Oliver Stone......?!

Started by moonshiner, March 13, 2003, 12:17:04 AM

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

socketlevel

Quote from: SiliasRuby on September 16, 2009, 01:38:28 AM
I LOVE HIM!!!!! I can't get enough of the guy! JFK is one of my favorite films of all time.

Amen, there are very few movies that run over 3 hours that have me by the balls from beginning to end.  easily a masterpiece.
the one last hit that spent you...

Gold Trumpet

http://www.amazon.com/Responses-Oliver-Stones-Alexander-Wisconsin/dp/0299232840/ref=reg_hu-wl_item-added



Say what you will about the film. Hate or love it, not many films get this kind of treatment in publication. I hope the majority of these essays don't just deal with the theatrical release and instead take notice of the later cuts. The byline in the book says it will be about the Final Cut, but who knows?

Gold Trumpet

Lots of websites are reporting this, but I'll still wait for full confirmation before fully buying it, but the idea of Stone tackling a Pot growing business novel seems to fit because he likes to be on the front lines of new sociological topics, including one he has experience with, like pot.

I also don't know how long a full script by Stone would take because they normally take years to write. They just don't feel like years because Stone doesn't start going public with a script idea until he's well into the process (like 3 or 4 drafts in), but in the 90s he was tackling new projects all the time so maybe...

Oliver Stone Plots Drug Cartel Drama
By MIKE FLEMING | Category: Hollywood, New York | Thursday March 4, 2010 @ 7:11am

EXCLUSIVE: After tackling corruption in high finance with Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone is turning his attention to a three-way romance and the Mexican drug cartels. I've learned that Stone has just closed a deal to direct and produce Savages, a Don Winslow novel that Simon & Schuster will publish in July. Winslow and Stone will collaborate on the script, with the author writing the first draft while Stone completes the Wall Street sequel for April 23 release.

In Savages, two pals from Laguna Beach pals share the same girlfriend and a thriving business growing and distributing the best-quality pot on the planet. When they resist being muscled by a Mexican drug cartel , the girl is kidnapped and the ransom is every cent they've made for the last five years.  They agree to pay but hatch an alternate plan to get her back, get revenge, and then get lost.

I'm told that Stone hopes to make Savages his follow-up to Wall Street 2. He believed in it enough to put up his own money, a maneuver that's growing in popularity with control-craving directors. It allowed Michael Mann to call the shots when he set The Fields with District 9-financier QED, with his daughter Ami Canaan Mann directing Sam Worthington. Steven Soderbergh just got Warner Bros to step up for his $60 million action-thriller Contagion after walking in with script, start date and a cast of Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Savages is the first book in a new publishing deal that Inkwell's Richard Pine made with S&S publisher David Rosenthal that moves Winslow out of Knopf. Film adaptations have done wonders to heighten the profile of crime/mystery authors like Shutter Island's Dennis Lehane. Winslow is poised for a breakthrough after false starts on several of his books, including an adaptation of The Winter of Frankie Machine that had Robert De Niro poised to star for Martin Scorsese and then Michael Mann, before the project cratered and the rights went back to the author. Shane Salerno is executive producer of Savages, and CAA made the movie deal.

MacGuffin

Is Oliver Stone moving from 'Wall Street' to 'Travis McGee'? (exclusive)
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Fresh off directing "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" for Fox, Oliver Stone is in talks to helm "Travis McGee" for the studio. Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to star as the lit-based title character.

McGee is the shaggy hero of 21 detective novels written by John D. MacDonald and could provide fodder for another Fox franchise. The movie will be based on the first book in the series, "The Deep Blue Good-by," published in 1964. The novel tracks the Florida-based "salvage consultant" as he reluctantly leaves his houseboat to go in search of a treasure hidden by a soldier after World War II.

Appian Way's Jennifer Davisson Killoran and DiCaprio are producing with Amy Robinson. Peter Chernin is also expected to produce. Dana Stevens ("City of Angels") and Kario Salem ("The Score") have written the screenplay.

