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I'm Sean Fettasy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Oliver Stone. Amanda, I in my mind have been circling a podcast episode about Oliver Stone probably since about 1991, which is when I first had some consciousness about the work of one of the most fascinating figures of the last 40 years in American cinema.
There's a reason we're going to be having an episode conversation about Stone today, which is that he has a new memoir. That memoir is called Chasing the Light, Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game. It's a very interesting book. You and I have both read it.
I think we're both riveted in some ways and perhaps frustrated, confused, devastated in other ways. Before we get into the book, though, and before we get into how we're going to talk about the scope, the massive scope, the unbelievable scope of Oliver Stone's career. When I say Oliver Stone, what do you think? Conspiracy theorist, just to be totally honest, and filmmaker and really a boomer.
And I think that that is going to inflect a lot of the way that I talked about Oliver Stone and his filmography because I am a generation younger. I am the child of boomers and I came to Oliver Stone's work and to Oliver Stone's understanding of the world, a generation after he lived it and made it. And it was very funny and re-watching everything from platoon to Wall Street to JFK to realize the way in which those movies shaped my understanding of visual and political about Vietnam and about JFK and about how we examine America and the government. And I am both like a child of Oliver Stone's world and maybe because of the time and the way the world has changed, a skeptic of Oliver Stone's world at this point, which is just to say on the next generation, I think a lot of this will be boomer versus millennial.
And that's good. That's how the world should work. I think even Oliver Stone would agree with that. Though maybe not, we can talk about it, but I don't know.
What do you think of? You may already so many good points. I think he's an artist who strains credulity while also, I think, enlivening imaginations. He's somebody who is obviously immensely thoughtful and intellectual and spiritual and simultaneously feels like he's completely out of control and trying to break the boundaries and stretch the concept of the truth all the time.
And so he's just a generational paradoxical figure. He's a person who I think makes immensely entertaining movies that don't always stand up to deep examination. And so I think he is an archetypal baby when we're figuring that way and that he is, there's a certitude about his mission and there's an earnestness and a sincerity to the message that he's trying to send. But also underlying that is perhaps a kind of a cynicism and a skepticism about what he should be doing with his time versus what he's actually doing with his time.
And so I find I've always found him to be fascinating. Maybe not as a human being per se, but at least the stories that he tries to tell. I was going to say I do think he's interesting as a filmmaker and also as a person. And we're going to talk about all the different ways in which Oliver Stone like, quote, breaks the rules, but I have been thinking a lot as I have been reading his book, which is a fantastic read.
I will just say that the guy can write. And I have also been revisiting his work that you and I are trained to, as much as we can, or at least I wasn't called a train to separate the artist in the art. The art has to stand on its own. You can't complete the filmmaker and the work and you also need to understand that the work and the intention are possibly separate as well.
And Oliver Stone just makes a mess of all of that. And he makes a mess of that in his actual art and he makes a mess of that in the life that he lives and in the interviews that he gives and the work that he pursues. And to me that's exciting because it opens up a conversation to talk about what can you take seriously and what is cynical and what is sincere and what is true and what is not true and who is responsible, which is at least a different way to talk about art. So I give him that even though I don't always agree with where I think Oliver Stone comes down on those answers to those questions.
But even there, I'm just guessing. Well I think if you look at the book, you certainly are looking at the man or at least the self-perception of the man. And so we'll talk a lot about him and his story and his life and the way he is capturing his own life on the page, which I agree. I mean, in case you didn't know, this is an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
This is one of the great movie writers of the last 40 years. This is also a person who didn't just write his own films but wrote Scarface and Conan the Barbarian and a number of other films over the years. So he knows what he's doing on the page. But he is also somebody who, if you look at the political thought, not like a straight line where there is a left and a right, but if you look at it like a wheel, like a circle, and if you go too far from one side of the circle to the other, you can land, you may think you are a liberal person and find yourself with right-wing ideology or libertarian ideology.
And the reverse can also be true. And I think one of the reasons it's really hard to unpack, not just what Oliver Stone says in interviews or what he even portrays in his documentaries, but even what he puts in his films, is it feels like he's constantly running around that track, that circle of political thought. He's actually a perfect figure for this moment where there is this desperation to find that coincides with our political ideology or our sense of what the world should look like. And as you said, Oliver makes a mess of that.
He's contradicting himself in real time. He's contradicting the sensibilities of that kind of baby boomer anti-war mentality. But on the other hand, he's an avatar, a spirit animal of truth for a certain kind of humanism. And that sounds really kind of haughty, but I think he really wants to representationally be a person who is thinking about putting people before government, business, political structures.
It's complicated, right? Because he's essentially a wealthy, well-to-do white man who was born in the immediate aftermath of World War II. And so he had so much opportunity to do the things that he wanted to do in a way that other people don't. So he's not, he's just not a tidy figure for that pursuit of humanism.
It's interesting that you said he's putting people in front of institutions and ideas and governments. Because I think that's true, but it's usually one person. And if you look at his entire, his filmography, and really I think even if you look at how he parses a lot of political issues, but it's not the greater good, it's usually focused on one character who is often a man and quite often a white man. And it is understanding history through a single person's experience.
So it's like, it's almost, I mean, he certainly subscribes to a great man theory of history, but at the same time is also reversing it, which is like the one person's experience of history, which can be really exhilarating in certain films that we'll talk about and really, really misguided, I find, or not even misguided, but just doesn't work and isn't illuminating in the way that he thinks it is in certain aspects. And then also in certain cases, it can just be about himself. And it is the thing that makes his memoir so electric is that it really is self-mythologizing and he is really trying to understand himself and trying to pin down that constantly moving wheel, as you said, simultaneously. And I really admire having access to that.
I obviously read a lot of celebrity junk and memoirs and I'm interested in trying to have access to people's ideas and inner thoughts and understand their characters. And most people won't give it up in that way and won't share and won't be as open and messy as Oliver Stone is. And that's true of the book. And that's true of his politics, for sure.
And it's true of his filmmaking. The great man theory is really relevant to this conversation, not just because of the book, not just because of the films, but because it's a little bit unclear, it's a sort of a chicken in the egg or the egg proposition with him. Does he subscribe to those theories? Because as we read about in this book, he is interested in the dramatic pursuit.
He has a pretty clear understanding, literally, of how to tell a strong story. And that story is usually through a Homer-like figure or a have-like figure, somebody who is on an indomitable quest to achieve something that seems impossible. He's really passionate about this. And again, there is something kind of haughty about this, but also he seems to come to it very sincerely.
And so, he says, Jim Garrison in JFK, or he uses Jim Morrison in the doors, or he uses Ron Kovac in Born on the Fourth of July, as these avatars, as these great men who are seeking to achieve something that no one else could even perceive as possible. And I think Oliver Stone sees himself in a very similar fashion. He sees himself as this well-to-do white guy who volunteers for the Vietnam War to explode his privilege and to understand the world in a hopefully deeper way. And then after he does that, he goes through this tremendously traumatic experience in the war.
And then that becomes a centerpiece of the stories that he tells for the next 25 years. And it's fascinating to know kind of which came first. Is it the urge to tell dramatic stories, or was it that he experienced life and he had a became to understand life as a series of stories, especially American stories about great men, and then chose to pursue those stories as his life's work? It's kind of a fascinating what if in terms of how he pursued all his work.
