Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone Biography

William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and veteran. Stone came to public prominence between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s for writing and directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had participated as an infantry soldier. Many of Stone's films focus on contemporary and controversial American political and cultural issues, such as JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon.

Stone's films often combine different camera and film formats within a single scene as evidenced in JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. British newspaper The Guardian has described Stone as "one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema." Stone has received three Academy Awards for his work on the films Midnight Express, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July. He was presented with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2007 Austin Film Festival.

Early life

Stone was born in New York City, the son of Jacqueline (née Goddet) and Louis Stone, a stockbroker. He grew up in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. His father was a non-practicing Jew, and his French-born mother was a non-practicing Roman Catholic. Stone was raised in the Episcopal Church, and now practices Buddhism. Stone attended Trinity School in New York City before his parents sent him away to The Hill School, a college-preparatory school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His parents were divorced abruptly while he was away at school (1962) and this, because he was an only child, marked him deeply. Stone's 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. He often spent parts of his summer vacations with his maternal grandparents in France, both in Paris and la Ferté-sous-Jouarre in eastern France. Stone also worked at 17 in the Paris mercantile exchange in sugar and cocoa "? a job that proved inspirational to Stone for his film Wall Street. He speaks French fluently. Stone graduated from The Hill School in 1964.

Stone was admitted into Yale University, but left after a year to teach high school students at the Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam. Stone taught for six months, after which he worked as a wiper on a United States Merchant Marine ship, traveling to Oregon. He returned to Yale, where he dropped out a second time (in part due to working on an autobiographical novel A Child's Night Dream, published 1997 by St. Martin's Press). In April 1967, Stone enlisted in the United States Army, requesting combat duty in Vietnam. He served from September 1967 through November 1968 with the 25th Infantry Division, then with the First Cavalry Division, earning a Bronze Star with "V" device for heroism in ground combat; he was wounded twice and received a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster. He also received the Air Medal for participating in more than 25 helicopter combat assaults and the Army Commendation Medal.

Directing career

Stone graduated from film school at New York University in 1971, where among his teachers was director Martin Scorsese (the same year, he had a small acting role in comedy The Battle of Love's Return). Stone made a short, well received 12 minute film Last Year in Viet Nam. He worked as a taxi driver, film production assistant, messenger, and salesman before 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 and The Hand. In 1979, Stone 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 Al Pacino's drug lord tale Scarface and Year of the Dragon with Mickey Rourke. Stone has either written or co-written most of the films he has directed. 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 Philippines. Stone loosely based Scarface on his own addiction to cocaine, which he successfully kicked while writing the screenplay.

Platoon brought 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 the Vietnam War: the others were Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth, each dealing 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 the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, in which Le Ly Hayslip, recalls her life as a Vietnamese village girl drastically affected by the war, who finds another life in the USA.

During this same period, Stone directed one of his most ambitious, controversial and successful films to date, JFK, that depicts the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Stone also directed the acclaimed Wall Street, which won Michael Douglas an Academy Award for Best Actor as a ruthless Wall Street corporate raider; Talk Radio, based on Eric Bogosian's Pulitzer-nominated play, and The Doors. 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 Krieger distanced himself from the work before the film's release. However, Densmore thought highly of the film, and in fact celebrated its DVD release on a panel with Oliver Stone.

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.

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1994 saw the release of Stone's satire of the modern media, Natural Born Killers. Originally based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, critics recognized its portrayal of violence and 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).

Stone's screenplay Midnight Express was criticized for its fictitious portrayal of Turkish people. The original author, Billy Hayes, around whom the film is set, spoke out against the film, protesting that he had many Turkish friends while in jail. Stone later apologized for showing Turkey in a negative light, while not repudiating the film's stark brutality. During a question and answer session at the University of Texas at Austin, in 1994, Stone explained that the film had primarily been a reactionary reflection based upon his own prison experience on American soil. Though Stone had been imprisoned by the United States, he had not been in Turkish jail.

Stone went on to direct the Richard Nixon biopic Nixon, which was nominated for Oscars for script and Anthony Hopkins' portrait of the title role. Stone followed Nixon the road movie/film noir, U Turn and Any Given Sunday, a film about power struggles within and without an American football team. Stone also directed the critically savaged Alexander. He later radically re-edited his biopic of Alexander the Great into a two-part, 3 hour 37 minute film (almost an hour longer) Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut. After Alexander, Stone went on to direct World Trade Center, based on the true story of two PAPD policemen who were trapped in the rubble and later survived after the September 11 attacks.