Years ago, Robert Schwentke ("Flightplan") was attached to direct the project, and Gary Fleder ("Kiss the Girls") was also interested at one point.

The CAA-repped Stone also has "Jawbreaker" in development at Paramount. His most recent films have been "W.," "World Trade Center" and the Hugo Chavez documentary "South of the Border."

The "Wall Street" sequel is scheduled for a September release.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Gold Trumpet

Yea, I hope not. Unless that description does not cover all that is good about the book, I'm not too interested. I'm also not buying this report because it says Stone is still developing Jawbreaker which couldn't be further from the truth. He disowned that project years ago.

Gold Trumpet

When I said Oliver Stone was the most complete filmmaker in the L'Enfant thread, I got a response of disbelief. I think I labored a cognitive answer, but as I think about it more, I have to revisit my emotions to find new ways to consider the possibilities. First, of course, it is a loaded statement and filled with subjective ideas of what "complete" even means, but simply, more than any other filmmaker, he uses more modes of popular and abstract storytelling to extend the common narrative of a film. Where many people believe his movies are loaded with messages and obvious metaphors, I argue those points are either wrong or correct but meant to be invitations to start contrasting elements within the film to show there are purposeful contradictions which makes the viewer come to no easy conclusions.

I hope, when it's all said and done, Oliver Stone is credited with being the real filmmaker who has expanded Sergei Eisenstein's original theory of vertical montage since he has added so many elements to it that the theory, which was be rendered in an article by Eisenstein at the beginning, now would require a full book of new ideas and additions which feel too essential to return to the originalism of Eisenstein's first thoughts. It is the mode of editing which isn't concerned about how one scene connects to another, but focuses on how much one scene can be extended and edited within each other to get multiple angles from various characters to tell many things. Eisenstein saw it as a way to compact history and relay large human themes within big stories, but Stone sees it as the only way to depict consciousness on screen. For that, he's transformed it in a million ways.

This is a 1997 article from Atlantic Monthly by the historian Garry Wills. It doesn't back up my position, but it is the best beginner article to looking at Stone in a multi-layered way and exonerating the deeper themes within the film. It isn't a perfect article because I don't agree with his position on the Doors, but his analysis of Platoon is the best I have ever read and the place of religious themes within Stone's films is an amazing insight. I may be posting for self interest since the article is over 3,000 words and about someone I care about to cover multiple comments on him as a filmmaker, but I considered it important and am trying to find a way to care about posting on Xixax again in some fashion.


Dostoyevsky behind a camera
Garry Wills. The Atlantic Monthly. Boston: Jul 1997. Vol. 280, Iss. 1; pg. 96, 5 pgs

OLIVER Stone makes movies out of the day's headlines. That is usually a prescription for the shallow or the ephemeral. A dozen or so conspiracy films came out after President John F. Kennedy was killed, but only one continues to nag at people's minds. Movies about sex and drugs in the sixties are painful to watch now, but The Doors has survived. Stone with some of his movies seemed to be writing future headlines, as when Wall Street and Talk Radio anticipated later developments. Newspapers can have trouble keeping up with him.

How do Stone's timely things stay fresh in a culture that devours its past, forgetting it daily? There is a feel for timeless narrative patterns in Stone's work, connected with his film-school training in the genres. JFK, for instance, is a mystery story. The prosecutor's speech (which runs for more than half an hour) is like William Powell's gathering of all the suspects to go over evidence in the final reel of a Thin Man film. Wall Street is Father Knows Best, a tale as ancient as the Prodigal Son and as commercially sturdy as the Andy Hardy series. The Doors tells the story of an artist torn between a good woman (his muse) and an evil woman who destroys him.

Natural Born Killers takes movies like Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. and Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo and stands them on their heads. In those films people escape into movie dreams, mingling with the celluloid figures. In Killers the images leap off the screen to swallow up their viewers. Movies themselves are the monsters that devour the world.

