Stone has courted controversy with his series of interviews with Vladimir Putin and his questioning of the Washington/Western narrative of that war. The only mention he made to that was that “I have been passionately driven and for that I’ve paid a price,” and criticized censorship (his 2016 documentary "Ukraine on Fire" had been initially banned on You Tube and then reinstated).

“Free speech is a right, not a privilege” he said, to applause from the room. Of the current political dynamic, he lamented that the “neocons are here from the last administration as well as this administration, they are not going away."

“We’ve made one mistake after another on foreign affairs, there is no reason why we cannot be partners with Russia and China. We don’t need a war.”

Unfortunately, the country’s love for was is “a religion,” he said. All one can do is keep resisting it. His entire life after Vietnam seems to have sprung from that adage. “Be a rebel, and that’s the best way to be.”

-Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, "Oliver Stone: World War III may be inevitable," Responsible Statecraft, Nov 16 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Academy Award-winning writer and director Oliver Stone. He discusses and reflects on the 9/11 attacks 20 years on, from the heroism of the first responders to the rush to go to war by the Bush administration, the reasons why 9/11 happened and how they were ignored by Americans, the War on Terror and US imperialism, why he defends President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and opposes the hysteria from the media over the withdrawal, the Wall Street crash of 2008, and much more!

[back-and-totheleft]

Trump, Putin and a Sydney ‘love-child’ 

Oliver Stone is an American film and documentary director, producer and screenwriter. His work includes Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, JFK and Any Given Sunday. I spoke with him on Thursday.

Fitz: Mr Stone, I’m not going to waste too much of your time by burbling compliments. Let me just record my deepest admiration for almost your entire body of work.

OS: Thank you, Peter.

Fitz: In your long and storied career, have you had much to do with Australia or Australians?

OS: I’ve been there, I don’t know, a dozen times, often to open my films. Before that, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, I would go to Sydney on R&Rs, which were quite exciting.

Fitz: In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?

OS: [Pause.] Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, “Hello, I’m your daughter.” That turned into some few days, naturally, trying to get to know this sincere young woman who’d lost touch with her mother. Eventually, we sorted it out with a DNA test, and she was not my daughter.

Fitz: Moving on! Having watched all 12 episodes of your documentary Untold American History, I was absorbed by your theme that what we think is actually happening in the world isn’t what’s really happening – a theme that runs through all your work. Is it fair to say that it was specifically your experience in the Vietnam War that made you see the world entirely differently?

OS: The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not. So my military experience pretty much started to repeat itself. I would get into a subject matter, such as a JFK film, and the deeper I went, the more it became apparent that there was a lot of lying going on. So yeah, I had a deep suspicion, a deep distrust of the official narrative. We all should know by now that governments often lie to cover their arse.

Fitz: I loved your film on JFK and your documentary on his assassination asserting it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald who shot him. But given your experience with Australia, I’m hoping you won’t mind if I put this next question in Australian vernacular?

OS: Go on.

Fitz: So who the f--- did kill JFK?

OS: [Pause.] I don’t know, but you can start with the CIA and its great interest in Kennedy in the Cuban operations, and how Kennedy – by not going through with the desire of the warrior class to attack Cuba in 1962, after the Bay of Pigs debacle – really made serious enemies. There were people who really thought he was a traitor. We kept hearing the word “traitor” used by certain of these people, some of whom worked with the CIA; in fact, there are several suspects inside that agency who we’d like to know more about.

We can start at the top with Allen Dulles, the CIA director who was fired by Kennedy. And there are other suspects from the CIA, but it’s certainly not the whole organisation. No, it’s always about some key men who operated on their own terms because they had been given so much leeway by president Eisenhower over the previous eight years. They had operated “off the shelf” – that was part of their charter. In 1947, under the National Security Act, they were given that vague right to do so on a covert basis as the president saw fit. That part of their charter was a huge mistake. Hundreds of covert operations have followed.

Fitz: Through your whole career, you’ve taken turns that nobody saw coming, with one of your most recent being your advocacy of nuclear power in your documentary Nuclear Now. I would have positioned you as a strong liberal, but the position you take in this documentary is we need to go back to nuclear which, at least here in Australia, aligns with some notably shrill conservative voices.

OS: Nuclear energy was one of the great discoveries of the last century, actually the late 19th century, and it was developed. Of course, it was given a stimulus by WWII and the chase for the atomic bomb, but people have not understood and they haven’t distinguished between a bomb and the uses of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. To make nuclear energy, you only need approximately 2 per cent enriched uranium, as opposed to approximately 95 per cent enriched for a bomb; there’s a huge difference in making and producing that kind of energy. So nuclear energy is very usable, it’s been proven safe for many usages over the years, and we should be employing more and more of it in the mix with hydro and renewable energy to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

Fitz: We both hope you live for another 30 years and can keep working for 27 of them. But is it fair to say you’d rather live, surely, next to a wind farm than even a small nuclear facility in your backyard?

OS: I’d have no fear. Because there’s going to be a lot of new small SMRs – small modular reactors – built for many purposes, and with updated safety measures. It’s the next step, especially for the Americans who are developing that form of it. The Russians and Chinese are way ahead of us in nuclear development. They’ve been doing it consistently, whereas we stopped building in the 1970s after the Three Mile Island supposed disaster. No one died, and no serious radiation was released. This was a shame because it was so misunderstood and hyped as a disaster. America can’t build a nuclear reactor any more on that scale as we did from the 1950s to the ’70s. We gave up, but now we’ve started building again to some degree with scientists and researchers, with more than 50 different companies pursuing original research, including small divisions at Westinghouse and General Electric. But these are smaller reactors. Meanwhile, the world, especially the less developed regions, are going to need a lot of nuclear energy, a lot. We’re going to need not just a little, we need a lot.

