Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone
Stone at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, 2009
Born	William Oliver Stone (1946-09-15) September 15, 1946 New York City, USA
Occupation(s)	Film director, producer, and screenwriter
Years active	1971–present
Spouse(s)	Najwa Sarkis (1971–1977) Elizabeth Burkit Cox (1981–1993) Sun-jung Jung (1996 – present)

William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. He won further attention - and controversy - with films JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994). Stone's movies frequently focus on contemporary political and cultural issues. He has received three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), and Best Director for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). British newspaper The Guardian described Stone as "one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema." Stone's films often combine different cameras and film formats within a single scene (including VHS and 8 mm film) as evidenced in JFK and Natural Born Killers.

Early life

Stone was born in New York City, the son of Jacqueline (née Goddet) and Louis Stone, a stockbroker. He grew up affluently and lived in townhouses in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. His father was Jewish and his mother was French-born and Roman Catholic. As a religious compromise, Stone was raised in the Episcopal Church, but has since converted to Buddhism. Stone attended Trinity School before his parents sent him away to attend The Hill School, a college-preparatory school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His mother was often absent and his father made a big impact on his life; father-son relationships were to feature heavily in Stone's films. His parents divorced when he was 15, due to his father's extramarital affairs with the wives of several family friends. Stone's father was also influential in obtaining jobs for his son, including work on a financial exchange in France, where Stone often spent his summer vacation with his maternal grandparents - a job that proved inspirational to Stone for his movie Wall Street. Stone graduated from The Hill School in 1964.

Stone was then admitted into Yale University, but left after a year. Stone had become inspired by Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim as well as by Zorba the Greek and George Harrison's music to teach English at the Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam. Stone taught in Vietnam for six months after which he worked as a wiper on a United States Merchant Marine ship, travelling to Oregon and Mexico, before returning to Yale, where he dropped out a second time (in part due to working on his 1,400 page autobiographical novel A Child's Night Dream). In September 1967, Stone enlisted in the United States Army, requesting combat duty in Vietnam. He fought with the 25th Infantry Division, then with the First Cavalry Division, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster before his discharge in 1968 after 15 months.

Early film career

Stone graduated from film school at New York University in 1971, where he was mentored by director Martin Scorsese (the same year, he had a small acting role in comedy The Battle of Love's Return.). Stone first began making his mark in film as a scriptwriter in the late 70s, in the period between his first two films as a director: horror films Seizure (1974), and The Hand (1981), which stars Michael Caine. In 1978 he won his first Academy Award, after adapting true-life jail tale Midnight Express into a hit film for British director Alan Parker (the two would later collaborate on a 1996 movie of stage musical Evita).

Stone wrote further features before his directing career took off in 1986, including cult Al Pacino druglord tale Scarface. The majority of those that made it to the screen were crime stories or thrillers, with the exception of Conan the Barbarian (1982). Stone has written or taken part in the writing of every film he has directed, except for crime movie U Turn (1997).

In 1986 Stone directed two films back to back: the critically acclaimed but commercially-unsuccessful Salvador, shot largely in Mexico, and his long in development Vietnam project Platoon, shot in the Phillippines.

Mainstream success

Platoon bought Stone's name to a much wider audience. It also finally kickstarted a busy directing career, which saw him making nine films over the next decade. Alongside some negative reaction, Platoon won many rave reviews (Roger Ebert later called it the ninth best film of the 1980s), large audiences, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2007, a film industry vote ranked it at number 83 in an American Film Institute "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies" poll of the previous century's best American movies. British TV channel Channel 4 voted Platoon as the sixth greatest war film ever made.

Platoon was the first of three films Stone has made about Vietnam: the others were Born on the Fourth of July (1989, for which he won his second Oscar for directing) and Heaven & Earth (1993). He has called these films a trilogy; each deals with different aspects of the war. Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about Stone's experience in combat; Born on the Fourth of July is based on the autobiography of US marine turned peace campaigner Ron Kovic; Heaven & Earth is based on memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, in which Le Ly Hayslip, recalls her life as a Vietnamese girl drastically affected by the war.

During this same period, Stone directed one of his most ambitious, controversial and successful films to date, JFK (1991). His take on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy won him a Golden Globe for directing. Stone also directed the acclaimed Wall Street (1987), which won Michael Douglas an Academy Award for Best Actor as a ruthless Wall Street corporate raider; Talk Radio (1988), based on Eric Bogosian's Pulitzer-nominated play, and The Doors (1991), starring Val Kilmer as singer Jim Morrison.

I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.

–Oliver Stone

1994–present

In 1994 saw the release of Stone's frenzied, controversial satire of the modern media, Natural Born Killers. This tale of two serial killers was later ranked as Entertainment Weekly's eight 'Most Controversial' movies to date. Stone went on to direct Nixon (1988), which was nominated for Oscars for script and Anthony Hopkins' portrait of President Richard Nixon.