People tend not to notice that Stone relies on such film cliches, because he imports into them not only newspapers from below but also a mysticism from above. He is constantly suggesting cosmic showdowns behind or beyond the newsy events and the genres. Improbable martyrs and gurus haunt the screen-the saintly photographer in Salvador, the Dionysiac Elias in Platoon, Ingmar Bergman figures of Death in The Doors and Natural Born Killers.

This mixture of apparently disparate materials-scandal and spiritualism, current events and eternal recurrencesis not promising on the face of it; but Stone arranges his scripts in a threetiered system that gives layers of meaning to the stories he tells. Above the current events is an ordinating pattern taken from cinema typology. And above those types is a "war in heaven" of clashing spiritual principles.

Where have we seen this three-tiered approach before? Who else took plots out of trashy news reports, used the narrative conventions of melodrama, and topped the confection with the gaunt monks and foolish seers of an idiosyncratic religiosity? Dostoyevsky, too, has been accused of a bogus spirituality-as when Vladimir Nabokov denounced his characters for "sinning their way to Jesus." Dickensian plots and Victorian cliches (the good-hearted prostitute, for example) are his equivalents of Andy Hardy sentiment in Stone's work. But both men set this material ablaze with fierce energies. Dostoyevsky's three tiers are evident in a work like The Demons. This story of radical plotters was taken from contemporary politics (in surprisingly accurate detail). But its complex elements are unified around the generic story of a doomed Byronic hero (which made Dostoyevsky first call his novel The Life of a Great Sinner). Finally, high in the sky over this local tale, the fate of Russia is being decided in a struggle with the demons who possess the great sinner, Stavrogin. Exorcised from Stavrogin, devils rush into his accomplices-as demonic spirits were driven into swine at Gadara, according to the Gospel of Saint Luke, from which Dostoyevsky takes his novel's epigraph.

That is the kind of storytelling that Stone is up to in Natural Born Killers. The script he began with, by Quentin Tarantino, is a shocker from our TV culture, the tale of a true-crime program that promotes the careers of the young serial killers Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis). The TV host, Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), is the main character in Tarantino's little fable of media sensationalism; the killers have no psychic history at all. Stone provides a whole new layer of narrative, using the archetypal "they made me a criminal" pattern. As Bonnie and Clyde were the crippled cripplers of others (Clyde impotent and lame, Bonnie the victim of a despotically puritanical upbringing), Mickey and Mallory were victimized by violent parents in their childhood. But where Bonnie's father was repressive, Mallory's was leering and sexually aggressive. In flashbacks she remembers the killing of her parents as a sitcom like Married With Children. Mickey's physically threatening parents are also remembered in flashbacks, which make him feel guilty for his father's suicide. Their police stalker, Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), also carries the guilt of his mother's death (she was killed by the Texas Tower mass murderer); his dreams actually mingle with Mickey's.

Mickey and Jack are mirror images of each other, prey and hunter-Jack even kills a prostitute in order to enter into Mickey's mind. But then Stone imposes his top layer of spiritual meaning on the story, taking Mickey onto a plane entirely beyond Jack. Mickey and Mallory try to escape the media-polluted world of their upbringing by a return to naturemarrying each other above a huge canyon, seeking wisdom in the desert. They encounter a Native American shaman whose hogan has no TV, no newspaper, no telephone-just a great opening through the roof into heaven. Violence has scarred the shaman, as Mallory finds when she picks up a picture of his son, killed in Vietnam. But he has conquered his demons, just as he tamed the snakes in his desert home. He tries to drive the demons from Mallory; but Mickey, dreaming of his father's death, kills the shaman in his stupor. Mallory shouts "Bad! Bad! Bad!" at him, at a loss for a moral language to convey what she is only dimly aware of: "You killed life." The tamed snakes come alive with punitive hissings and bite the two. They seek a cure but don't find it, since they have been infected with tragic knowledge, and-as Stone says of this sequence-no pharmacy has an antidote for that.