Fitz: Another surprising turn that you took, at least for me, were your interviews with Vladimir Putin, in The Putin Interviews. I take your point that he’s not just a cartoon character dictator, but a man of flesh and blood beset by forces that are around him, navigating the best he can. Nevertheless, are you shocked, as I’m shocked, by the brutality in the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin at the base of it?

OS: I’m sorry, there has been a great deal of awful new propaganda about Russia ever since the turn of this century. It’s coming from a neoconservative Washington, which is seeking to destroy the so-called Russian Empire and use it as a rich base of natural resources to be exploited by the West. We’ve made Putin into the major villain of our time because he’s invaded Ukraine, whereas the United States – with NATO – illegally invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria with impunity. This is a war that’s been very misunderstood, especially the stakes. If you remember correctly, the United States staged a coup in Ukraine in 2014, which exiled the elected president and brought in a vehement and strongly anti-Russian government. They have a long history in Eastern Europe of fighting Russia. Donbas, which is the eastern, Russian-minority part of Ukraine, never joined this new government, nor did Crimea, and they were identified as “terrorists” by the government. The Russians, however, saw them as “separatists” who wanted no part of this unelected government.

While pretending to follow a peace process in Minsk I and Minsk II, the US and European Union betrayed Russia, significantly building up the Ukrainian army from 2016 on. One hundred thousand of these troops were poised to retake Donbas in February 2022. At the same time, the Ukrainian government was making quite a bit of noise about getting nuclear weapons into Ukraine. This was a huge issue for the Russians because, as you may remember, Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush negotiated in the 1980s and ’90s for a new, peaceful Europe. East Germany was reunited with West Germany on the basis that NATO would not move beyond Germany one inch to the east. That vow was broken repeatedly by the United States. NATO, with our blessing, added 13 countries to its treaty, and grew into a monster on the borders of Russia in a major movement to supposedly “contain” Russia.

There’s no point going into the history of this enormous violation to Russian national security, but it would be similar to Mexico or Canada suddenly declaring they have put a hostile army on the Mexican or Canadian border of the United States, and were, with nuclear weapons, minutes from all our major industrial centres. Nor should it be forgotten that it was the United States who reignited the Cold War in 2002 when Bush abruptly abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. So, between using NATO to expand and breaking several other nuclear agreements, the United States and NATO began the process of encircling Russia, which became increasingly suspicious of the motives of the West.

To put it in another way, if Putin had not reacted to the build-up on his borders by invading Donbas and annexing Crimea (which occurred, interestingly, without violence, because most of the population was pro-Russian), he would have lost the trust of the Russian people, who were not blind to what was going on. That’s when Putin, after giving us several warnings about the West crossing Russian red lines, reacted and sent some 120,000 Russian troops into Donbas, which had already become a bloody war by 2022 with some 7000 to 8000 “separatists” murdered by the illegal Kyiv gangster government. It was certainly not in Putin’s interest to destroy the Donbas. To the contrary, he wants to have it back in the Russian sphere of interest and keep it productive, which it once was. So one wonders where all this alleged brutality propaganda is coming from? Motive is necessary, and perhaps when this war is over, there’ll be a more rational reporting of the news.

Fitz: We can talk about this one for three hours, and I’d love to, but I’m aware of your time restrictions. Do you just despair for the current state of the movie industry with the endless Marvel franchise stuff?

OS: I don’t despair because there’s always good movies made, and there are ways to make them. I despair at the lack of depth of the theatrical movie in the United States, because the distribution system rewards essentially only blockbusters and crucifies the less lucrative releases. As a result, it’s very hard for independent and less popular productions to get made and distributed, which is a great loss to the art of cinema. It’s not just a circus business.

Fitz: Of all your movies, the scene that I most loved is in Any Given Sunday, with Al Pacino’s as the ageing Coach D’Amato talking to his team before the big NFL match: “We’re in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time. Now I can’t do it for you. I’m too old … but the inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch!” It’s a classic. When you shot it, and Al Pacino delivered it, did you recognise it at the time as that, or only when you saw it at the cinema?

OS: We never know what’s going to hit or not, or connect with an audience. You never know. Yes, that happened to be taken up, and it’s been used by numerous coaches across the country, and possibly on some Australian rugby teams, as a model for rah-rah speeches.

But, nonetheless, that movie called for it, not only because the team was losing, but also because the actor, Al Pacino, was in a mental hole too. He was having problems with ageing. If you remember, the movie is based on his being edged out of his NFL club, which goes on all the time. People get too old. So there was a lot of personal identification with it. At that point, I had been in the movie business a long time. And there were new executives coming in and a lot of them were women. And so that Cameron Diaz character, the team owner, was based in large part on a couple of the cut-throat executives I met in the film business who were young women in their 20s and 30s.

That’s not to say there weren’t cut-throat young men also emerging from colleges and entering the film business without much love or understanding of cinema.

Fitz: But did you have any experience in a dressing room with a coach saying stuff like that in your background? Or anything where a coach had spoken like that?

OS: I played tackle football in elementary school, but the speech was created for the film.