I would add that there is also possibly a middle ground where he is trying to understand what happened to him and his own experience through the narrative structures that are familiar to him and can help further that experience. And again, that's a lot of artists versus art and marrying the two things which were quote not supposed to do, but we're going to break all of the rules in this podcast. So let's talk about what this podcast is going to be. Before we get into a conversation about the book where we talk about the artist, later in the show, we're going to play a new game.
It's an old game for those of us who were alive in 2006 when I first heard about this game, but it's new to this podcast. It's a it's a Mary Kill. So Amanda and I have chosen a handful of films, a number of films that we would like to copulate with that Alberston made that we would like to spend eternity with and that we would like to destroy immediately. So that is one way for us to travel through this 20 film filmography, all of these documentaries that he's made, all of this work that he's put on the page on screen over time.
And I'm interested because I know that you are a skeptical Alberston consumer. Yeah, I'm a skeptical consumer of everything. And I also hope that Oliver Stone himself would understand the skeptical approach that I bring to his films because he is also a skeptic. Don't trust anything.
Or if you did trust everything, anything, then you're going to pay the price for it. So yes, we will talk about Alberston's filmography. I think it is very interesting to watch it as millennial. It's interesting to watch it as a woman that we won't dwell on that.
But you know, because it's kind of boring at the end of the day, we're engaging with Oliver Stone's work, but I have certainly learned some things about a certain generation of masculinity that definitely are different than my day to day life. And you know, that's the point to an extent. I think it's also just really interesting to examine how Oliver Stone has influenced the way that you and I watch movies and what lessons other people and he himself have taken from it and what works and what we would rather get rid of. Yeah, I'm excited.
Honestly, it'll come as no surprise to you or anybody who was for me talking to show just to talk about the very formal aspects of what he does as a filmmaker because he's such an outspoken and generational political figure that I think that that has kind of subsumed a lot of the work that he has done. In fact, in an interview in the New York Times Magazine last week, David Marchese directly asked him that question. And you know, I don't think Stone necessarily gave the kind of answer that we wanted. You know, it was a sort of like no regrets, man.
That was his answer. And give a lot of answers in that particular interview that we'll be discussing. I recommend it. It's a great piece.
I mean, there have been some very interesting interviews with Stone in the last few weeks. He knows how to talk. That's part of the reason why he has stayed in the consciousness for as long as he has is impressively stoked the flames with his work and with his words. So let's talk about the words a little bit.
This is a fascinating book. And I think we should just start from the beginning because the first chapter of chasing the light is called Child of Divorce. And Amanda, the listeners out there who heard our marriage story episode, for example, or have heard us talk about marriage in any way, shape, or form in the last couple of years, we two are children of divorce. And I will say that there are parts of his story about his parents and about the way that he was raised that were resonant for me and that I identified with.
And then there were other parts that I found confounding in almost grotesque. What did you think of young Oliver in his own eye? I think I really excitedly looked up from the book and announced my husband and then also texted you like, oh my God, it's the childhood worst chapter because I do always kind of see that as a source key for understanding really anybody. He approaches it with more distance than you or I do, I think, which in one sense makes a lot of sense because he's older than us.
So he has quite literally more time and distance from it. And I think also expectations of marriage and things were different 30 or 40 years ago. The Child of Divorce chapter for me is actually less about divorce and more about his particular relationship to both of his parents, which are extremely important to him as anyone who has seen any of his films would know because we're going to talk about daddy issues. But yeah, to me, it was just a way of working through those relationships, which he carries definitely through the book.
I wanted to read a passage from the book about this specific phase of his life because as you said, it's there is some critical distance, but he is also trying to tangle with his feelings. And you know, this is a guy who is born in 1946. His father was a GI. His mother was a woman living in Paris who his father met and brought her back to the States.
And you know, they have that very kind of traditional American romance. You know, you can imagine them being in that photo of the naval officer and the woman in the middle of the street on 42nd Street during a parade kissing. And then of course, like things come apart like so many things did in the 1950s. But he wrote something interesting here that I wanted to share.
This is a consciousness that is shared by most children of divorce that our lives are being itself is the creation of many lives. If my parents had known each other truly before they were married, they would have never united and I would have never existed. Children like me are born out of that original lie and living a false front. We suffer for it when we feel that nothing and nobody can ever be trusted again.
Adults become dangerous. Reality becomes loneliness. Love either does not exist or cannot survive. And my past 15 years on earth was a quote, fake past a delusion.
So in case you're wondering why Oliver Stone's films are paranoid and riddled with doubt, it's all there in the opening stages of this book in a very, very Freudian way. And throughout the early stages of it, you also come to learn that Oliver Stone is outright in love with his mother and has strong physical urging for his mother, which is a lot to take in, although radically honest in the way that he sometimes is. But also maybe he is trying to kind of shock and provoke us in a way that it seems like Stone likes to shock and provoke. And so it's this really complicated portrait of a young guy who has these wild mommy and daddy issues that may or may not be informing this life's work.
Yeah, but even the mom stuff is him leaning on the edible myth in order and using older narrative frameworks in order to help understand himself. I listened to the passage that you just read. And I think I'm really glad that my parents put me in therapy shortly after the divorce. Me too.
Yes. I just like, you know, and I feel sad that Oliver Stone didn't get access to that. Yes. Because it's just, you know, because like at the end of the day, it's like really not about you that much, man.
It's just not. And I know a lot of ways after what every single Oliver Stone movie, you could just say it's really not that much about you, man. So that is hilarious too. But yeah, I think there's a combination of not having worked through some of the emotions that maybe we a generation later did get to work through.
And that doesn't just go through divorce that goes through a lot of political issues as well. And then also him having a flair for the dramatic in the very little dramatic sense. That's how he understands the world and tell stories about himself and everything else. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
It seems like he was not given the opportunity or did not know how to express himself at this phase. This is the early 1960s and a lot of this stuff is happening. We're not the consciousness that we had about the idea of therapy and communicating with your children about divorce. That didn't exist 45, 50, 60 years ago.
Yeah. And again, it's just peak boomer stuff. And I can just, I don't know, if you are a boomer and listening to two millennials talking about Oliver Stone right now, like I'm sorry. I apologize.
It must be really annoying. But some of it is just such a product of the time and generation. And not even just, I mean, that is true, but also like archetypically, like that is what we're talking about when we say, okay, boomer on TikTok or whatever, I guess, Instagram, because millennials don't know how to use TikTok. And in a way, it's a credit to him that even in his politics and his emotions, he is telling a story at that broad generational level.
Yeah. I think he comes by it honestly. I just don't, again, I don't know if it's a check interact. I don't know if he is a drama queen for lack of a better phrase or if he is naturally born this way, you know, like it's just impossible to say it is nature or nurture and like the nurture clearly seems to have been a challenging aspect of his early life.
And that leads to these fascinating decisions that frankly, most of his other kind of boomer generation cohort don't pursue. Now, we know that, you know, a lot of boomers, especially politically active boomers participated in the protest movement, participated in the civil rights movement, the anti war movement, women's liberation, these are obviously key talking points or generational points or generational life points from my mother, for example, she was a very active person in the world in that way. But for so he does something a little bit different. He, he's a very bright guy, obviously, but he's also a child of privilege as father went to Yale and so he went to Yale and he goes to Yale after spending some time in boarding school.