Stone followed Nixon with two more intentionally-populist works, road movie U Turn (1997), and Any Given Sunday (1999), a film about power struggles within and without an American football team. In 2010, he returned to Wall Street for sequel Money Never Sleeps. Stone also directed the critically-savaged Alexander (2004). He later re-edited his biopic of Alexander the Great in two different cuts for DVD. After Alexander, Stone went on to direct World Trade Center, based on the true story of two Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) policemen who were trapped in rubble after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Stone hoped to direct a fourth Vietnam War film Pinkville, about an investigation into the My Lai Massacre of Vietnamese civilians. The film was to have been made for the newly reformed United Artists., but the company halted the December 2007 production start thanks to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. After the strike, Stone went on to write, produce and direct the George W. Bush biopic, titled W. (2008). The film portrays the controversial President's childhood, relationship with his father, struggles with alcoholism, rediscovery of his Christian faith, and continues up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Josh Brolin plays the title role.

Controversy

In 1991, Stone showed his film JFK to Congress on Capitol Hill, which helped lead to passage of the Assassination Materials Disclosure Act of 1992. The Assassination Records Review Board (created by Congress to end the secrecy surrounding Kennedy's assassination) discussed the film, including Stone's observation at the end of the film, about the dangers inherent in government secrecy. Stone published an annotated version of the screenplay, in which he cites references for his claims, shortly after the film's release.

Stone's screenplay Midnight Express was criticized by some for its portrayal of Turkish people. The original author, Billy Hayes, around whom the film is set, has spoken out against the film, protesting that he had many Turkish friends while in jail.

Stone's film Natural Born Killers (originally based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino), released in 1994, received controversial recognition for its portrayal of violence, along with the intended satire on the media. Before it was released, the MPAA gave the film a NC-17 rating; this caused Stone to cut four minutes of film footage in order to obtain an R rating (he eventually released the unrated version on VHS and DVD in 2001). Entertainment Weekly ranked Natural Born Killers at number 8 on their list of the 25 Most Controversial Movies Ever.

Stone's other film The Doors, released in 1991, received criticism from former Doors member Ray Manzarek (keyboardist–bass player) during a question and answer session at Indiana University East (in Richmond, Indiana), in 1997. During the discussion, Manzarek stated that he sat down with Stone about The Doors and Jim Morrison for over 12 hours. Patricia Kennealy Morrison - a well known rock critic and author - was a consultant on the movie, in which she also has a cameo appearance, but she writes in her memoir Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison (Dutton, 1992) that Stone ignored everything she told him and proceeded with his own version of events. From the moment the movie was released, she blasted it as untruthful and inaccurate. The other surviving former members of the band, John Densmore and Robby Krieger, also cooperated with the filming of Doors, but distanced themselves from the work before the film's release.

Also in 1997, Stone was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested against the treatment of Scientologists in Germany and compared it to the Nazis' oppression of Jews in the 1930s. Other signatories included Dustin Hoffman and Goldie Hawn.

In 2010, Stone defended his decision not to interview Hugo Chavez's opponents during the filming of his documentary South of the Border. Stone indicated that people hear enough of those complaints already and that the movie is not intended to be a detailed examination of Chavez's record. He praised Chavez as a leader of a movement for "social transformation" in Latin America and expressed his deep admiration for him.

Drug use

Stone loosely based Scarface on his own addiction to cocaine which he had to kick while writing the screenplay. On the DVD of Natural Born Killers: The Director's Cut, one of the producers, Jane Hamsher, recounts stories of taking psilocybin mushrooms with Stone and some of the cast and crew and almost getting pulled over by a police officer—a situation which Stone later wrote into the film. In 1999, Stone was arrested and pleaded guilty to alcohol and drug charges. He was ordered into a rehabilitation program. He was arrested again on the night of May 27, 2005 in Los Angeles for possession of an undisclosed illegal drug.

Attempted meeting with FARC

See also: Operation Emmanuel

In a January 2008 interview with The Observer, Stone expressed disgust for what he claims to be the ongoing U.S.-supported paramilitary violence in Colombia's "war on drugs." He accompanied Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's president and third party negotiator with the Colombian guerrilla group known as Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in the release of three hostages held for over six years, another episode in the humanitarian exchange affair.

During The Observer interview, Stone did not condemn the FARC outright; "I do think that by the standards of Western civilization they go too far; they kidnap innocent people. On the other hand, they're fighting a desperate battle against highly financed, American-supported forces who have been terrorizing the countryside for years and kill most of the people. FARC is fighting back as best it can and grabbing hostages is the fashion in which they can finance themselves and try to achieve their goals, which are difficult. They're a peasant army; I see them as a Zapata-like army. I think they are heroic to fight for what they believe in and die for it, as was Castro in the hills of Cuba."