Fitz: You wrote that?

OS: Yeah. Because I believe football most embodies warfare – you win or you lose. It’s tough, gritty, people get hurt, and key decisions have to be made. And you have to recognise that, often, the outcome is a matter of inches.

Fitz: Allow me to say, as somebody who was sort of raised in dressing rooms like that, across several countries, it is extraordinary to me how well you captured it. We’ve all heard the theme of that speech a hundred times, except our coaches were never quite so eloquent as that. I mean, that was extraordinary!

OS: Thank you, that’s what movies are made for, I believe. Movies are bigger than life. And those are the kinds of movies that I especially like. Unfortunately, so many movies now are smaller than life. Times change. I miss the old movies, the spectacular shows.

Fitz: Last question, if I may. Most of us in Australia don’t understand Trump. We sort of understand how he might have been elected once, but after everything that happened, finishing with January 6, we cannot understand how Americans could look at him and go, “Yeah, let’s have four more years of that.”

OS: And if you look at the Biden administration, you can say the same thing. It has gotten America into three wars, if you really think about it: (1) Ukraine, which is really a proxy war to weaken or destroy Russia, which is the most extreme strategy any American president has ever attempted; (2) the Middle East war continued in Israel, with America’s full support of Israel; and (3) now we’re bombing Yemen ourselves.

Biden is a simple-minded, old-fashioned Cold Warrior of the first degree. As mad as [WWII US Air Force] General Curtis LeMay was in his way. He’s extremely dangerous. Trump might not be a solution to this madness, but he’s nothing compared to Biden or to the damage that George W. Bush did to my country by declaring the “War on Terror”, which was wholly unnecessary. He provoked this new world that we’re living in of extreme violence and militarism.

From Bush, it grows to where we are now in a most dangerous position. Obama, then Trump, now Biden, have provoked China as well by declaring a “pivot to Asia” and sending American marines and so forth to Australia, building up the Pacific Fleet … The US is brokering a major war in the Pacific. This is a very incendiary position. I hardly see what’s so wonderful about Biden.

Fitz: He is not Trump, is the first thing that’s wonderful about Biden!

OS: That’s your way of putting it, but I don’t think you fully understand that Biden has truly split the world into two scared camps and abides by the outdated imperial notion that the US can still dominate the world. It cannot. It must accept a multipolar world that can exist economically without war.

Fitz: OK, thanks. It has been one of the privileges of my professional life to speak to you and I seriously thank you.

-Peter FitzSimons, "Trump, Putin and a Sydney ‘love-child’ … I’d chat to Oliver Stone on any given Sunday," The Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 11 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

Aussie love child

In February, I was thrilled to interview the great cinematic impresario and political activist of global standing Oliver Stone. When I asked what the most formative period of his life was, he replied: OS: “The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not.” When he mentioned that he had often come to Australia on R&R from Vietnam, I asked the obvious. Fitz: “In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?” OS: [Pause.] “Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, ‘Hello, I’m your daughter.’ ” In the end, it wasn’t. But I loved the story.

-Peter FitzSimons, "The best bits of Fitz. My best chats of 2024," The Sydney Morning Herald, Dec 15 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

How to film a conversation

So what about visual language?

I'd say it starts in the script. You and I are talking. Everything we are saying essentially is very interesting, to us in this moment in the first dimension because we are fascinated by the unpredictability of what's going to happen. But visually this is very static, probably a boring image— two people talking in profile at each other. How to make this interesting is a big challenge. I would go about it minutely.

I would first of all try to figure out, well the lighting’s not bad, but try to get some decent light going. And also we have some views out the windows [sweeping views of a trademark Technicolor California sunset over the Pacific Ocean| Obviously, we have some sculpture, we have an office, there’s things to play off of.

But ultimately if it is going to work, we're gonna have to get to the words and the words would interpret for us. | would probably cut away to some of the concepts that are being illustrated. I might shoot, I could shoot this way [pointing into my face], I could shoot over, I could shoot into, I could shoot your lips, your eyes, your nose, the way of your habits, your manner of talking. I could pull back to a wide and have the whole room and have that effect, bouncing off. Some tight singles or else overs. I also have a choice. I could shoot low, shoot high, I could shoot over the shoulder, I could cut across the axis and shoot across your shoulders that way [pointing in another direction]. So | could combine a shot of you this way, this way, and then I have it cut this way and that way. I could do a split screen. What I’m trying to say is that I've given you about fifty options of how to shoot this very normally conventional scene.

-Oliver Stone on how he would film a conversation. From "The Wounded and The Living," by Steve Beck. Mondo 2000 magazine, Issue 17, 1997

[Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine.]

[back-and-totheleft]

"I'm not a historian and don't pretend to be"

Q. Talking about cruelty, we saw the cruelty of the Japanese army in Nagasaki – exhibits of the Nanjing Massacre, military sex slavery, and Unit 731 at the Oka Masaharu Museum.[9] The US too, even after its use of the atomic bomb, used cruel weapons such as Agent Orange, depleted uranium weapons, cluster bombs, and drones. The nature of war is cruel, but in the case of the US, it seems rampant. Is there any historical significance in this cruelty of the United States?