And he kind of washes out after a year. He seems kind of bored. He seems kind of disinterested. He's unclear if he's kind of a stoner at this point.
He decides to leave Yale to go teach in Saigon, teach English for a year, which is, you know, certainly like programs like Teach for America exists and this is a non-common thing that frankly a lot of children of privilege do. It's sort of get a gap year or get some new life experience. But so he sees Vietnam really at the earliest stages of the conflict in that country. And that's, this is right in the heart of Johnson's second term, I suppose.
And rather than flee and find a way to dodge the draft or, you know, put as much distance between himself and Vietnam as possible, instead he comes back to the States and he lists in the army as an infantryman. And you know, it is clearly the signature choice of his life. And it is the thing that has completely shaped him. It is the thing that has shaped his art and informed all of his art.
How much of this stuff, these choices, were you aware of when you were watching his movies and how much of this did it kind of inform the films and knew for you? I think none at the time, though, a lot of this is in the films. I mean, in platoon, he gives that exact choice to the Charlie Sheen character. And there is a conversation between Charlie Sheen and another soldier where Charlie Sheen's character explains his rationale.
And I was told like that's something only rich people would say. I think I'm like paraphrasing it, which, you know, you have to, it's in the movie. It's in the script. So Oliver Stone is aware of that and is reckoning with that.
So I think I was maybe not aware of it in a literal sense, certainly not the first time I saw a platoon. Again, that's another thing where when you come to these films as a person seeing the art versus being aware of the artist and probably I had some awareness of Oliver Stone and a later phase of Oliver Stone. So I think you can feel it in the work, but it does make you go back having read all of this and want to ask a lot of questions. Well, he does a fascinating thing in the structure of the book.
So the section that is functionally, after his childhood is functionally about Vietnam is very short. He doesn't spend a lot of time in the book on the war in real time because the book is told mostly chronologically, but we get more time about Vietnam and the people that he experienced and what he went through and, you know, the characters who would eventually come to the figures that we see in platoon that are largely based on real life figures. That all comes later when he's writing, when he's writing the screenplay for a film called Break, which never gets made. And then when he starts writing platoon, which I think is not until that 1976 or so, which is really the film that kind of gets him on the map in Hollywood, even though it isn't made for another 10 years after that.
So again, this like this concept of artifice and shaping your own narrative is such a big part of this stuff. So we don't even necessarily see like the more documentary aspect of his Vietnam experience, even in his own memoir, which I thought was kind of a fascinating choice. Yeah, I went straight child of therapy on that and was like, this is not avoidance because that's unfair, but it's like very clear that the only way that he's able to understand and talk through it is through filmmaking. And I mean, that's very clear in the work as well, but it was clarifying for me of just like, Oh, I mean, your life's work has been to understand what happened to you and what you went through.
Yes. I mean, that is something that like that just creates a lot of empathy from me, honestly. I think we can, it's, he's a very easy filmmaker to joke about and just be like, Oh God, Oliver Stone at it again. But I think when you see, when you try to understand him and that exactly, and I completely agree with what you just said, I think that there is clearly an attempt to put his feelings and his understanding into the work and not on the page, even though he's putting things on the page in the first chapter about his parents that are kind of like mind-blowingly personal and specific and have clearly not left him.
And there must have been so much that happened in Vietnam over the course of the 15 months he served that he's not putting on the page because either it's too difficult or he doesn't need another way to channel that information, which is just, it's like it's a reason to read these books is to better understand these people. So he serves in Vietnam, he does 15 months and he's awarded a Purple Heart and he's wounded I think three times and he has a tough go. I think it's 67 to 68 or the years that he serves, which is obviously right on the precipice of Latin America sort of explodes in 68 with the anti-war movement. And so he essentially leaves the armed services and goes to Mexico and I guess attempts to smuggle some drugs and is arrested, move trying to move into the United States and is basically bailed out of prison by his rich dad who knows the right people to get out.
And not exactly, I mean that's what happens and then he has one line. It's something to the effect of money it fixes everything or something like that. And it's told in a self maybe not self-last reading but in a self-conscious and knowing way like there's the reason that that one line is there but it's one line. Yeah and he says over and over in the book if I were black or if I were Latino or if I were this or if I were that I just would not be where I am.
He has he does have a self-awareness about that but it doesn't change the fact that all of these experiences are so deeply informing all the things that he's going to do. This guy got arrested for trying to smuggle drugs across the border and got out of prison serving virtually no time. And if you were any other person you probably would have spent three years in a Mexican prison that's just ludicrous. And so I think you kind of have to bring all of this information out when you revisit these movies and I hope if people are listening they will read this in the movies because they're so interesting in the context of the book.
They clearly inform so much. This is a guy who went on to write the movie Midnight Express for which he won an Oscar which is about somebody who tried to smuggle drugs out of a foreign country. It's all there in the text which is so fascinating. So somehow he manages to get himself out or his father gets him out.
And within a couple of years he's at NYU Film School and he's decided that he wants to be a filmmaker. He wanted to be a novelist as a kid. He wrote a novel he thought it was very bad. It didn't pan out.
And then he starts working on screenplays and thinking about what kind of stories he wants to tell and what he wants his life to be. And he shows up at NYU in the 70s and who's there but Martin Sworsezy is his professor of all people to be teaching him. And even though Oliver Stone is this green jacket wearing sullen Vietnam vet who rarely speaks, Martin Sworsezy identifies that this is a true talent. This is a guy who's not at all like any of his classmates or at least not an Oliver's perception that he's a loner.
And after he makes his first short film last year in Vietnam, Sworsezy identifies the film and says that is a filmmaker. That's a famous story. It's such a great moment. I mean you can hear him saying it.
Well, and you can hear the pause before Sworsezy says like that's a filmmaker. It's a great story. It's a story that I heard before. It's one of the few things in the book that I had read before because it's part of the stone mythology of how he came to be.
And it's interesting because over the years many people have speculated that perhaps Taxi Driver is based on Oliver Stone because Taxi Driver is about a Vietnam vet who drove a cab Oliver Stone drove a cab in New York in the 70s to help pay for his lifestyle. He was this kind of like dis-elute paranoid person with a history of time in the war and violence and the complexity of thought that goes into that film. Stone says this is not about me understandably trying to distance himself from Travis Bickle. But this collision and this time in American movies is the most interesting time we're ever going to have this mid to late 70s.
And so Stone being kind of at the feet of Sworsezy and then later being at the feet of the Parliament and Spielberg and all these people who went on to make Hollywood for the next 30 years. Also, I don't know if it's Grand Design or Good Luck or what, but he just finds himself in his perfect position. So he's in New York City. He meets a Lebanese woman named Najwa Sarkis who I guess works for the embassy in Lebanon.
And so she's a bit older than him and she has a high-powered job. And he writes quite freely about how she was an elegant and beautiful woman who he didn't love. And they were friends and they had a strong partnership. But he already, like he evinces, this like confusing emotional front.
You know, there's something about the way that Oliver Stone tells the story of his life that is simultaneously very raw and self-effacing and also completely difficult to parse. What do you think about the New York period of Stone? I think he's comfortable in the world of ideas and ambitions and not comfortable in the world of emotions. And so anytime he has to talk about the people in his life, whether it's his parents or his first wife and no spoilers, but there's a second wife and also I believe a third, it's you can see him trying to wrestle with the language and the emotions themselves.
