Xixax Film Forum

i don't know, if Cameron Crowe is on there, Oliver Stone easily deserves a spot......but i don't throw much weight around here.

The people who do don't really like him too much.  It makes no difference either way to me, though.

i would love an oliver stone thread. but maybe there are too many already, dont know. he definitely deserves one more than some of the others. Why not divide them into separate categories based on age, i.e. the 'new younger generation' which would incorporate Fincher, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, etc. and then the old geezers like altman, scorsese, stone, kubrick in another thread.

in my opinion, i think there should be fewer director forums. i'd probably take out wes anderson, cameron crowe, and steven soderbergh. not that they're bad filmmakers, i just don't think they've really made that big a mark in cinema that they should warrant an entire forum to them.

Quote from: snaporazin my opinion, i think there should be fewer director forums. i'd probably take out wes anderson, cameron crowe, and steven soderbergh. not that they're bad filmmakers, i just don't think they've really made that big a mark in cinema that they should warrant an entire forum to them.

Im with you on this one, some of the directors forums have like 3 threads. About Oliver Stone, I am about to watch Heaven and Earth later today, how is it?

ha, thats funny. i was just about to make a thread about it. i think its a wonderful film, very powerful and moving.

Heaven & Earth is a very beautifully shot picture.  Robert Richardson (a Stone usual) did an excellent job with the cinematography.  The movie is pretty good.  I haven't seen it in a while but from what I remember it was good.

I just finished watching this, at first I was really bored and didnt like it but by the time SPOILERS---------------------she got to America I was really impressed. Really paints a poor picture of what America is like. Hiep Thi Le should have been nominated. Thumbs up.

i agree that there's no need for more directors....Oliver Stone's influence might go a little further than that of Cameron Crowe's or even Wes Anderson's though.....on a whim i think we should have a separate category for those directors that also write all their films.

Agree......Oliver Stone is top-nutch  :-D

Anybody around here seen his Fidel Castro film?

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Movie director Oliver Stone and Cuban President Fidel Castro are seen in this Feb. 21, 2002 file photo, after the shooting of a documentary in the author's Ernest Hemingway's preferred bar "La terraza" in Cojimar near Havana, Cuba. On Thursday, April 17, 2003 Stone's documentary on Castro has been postponed indefinitely by HBO television, which had planned to broadcast the film next month. Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned Cuba in recent weeks for its crackdown on the opposition, followed by the executions last week of three men convicted of hijacking a ferry filled with passengers in a bid to get to the United States.

HBO Postpones Castro Documentary

Oliver Stone's documentary on Fidel Castro has been postponed indefinitely by HBO, which had planned to broadcast the film next month.

Stone spent three days with Castro in February 2002 in an attempt "to portray the human figure." But HBO, which had promoted "Comandante" as "an unflinching portrait of the famous icon," said Stone's interpretation was undercut by the Cuban leader's recent crackdowns.

"In light of recent alarming events in the country, the film seems somewhat dated or incomplete," said HBO spokeswoman Lana Iny, who characterized the film as "still in the works."

Stone was traveling Thursday from Paris to Los Angeles and had no response to HBO's decision, a spokesman in Los Angeles said.

Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned Cuba in recent weeks for its crackdown on the opposition, followed by the executions last week of three men convicted of hijacking a ferry filled with passengers in a bid to get to the United States.

At February's Berlin Film Festival, where "Comandante" was screened, Stone said his three-day encounter with the communist leader left a deep impression. "We should look to him as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult," said Stone, director of such features as "JFK" and "Nixon."

On Thursday, Iny said HBO is "talking to Oliver about going back to Cuba" to pose questions to Castro about the arrests and executions. "We'll have to look at what Oliver's able to do."

The Cuban American National Foundation praised HBO's move.

"To have provided a platform for Castro to try to whitewash his sins would have been an unforgivable insult to the thousands of men and women who suffer in his tropical gulag," said Jorge Mas Santos, chairman of the Cuban exile group.

Quote from: mogwaiOliver looks just like Saddam Hussein.

...or Tom Selleck.

I'm going to have to go with Hussein on this one

Quote from: tremoloslothI'm going to have to go with Hussein on this one

He really does.  That's sort of creepy.  I love Stone.  I just finished watching JFK for the first time..I was behind I know...but my intitial is WOW that was amazing.  Even though I'm not sure of the accuracy of it, it was still awe inspiring.

Quote from: tremoloslothI'm going to have to go with Hussein on this one

I'm sticking with Tom Selleck...

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How about Super Mario

Fans of the Match Game will know Avery Schreiber:

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You are all so trivial. It's all looks, looks, looks...   When I heard this I was outraged but dealt with it by means of a cynical smirk. How fucking convenient, HBO, how fucking convenient.

