Many apologies if I got anyone's hopes up for a Bergman profile- I will post a long Bergman thread later after I've fine-tuned my impressions.
Also, Bergman was never really an outsider- he doesn't need trumpeting or acknowledgement. He's been golden since the 50's.
Oliver Stone, on the other hand....
has French lineage. He lived in France as a boy (the countryside and Paris) and grew up under the delicate care of his mother Jacqueline.
He was an intelligent young man (he wrote a brilliant novel that was published in the late 90's) and he got into Yale University. He dropped out. He taught in Vietnam, he joined the merchant marine. He went back to Yale. He dropped out again-this time to enlist as an Infantry soldier (1st Air Calvary Division Airmobile). He actually wanted to go to the front lines: he wanted combat. The character of Chris Taylor in Platoon is a mirror image of Oliver.
He came back from 'Nam with a stack of military certificates lauding his heroism: he won a bronze star for valour & a purple heart.
He went to New York and enrolled in NYU filmschool. He made 3 short films that "created polarities" (his words): Michael and Marie, The Madman of Martinique and Last Year in Vietnam, which you can see on the DVD "Oliver Stone's America", a documentary by Charles Kiselyak.
Martin Scorsese was one of his professors at NYU, and evidently he was a great teacher. In 1967 Oliver sent a script he wrote called "BREAK" to Jim Morrison, thinking the Lizard King would approve and help get it made into a movie. He never heard back from him.
The first thing people should realize about Oliver Stone is that he is a WRITER. He started out as a writer, and his real talent is writing. He wrote several screenplays that got him rejection after rejection in Hollywood. He was able to make two interesting films prior to his break with Midnight Express: a film called Seizure and a film called The Hand with Michael Caine. Both are available on video and provide great insight into Oliver's mind before his career careened into a vortex of great cinema.
He won an Oscar for his Midnight Express script. The film is all Oliver-if I didn't know better I would say he directed it. It's an Alan Parker classic and is a must-see film.
Same with Conan The Barbarian, the definitive Schwartzenegger movie directed by John Milius. Who better than Oliver Stone to write about a mythic man of primitive combat?
Scarface is just as much an Oliver Stone film as it is a DePalma film. It's a threatening movie, an intense, epic tale of a man who has no redeeming qualities yet you root for him-because he realizes truth. Al Pacino is on fire as Tony Montana and this film is recognized as a classic by everyone from real criminals and drug dealers to Presidents.
If you haven't seen it then I'm sending someone to kill you, mang.
Hard pressed to get financing for Platoon which he wrote in the 70's, he had to leave it and make a small budget movie. Salvador might be his best film. It's before he burst out of the gate yet after some degree of success. It shows you how hungry he was as a filmmaker and how he shines while surrounded by chaos. Guerilla filmmaking at it's finest.
Platoon. He took 30-odd relatively unknown actors to the Phillipines, had them do a 2-week boot camp with Dale Dye, and he told the actors that after the 2 weeks they could go back to civilization for showers and good food and then they would make the movie. He lied. As soon as the 2-weeks were up, and everybody was good and dirty and weathered, he marched them in front of the cameras. They were pissed off-Charlie Sheen especially, because as Willem Dafoe said "Charlie likes the finer things in life"-some threatened to quit: "we're actors, man, not soldiers-fuck Stone!". But they all stayed on, they finished the film in record time and made a masterpiece. An Oscar-winning masterpiece. It's unfliching, raw: it shows how it really was over there, and Oliver said he wanted to bring the "I don't give a shit" mentality to the forefront. Amen on that. I still love this film.
Oliver next made a film for his dad: Wall Street, another classic in it's own right. Michael Douglas deserved his Oscar for playing Gordon Gekko, a man so corrupt yet so truthful it makes you wonder if you should love him or hate him. He has some long speeches and some beautiful dialogue: " The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the un-fittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated." And of course the brutal Greed is Good.
Talk Radio was film I saw at high school, in my Communications class. Our teacher showed it to us and said "this film shows as well as anything how the media is a powerful tool". I remember it like it was yesterday. We all sat enraptured, and were disappointed that the film would be shown over two days- we were so into it that we wanted to miss our next class to see the end!
What can I say about it? It's the saga of Barry Champlain, a radio talk show host who was modelled after the real-life Alan Berg. Eric Bogosian turns in a fire and brimstone performance, which he also did as a one-man show on the theatrical stage. Great film that BOMBED at the box-office. Oliver was severely disappointed. He took a hard knock with it's poor reception, but bounced back with a heavy, heavy-duty film that my father forbid me to watch: Born on the Fourth of July. It's based on the autobiography of Sgt. Ron Kovic, a US Marine who was severely wounded in Vietnam. Epic in scope, this film is a great leap for Oliver as well as Tom Cruise, whose acting had never been tested like this.
He was fucking ROBBED of a best acting Oscar. Robbed. In fairness, the Academy did give it to someone who was worthy: Daniel-Day Lewis, but cripes, Tom's performance is unreal in Born. This film also has one of the best scores John Williams ever did. Adds a lot to the experience.
Next up for Oliver was Evita, but clashes with Madonna forced him to drop the project. He hated her attitude. She wanted all these provisions in her contract about creative control and Oliver told her to fuck off- man what I wouldn't give to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting! Phony-star bitch. She did a good job on the film though when Alan Parker took over, but I digress.
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