It seems a bit blocked off. And so then the language that he uses is very representative of his time and place in the world, which means it's not always as progressive as we might wish it to be. No, certainly not. So while he's in New York, he makes the decision that he wants to be a filmmaker formally.
He tells the story of having a nightmare one night about three figures that haunt him who is an author character and eventually kill all of the people in his life. And this nightmare becomes his first movie in 1974. It's a very little scene, low-budget movie called Seizure. It's not very good.
I did rewatch it. You know, it's one part horror, one part paranoid thriller. You can see the kind of the makings of where Stone's imagination is going in the movie, but it's an interesting choice because you can see that he made a film before he was ready to make a film. And so unlike so many of those other guys that I was referring to, unlike Sorsese, unlike you know, it's a polymer Spielberg, those guys who made movies in their early 20s and were ready.
You know, Steven Spielberg at 20 years old was ready to be Steven Spielberg. And Stone is a little bit more of a slow burn in some respects. And he kind of constantly refers to that throughout this book. There's this sense that even though he's got all the opportunity in the world, he's not quite getting the opportunity that he wants.
And so there's something kind of confusing about this guy who really has done it all as far as filmmakers go. And yet still seems kind of steamed about the fact that he had to wait until he was in his mid-30s to be as great as he would become. Yeah, that's the theme for him in general of someone who really has been given every opportunity that America can afford someone and is just still like I have been betrayed by America. And he was betrayed by America in an actual, in the sense of being in Vietnam, but kind of parsing the ideological aspects of that and the expectations that come with being Oliver Stone is a very interesting exercise and certainly animates all of his work.
Before he fully decides to throw his hat on the ring as a screenwriter for the next 10 years, he kind of dabbles. He's thinking about what he's going to do. And as he's thinking about his writing career, he writes something interesting in the book that I want to share. So he writes, rather than pursue a career as an actor, he writes, I wanted to be my looks, have my own ideas, live in my body, not rent it.
I had ego, but unlike a good actor, I couldn't locate it. I didn't know who the hell I was. And that mystery drew me inwards searching. Maybe by connecting my own dots, I could help not just myself, but others to see things I hadn't seen before.
I could as a playwright or director bring actors to realizations they could not find on their own. The writer can become the handholder of the actor's dreams. The writer brainwashes an actor into feeling the scripts of words are his own feelings. Perhaps I was being arrogant, but toward those goals.
The blind and zealous faith. Perhaps I was being arrogant, could be at the beginning of virtually every page he writes in this book. But it's true. And it's an interesting, I think there's some pretty strong self analysis here, because Oliver Snow is a handsome, dashing, six foot three war veteran.
He's kind of Audie Murphy for the baby boomer generation, but he doesn't pursue that. He pursues something that is a little bit more metaphysical, a little bit more romantic and spiritual and also power driven. There's a power to being in charge of the writing and the directing of a film. So he goes on this quest to seek all that stuff out.
Yeah. I thought when you were reading this, this was going to be the passage that's maybe later on where he just says that as a director, he's got on a set, which in a way I suppose it's true is certainly one person's and one school's definition of being a director. But I think everything that you said is true. I do also just see it as a little bit of not even revisionist history, because that's a crazy you have to be careful with Oliver Stone.
But it's a way of understanding pre practical choices. And pretty he is an extremely successful person and has navigated himself into a lot of situations and has made like 10 unbelievably successful movies. A lot comes with privilege, a lot comes with luck. But also this is a guy who like maybe understood a little bit more of what he was doing than I think he wants to acknowledge in this book.
Yeah. And it's hard to know if it's because he was a great operator or it's because he was truly gifted or probably most likely a combination of both. And the book kind of transitions pretty hard about page 100 from the unknown details of this guy's life up until the age of about 25 to a lot of things that we're much more familiar with when he starts to enter his early 30s. So he moves out to Los Angeles, he gets a writing gig, learning at the feet of Robert Bolt, the screenwriting legend.
People may remember him getting a shout out from Quentin Tarantino earlier this year at the Golden Globes when he dedicated his Golden Globes to Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia. And for all seasons, the mission, Bolt's movies to me are very instructive for the kinds of stories that Oliver Stone would go on to tell these action oriented morality plays that are kind of tests of masculine metal. That's really those are the stories that Bolt told. And he clearly was a very rigorous teacher and taught Stone a lot.
And not everybody gets to learn at the feet of the single most gifted screenwriter of a generation and Stone did get that. The film that they wrote ultimately never was made, but it's clearly sets him on a course to figure out who he's going to become, which is at first this kind of Wonderkin screenwriter and his next project in 1978 is Medanxpress. As we mentioned, the Alan Parker film about Billy Hayes, a guy who tried to smuggle hash out of Turkey. And that movie was a sensation at the age of 31.
Stone becomes an Oscar winner. And then all of a sudden we enter Phase 2 of the book, which is LA, his second marriage to a woman named Elizabeth, a blonde, idyllic American dream woman in his eyes. And suddenly they both get very interested in cocaine. They start getting a lot of money.
And then he starts writing Scarface. And this is really like the stone myth, the life that we know about. And this will ultimately be a segue into starting to talk about his films and the things we're more aware of about him. But this section is where the book took on a little bit more of that character that you're talking about about the Celebrity Memoir where you're just like, oh, here's Diane Keaton and here's John Frankenheimer and here's a party at Sue Menger's house.
And these are all these recognizable touch points. This is the gossipy. When they tell you to skip the first hundred pages of the Celebrity Memoir because you don't care about their life in Oklahoma for the first 20 years, this is kind of what they're talking about in Act 2. Yeah, that's true.
And he names names and he was obviously in a lot of rooms. And there was some subtle score settling going on. You can tell who he likes and who he doesn't like and who he'll tell flattering stories of and who he just honestly wants to throw under the bus. There's also a great moment.
I don't know whether it starts in this section. I think it does where he starts quoting another book about him, which is an amazing, amazing structural choice. I point that out to say that he is clearly aware of how he's telling the story and he's making structural choices. And he is building Oliver Stone, the character you mentioned, the interview in the New York Times magazine with David Marquesi where the first question is about the book and Oliver Stone answers in the third person.
He's talking about that character Oliver Stone in the book as a person other than himself, which again is maybe pretentious, but is also just maybe like someone's thinking about storytelling, which is usually a word that is used to describe things that aren't storytelling. But in this case, my guy does know how to tell a story. Also, if you're a listener of the Rewatchables, there's a category called half-ass internet research. And this is the kind of book that creates a lot of half-ass internet research.
I learned a lot of things that I didn't know about, say about what the original incarnation of certain films could have been or would have been. For example, Platoon was a movie that Stone had written in 76. The fame producer Martin Braggman, former manager of Al Pacino got his hands on the script. And that kind of jet-streamed Stone into a lot of meetings and a lot of rooms.
And there could have been a version of Platoon in the mid-70s that started Al Pacino. And that would have been a very different story for Oliver Stone. And would he have been the director? Probably not.
Would it have been a Sydney Lament movie or Fred Zimmerman movie? These were the kind of things that pop up. And then later on, we learned that there was a version of Born on the Fourth of July, which also might have started Al Pacino despite the fact that he was in his mid-30s. And that's a really fascinating way of.