After their capture and trial, Mickey and Mallory communicate their new awareness to each other, even though they are kept in separate cells. Tarantino's script had no room for such growth in the characters. In fact, Tarantino's Mickey, acting as his own attorney at the trial, kills a witness on the stand. Stone filmed that scene but did not use it, because it denied the changes wrought in Mickey by the shaman. Mickey's next violence will be against Jack and the prison warden, who have planned to kill him in a rigged escape attempt. But before that Wayne, the TV host, is given a live interview with Mickey. As the show progresses and Mickey denounces the institutionalized violence of our society, the devils go out of him into the listening prisoners-just as the demons of Stavrogin entered the nihilists around him. The apocalyptic riot that brings down the prison is a cleansing destruction of the system, like the healing ordeal that Dostoyevsky envisioned for his Russia. Stone's movie, it is said, is too violent to be an indictment of violence-as Dostoyevsky was too complicitous in Stavrogin's beautiful destructiveness. But Stone's violence is stylized, done in the form of trashy media: comic-book wounds, bullets frozen in air, movies within movie-poisoned brains.

That a study of violent fantasies is taking the form of fantasy becomes clear in the garage scene where Mallory imagines that the man at the gas pump is Mickey. Mallory is angry because Mickey, in the pre-desert days, has proposed a sexual threesome with a female hostage. Imagining the attendant pumping gas into her car as Mickey raping the nonexistent hostage, she throws herself back on the hood of a sports car, to which she beckons the attendant to be killed. The blending of cars with sex and violence has been a staple of the advertising world for most of this century, but no comentary on the phenomenon has had the biting wit of this sequence-crowned when Jack Scagnetti, intuiting Mallory's body in the lines of the car, strokes it erotically. Yet this whole garage sequence is done with no nudity, no pornography in the presentation of the advertising world's pornographic strategies. In fact, there was no nudity in the film's theatrical release, and only one topless shot, of the prostitute Jack kills, in the director's cut (standard fare for R-rated films). There is no drinking in the film, no homosexuality in the vicious prison, no drugs but the mushrooms Mickey takes in the desert. This is a world all and only violent, except for the interlude of peace at the shaman's hut. It is a world given over to demons, and the demons inhabit the media. Bob Dole denouncing the media was a piker next to this film, which makes his point a thousand times more forcibly.

IT is true, nonetheless, that Stone brings an excess of rage to his work, not unlike Mickey's. That is because he, like Mickey, feels betrayed by his parents and their world. Though he was shunted to boarding schools in his boyhood, and to his grandparents in France for the summer, Stone never suspected that his parents' marriage was a sham covering up their affairs with other partners-not, that is, until his father's ex-secretary called him at boarding school to say that his father and mother were getting divorced and could not be reached by him. This disillusioning shock, delivered when he was sixteen, was followed by another when he was seventeen-the assassination of President Kennedy. He told his biographer, James Riordan: "To see his candle snuffed out so early and viciously was such a shock. I had no faith in my parents' generation after that." When I asked Stone if it is fair to say that the divorce and the assassination worked together to make him feel that his world was coming apart, he said, "Yes, that's fair." Later, when he examined the circumstances of Kennedy's death, he found that all was not as it had seemed: "My life was like that, uncovering what was really going on between my mother and my fatherthey were not really lovers."

So disoriented was Stone by such blows that he gave up on Yale after a year and went to Vietnam as an English teacher in the Catholic school system. After his return to America he buried himself ("like Dostoyevsky," he says) in writing his version of Underground Man. Rejection of the novel by publishers drove Stone to despair, and he volunteered to go back to Vietnam as an infantryman. "It was suicidal, though I would not pull the trigger on myself." After he was wounded twice in Vietnam, his death wish took him back to the front for a second time-but he returned to America, and to film school at New York University, with the materials he shaped later into Platoon.

