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Stone sees life as spectacle and spectacle as entertainment. DeMille, Stone understands that film, more than any other art form, is best at conveying the emotional spectrum of the human experience, whether its a rock concert, the movement on the floor of the stock exchange, or the gladiatorial battle of football. He knows you have to grab viewers by the throat to get their attention. His movies aren’t about what happened as what we believe happened, and how we feel about it. To consider his body of work is to see how we’ve processed the past 50 years of American history and culture. He’s become the point man for the Baby Boom’s collective memory-Īnd the poet laureate for the portion of that generation that didn’t get deferments. It would take Stone’s third film, Salvador, for him to announce himself as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. His first two directorial efforts, Seizure (1974) and The Hand (1981), are the works of a man who is torn between avant-garde experimentation and exploitation gusto. Even then Stone knew that in successful films, emotional truth trumps fact. His Oscar-winning script for Midnight Express (1978) was attacked for taking liberties with real events to jack up the film’s already unbearable tension. His scripts for Scarface (1983), and Year of the Dragon (1985) showed he had a gift for punchy, populist story structure.
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Stone didn’t make his first “Oliver Stone” movie until 1986 in the first phase of his career, he was one of Hollywood’s most successful-and notorious-screenwriters. Fact and speculation crash into each other until they create a truth that illuminates what you thought you knew into something new, cleansed of myth, profound. Stone prefers to mainline history and entertainment into your system.
Stone understands that the Richard Attenborrough approach to biopics ( Young Winston, Gandhi) turns the past into a Sunday school lesson, orderly and good for the soul. For Stone, to be reverential toward history is to simplify it, put it into its place. When he tackles true-life subjects like Nixon or the JFK assassination he is respectful but not reverential. It’s his unwillingness to adhere to Hollywood conventions. So, what’s all the fuss? Why does the phrase “An Oliver Stone Film” make people tense up and prepare to dismiss Stone’s latest as the work of an irresponsible attention-seeker? It’s not just Stone’s provocateur identity that rankles.
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(Is it really a surprise that Stone’s latest movie is about the defining moment of the 21st century?) Whether it’s the dark side of the counterculture ( The Doors), the moment America entered the media age of paranoia and punditry ( JFK), the ambition-and folly-that comes with being the leader of the most powerful country in the world ( Nixon), or the corporatization of America ( Wall Street, Any Given Sunday), Stone has used film to chronicle the dreams, fears, and disillusionments that marked the last half of the 20th century as the most creative-and destructive-in U.S. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Stone embraces myth then cuts it up to reveal a truth at its heart. (Subtle isn’t one of them.) He has spent his filmmaking career charting the currents that propelled America in the post-war era: war, greed, sensationalism, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. These are just some of the labels used over the years to describe Oliver Stone.