Every movie could have started Al Pacino at some point. Is my understanding of reading this book? Yes. And like you say, some people get stray shots.
Like, Platoon. And instead, I think took on The Brinks Job, which was a movie that was not successful. And you know, Stone has a dagger for freekin. So these are like all reasons to read the book.
Like if you care at all about Hollywood history, if you care at all, especially about Hollywood in the 70s, there's a lot of really fun and juicy stuff here. And then there's a lot of kind of depressing paranoid stuff about his rise to fame. And it's kind of a tried and true tale where you get a lot of money, you get access to drugs, you get access to a certain class of person, perhaps a woman, if you're a man. And that refracts into sorts, your perception of self.
And it leads you into these crazy decisions. You know, one of the decisions he makes which is so fascinating and so like unexplored, I think about the Stone Myth is just the fact that he made a second movie after Seizure called The Hand, which I also revisited last night and which is not very good. And this is well after he's already won an Oscar. This is well after he's already achieved a kind of incredible fame.
It's a horror movie starring Michael Caine about a cartoonist who loses his hand and his hand then haunts people and kills them acting as a kind of like disembodied id. And again, Oliver Stone, guy, even though he's got a lot of money, beautiful life, Oscar on his mantle, he's coping with some demons, coping with the idea of physical violence. You know, I'm sure he saw his fair share of, you know, severed appendages during his time in Vietnam. The way he's releasing some of that pain to create these horror movies, he's just clearly not yet ready to be a great filmmaker.
And so the book then spends essentially the final third analyzing his two great triumphs in 1986. There's plenty of time spent on Scarface, which is entertaining and clearly a frustrating experience for him. There's some time spent on some other films that he made Year of the Dragon from Michael Cimino and Eight Million Ways to Die and some of his writing projects. But really the book turns on Salvador and Platoon, which I think makes him, I don't know, I'm sure I'm going to get this wrong, but he's the only person I could think of who was nominated for best original screenplay twice in the same year.
Can you think of any other person who had that that honor? There must be someone over the years that presumably, but probably like decades ago, because it seems he happens a lot with actors, but that's just a little bit more because of when projects are released and it happened in directors with Soderberg, I think, in 2000. But the screenwriters were always just fighting to get anything made. So it's really hard to have two at once.
Exactly. I mean, that was exactly what I was thinking. And it's clearly, you know, it's a manifestation of two projects that he'd been working on for a very long time, finally both getting the green light in or 85, I suppose, and then making them an 86. And they're kissing cousins these two movies.
You know, they set a template for the kinds of work that he's going to do. And we'll talk about them a little bit more when we get into the game. But like, let's just put Stone in context here as a filmmaker before we get into the game. OK?
OK. 12 Academy Award nominations in his career. He has four Oscars. He also has two best director Oscars.
There's a very short list of people who have two best director Oscars. He got them both within a stand of four years. That's just that's pretty crazy. And now I think it's very overlooked when we talk about him because of some of that, you know, the political energy that exists around him.
Well, I think it's essential to understanding everything that comes after because he is so quickly goes from all of the trials and tribulations and self- received failures that he outlines in this part of the book to winning two best director Oscars in the span of four years. And he's entirely accepted by Hollywood and the establishment. And like once you are completely validated, then your mind starts going in other directions. And that's how you get JFK and that's how you get the Oliver Stone of the 90s.
I think that's exactly right. There seems to be an act of defiance going on in the second third of his career where he's trying to take that, I don't know that, just the kind of like comfort and ease with which we talk about people who have achieved a great deal and try like trying to explode that to he's always trying to blow something up. And it seems like he's trying to blow up that respectability. So, you know, his films have garnered 42 nominations and 12 wins over the years.
This is one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the last 50 years. As a writer, as we said, it's pretty clear what his influences are, you know, Greek mythology, Moby Dick, he literally quotes George Orwell in this book. He's very cynical, but very romantic. He's postmodernist, but he's also a total classicist.
Like he's trying to have his cake and eat it to a throughout his whole career, which makes for I think fun art to to disentangle, you know, this is not this is not Fast and Furious 5, you know, I mean, like I like Fast 5 just fine. There's no there's no undertext in Fast 5. Yeah, but sometimes there's not a ton of undertext in all of our stories. I don't think that Fast 5 is the worst comparison in terms of bombast and you know, cramming everything in to a film that he's working on a very grand scale always in ideas and an execution.
That's a good point. You're right. In some ways, there's very little that is unsaid in his work. And so that's that's that's he's kept in obvious.
Yes, sometimes that works really well. I think in the case of JFK, it's actually great that he just says everything that ever occurred to him about the JFK assassination. In other cases, not so much. But we'll get to that.
As I said, the filmmaking style is pretty important. He basically has two different phases of his work as a filmmaker. The first is that was sort of Salvador and platoon films, which are very grounded. They're almost like they're almost documentary like in the way that they're shot there, but they're still, you know, still dramatic, still kind of that spiritual moment where we'll be false to his knees as his character is dying as the helicopter pulls away.
But for the most part, he's trying to capture something very earnest and straightforward and right in the character's face. And then there's that second phase, which sort of mutates as we get into the early 90s that is this fast cutting, you know, multiple film stock hallucinatory and pressurinistic media saturated over eager, hazy portrayal of, you know, the way that influences kind of poison our brains. And I still don't totally know if Oliver Stone invented that psychology and then made me think that that was all true or if he was reflecting on something that was real, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like, did he invent that commercial style or was he trying to manifest something that he was seeing in the world?
I've always thought it was a little bit the latter, but that's because I think I came to that era of Oliver Stone at the same time that I came to pop culture itself. So it's very hard for me to separate, you know, what I saw on MTV versus what I saw in an Oliver Stone film. I just kind of all blends together as stuff I got to catch up on. And, you know, and how you receive it does affect how it's effectiveness for you as well, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
There's one movie in particular that I know we're going to talk about. So yeah, I think if you look at the subjects that he focuses on, that approach, that explosive impressionist approach makes a lot of sense, you know, Vietnam and Kennedy and rock and roll and drugs and identity and love, these are all things that are actually in some ways best understood, not in linear fashion, because too frequently if they're under the linear fashion, then it's they're explained to too simply. And I think he puts something he can cloud the certitude of some of his ideas by throwing a lot of things at you all at once. Sometimes sometimes that works, sometimes it's what you're saying.
It's sort of making things too obvious. And that's part of what makes him so interesting. The glue of this second stage approach is definitely Robert Richardson, who is shot most of his kind of masterpieces, most of his best liked and best loved films, 11 of his features were done with Richardson and then Richardson went on to become, you know, one of the four or five most celebrated cinematographers of his era teamed up with SaaS, he turned Tino, Ermouris all since working with Stone. Notably has not really worked with Oliver Stone in about 15, 25 years.
And that can tell you a little bit about where Stone's career has gone too. I think that they miss each other. And Hank Corwin is the editor who was a commercial editor who helped develop that editing style with Stone and Richardson that I think, you know, when I think of Hank Corwin, I think of natural born killers and he's been in the news in the last few years because of the big short advice, but he really built that style with Stone 25 years ago. And so those two guys along with, you know, Bruno Rubello and a bunch of other people, you know, the casting directors who found a lot of the stone players over the years, they built that mythology, that first 10 years of significant work for him from 86 to 96 that I suspect will spend most of our time on.