Stone: I do not believe that the United States was as cruel as Germany and Japan were. I mean I was in Vietnam; I saw Agent Orange dropped on us many times. I still do not know. Maybe I am going to be a victim of it. I do not think about it that much, but I know people have claimed they had been. We saw the results with the Vietnamese. Agent Orange was the cruelest we became. Although we developed mustard gas in WWI, we never used it. The atomic bomb and Agent Orange were the worst. When Obama talks about Syria and he says that the red line for Syria is chemical weapons, what a fucking hypocrite! Why doesn’t he look at our own history? He probably would not even admit that we used chemical weapons in Vietnam. And we made a big deal about Saddam Hussein’s having used chemical weapons when we were trying to justify invading Iraq. (Kuznick: But when Saddam used them against the Iranians, we initially ran interference for him at the UN, preempting a resolution explicitly condemning the Iraqi use. He was our ally. And after he used them against Iraq’s own Kurdish people at Halabjah in 1988, the U.S. increased aid to his vile regime.) So who makes money off this? Dow Chemical profited immensely in Vietnam, but the students drove their recruiters off campus. But cruelty, no; cruelty is not human nature. There are always cruel soldiers in every country in the world, people who are racist, people who are stupid. But as a policy, the United States. . . , take waterboarding. We do it, but we always back away from it, whereas you have to admit that the Germans and the Japanese wholeheartedly embraced cruelty for many years. If they had been winners in WWⅡ, we would be experiencing Unit 731 in Manchuria. [...]

Q: Japan faces debate over historical issues such as the Nanjing Massacre and military sex slavery, and when we try to deal with these issues honestly we are called anti-Japanese. Do you get such reaction too as being called anti-American or unpatriotic? How do you deal with such criticism?

Stone: I think the strongest credential I can put forward would be, number one, my service in the military in Vietnam, which is hard for them to get around. John McCain can bluster all he wants, but at the end of the day, he was a bomber; he bombed people from the air and he knows that. I do not understand the man’s mentality, how, after being in the prison camp like he was, he can still have such anger and hatred in his heart for the perceived enemies of the United States, possibly soon including China. McCain is what I would call an unreconstructed, un-evolved soldier; many of them exist. I, on the other hand, feel good about my mission…because I served honorably. To be honest, I mean it was not an honorable war, but I served honorably within the confines of my own understanding of the war. And at the end of the day, I became a warrior for peace, which is what I am now, not a warrior for more wars, so I feel strong about that.

And number two, I think what is very important for me is that I did not speak out until I had made roughly eighteen feature films. I spoke as a dramatist, which is my profession. I am not a historian, and I do not pretend to be. I do not have the grounding in it, but I do care about history and I can dramatize it well. Now as I speak out as a documentarian with a background of having made movies, I get criticized very often for nonsense reasons, rubbish reasons. The way they threw it at me was that I made up history, and it took me a while to understand it. Many dramatists have used history before me and I do not apologize for doing historical drama. I never once claimed that I was doing a documentary, and I was not doing a documentary, never, and they put words in my mouth. Anyway, that is why I feel that I can talk strongly without feeling shame.

-Oliver Stone, "“We Used Chemical Weapons in Vietnam”: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick Explain How Telling the Untold History Can Change the World for the Better," By Satoko Oka Norimatsu & Narusawa Muneo, Truthout, Oct 6 2013

[back-and-totheleft]

Director Oliver Stone leads lecture on impacts of Vietnam War 50 years later

During the Vietnam War, USS Midway’s below-deck hangar quartered iconic fighter jets like F-4 Phantoms and F-8 Crusaders. These days, the space is a showroom for the USS Midway Museum’s restored planes, helicopters, and flight simulators that help tell the story of the United States military’s proud tradition of aviation innovation.

There is also space carved out of the vast hangar for special events. Last Thursday, San Diego State University’s Center for War and Society and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft hosted renowned American film director Oliver Stone to share a different story about our country's military history.

“Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America’s Forever Wars,” the title of Thursday’s talk by Stone, examined how the Vietnam War, and other wars before and after, shaped foreign policy and American society, and set the tone for so-called “forever wars” the U.S. has found itself involved in since the end of Vietnam.

Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone leads the "Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America’s Forever Wars" lecture aboard USS Midway on Nov. 14, 2024Open the image full screen. Academy Award-winning film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone leads the "Vietnam at 50: Documenting the Legacies of America’s Forever Wars" lecture aboard USS Midway on Nov. 14, 2024. (SDSU) Guided by questions from Gregory Daddis, director of the Center for War and Society and USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History, Stone began the talk with details of his early life, growing up a son to an Army Lieutenant Colonel who served on President Eisenhower’s staff in Paris, France and post-occupation Berlin, Germany during World War II, and how his father’s anti-communism stance influenced his own ideology.

“As the war ended and the U.S. became more conscious of the so-called Russian threat … He joined the band because I guess that’s one way to get ahead,” Stone said.

It wasn’t fear, so much, that pushed Stone to enlist in the Army during Vietnam. He talked about how he spent a year in South Vietnam as a teacher and left the country with more questions than answers.

“I didn’t feel like my education was complete. I was still confused about what was going on because I didn’t understand all of the politics … I went back because I didn’t feel that I knew enough. I didn’t want to be a fraud,” Stone recounted. “I felt like I had to go to this war to understand it. I had to go back. I had already seen a bit of it from the fringes, but I went right into the heart of it in ‘67.”

He also briefly discussed a period of several years following his return from war during which he struggled with, and eventually overcame, various mental health challenges, and how he settled on film school.

“You can get a college degree from watching movies? Why not?” Stone quipped.