There are no politics in Platoon, nothing about communism or dominoes or empire-just the grind and panic of war and the rub of frightened men against one another. The story pattern that Stone imposes on this is the clash of two leaders in a crisis situation-Mr. Christian against Captain Bligh on the Bounty, Odysseus against Agamemnon at Troy, Corporal Thomas against Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima. Stone draws directly on Sands, giving his Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger) John Wayne's slogans: "Saddle up! Lock and load!" Like Wayne, Barnes can boast, "I am reality."

Barnes is less vulnerable even than Wayne's character, who is killed by the enemy in Sands. The men in Platoon recognize that "the only thing that can kill Barnes is Barnes." Pitted against Barnes, the war god, is Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), who is not opposed to the war-indeed, he has found an eerie serenity in the midst of his efficient killing. Barnes thinks that Elias has relaxed too much into a war that sickens Barnes to ruthlessness-Elias must be killed for the good of his own followers. Over the plot mechanics Stone has imposed the idea of a suffering Dionysus taken from Nietzsche and from Stone's study of Greek tragedy at NYU. Elias accepts death with the smile of Dionysus in Euripides' The Bacchae-a play Stone drew on and refers to in The Doors. In Platoon, Chris Tayler (Charlie Sheen), torn between "two fathers," has to become Barnes in order to destroy Barnes. He goes back to America with Elias in his heart but Barnes in his gut.

The student movie that Stone made in Martin Scorsese's class at NYU was unconsciously a preview of Platoon. Stone filmed himself as a Vietnam vet trying to purge the Barnes in him, going out to nature (the film changes from black and white to color) to shed his medals and bathe in cleansing waters, communing with his Elias side.

The search for a father is carried on in most of Stone's work. It is both private and public, reflecting the betrayals of his teens. This explains the fierce personal heat with which Stone engages public issues. Dostoyevsky drew on a similar private-public shock, undergone in his teens, when he lost his father. While Dostoyevsky was at engineering school, guilty over the funds he was draining from his father's struggling estate, the farm's serfs murdered the father for his stinginess-or so Dostoyevsky was given to believe (later evidence threw doubt on the matter). The public issue was the political discontent of the serfs. Dostoyevsky became, overnight, a champion of their liberation, because he felt he had forced them to desperation by the competing financial demands he placed upon his father. The tangled guilt of the Karamazovs was born (in part) of this experience.

STONE'S feelings about his own father, Louis Stone, a New York stock analyst, are clearest in Wall Street. Charlie Sheen, as Bud Fox, is again torn between a commanding figure and a more humane one-the stock manipulator Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and his own father, a union leader. Though the Andy Hardy pattern makes Fox see that his father's values are more important, forcing him to destroy Gekko (as Tayler destroyed Barnes), the Dionysian energy of Gekko has made him the hero of applicants to business schools and of the financial columnist for National Review (who writes under the pseudonym Gekko). Gekko is humanized by his love for his son (played by Stone's son Sean), his taste in art (better than that of his arty mistress), and his desire to get back at the Ivy League WASPs who tried to keep this City College product out of their clubs. Louis Stonewho changed his name from Silverstein, went to Yale, and repressed his writing talent in order to climb in the financial world-was a Gekko who failed and needed no destroying. But it is the act of forgiveness under the indictment that brings Gekko to life in Wall Street. Those who thought it a mere attack on Reagan's era of greed missed the conflicts within Stone's own sympathies. He does not tell simple stories.

Yet he is constantly accused of doing that. Because he takes on serious topics, he is called a "message" director. But it is hard to see a political message in, say, Platoon. What would it be? That one must become a Barnes to defend an Elias-thus undercutting the point of defending Elias? Stone is also said to be obsessed with conspiracies, though his one conspiracy film, JFK, is so inclusive in its condemnation of everything but an implausibly pure John Kennedy and a ludicrously virtuous investigator, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), that the real conspiracy seems to be life itself. It was a touching if loony idea to turn the harddrinking and womanizing Garrison into a kind of Atticus Finch, straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, a poster boy for family values.