And I guess the last thing to talk about is what you opened with, which is that people think Oliver Stone is a conspiracy theorist. So do you think he actually is a conspiracy theorist or do you think he is trying to upgrade and unnerve conventional wisdom? I think at some point he has turned into a bit of an actual conspiracy theorist. And so, you know, the reason I answered the way that I did because it was because he was good at branding and this idea of Oliver Stone and what to expect from his movies and from his interviews and kind of the world of Oliver Stone was like extremely well communicated to me and it's how I understand.
And I think as we talked about when we talked previously about JFK, and I'm sure we'll talk about it some more, but how we all learned to look at like actual film and things like this, you know, there's a pruder tape and what we ask questions of and how we communicate skepticism and conspiracy. I guess our entire generation learned that from JFK. So I give him a lot of credit for that. I think it is possibly more knowing and intentional in JFK than it is in perhaps the documentary that he says that he is releasing a follow up to JFK.
Again, I refer you to the New York Times interview with David Marchese where he has asked about this project and he explains all of the things that have since been revealed that will be in his documentary and it's very hard not to take that as an actual conspiracy theorist. Yeah, I mean, I think the other significant complication around this is the documentary work he's done spotlighting the leftist leaders of the world. And he spent a significant amount of time on camera and off with Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez. He has put these people who many people believe are very evil and destructive figures in world history and he's put them in a very positive light.
Stone is very sympathetic to their causes. And he has been accused of being a bit soft on people, particularly Putin, who, you know, many people obviously believe is a strong man and a very dangerous figure. And I perhaps this is my kind of like simple minded wish, wish casting. But I would love to know what we would think of Oliver Stone if he just hadn't made any of these documentaries, if he just had not done any of this work over the years because they're inextricable now.
The fact that he made two documentaries about Fidel Castro, the fact that he made a very, very not good documentary about Hugo Chavez and the revolution in Venezuela and how that affected South America. Just like a very credulous portrayal of a person who is immensely complicated, who is not challenged in the movie. I think that would be fascinating to look at these 20 feature films he made and just look at those films as like the text of Oliver Stone's life. But I don't think they're inextricable now and that's it's certainly complicates him.
I do also think that the culture has just caught up to Oliver Stone and technologically and psychologically and psychologically, we're a lot more familiar with the type of thought that he is presenting in those documentaries. And it seems like what we see on YouTube is in a lot of ways, like an evolution of what started 20 years ago. Now, can you hold him responsible for that? I think no, we're going to talk a lot about the reactions to his films and other people's interpretations of his art.
And I don't think that you can hold someone entirely responsible for that. But at the same time, Oliver Stone is very aware of his own meta narrative and he is very aware of the politics and is very aware of the media and schools of thought. And so I don't totally know how to untangle all of it because he is actively engaged in the work of his own influence. And some of those data issues that we mentioned, I think crop up so specifically in all of his work, documentary and otherwise he's seeking this kind of political father figure.
He obviously has this incredible adulation for John F. Kennedy. He's talked recently a lot about his the literal hope he had in Barack Obama and how let down he felt by his administration. You know, he's talked about what a meaningful figure Castro was to him.
And these are really complicated personal issues that he's bringing to deeply political and social issues that makes him such a difficult person to sort out. You know, like you can feel the psychology in play in the way that he is saying, gosh, I idolized JFK in the same way that he represents something my father could not be or the way that I was disappointed by this version of Uncle Sam. And you know, he's so like he's so ball faced in that stuff that it's kind of fascinating. Yeah.
And again, that's where the real boomerism of it all comes into me because at some point, and I'm only speaking for myself, but my reaction, I do find myself hating a wall against the like America daddy issues, just because I understand that it is the like Vietnam is the defining moment of his life and he's working through that. And so I don't mean to diminish it, but it's just also I as a millennial who was born when I was, just can't understand believing in America and feeling as betrayed by America in the way that he did, he does still. And some of that is just because of his generation and his time and he is still working through his experiences in the way that he was betrayed. But it does.
I think we just all look at politics and the idea of America so differently. Okay, before we get into our game, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode of the big picture is brought to you by an American pickle and American pickle star Seth Rogan as first a greenbound 1920s American immigrant who was accidentally brined in a bat of pickles for 100 years, emerging in present day New York City. Seth Rogan also plays virtually only surviving relative, his great grandson, Ben, a mild man or computer, living in Brooklyn from the producers of the disaster artists in 5050.
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Okay, you're just going to read the whole list. Well, no, no, no, I think what we should do is we'll set some ground rules for this game. Okay. So we've just had this sincere and deep conversation about one of the more provocative artists of the 20th century.
I thought they were pretty fair. I thought so too. I mean, I come to this as a big time fan of Oliver Stone's movies, not all of them, but a lot of them. And I'm proud of the way that we've talked about his work and his book as far, but we're going to play a stupid game in order to organize our feelings about him a little bit more coherently.
So fuck Mary kill, here's the deal. We're only going to focus on the future films. So we're not going to focus on the work that he did as a screenwriter. As I said, that includes Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, You're of the Dragon, 8 Million Ways to Die, and he does have a writing credit on Evita, which is a film that he desperately wanted to make and was not able to make.
And it was eventually made in the mid 90s starring Madonna, maybe one day, we'll talk about Evita in depth on this podcast. Fun fact, I did see that film on a school trip and I'm not sure what my teachers thought I needed to know about Ava Peron, but they thought I needed to know something. And we're also not going to talk about the documentaries. I think I'm not really a fan of most of the documentaries.
I do think that the 12 part, the untold history of the United States, which you can watch on Netflix is interesting. I think it's probably the most interesting documentary work he's done. It's this really kind of breathtaking, comprehensive look at America through the nuclear age, starting in the 40s running all the way through George W. Bush.
And, you know, there's that kind of pick a risk. Oliver Stone, like who could ever believe I'd be the one to tell this story feeling in that series, but everything else I find is pretty politically complicated and feels like Agent Provocate tour stuff to me. You know, it feels like he's trying to draw people out and get them to embarrass themselves publicly by talking about some of this work, which is something that we have decided to do on this podcast like Fools. But so we'll just talk about the 20 movies.
So Amanda, you got three Fox, three Mary's and three kills, and I got three, three and three of the same. So let's just go through each movie one at a time and you can tell us if you decided to fuck Mary or kill it or none of the above. OK, this is interesting because I didn't know that this green writing was off the table. So I have one free spot that I'm just going to have to award during the during the run of play.
So that'll just be interesting. Well, if you want to monologue about it for 20 minutes, feel free. I do also have a very vivid memory of seeing a video that I don't know whether it was a school trip or just my parents like a home education. Anyway, well, should we use this as an opportunity to talk quickly about Scarface?
I assume Scarface is the film you're going to pick. Yeah, I was going to be one of my fucks because what else are you going to do with Scarface? Yes, you got a fuck Scarface. It's just not his movie, you know, I think if it was his movie, it would have been a very different movie and he says as much and that seemed like a fascinating experience for him.
Oliver Stone talking about the people who really got Scarface, which is something that I've been reading for 40 years where he's like, you know, black and Latino and city inner city people understood this movie always kind of just gives me the chills a little bit. It always just feels like he's not the right person to be telling that story. Even though in many ways, he's right. And in many ways that the film was kind of saved and mythologized by hip hop and by a different kind of a culture than this sort of white safe Hollywood culture that it found its way into.