In 2007, Stone was intended to direct his fourth Vietnam War film Pinkville, about a Pentagon investigation into the My Lai Massacre of Vietnamese civilians. The film was to have been made for United Artists, but the company officially cancelled the production start due to the 2007"2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Shortly after the strike, Stone went on to write and direct the George W. Bush biopic W., that chronicles the controversial President's childhood, relationship with his father, struggles with his alcoholism, rediscovery of his Christian faith, and continues the rest of his life up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2010, Stone returned to the theme of Wall Street for the sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. More recently, Stone directed Savages, based on a novel by Don Winslow.

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). 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 (St. Martin's Press), a semiautobiographical novel first written in 1966-1967.

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

Documentaries

Stone made three documentaries on Fidel Castro: Comandante (2003), Looking for Fidel, and Castro in Winter (2012). He made Persona Non Grata, a documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations, interviewing several notable figures of Israel, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Shimon Peres, as well as Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In 2009, Stone completed a feature length documentary, South of the Border about the rise of progressive, leftist governments in Latin America, featuring seven presidents: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Ecuador's Correa, Cuba's Raúl Castro, the Kirchners of Argentina, Brazil's Lula da Silva, and Paraguay's Lugo (all of whom hold negative views of US manipulations in South America). Stone hoped the film would get the Western world to rethink socialist policies in South America, particularly as it was being applied by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. Chávez joined Stone for the premiere of the documentary at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2009. Stone defended his decision not to interview Chávez's opponents, stating that oppositional statements and TV clips were scattered through the documentary and that the documentary was an attempt to right a balance of heavily negative coverage. He praised Chávez as a leader of a movement for social transformation in Latin America (The Bolivarian Revolution), along with the six other Presidents in the film. The documentary was also released in several cities in the United States and Europe in the summer of 2010.

The Untold History of the United States

See The Untold History of the United States for more information In 2009, it emerged that Stone was preparing a documentary miniseries for Showtime titled Oliver Stone's Secret History of America. It would cover "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." In January 2010, it was revealed that he had been working on the project since 2008 with American University historian Peter J. Kuznick, who co-wrote the script with Stone, along with British screenwriter Matt Graham. Stone is the director and narrator of all 10 episodes, which intend to provide an unconventional account of some of the darkest parts of twentieth century history using little known documents and newly uncovered archival material. Kuznick objected to the title "Secret History", claiming that "the truth is that many of our 'secrets' have been hidden on the front page of the New York Times. If people think the secrets will be deep, dark conspiracies, they'll be disappointed. We'll be drawing on the best recent scholarship". It was subsequently retitled The Untold History of the United States.

The first three episodes of the series premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 6, 2012, which Indiewire described as "extremely compelling" and "daring". The series will also be personally presented by Stone at the Subversive Festival on May 4, 2013 in Zagreb, Croatia, which next to film screenings also includes debates and public lectures by prominent intellectuals such as Slavoj Zizek and Tariq Ali.

The 10-part series is supplemented by a 750-page companion book of the same name, also written by Stone and Kuznick, released on October 30, 2012 by Simon & Schuster.

Stone described the project as "the most ambitious thing I've ever done. Certainly in documentary form, and perhaps in fiction, feature form." Because of Stone's feature film commitments, production took four years to complete. Stone confessed "It was supposed to take two years but it's way over schedule", The premiere was finally set for November 12, 2012. Stone spent $1 million of his own money on the budget, which had inflated from $3 million to $5 million.

In 2012, The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald highly recommended the series and book, describing it as "riveting", "provocative" and "worthwhile".

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev wrote approvingly of the book:

"Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick provide a critical overview of US foreign policy during the past few decades. There is much here to reflect upon. Such a perspective is indispensable at a time when decisions are being taken that will shape America's role in the global world of the twenty-first century. At stake is whether the United States will choose to be the policeman of a "Pax Americana", which is a recipe for disaster, or partner with other nations on the way to a safer, more just and sustainable future."

