“Chasing the Light” by Oliver Stone, 2020
This is an autobiography of Stone, a director and
screen-writer who had a reputation for liberal-left politics, wild or
intoxicated behavior and kamikaze directing.
It tells the first part of his life, from his parents in Paris and later
New York, the education at Yale that he abandoned and his stint as a grunt in
Vietnam. This last formative experience
led him to a real career in film, which really went into overdrive with Platoon, his Oscar-winning Vietnam epic.
Prior to that Stone discusses working on the scripts for Midnight Express, which was about being
jailed in a Turkish prison for hashish; Scarface,
the story of a violent Marielista Cuban thug getting rich in Miami’s drug
trade; and Year of the Dragon, about
the Chinese tong gangs in New York. If
you sense a certain theme here, you wouldn’t be far off. Stone was not just an angry veteran but also
a heavy drug user like a lot of Hollywood types, until he kicked the habit
before Platoon. In between he directed a film called The Hand with Michael Caine, a
psych-horror film that no one watched.
The book opens with the chaotic filming of the last scenes
of Salvador, as leftist rebels
overrun a government military unit in a small Salvadorean town, a town which
was really in Mexico. What’s funny about
this is that Stone admits he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 – later the sponsor
of El Salvador’s bloody dictatorship. His politics before, during and after Vietnam
were somewhat muddled for a long time.
His father was a Republican Wall Street finance broker; his
mother a French-born socialite and bon vivant.
They finally got divorced when Ollie was 15. He went to a strict boarding school in
Pennsylvania, then on to Yale where he failed to attend classes and instead
began to write. Oddly, he taught English
in Saigon for a while before enlisting. As
his career takes off, the book drops names of producers, directors, actors and
films like he’s trying to bomb his own insignificance out of existence. And he
does!
This is a book that will probably thrill movie fans,
wannabe directors and screen-writers with the inside dope. It’s personal and a
bit self-obsessed, but then this is an autobiography. His sexual liaisons, LSD and cocaine use are
mentioned, but in no detail. He has a
soft spot for Paris, his mother’s home town; he also feels at home in the
jungle after his 15 months around the A Shau Valley with the 1st Air Cavalry and 25th
Infantry of I Corps in Vietnam. He was
in a firebase during the attacks of Tet in ’68. These direct experiences allowed him to make Platoon and Salvador. The violence he
saw also led him to make Scarface, Midnight
Express and Year of the Dragon. He’d worked on an early script version of Born on the 4th of July and had
gotten to know Ron Kovic well. He also
had a hand in the Conan script with
Schwarzenegger, which was later butchered.
 |
| A journalist, photographer and 'guide' walk into a bar in El Salvador |
Salvador
and Platoon
Stone had to sue Dino DeLaurentis for his Platoon script back, which is one of the
stories he tells about the massive problems in making films. He had to deal with nasty reviews by the faux
doyen of American film criticism, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker until the end. Shortness of
money, broken promises, fickle studios, the odd variety of actors and the
stupidity of some script changes are prominent.
And ‘chasing the light’ to get every shot needed on each day’s shooting
schedule. The experience in Mexico
making Salvador is epic. Stars walk
off the set, extras go on strike, actors get drunk, equipment is late, money
always tight or non-existent, stunt men are injured, a case of heat stroke, a conservative Mexican censor, camera and sound people unreliable, a bad film lab, personal
antagonisms galore and money-men telling him to ‘cut, cut, cut’ the script to
save cash. He still doesn’t know how the
film was paid for, but it finally got shot.
That experience prepared him for Platoon, as the films were tied together by the studio. It had more money behind it courtesy of
Orion, but was staged in the Philippines just after an election ousted Marcos,
so turmoil was at its birth. They had to
clear the jungle for the set and the actors were trained by a hard-ass military
man to achieve realism. Some of the film’s
choppers were so overloaded they almost crashed. His crew of mostly young
actors were ‘blooded.’ Problems occurred – heavy rain, bugs, bad light, snake
bites, truck accidents and a strike due to Stone losing his temper with the
Philippine crew, but it, like Salvador,
eventually wrapped. It was not a disaster like the filming of Apocalypse Now or as difficult as Salvador.
These two were both leftist films subject to the
winds of politics. Stone put in an
unreal, untruthful scene in Salvador
about rebels executing National Guard soldiers after they surrendered, which
never happened. The rebels were
interested in making surrenders easier, not harder. He regrets that decision in trying to appeal
to the typical government narrative on Central America, in the pursuit of ‘balance.’
Above all this is a careerist story, as being a famous
director was the goal and Stone succeeded. His glory at Platoon’s Oscar is palpable. Even his conservative father finally
approved of his hippie son. Whether that
would be possible now, with the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s fading away, is
debatable, as those were different times in Hollywood. Movies are now being
supplanted by streaming series. ‘Safe’
cash outlays are even more prominent, as the profusion of
sequels attests. And world cinema is intruding on Hollywood. Autobiographies are
self-aggrandizing for the most part, and he lets his opinion of figures in
Hollywood show. He’s famous enough now,
in spite of his bete noire image, so he
can. This book shows that even people with incoherent political instincts come
around if enough facts from their own life experience start to accumulate, as
did Stone, who became a liberal-leftie after being an amorphous aesthete. That is the influence of material reality, of
materialism.
Stone went on to make two Wall Streets, Born on the 4th of July, The Doors, JFK,
Natural Born Killers, Nixon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Snowden and The Untold Story of the United States,
among others. As you can by this
selection, his films were not too radical, but they all undermine conservative
orthodoxy about Wall Street, Vietnam, hippies, the JFK assassination, porn,
surveillance and history. They are all a
bit sensationalist and do not focus on capitalism or class. Yet many in Hollywood intensely dislike Stone
because of his ‘slant,’ including liberals and centrists. So you wannabe
Stone’s out there, here is how it worked for him.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Chasing
the Light,” “Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps” (Stone); “On the Trail of the
Assassins”(Garrison); “November – A Novel,” “Central America’s Forgotten
History” (A. Chomsky); “Manufacturing Consent” (N. Chomsky) or the word “Vietnam,” which will give you multiple
hits, as the blog specializes in books about Vietnam.
And I bought it at May Day Books! … which has solid fiction
and culture sections.
The Cultural Marxist
August 25, 2023
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