But, you know, it's an amazing movie. I love Scarface. It's just a complete mess. It's all over the place to do Paul Mad at his or to Paul Maness.
And Stone throwing every pipe on he has in his bag into a screenplay. Well, that's I mean, that's kind of why I think it is more of an Oliver Stone film than you're giving it credit for. It's just absolutely ridiculous and also so instantly memorable, especially like much of the dialogue. But I was just watching some clips before we do this.
I can't not laugh when Appuccino is like speaking in in this movie. It's I can't believe this happened. I can't believe this happened, which is is honestly the true as Oliver Stone experience. Are you surprised that this movie hasn't been canceled yet because Pichino is playing a Cuban man?
I just assumed that you can't do all of Oliver Stone's movies, I think. Yes. That's a good point. That's that's so Oliver Stone in the time of cancel culture is fascinating.
Fascinating. He's almost untouchable in a way because everything is contaminated. Yeah. OK, so you're going to have to make another pick.
You're going to have to fuck another film, which is that a challenge for you? This was the last spot. This was the one I couldn't feel. I told you very confidently yesterday that I had eight of nine slots figured out.
And the ninth one is. Yeah, I don't totally know what to do, but I'll get there. I'll figure it out. OK, so we're flying fast and free.
So I mentioned those first two films in the year, 1974 seizure in 1981 is the hand. I think it's safe to say that neither one of us are going to fuck Mary or Kelly through these movies, right? Correct. I definitely seems like Oliver Stone needed to get fucked after making these movies because they're just really kind of sad and weird and paranoid.
And he should be making horror movies. He should be making the kinds of films that he would go on to make shortly there. After. So the next films that we get are the 1986 duo of Salvador and platoon.
Do you have any morals for either of those films? I do not. I wish them well and I have like a lot of respect for platoon sort of. No, I mean, I do, but it's a pass for me on both.
Let's talk about platoon quickly because I'm going to fuck platoon, which is a complicated emotion to have about a movie as searing as platoon. I understand platoon because of the way that it was it's it's myth was communicated to me, which is that this was the most real Vietnam movie that had ever been made. That was the way that it was older. And this movie comes after Apocalypse.
Now it comes after Full Metal Jacket. It comes after a lot of these, you know, harrowing and serious, but also kind of mythological approaches to war films. And this was like I said, much more of a boots on the ground approach. They'll die the was the advisor on this film.
He goes on to be an actor with years and many of stones films. And he's the person who trained a lot of the actors to look like soldiers. And you know, this book ends functionally with platoon winning best picture. That is like the summation that is like tada of Oliver Stone and his story.
And it's funny that he then goes on to literally 35 more years of crazy shit. The book actually ends with him being like, it was so great that I won best picture because it would steal me for the wars to come. Like that's how it ends to be continued, AKA this podcast. So I have a lot of admiration for Plissoon.
I think it is like so many war movies before it. It is not aging well necessarily because the way that we see war movies has evolved a lot. But it's also it's set the archetype in so many ways for the kind of war movies we would come to see. And so it's one of those things where it deserves multiple points for setting the table for, you know, the next batch.
And you know, casualties of war, I'm sure, they're after Brian DePalm is a non movie and they have a lot in common. But this, you know, devil and angel devil and Jesus figures in the film too, is a total literal design from stone, the Willem de Faux character of Elias and the Tom Behringer character of Barnes. But they create just this like straightforward, uncomplicated, but beautiful metaphor for his tormented soul as he spends time in the jungle. And the movie is, you know, I don't think it's a perfect film.
I don't think it's his best film. I don't think it's even his most kind of like searing and excitable movie. It's quite a solemn movie in many ways, but it's undoubtedly the work of somebody who knows what they're doing and what they're talking about. Despite the fact that as you write about in the book, it seems like they had to beg, borrow and steal just to get the thing finished.
And it seemed like it was a very difficult shoot. And there was a lot of learning that he had to do on the fly while making it. But you know, it's it's one of his signature movies. It's kind of traditional American four star movie.
So I'm having sex with it. Yeah. I want to rewatch it. I was reminded just how much like my and I think our generation's like understanding of Vietnam is shaped by this movie.
In a lot of ways, it's just a we've moved past it. And you know, our understanding and that American centered version of a war movie is just kind of not where we are. And so I think I'm also just maybe I'm thinking a little bit too much about the definitions of fucking versus marrying versus killing something, which we didn't like really talk about and like possibly for the sake of, you know, our and everyone should not really define how we're thinking about those in any great terms. But I would say the platoon was kind of like a second tier Mary for me and I just didn't get there.
So I think that I have a case for flipping a Mary in a fuck and this is the one that I may like I could flip theoretically, but we'll get there when we get there. OK, so 1987 after platoon after best picture after Salvador, which we didn't really talk about. But you know, is this kind of crazy adventure movie about a journalist who travels to El Salvador to expose the lies of what the Americans are doing to support the right wing parts of the party and then the rebel soldiers in the confusion there has an amazing James. It was not a good factor.
But I don't know if they're better. All I know is that some campus, you know, who can't read or write or feed his own family has to watch his kid die and now nutrition. You think he gives a shit about Marxism or capitalism? Was that kind of crap thinking that lost us Vietnam?
There's guilt shift. You liberal assholes. What do you think the KGB's doing? Huh?
So what you guys are here? Some kind of post Vietnam experience like a need a rerun or something. You pour 120 million bucks into this place. You turn into a military zone.
So what? So you can have chopper forays in the sky. It's a bit of a like feels like it's still being made by somebody who doesn't totally know how to make a movie yet, but he pulls off all these crazy set pieces on the shoestring budget that it's definitely worth a watch. But it doesn't doesn't register for me.
1987 Wall Street. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that green for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works.
Greed clarifies cuts through and captures the essence of evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked an upward surge of mankind and greed. You mark my words.
We'll not only say tell our paper, but that other malfunction corporation called the USA. Definitely one of the archival Oliver Snow movies. Upon revisiting, I did not like it. In fact, I wanted to kill it.
Are you killing Wall Street? Yeah. That's insane. Wow.
You don't know what a good fuck is then because I'm fucking Wall Street. Okay. Of course it's not good. And of course it creates Gordon Gekko and then we all have to live in Oliver Stone's Wall Street world.
It thinks that it's commentary and it's mythologizing the Wall Street big spending greed is good character that it's trying to critique. And part of that is because Michael Douglas gives an all time performance and part of that is because Oliver Stone is working through his definition of what a great man is and what ambition is and what you should admire and what you should revile both in men and in capitalism. And also partly it's bad because you have the Charlie Sheen character in there who has to go through his daddy issues and make good at the end, which is clearly a stand in for someone who we've been talking about a lot on this podcast and adding on a moral lesson that you don't really need. But the Gordon Gekko of it all is all time in terms of creating a character and an image and penetrating the culture.
I think you have to give him credit for that even if it gets away with him. In a lot of ways, that's the Oliver Stone story. It got away from him. It's an interesting thing.