Stone made the comments shortly after returning from a trip to Colombia, where he was to have filmed footage of the expected release of three FARC hostages, including a young child named Emanuel. In the days before the 2007 New Year's Eve, the Venezuelan government had arranged for the release of high-profile hostages held in the Colombian jungle by the FARC guerrilla group. A high-level international team of observers was on hand, including former President Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, Brazil's top presidential foreign policy advisor, and representatives from France, Switzerland, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, the Red Cross, and Oliver Stone. The mission failed, and Stone blamed the Colombian government and the United States for the fiasco. President Uribe said the FARC were lying the whole time, and they never had any intention of releasing the hostages because they did not have one of the three they had promised to deliver (a 3-year old boy who was born in captivity). President Chavez angrily accused Uribe of "dynamiting" the mission. He said the FARC was in fact ready to release the two hostages they held, but had to retreat from Colombian military operations. President Uribe maintained his military, under orders from him, had held to a cease-fire in order to allow the release.

Controversial remarks

In an interview with The Times newspaper on July 25, 2010, Stone claimed that America does not know "the full story" on Iran and complained about Jewish "domination" in parts of the US media and foreign policy. When Stone was asked why so much of an emphasis has been placed on the Holocaust, as opposed to the 25-plus million casualties the Soviet Union, for example, suffered in World War II, he stated that there was a powerful Jewish lobby within the US. The remarks were heavily criticized by Jewish groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, (where Yuri Eidelstein described his remarks as what “could be a sequel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,”) and the American Jewish Committee, as well as from Israel's Diaspora Affairs and Public Diplomacy Minister.

Stone a day later, stated: “In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity.”

On July 28, 2010, Stone issued a second apology to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was accepted. "I believe he now understands the issues and where he was wrong, and this puts an end to the matter," said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman.

Other work

In 1993, Stone produced a miniseries for ABC Television called Wild Palms. In a cameo, Stone appears on a television in the show discussing how the theories in his film JFK had been proven correct (the series took place in a hypothetical future, 2007). Wild Palms has developed a moderate cult following in the years since it aired, and has recently been released on DVD. That same year, he also spoofed himself in the comedy hit Dave, espousing a conspiracy theory about the President's replacement by a near-identical double. In 1997, Stone published A Child's Night Dream, a largely autobiographical novel first written in 1966-1967. After several unsuccessful attempts to get the work published, he "threw several sections of the manuscript into the East River one cold night, and, as if surgically removing the memory of the book from my mind, volunteered for Vietnam in 1967." Eventually, he dug out the remaining pages, rewrote the manuscript, and published it.

Stone with Hugo Chávez

In 2003, Stone made two documentary films: Persona Non Grata, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Comandante, about Cuban President Fidel Castro. In 2004, he made a second documentary on Castro, titled Looking for Fidel. (See also Controversy, above.) Stone is directing a short film about the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, where the games were held. He was recently granted permission by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make a documentary about him. Stone had been previously refused permission by the Iranian government when the President's media advisor, Mehdi Kalhor, denounced Stone as being part of the "Great Satan" of American culture, despite his opposition to the Bush administration. However, Ahmadinejad approved permission a month later, saying he had "no objections" provided the documentary was based on accurate facts. Stone is due to visit Tehran to negotiate the production of the film with Iranian officials, possibly the president himself.

In 2008, Stone was named the Artistic Director of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Asia in Singapore.

In 2009, Stone completed a documentary about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the rise of progressive, leftist governments in Latin America. Stone, who is a supporter of Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, hopes the film will get the Western world to rethink the Venezuelan president and socialist policies. Titled South of the Border, Chavez joined Stone for the premiere of the documentary at the Venice Film Festival in September 2009. The documentary features informal interviews by Stone with Chavez and six allied leftist presidents, from Bolivia's Evo Morales to Cuba's Raul Castro. Stone stated that he hopes the film will help people better understand a leader who is wrongly ridiculed "as a strongman, as a buffoon, as a clown." In May 2010, Stone began a Latin American tour to promote the film, with screenings planned in Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. The documentary was also being released in some cities in the United States and Europe in the summer of 2010.

The Untold History of the United States

In early January 2010, it emerged that Stone was preparing a 10-part documentary series for Showtime titled The Untold History of the United States that he had been working on with American University historian Peter J. Kuznick since 2007. Stone will direct every one hour episode of the series, which intends to provide an unconventional account of some of the darkest parts of twentieth century history using little known documents and newly uncovered archival material. The miniseries will be accompanied by a companion book of the same name by Stone and Kuznick. Stone hopes to put into context some of the most controversial figures of the last hundred years, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Stone described the series as "the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done. Certainly in documentary form, and perhaps in fiction, feature form." The series was expected to premiere May 2012, but Stone told MTV News in April that it wasn't ready: "there are so many factors and fact checking. It's a lot of work...each hour has to work like a movie", he confirmed that the series was tentatively rescheduled for November 2012

Future projects

Stone is also set to direct the 2012 film Savages, based on a novel by Don Winslow and featuring an ensemble cast that includes John Travolta, Uma Thurman, and Benicio del Toro.