Stone went on to direct a trilogy of Vietnam War-focused films that address the brutality and politics of the conflict, starting with “Platoon” in 1986. The film was based, in part, on Stone’s own experience on the frontlines, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

“Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) is based on the autobiography of Ron Kovic by the same title. Stone again won the Academy Award for Best Director.

The last film of the trio was “Heaven & Earth” (1993), based on the memoirs “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” and “Child of War, Woman of Peace” by Vietnamese-American writer Le Ly Hayslip, who was in attendance Thursday on USS Midway.

“No film is going to change people if they don’t want to be changed. A lot of people saw that movie and signed up. A lot of them went to the Iraq War … You can’t say that [it’s anti-war]. You can just say, ‘Here it is,’” he said.

Throughout the lecture, Stone spoke about the nation’s military-industrial complex and how it evolved and influenced U.S. action in different conflicts spanning the 20th century, and the aftermath of those conflicts on foreign policy.

One of Daddis’ final questions for Stone was about legacies, and what the most important legacy of the Vietnam War was.

“Obviously nothing. Nobody paid attention and we keep going back to war. We’ve made one mistake after another in foreign affairs. We’re not a very smart country diplomatically. Had we been cooler, we could’ve gotten along with everybody in this world, with one or two exceptions. There’s no reason why we can’t be partners with Russia and with China, and we could have economic competition. We don’t need a war,” Stone said.

“We as a nation continue to wrestle with the legacies of our long and divisive war in Vietnam, even 50 years on,” Daddis said. “So to have one of America's foremost film directors share his thoughts on that war with our students and community is truly special. It's vital for us to consider how popular culture and film shape our conceptions of war and of the militarized foreign policies we undertake. And because Stone is both a veteran and a director, he brings a unique view to how Americans consume stories about wars and the soldiers who fought in them.”

Stone’s lecture was the fourth in the Center for War and Society’s ongoing J. Fred and Susan Oliver Speaker Series. The lectures are intended to foster informed dialogue around the impact of a militarized U.S. foreign policy on society. Student involvement is a key to the sponsorship. Last Thursday, nearly 25 SDSU students attended the lecture alongside scholars, guests, guests and military-affiliated organizations.

This year’s lecture event was co-sponsored by the Quincy Institute, the Washington, D.C. thinktank whose mission is to “promote ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.”

-Rafael Avitabile, "Director Oliver Stone leads lecture on impacts of Vietnam War 50 years later," San Diego State University, Nov 19 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone's Dallas

Director Oliver Stone put Dallas on the map as a desirable Hollywood film shoot location in the late 1980s and 1990s with Talk Radio, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Any Given Sunday. He’s also the subject of my book The Oliver Stone Experience and has been a friend for 15 years.

Texas Theatre honchos Jason Reimer and Barak Epstein invited Stone to attend a mini-retrospective earlier this month titled “4 Days in Dallas with Oliver Stone,” which screened his Dallas movies Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK. Natural Born Killers was also part of the lineup; it wasn’t shot in Dallas, but celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. While he was in town, Stone fit in visits to Dealey Plaza, the Sixth Floor Museum, and the municipal archives beneath City Hall where records related to the Kennedy assassination are kept.

The centerpiece of the weekend was the Oct. 4 screening of 1991’s JFK at the same theater where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, and where Stone re-created the arrest with Gary Oldman portraying Oswald. I sat with Stone in the back of the theater, a row behind one of the two seats Oswald occupied on November 22, 1963. When police onscreen spotted Oswald circa 1963 and demanded his surrender, they seemed to be addressing the assembled audience in 2024: a through-the-looking-glass moment.

After the screening, Stone spoke to me onstage about researching and making the movie as well as his personal experience of the assassination and its aftermath. He was 17, and spent the day “watching the coverage, like everybody else.” He didn’t begin seriously questioning the official version of historical events until after the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, when he read that some individuals involved in the crime had connections to the federal government. “Through the 1970s, I began to educate myself,” he said. Stone became fascinated by alternatives to the “lone gunman” and “magic bullet” theories in the late 1980s, when he was sent a nonfiction book as possible adaptation material: On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, who, as the district attorney of New Orleans in 1960s, brought the only criminal trial related to the president’s murder.

Image Oliver Stone in front of the Texas Theatre marquee. Peter Salsbury “I really thought ‘this is a great thriller,’” Stone said of Garrison’s book. “I hadn’t done the research. I just believed what I was seeing [as I read] was…a potentially great movie.” While writing the script with Zachary Sklar, Stone melded Garrison’s book with Jim Marrs’ Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, and added information he’d gleaned while visiting the film’s primary locations of Dallas, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. He read the Warren Commission Report and books that questioned it. He talked to historians and former and current officials.

Stone had previously explained in my book, as well as in many interviews, that he made Garrison the main character of JFK because he presented the criminal case against alleged conspirators to kill Kennedy. Stone believed him to be a perfect vehicle to present additional information and other theories about what happened. He admitted that Garrison lost because he “had a weak case” against New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), but added that Shaw “was lying” to investigators and the jury about his connections to the New Orleans criminals and hustlers, anti-Castro Cubans, and members of right-wing paramilitary groups, all of whom loathed Kennedy.

Stone told Dallas Morning News writer Sarah Hepola that reading Garrison’s book while filming Born on the Fourth of July in Dallas may have sparked his decision to make JFK. “I never really made that connection [before], but I’m sure someone took me to see Dealey Plaza for the first time,” he said. “When you see it, you realize what a jewel box it is. How small. You don’t realize that from pictures. It’s a perfect ambush site.”