I think you made my case very strongly when you said all the things before, but which is that it created a culture, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not, that I think was pretty toxic. Maybe it didn't create it, but it cemented it. It cemented that Michael Milken, powerbroker pinstripe suit, suspender Superman figure that is obviously really gross. And Michael Douglas was amazing.
There's no doubt about it. But this movie was really not that well received, was not a hit. And Douglas was the only person who got an Oscar nomination. And so even though it has this big reputation and it's considered a very big movie, it really wasn't.
I think many people considered it kind of a letdown in the aftermath of Platoon, even though it did have, there's an iconography to it that is still memorable. But God, Charlie Sheen is not good, not a good actor. And there is literally a scene in which he's standing on the sky roof of a skyscraper and screams into the night, who am I? Like could there be a more dumb shit representation of a person going through problems than literally asking themselves who am I as they make decisions in life?
Like, there still seems to be like a little bit of a one-on-one thing in play, and he hasn't totally tapped into his essential stoneness. And I think I was just surprised by how simple this movie was, how not deep it was. All totally fair. And then how you respond to that fact says a lot about other aspects of your life.
I think we should also add it's one of the worst performances by an actress in an Oliver Stone movie, which is saying something. I don't, Daryl Head, I don't know what's happening. But it's not good. No, it's not good.
But I just kind of think in terms of like seizing the zeitgeist and like image and energy making and putting your finger on something with Gordon Gekko, you got to give credit to it, but not enough to marry it. So I got it. You love to sleep with stockbrokers noted. 1988 talk radio.
I've chosen to marry the film talk radio. Did you get a chance to look at this before doing the show? No, I did not rewatch it. I think I've seen part of it, though I will be honest.
I don't think I've seen it at all. You're happy as well. Others are in pain. I'm here to lead you by the hands with a dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation.
I'm providing a public service. You're so scared. You're like a little child under the covers. You're afraid of the boogeyman, but you can't live without him.
Your fear, your own lives become your entertainment. Interesting film. Not exactly what I remembered seeing many years ago. I could probably make the case for flipping the fuck session with Platoon with a fuck session with talk radio and then marrying Platoon.
It's debatable here. I was really taken with this movie though because something I wouldn't have picked up on when I saw it in the 90s was just how incredibly well made it is. This kind of signals like Stone going to another stratosphere in part because this is arguably an even harder movie to make cinematic than Wall Street, Platoon, and Salvador because the whole damn movie essentially takes place inside of a radio booth. It's just in a radio station and it's just Eric Bogosian yelling into a microphone for about 80% of the film.
Somehow with Richardson, he manages to use all of these filmic tricks to make his movie completely riveting. It's based on a Pulitzer Prize nominated play that Bogosian put on the public theater and later on Broadway. And Bogosian is of course this incredible monologous and playwright and is best known now probably as the guy who was trapped in the best of people in the end of Uncut Gems. And also has been available in a lot of films and plays a very unlikable shock jock in Dallas Texas in this movie.
It gives a searing performance. But I think the movie in many ways predicts the Ben Shapiro's and Joe Rogan's of the world, the intense, deeply angry and sure that they understand the truths of the world talking head figures that dominate so much of media now. And certainly the Bogosian character would fit in in a Twitter world very well, very comfortable and so the script has a lot of foresight. But to me it's much more story about basically a director figuring out how to make movies, not how to make stories that are essential to him and like platoon is essential to him.
Wall Street writes a little bit about his father's struggles with money at the end of his life and how the way that kind of stockbroker culture overtook New York and how that damaged his family. Like Wall Street's a very personal film. Talk Radio, he didn't write it. Bogosian wrote it.
And he comes to it almost for hire because he had to wait a year for Tom Cruise to be available to make his next film. And so in this year he takes the year and whatever in a 60 day shoot makes this really interesting movie. If you haven't seen Talk Radio, I would definitely recommend it is not a perfect film but it is something that I thought about a lot after seeing it which is not always the case with all of your film films. So marrying Talk Radio with maybe a side Fox session as well.
Okay. Nice marriage but whatever. Yes. 1989 born on the fourth of July.
I'm going to get to the top ten! Yes you can! It's all fully admired. Can't, can any can state.
We almost fucking wore it. It's not my fault. It's all for nothing. It's not true, honey.
What do you know? What do you know? Yes, I'm marrying born on the fourth of July. I'm too.
I knew this was where we would meet. Amazing. I'm so glad I re-watched it. No God!
You probably have the best film in my life. Yeah, I think it's just, it isn't a lot of ways the most obvious because it is the closest marriage of what Oliver Stone is working through and the themes and how he relates to the ideas of America and politics and Vietnam with the actual text. And so there is something, you know, I hesitate to use the word honest because I don't mean that the others aren't honest but it just feels unvarnished almost while also being just like a really big tent filmmaking and using all of the American iconography and the John Williams score. And it's Tom Cruise.
Cruise is playing on the idea of Tom Cruise as a movie star and, you know, the American matinee idol in 1989. So it's, I do kind of think it's kind of his most well-rounded work if that makes any sense. And that's what I'm looking for in a marriage. Oh, that's a nice way of thinking about things.
I mean, I think of, when I think about the married concept of this game, I think about what's the thing that I want to spend the most time with. And Ron Kovic's story is powerful to me for very obvious reasons, which is that Ron Kovic is a brown-haired, idealistic kid from Long Island. And when I was growing up, I went to Walton High School in Huntington. And Ron Kovic was friends with many of the people who taught me in high school.
And so Ron Kovic was a name you would hear all the time. He's like a Long Island legend in many ways. And he's known as this incredible anti-war activist, obviously now in a latter stages of his life. But just to provide some context for that, I think the film does an amazing job of capturing what Long Island is like, which is to say it is not really the home of a lot of anti-war activists.
And for him to be a figure who emerged from that and went through the trials that he went through, you know, losing the use of his legs and encountering like his own incredible frustrations and PTSD and the problems inside of his family. Like, it's Pat to say that it hit home, but this is like a movie that hits home so hard for me. And Kovic is just like American hero in both of the ways that we like to use that phrase. He is the person who gave his life and his body for his country.
And he's also the person who, you know, sacrificed his freedom to say the things that he felt were true. And Stone not being Ron Kovic, I think makes him the best person to make the movie. You know, Platoon is so personal and so specifically about Stone. And I think that people blonde onto that and they romanticized it when they were celebrating him for the film.
But him having just a little bit of critical distance while also knowing how to tell a Vietnam story and then a story about this guy who lives a slightly different life than he did. I think it just makes it's the perfect marriage. And as you said, Cruz, this is like, is this the best Cruz has ever been in my mind? I mean, at least in terms of the kind of, you know, the serious awards worthy work that he's done over the years, it's nuts to me that he didn't win.
I mean, I got, he lost to Daniel Day Lewis from my left foot, a similarly, you know, body sacrificing kind of performance. And it's fascinating that they were up against each other at this time. But man, this is just one hell of a movie. I really, really like it.
I was so happy to, after watching a lot of like mediocre Oliver Stone movies, this was the last one I rewatched and I was really happy with it. So we're both marrying Born on the Fourth of July, 1989. I suspect we both have strong feelings about the next film, which is 1991's The Doors. You're all a bunch of fucking slaves.
Come on, you think it's gonna last? How long are you gonna let him push you around? I tell you this, I'm gonna get my kicks with one of the whole shit house goes up in flames. So we're in the sweet spot.