Family is the crucial link between public and private in Stone's work-as it was the nexus for his own sense of betrayal at home and, with Kennedy's assassination, in the country. In Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth mothers first send their sons to war and then reject what they become there. Parents terrorized the two who become terrorists in Natural Born Killers. In Nixon, Hannah Nixon cripples her son emotionally, far more than his father, Frank, abuses him physically.

The reaction to Nixon is a good example of the errors people fall into when they read Stone in an ideological way. Some took his movie as a political attack on Nixon, the way they took Wall Street as a political attack on Reagan. There is a minor role for conspiracy in Nixon but Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) is more the victim of a Cuban-CIA tie than its mastermind. What matters in Nixon is the extended rethinking it gives to Citizen Kane. The connections to that film were noticed by reviewers but treated as mere addenda or ornaments stuck onto the tale extraneously. In fact the attempt to fathom the mystery of a mystery-less man has not been done better since the Welles classic. Both Kane and Nixon are incapable of intimacy. In the scene where Kane's mother gives him away to a guardian, the boy thrusts his sled between himself and the guardian. After that he is never seen embracing anyone, not even his wife or mistress. How he can manipulate people while distancing himself from them is the intriguing puzzle never solved by the movie. Nixon's panicky circling away from Pat (Joan Allen) as the camera pursues him is as affecting as his few pathetic lunges toward intimacy-the delusion that he found common ground with the protestors at the Lincoln Memorial, and his drowner's way of pulling Kissinger (Paul Sorvino) down with him into desperate prayer.

Nixon is really the story of two Nixon generations, of Hannah and Frank, of Pat and Dick-and of the latter pair's inability to escape the former. Nixon is a victim of shattered family values, as surely as is Mickey in Natural Born Killers. The difference between them is that Mickey can find release into the higher world of the shaman. When Nixon turns to his mother's religion of fear, it does not free him from self-imprisonment but locks the bolts tighter. The tragedy of Nixon is that the path to transcendence is sealed off by the false sanctity of his mother, who uses religion to control and stunt him.

Here is the deepest paradox of Stone's career. At a time when the religious right is attacking movies in general and him in particular, Stone is one of the few filmmakers who regularly treat religion in a serious way. Some refuse to consider his religious thrashings important, because (like Dostoyevsky's) they take exotic form-the religion found in and beyond excess, the Dionysiac serenity-inviolence of Elias, the Bacchic ecstasy of Jim Morrison, the Native American shamanism of Natural Born Killers, the saintly quest for truth by the photographer John (John Savage) in Salvador, the universal forgiveness of the Buddhists in Heaven and Earth. But these reflect serious preoccupations in Stone's life-he has been meditating with a Buddhist master for years. And they reflect an age-old strain of religion that finds those deeply engaged in life's conflicts more capable of vision than are the complacent. It is a truth the Christian right can find in its own Gospels: "Verily I say unto you that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you" (Matthew 21:31). Nabokov might say that Stone's characters are "sinning their way to Buddha," but that is often the story of religion when it is real. When it is unreal, it becomes a temptation and a trap-not only the Christianity of Hannah Nixon but also the Judaism of the host in Talk Radio, who uses a lie about his ties with Israel to manipulate his audience. What is being attacked here is not Christianity or Judaism but the distortion of each for purposes of human domination.

If the secular saint Jim Garrison is totally unconvincing, it is because JFK alone of Stone's films has no complex character at its center. That, not the wacky theories it airs, is its real artistic failure. On the other hand, the photographer in Salvador is one of the few modern saints on film. A scene that reflects from an opposite pole the empty prayer of Nixon and Kissinger is that in which the morally despicable correspondent in Salvador (James Woods) clasps the hands of the dying John and accepts a higher sense of calling from him. (The scene reflects an earlier clasping of muddy hands, when the correspondent gave a dead church worker his own ring.)