David Wiegand wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle: "The films are at their best when they provide a panoramic view of our history in the middle part of the 20th century. Ably abetted by the superb editing work by Alex Marquez". Verne Gay for Newsday similarly praised the craft: "By far the most interesting part of 'Untold' is the visual presentation. Stone has cobbled together a mother lode of chestnuts, including grainy newsreel footage and Soviet propaganda films. It's all weirdly engrossing" but found the content less than provocative: "You keep waiting for a fresh insight, a new twist, a bizarre fact and after a while would even be profoundly grateful for some wacky Stone revisionism. It never comes. What's 'untold' here?"

Stone defended the program's accuracy to TV host Tavis Smiley

This has been fact checked by corporate fact checkers, by our own fact checkers, and fact checkers [hired] by Showtime. It's been thoroughly vetted...these are facts, our interpretation may be different than orthodox, but it definitely holds up.

In November 2012, Hudson Institute adjunct fellow historian Ronald Radosh (who was averse to the project since its announcement and encouraged a write-in campaign to cancel the series) lambasted it as "mendacious" Cold War revisionism and "mindless recycling of Stalin's propaganda," noting similarities to Communist author and NKVD agent Carl Marzani's Soviet-published treatise We Can Be Friends. Writes Radosh:

Over and over, Stone uses the same quotations, the same arrangements of material, and the same arguments as Marzani. This is not to accuse Stone of plagiarism, only to point out that the case he now offers as new was argued in exactly the same terms by an American Communist and Soviet agent in 1952.

Also in November, journalist Michael C. Moynihan criticized the book for "moral equivalence between the policies of the psychotically brutal Soviet Union and the frequently flawed policy of the United States" and called the title "misleading" in that nothing within the book was "untold" previously.

In December 2012, the Real News Network began the beginning of a long multi-part interview about the series where viewers can submit questions about the show which will be answered in future videos. Paul Jay, The Real News's Senior Editor talked about how interesting it is that corporate-owned Showtime decided to put the series on television.

USA Today' quoted Stone's dissatisfaction with the Obama Administration in early 2013: "The country Obama inherited was indeed in shambles, but Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse,"..."Rather than repudiating the policies of Bush and his predecessors, Obama has perpetuated them."

Six days after the book's release, Stone said he had voted for Obama on November 5 in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Obama was cast against Bain Capital founder and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, and was ultimately re-elected by a narrow margin.

The Full Story on Iran

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 40-plus million casualties the Soviet Union, for example, suffered in World War II, he stated that in Washington American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was an overly 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."

Two days later, 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.

Operation Emmanuel

See Operation Emmanuel for more information Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's then president, proposed and set up Operation Emmanuel, third-party international negotiations with Colombian revolutionary guerrilla group FARC involving the release of three hostages held for over six years, another episode in the humanitarian exchange affair. Chávez's plan was supported by the governments of Argentina, Brazil, France, Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as the Red Cross which also participated in the operation. Stone was invited to film a documentary.

In the days before the 2007 New Year's Eve, the Venezuelan government had arranged for the release of high-profile hostages held by FARC in the Colombian jungle. 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 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 Chávez angrily accused Uribe of "dynamiting" the mission. He said 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.

In a January 2008 interview with The Observer, given shortly after these events, Stone expressed disgust for ongoing U.S.-supported paramilitary violence in Colombia's "war on drugs." During The Observer interview, Stone said: "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."

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 daughter, Tara (b. 1995).

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 2003, Stone was a signatory of the Humanist Manifesto.

According to Newsmeat and Entertainment Weekly respectively, Stone voted for Barack Obama as U.S. president in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, instead of John McCain and Mitt Romney, the GOP candidates for the presidency. Stone was quoted as saying at the time: "I voted for Obama because...I think he's an intelligent individual I think he responds to difficulties well...very bright guy...far better choice yes." In 2012, Stone endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican nomination for President. He said that Paul is "the only one of anybody who's saying anything intelligent about the future of the world." then later: "I supported Ron Paul in the Republican primary ... but his domestic policy...made no SENSE" He ultimately voted for Barack Obama in the general election.

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. 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.

Oliver Stone is a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Stone signed a petition in support of Assange's bid for political asylum in June 2012. In August 2012, he penned a New York Times op-ed with filmmaker Michael Moore on the importance of WikiLeaks and free speech. Stone visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2013 and commented, "I don't think most people in the US realize how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support." He also criticized two upcoming WikiLeaks films from Alex Gibney and Bill Condon.

In June 2013, Stone and numerous other celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Bradley Manning.

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

The 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)
Greystone Park (actor) (2011)
End the War on Animals (narrator, PETA video) (2012)

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)
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)