Various Hollywood and independent directors chose to shoot in Dallas before Stone came to town, resulting in films such as Logan’s Run, Robocop, the 1962 adaptation of the musical Stage Fair, and the horror film Phantom of the Paradise (which will receive a 50th anniversary screening this month at its primary filming location, the Majestic Theater). But it wasn’t until Stone chose Dallas as the location of his claustrophobic 1988 drama Talk Radio—based on star Eric Bogosian’s play, and filmed around the city and on soundstages at Las Colinas—that Dallas hosted a production that felt like possible Academy Awards material, helmed by a director who’d already won multiple Oscars (for Platoon, his 1986 film based on his experience as an infantryman in Vietnam, and his follow-up Wall Street, which got Michael Douglas a statuette as Best Actor).

Released at Christmas despite Stone’s objections (“it was so depressing!”) Talk Radio was a box office disappointment that got no awards traction. But his next project, 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, about paraplegic war activist Ron Kovic, was a hit that was nominated for eight Oscars and won two (for directing and editing). Born was the movie Stone had wanted to make first in Dallas, mainly because nonunion crews would stretch its budget, but he had to wait eight months until his star Tom Cruise finished making Rain Main. He ended up doing Talk Radio as a time killer and—he said during a post-screening discussion—a way to try different directorial techniques and learn about the city.

For Born, the Elmwood neighborhood of Oak Cliff doubled for Kovic’s hometown of Massapequa, Long Island. Dallas was also briefly home to Syracuse University (faked at Southern Methodist University) and the Miami Convention Center (actually Dallas’ convention center with different signage and some trucked-in palm trees). JFK was the second Stone production to let Dallas be Dallas, and it brought a new level of real-world specificity to its action and dialogue, immersing itself deeply in Dallas’ identity. Where Talk Radio was electrifying for local viewers because of the abundance of recognizable locations and references (a gargoyle-ish rock-and-roller played by Michael Wincott gives a shout-out to “the girls at Valley View Mall!”) Stone’s immense, densely packed JFK—a combination courtroom thriller, detective story, and muckraking work of agitprop–went much further, making the layout of downtown and other parts of Dallas integral to the tale. It weaved in references to actual Texas politicians, institutions, and corporations—including “General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas,” cited by Donald Sutherland’s Mr. X as one cog of the military-industrial complex that stopped the United States from pulling out of Vietnam before combat troops could be introduced.

Three of the four screenings were sellouts, which seemed to surprise Stone, and the audiences lined up for good seats well in advance. At the JFK screening, Sutherland’s mammoth exposition dump and star Kevin Costner’s tearful final summation earned rounds of applause.

Stone attended a book signing before JFK, during which he inscribed copies of his memoir Chasing the Light, the JFK screenplay, and The Oliver Stone Experience as well as artifacts related to his filmography and its subjects. He signed a poster for his first directorial effort, the early-’70s horror film Seizure, and November 23, 1963 editions of Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald.

The last time Stone spent serious time in Dallas was 1999, when Jerry Jones let him use the old Texas Stadium to shoot parts of his football epic Any Given Sunday. To my surprise, he said yes to a last-minute offer by city of Dallas archivist John Slate to peruse Dallas Police Department documents and photos from the days following the assassination, including crime scene photos of the book depository and the spot where Oswald shot officer J.D. Tippit in Oak Cliff, arrest sheets, fingerprints, and mugshots of Oswald and his killer Jack Ruby.

The only time when Stone could fit in a visit was a Saturday morning when the archives were officially closed, so Slate met us on a street corner near City Hall. He drove us into the parking garage and escorted us into the guts of the building, a sequence of events that would’ve fit right into the shadow world of JFK. Slate and assistant city archivist Kristi Nedderman had laid out some of the archives’ holdings on a long table. The two alternated showing Stone certain items with their own commentary and letting him sit quietly and flip through materials, which are kept in protective sleeves, at his own pace. (Copies can be viewed online here.)

Slate said the archives began in the late 1980s as a part of the city secretary’s office. The “original stash” of the JFK records was rediscovered in the police department “around 1989. We already had the bulk of the records, and although I don’t know all the details, right after [Stone] finished filming there or during the time he was filming there in 1990 and early 1991, the City Council got rather excited about whether they had done due diligence to take care of whatever was in city departments related to JFK,” Slate said. “A City Council resolution was passed in early ‘92 that all departments were directed to send JFK-related materials to the municipal archives.”

The JFK collection now contains more than 11,400 items that took two years to catalog, annotate and preserve, under the direction of Slate’s predecessor, Cindy Smolovick.

Slate told me he’d heard about the Texas Theatre screening series only a few days before it was scheduled to begin. He did not expect a yes from Stone on such short notice, but felt obligated to make the offer because “it’s fair to say that Oliver Stone was a direct influence on the development of the archives [in the 1990s] and the premiere collection in our archives, which is the JFK materials.”

-Matt Zoller Seitz, "Oliver Stone's Dallas," D magazine, Oct 10 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

As a former archivist myself, I've wondered where Oliver was going to donate his archives. I always suspected it would be his alma mater, New York University (Tisch School of the Arts) where he's been honored and also served as artistic director of the Asia campus. Today it was announced he's donated his archive to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences: "Oliver Stone papers: Production records, scripts, correspondence, and photographs from filmmaker Oliver Stone, including materials from Platoon (1986), The Doors (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Nixon (1995); Gift of Oliver Stone."