In one of several interviews I have conducted with Stone, I said that I think of him as a moralist. At first he took it as an insult: "A moralist? You'll have to defend that." I meant that he engages issues with moral urgency. It is the difference between the script of an ironist (Tarantino) and the passionate film that Stone made of Natural Born Killers. Stone eventually accepted the "accusation" if it meant not that he tells others how to live but that he makes his characters try to give a responsible account of themselves. The selves being assessed are complex. Charlie Sheen's characters in Platoon and Wall Street contain both Elias and Barnes, both Gekko and Bud Fox's father. Mickey in Killers contains both the demons of his father and the shaman who fights demons. The heroine of Heaven and Earth (played by Hiep Le) contains two entirely different worlds, East and West, and wrestles them to a mutual forgiveness.

Heaven and Earth resists ideological reductionism. The heroine is violated more by the Viet Cong than by the French or the Americans, and the American husband she takes (Tommy Lee Jones) is more the victim of his own culture than an inflicter of it on others. She ends up realizing that a failure to forgive aggression is a deeper form of aggression, a yielding to the demons coming out of one's enemies. She reaches a sense of binding compassion like the vision of cosmic harmony at which Alyosha arrives in the foul world of the Karamazovs, or like Prince Myshkin's transcendence through suffering in The Idiot. This is not your ordinary two hours' traffic of the screen. It is more like what writers aspired to when they hoped to write the great American novel. Great novels are now being written with the camera-at least when Stone is behind the camera.

MacGuffin

Oliver Stone inks TV deal with Epix
'Still Holding,' Bruce Wagner one-hour scripted dramatic series
Source: Hollywood Reporter

NEW YORK -- Oliver Stone and Bruce Wagner have struck a development deal with Epix, with their first project being a one-hour scripted dramatic series called "Still Holding," based on the Wagner novel of the same name.

The series for the premium TV service, which is run by Viacom, Lionsgate and MGM, will explore "the colliding worlds of three disparate people in Los Angeles, and the violent consequences of love and betrayal, of holding on and letting go," Epix said. Stone and Wagner will serve as executive producers. They previously worked together on mini-series "Wild Palms."

"I'm interested in the possibilities in television," Stone said. "When a company like Epix comes along, it's a chance to break new ground. They want to make their mark. They want to entertain and provoke; they don't want their drama or comedy watered down."

Said Epix president and CEO Mark Greenberg: "EPIX offers a unique canvas for talent to fully realize their creative vision across multiple screens on television and online. We're thrilled that filmmakers and writers have flocked to our network with bold, daring concepts."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Gold Trumpet

Probably means Stone just signed his name to it. Unless he starts coming on board to direct some episodes, I couldn't care less. His name is probably why it got any production backing anyways.

MacGuffin

Oliver Stone apology 'insufficient,' says ADL
Group calls for director to repudiate all anti-Semitic remarks
Source: Hollywood Reporter

The Anti-Defamation League said Wednesday that Oliver Stone's apology for his remarks about Jewish control over the media stops short and he needs to "fully repudiate all of his conspiratorial anti-Semitic statements about Jews."

"Oliver Stone's apology stops short and is therefore insufficient," Abraham Foxman, ADL national director, said in a statement. "While he now admits that Jews do not control Hollywood, the media and other industries, he ignores his assertion that Jews are "...the most powerful lobby in Washington" and that "Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy." This is another conspiratorial anti-Semitic canard that Mr. Stone needs to repudiate."

A spokeswoman for Stone said the director stands by his apology and has no further comment.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

socketlevel

it's sad that people can't critique foreign policies without being knee jerk labeled.  i have faith that Oliver stone isn't antisemitic. every lobby group should be scrutinized regardless of their origin. lobby groups (or the body of people they are lobbying for) can, and most likely will become corrupt when they grow too large and seek too much influence based on their agenda. in this case, it's extra sad when the left defends them due to the fallout of what happened 60 years ago. that's the perfect time to get away with said corrupt actions, even if they don't rationalize it that way. i'm sure they see it as just. why is opposition on some issues seen as racist? like when david becomes just as big as goliath, i don't know if he would recognize it, instead opting to have a little-engine-that-could mentality despite the changed circumstances and inflated power.
the one last hit that spent you...