Personal life

Stone married three times, first to Najwa Sarkis on May 22, 1971. They divorced in 1977. He then married Elizabeth Burkit Cox, an assistant in film production, on June 7, 1981. They had two sons, Sean Stone/Ali (b. 1984) and Michael Jack (b. 1991). Sean appeared in some of his father's films while a child. Oliver and Elizabeth divorced in 1993. Stone is currently married to Sun-jung Jung, and the couple have a teenage daughter, Tara. According to Newsmeat, Stone supported Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

In 1999, Stone was arrested on alcohol and drug charges and, as part of a plea bargain, agreed to enter a rehabilitation program. On May 27, 2005, Stone was arrested for driving under the influence and possession of drugs. He was released the next day on a $15,000 bond. In August 2005 Stone pled no contest and was fined $100.

He stated recently that he would prefer Ron Paul for U.S. President: "I think in many ways the most interesting candidate – I'd even vote for him if he was running against Obama – is Ron Paul. Because he’s the only one of anybody who’s saying anything intelligent about the future of the world."

In 2012, his son Sean told Agence France-Presse he converted to Islam whilst in Iran filming a documentary. The 27-year-old filmmaker did not say why he converted. According to Iran's Fars News Agency, Sean has become a Shia Muslim and had chosen to be known by the first name Ali.

Filmography

As director

Year	Film	Academy Award Nominations	Academy Award Wins	Golden Globe Nominations	Golden Globe Wins	BAFTA Nominations	BAFTA Wins
1974	Seizure
1981	The Hand
1986	Salvador	2
1986	Platoon	8	4	4	3	3	2
1987	Wall Street	1	1	1	1
1988	Talk Radio
1989	Born on the Fourth of July	8	2	5	4	2
1991	The Doors
1991	JFK	8	2	4	1	2	2
1993	Heaven & Earth			1	1
1994	Natural Born Killers			1
1995	Nixon	4		1		1
1997	U Turn
1999	Any Given Sunday
2003	Comandante
2004	Alexander
2004	Looking for Fidel
2006	World Trade Center
2008	W.
2009	South of the Border
2010	Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps			1
2012	Savages

As actor

• Battle of Love's Return (1971)
• Platoon (1986) (cameo)
• Wall Street (cameo) (1987)
• The Doors (1991) (cameo)
• Dave (cameo) (1993)
• Any Given Sunday (1999)
• Torrente 3: El Protector (cameo) (2005)
• Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (cameo) (2010)
• Graystone (film) (actor) (2011)

Screenwriter only

• Midnight Express (1978)
• Conan the Barbarian (with John Milius) (1982)
• Scarface (1983)
• Year of the Dragon (with Michael Cimino) (1985)
• 8 Million Ways to Die (with David Lee Henry) (1985)
• Evita (with Alan Parker) (1996)

Producer/executive producer only

• Sugar Cookies (1973)
• Blue Steel (1989)
• Reversal of Fortune (1990)
• From Hollywood to Hanoi (1992)
• Zebrahead (1992)
• South Central (1992)
• Wild Palms (1993) (TV)
• The Joy Luck Club (1993)
• The New Age (1994)
• Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995) (TV)
• Freeway (1996)
• The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
• Cold Around the Heart (1996)
• Killer: A Journal of Murder (1996)
• Gravesend (1997)
• The Last Days of Kennedy and King (1998)
• Savior (1998)
• The Corruptor (1999)
• The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001) (TV)
• Comandante (2003)
• Persona Non Grata (2003)

Bibliography

• Hamburg, Eric. Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film. Hyperion Books. ISBN 0-7868-8157-7
• Riordan, James. Stone: The Biography. (1996)
• Stone, Oliver. JFK: The Book of the Film. Applause Books. ISBN 1-55783-127-0
• Salewicz, Chris. Oliver Stone: the making of his movies. Orion. ISBN 0-7528-1820-1

External links

• Oliver Stone at IMDb
• The first chapter of A Child's Night Dream by Oliver Stone at the New York Times site.

Online bibliographies

• A biography of Oliver Stone
• Oliver Stone Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)

Interviews

• 1987 Cineaste magazine
• Can Oliver Stone Rock the Vote? -- Maxim Magazine, November 2008
• DVD Talk Radio interview with Oliver Stone
• Roger Ebert interviews Stone
• L.A. Weekly interview
• The Onion A.V. Club interview - October 16, 2008

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