[back-and-totheleft]

30 Minutes on Talk Radio

Barry Champlain, the main character of 1988’s “Talk Radio,” is a Dallas-based, left-wing “shock jock” whose rants are little arias of outrage. Sometimes a caller who’s obviously suffering will bring out his humanity for a moment, but his default mode is scorched-earth combativeness. It would be misleading to call him a “provocateur” because the word is elegant and Barry is not, and because Barry doesn’t provoke; he attacks, and continues attacking even after his adversary has folded. Sometimes when a caller tries to take a piece out of him, Barry will not just verbally beat them down but cut off their audio feed without telling the audience he’s done so and then rip into them for another few seconds, which makes it seem as if the person that used to be on the other end of the phone line was stunned into silence by his words. He’s a virtuoso of rage, and that’s more than enough to make him a local star and get a national radio syndicate interested in picking up the show.

But Barry can’t turn the rage off. He directs it at his coworkers, his supervisors, his romantic partners (currently his producer Laura, played by Leslie Hope) and himself. I know a lot of people who gave this movie a try but had to turn it off because Barry was too much to take. I get it. Even when you agree with him, he’s miserable and angry. Exciting, too, but not in a healthy way.

Star Eric Bogosian created Barry Champlain for the stage in a same-named play that debuted on Broadway in the late 1980s, where it was seen by film producer Ed Pressman. Pressman called one of his regular collaborators, director Oliver Stone, who’d had a three-film winning streak with “Salvador,” “Platoon” and “Wall Street” but had recently been told that his next movie, the antiwar drama “Born on the Fourth of July,” would be delayed eight months while his star Tom Cruise finished making “Rain Man” with Dustin Hoffman. Stone filled his schedule gap with “Talk Radio” and combined Bogosan’s play with elements from the nonfiction book “Talked to Death,” about the murder of Alan Berg, a Denver-based, Jewish talk radio host with progressive politics, by a member of a neo-Nazi terrorist group.

Everything about the movie feels unstable and potentially explosive, so much so that when Barry launches into his most paranoid and unhinged monologue yet, cursing the world itself and attacking his listeners for listening to him, and the main set seems to rotate slowly around Barry, it’s as if somebody is winding up a timer attached to a bomb. Although Stone didn’t create the character, Barry is a consummate Oliver Stone hero, a creature of nearly mythological force, shouting prophecies and curses at a burning world. When a right-wing listener sends him a dead rat wrapped in a Nazi flag, Barry’s reaction is a mix of fear, disgust, and wonderment, as if he’s realized that if he’s pissing off these kinds of people this much, he must be great at his job.

This aspect of Barry’s story is why I became obsessed with “Talk Radio” 36 years ago after seeing it in a Dallas theater. He was an antihero in the tradition of so many ‘70s film protagonists: somebody you weren’t supposed to like, but to find interesting, even when he was at his most loathsome.

The parts of the movie that I didn’t like and that frankly didn’t think was necessary or interesting were the flashbacks to Barry’s rise to success and the corresponding disintegration of his relationship with his wife Ellen (Ellen Greene), which are tied into a subplot about Barry swallowing his pride over destroying the relationship and asking Ellen to come to Dallas and counsel him the weekend before the show is supposed to go national. Ellen’s ease with diving into the old dynamic (even after Laura answers the phone when Ellen calls, and Barry lies and claims she’s his secretary) didn’t seem plausible to me back in 1988. When Ellen called into the show in the present-day part of the story, throwing a life preserver to a man drowning in a sea of his own bile, I think I might’ve rolled my eyes, because it seemed like more grownup version of a male fantasy of a woman getting turned on by a man’s hatefulness. Barry used and abused her at every stage. I never saw anything I recognized as real love flowing from Barry to Ellen, only from Ellen to Barry.

Did you already figure out that I was 19 when I saw “Talk Radio” for the first time and had yet to begin my first long relationship with a woman? Well, that’s why I didn’t get it. Angry young men are drawn to films like this, perhaps more so than other types of viewers, because they center the antihero and put you inside his head at least part of the time, and while they aren’t forcing you to identify with them, they make it pretty easy. But this movie is more subtle, I think, which probably seems like a strange assertion considering how unrelentingly intense it is.

Stone gets criticized for being less interested in female characters than male ones, and having a misogynistic streak. Setting aside the particulars of why I think this is complicated (i.e. not entirely fair or unfair) I don’t think it applies to “Talk Radio” at all. It’s observing a dynamic that’s real. There are a lot of guys like Barry who take their partners for granted or just plain use them (women can do this, too) and there are absolutely a lot of female partners of dynamic/abrasive men who spend their lives lugging a fire extinguisher under one arm in case their man flips out and starts trying to burn things down. (Sometimes you see a relationship like this where the typical gender roles are flipped. Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones in “Blue Sky,” for instance. Or my mother and stepfather.)

The Barry-Ellen relationship rings progressively more true to me the older I get and the more experience I have as a significant other—and, frankly, as a human being who has spent a lot of time observing other relationships and has gotten to the point where I can spot codependency from the other side of a room before a couple has even been introduced to me. Barry and Ellen are codependent in a complicated, real way. That’s why they don’t struggle before slipping into old patterns.