Pas

I am starting to get into this guy and I guess he's pretty underrated in a sense. Just watched Any Given Sunday for the first time since it came out and I was blown away by how ahead of it's time it is in style. It also felt really personal.

It was the most mysoginistic film I probably ever seen (all women are either the worst cunts (cap's wife), whores (mandy, 100s of other whores), stupid (all) or evil (cameron diaz)) but I don't hold it against it. I'm convinced it must be true in that field. But maybe it's a cliche?

What are this guy's politics? He doesn't sound like the typical lefty-douche type (I don't mean all lefties, just the douchier ones like pete haha jk) but I always thought he was supposed to be a communist or somehing? Maybe I imagined that...

Gold Trumpet

Any Given Sunday is very underrated. For me, the major problem is the finale when the film tries to wipe the slate clean on every character development with resolutions that feel much too easy, but the majority of the film is a huge effort on vertical editing and filmmaking to take slam bast characters, give us their every cliche characterization (ala American Beauty), and roll it out in a million kind of characterizations. People attach the label of preaching in Stone's films because he makes the characters stand out glaring forms of obviousness, but every character and what they supposedly stand for, is rebuffed at one point or another. When the end comes, the problems are never fully resolved. Their personal conflicts linger on. In this film, there is some attempt to resolve everything in a weak manner, but Stone still allows for a lot of their personal demons to lay dormant.

The style is amazing and necessary because most of the commentary on the characters comes in the editing. Usually when this style is utilized, it's just for the sake of making everything more exciting. Stone does make football exciting in the film, but he also creates a fantastic and elaborate design work in which he frames how we understand characters. Some of them get speeches to speak upon their interests, but most of the elaboration is in their stylistic design work. They come off as figures in a bigger picture and when they are able to elicit deeper feelings, they say things that are only contradicted at another point in the film. Stone has his characters make testaments for the point of time only, but as the puzzle develops, things never fully form to a true and concise understanding.

He avoids it by making the story based on experiences. The film jumbles three scripts together in one. There is no real structure. More or less, there is a wavelength with how everything develops and fucks with itself. Basing a story on experience is what keeps the film from ascertaining easier understanding and it is what keeps lots of people from liking the movie. I don't care if someone likes the movie or not, but I always hear how the movie is muddled, too much, over realistic, and they say those are faults when, in fact, those are parts of the film's intentions. I guess I agree Stone is underrated, but more importantly, I say he's misunderstood.


©brad

I agree with GT across the board. I wrote a really bad paper in my intro to film college course on the editing of this film, which to this day astounds me. Critics are quick to write it off as MTV-cutting but I think that's bullshit. I don't think football or any sport has ever been captured in such an intense way on film.





Gold Trumpet

Oliver Stone to adapt Broadway musical, "Memphis"?

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2010/08/justin-timberlake-zac-efron-both-want.html

While no formal announcement of a movie has been made, talks are apparently already happening with reps for Oliver Stone confirming he has met with with the show's writers Joe DiPietro and David Bryan with an interest to direct the film. It might seem at first glance to be an odd choice, but Stone is no stranger to music-based films ("The Doors") and certainly the race-based setting of the story would be right in the director's wheelhouse of controversial subject matter.



Interesting considering his MLK film was also titled Memphis, but along with Travis McGee (a snooze project) and Savages, he's jumbling a few projects and seeing which one takes first.

Alexandro

NIXON is a fucking masterpiece. American cinema is still waiting for someone with the balls to even attempt something like that again. An 80 million dollars introspective study of power by way of Richard Nixon?
I miss that Oliver Stone too much.