At one point, Ellen calls into Barry’s show and lies down on a black table in an unused studio as if she’s waiting for a lover to walk in and get busy. It’s theatrical–not a complaint, just an observation–and I wonder if that’s why I thought it was reductive or silly on first viewing. It’s closer to a kind of expressionism or symbolic choreography, like the kind you see in the staging of plays or dance numbers, where people pose in a way that embodies an idea or metaphor.

This is a brilliant movie, one that not only gets better and richer the more often I revisit it, but that’s filled with truths about the human condition, not just the media or America or sociology or history. You can see yourself represented in it, whether it’s as Barry, Ellen, another character at the radio station, or one of Barry’s listeners, who love him even when they hate him, and the reverse, and spend way too much time wondering if he’ll save or destroy himself, or if that’s out of their hands, and Barry’s.

-Matt Zoller Seitz, "30 Minutes On: Talk Radio," RogerEbert.com, October 11, 2024

[back-and-totheleft]

The making of Oliver Stone, the Unmaking of Hollywood

When I think about Oliver Stone, I imagine a gambler at a craps table who bets every chip he’s got, every time, and usually comes out a winner. And, his gain is ours as well, for he has gambled everything on making some of the best films of our generation.

Check out Stone’s oeuvre, and you will be shocked at how many movies he has made; how many of his you have seen but didn’t know were his. The first Oliver Stone movie ever I saw (but I didn’t know until recently that it was his film) was The Hand with Michael Caine. I saw the film on TV when I was 6 or 7. It is about a cartoonist whose hand is cut off in a car accident, and the hand returns to haunt him and others. I couldn’t sleep for a week. I was constantly looking under my bed to see if a severed hand was there waiting to attack me.

Stone’s just-released memoir, Chasing The Light, reads like a movie script, for Stone’s life and career have indeed been worthy of the big screen. As we learn through riveting prose, the story of the boy Oliver Stone could have been written by Charles Dickens, but Stone is more David Copperfield than his namesake, Oliver Twist. Stone is placed in a boarding school during high school, removed from the parents he adores. His loneliness only increases when he is told over the phone at age 15 that his parents are divorcing and that his mother has moved back to France without even so much as a goodbye. He then learns shortly thereafter that his father has lost his fortune, and with it, Oliver’s inheritance. By his own admission, Stone has yet to fully get over this trauma.

Oliver then had to begin life anew, and to forge his own path, ultimately to the silver screen. It is that lonely journey we learn about in Chasing The Light.

The book opens with Stone’s recounting of his making the movie Salvador (one of my favorites) in Mexico on a shoe-string budget with a cast of characters, including James Woods with whom Stone has remained friends. But it is the excitement of creating a film with so little backing, and with such a great risk of failure, that excites Stone, and also the reader of his memoir. The results are stunning, with Stone succeeding at making what I believe to be the defining Hollywood movie about Reagan’s vicious war in Central America.

It is in this section of the book that Stone writes some of my favorite lines of the book:

The truth is, no matter how great my satisfactions in the later part of my life, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much excitement or adrenaline as when I had no money. A friend who came from the underclass of England once told me, ‘The only thing money can’t buy is poverty.’ Maybe he really meant ‘happiness,’ but the point is, money gives you an edge, and without it, you become, like it or not, more human. It is, in its way, like being back in the infantry with a worm’s-eye view of a world where everything, whether a hot shower or a hot meal, is hugely appreciated.

I have to imagine that, somewhere, there is a sled or other such object for which Oliver pines, reminding him of simpler days, when he was the object of his parents’ love and affection, and when life seemed more certain.

But, as things turned out, Oliver would come to eschew certainty and comfort at every turn. For example, when he was a freshman at Yale, he quit school to volunteer for the US war in Vietnam. To me, it is this which makes Oliver the stand-out individual he is. While cowards like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton would hide behind the ivy walls to avoid service, Oliver went out of his way to sign up to fight. He would become a highly decorated soldier, earning a number of awards, including the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

In the end, as we learn in his semi-autobiographical film, Platoon, which would win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the war in Vietnam would be a disillusioning experience for Stone. He would learn, as so many others did, that the US was not really fighting for democracy in that far-flung country, and that it was instead brutalizing a poor peasant society trying to shed the yoke of French, and then US, empire.

Platoon was the first Oliver Stone movie I saw on the big screen. I was 17 at the time, and I saw it with my very right-wing father. That movie blew my mind. The scene in which the Charlie Sheen character stops his fellow comrades from raping a Vietnamese girl shook my world. I had no idea until that moment that that sort of thing happened in war, and certainly not by US servicemen. That film, along with Salvador, would help to radicalize me and to make me the person I am today. But what makes Platoon great, I think, is that it captured in a dramatic fashion the cruelty as well as the fog of war. After seeing it, I talked to my boss at the sporting goods store I was working at about it. He was a Vietnam veteran himself, and he readily stated that Platoon was the greatest Vietnam War movie ever made because it told the story of the war so truthfully. This is the highest praise one could receive for such a work.

There is much more to say about Oliver Stone and his memoir. The book is a gripping read, and it is made all the more compelling by Stone’s incredible honesty about himself as a person; about his feelings, including embarrassing feelings that most people would leave to the therapy couch; and about his triumphs and failures. Oliver Stone, first and foremost, is an amazing human being, and to learn about him in his own words, with all his humor and candor, is a delight.

-Dan Kovalik, "The Making of Oliver Stone, The Unmaking of Hollywood," July 24 2020