I've only seen Platoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Loved them all. I'd support his section.

for the stone enthusiasts, i just found a great interview taken at Berkley from 1997. It's long but a great read. here's a couple of memorable quotes from it. you can read it here. (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Stone/stone-con1.html)

"I always get asked that question, What are your favorite movies? Which movies most influenced you? And my answer is, there are a few names of people that certainly stand out but to name them would hardly be fair to the huge body of work that I've seen that belongs to many different people. By that I mean that there's a tradition that I feel that we inherit on coming to the business. You could say the "auteur" theory is over-hyped; there are many talented people who work in the business. It's a mistake to get into this list-making. That's what critics do. They make "ten best" lists and unfortunately that's not always fair and it hurts people who deserve inclusion.

"Exactly. Everyone has different reactions. I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it. Whereas the reverse is also true. So the movie critic thing is a dangerous thing because an opinion ... whose opinion is it? Consider the source. And also, how do we criticize a movie in terms of its achievement or acknowledge its objective? Do we say, "This movie, I may not agree with the objective, but this is what the objective is and the filmmakers are trying to do this." That would be an honest criticism, it seems to me. Not, "How disgusting, this is a terrible subject." Or, "No one should be allowed to see this." There's this censorship going on, and that's not genuine criticism.

How would you characterize your political philosophy?

The spur-of-the-moment answer would be that in political terms, what is important is that you lived a life. I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience. I always feel comfortable with those type of leaders and with the Roman political philosophy. I'm very worried about professional politicians such as Mr. Clinton or Richard Nixon, in a way. Although Nixon did have a career, it's true, he certainly was concerned more about politics. Political philosophy probably is just a base in experience. I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future. It's a very delicate balance. That's the nature of existence. I don't believe in left or right. I don't believe in liberal or conservative. I believe in both. I was very influenced by Edmund Burke. He was very popular in school. So I'm not the dyed-in-the-wool liberal leftist that is painted by people who want to simplify and categorize me.

We all know Tarantino hated Stone's Natural Born Killers. Does anyone know what Stone had to say about Tarantino's reaction ?

does any one have the stone box set -- i know someone that wants to sell it to me -- brand new (sealed) for 50 bucks -- how are the commentary tracks?

Quote from: cowboykurtisdoes any one have the stone box set -- i know someone that wants to sell it to me -- brand new (sealed) for 50 bucks -- how are the commentary tracks?

They're good.

Quote from: cowboykurtisdoes any one have the stone box set -- i know someone that wants to sell it to me -- brand new (sealed) for 50 bucks -- how are the commentary tracks?

very good. its worth the $. try amazon or ebay, you should be able to get one for cheap. if you don't want to buy the 10-disc one you can opt for the cheaper 6 disc, which has Any Given Sunday, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, Wall Street, and Oliver Stone's America, which is an interview with Oliver talking about all his films and stuff. I'd get the 10 disc if you have the cash.

I have the set, the commentary's okay but it's surprising how sick I get of hearing Stone's voice. Don't expect a 'fun' commentary like on Evil Dead II or Vanilla Sky. It's just Stone droning on....and on.......and on.....and on.....

EDIT: and on.....

Quote from: MrBurgerKingI would buy that set, but I hate Any Given Sunday. Perhaps I can throw the disc away and replace it with something else? what other Stone movies are in similar cardboard cases?

i hate it too

i just watched jfk for the first time and i thought it was very good.  so of all Oliver Stones flicks, i've previously seen...

-PLATOON
-WALL STREET
-BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY
-THE DOORS
-JFK
-NATURAL BORN KILLERS
-U TURN
-ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

JFK had the biggest name cast i've ever seen in a movie.

kevin costner
kevin bacon
tommy lee jones
laurie metcalf
gary oldman
michael rooker
sissy spacek
bryan doyle-murray
wayne knight
vincent d'onofrio
ed asner
jack lemmon
joe pesci
walter matthau
john candy
donald sutherland
john laroquette

all doing great work.  it was really interesting seeing who would pop up next in some small part.  i remember hearing a lot about this movie when it was released, but had not gotten around to seeing it until now.  really interesting stuff.  i had no idea the conspiracy was that apparent.  i'm not really an oliver stone fan, but this was one of my favorites of his.

Quote from: themodernage02so of all Oliver Stones flicks, i've previously seen...
-PLATOON
-WALL STREET
-BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY
-THE DOORS
-JFK
-NATURAL BORN KILLERS
-U TURN
-ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

Run out and get "Talk Radio" and "Nixon" right now!!!

should I?!? are they that good?!?  are they some of the better ones of his collection, or just so i can have seen them all?  if you're recommending them, i'll add them to my list now.

Nixon's definitely one of my favorite Stone films.

Anybody ever watch the Hand or Seizure..?
The later had a crazy history to it. They're both a real trip to watch.. Although I think only big Oliver Stone fans should go out and rent them cause if your not your gonna say to yourself "What the Fuck!?," after Seizure especially a very insane flick.. But it is Stone's feature film debut.. also not to forget the quality of the tapes they've put out is horrific.. Ep mode.. released from a Canadian distributing house.. I think the only way to ever see it.. a shame, it might be ten times better on DVD or in Sp mode with better prints, providing cleaner sound and picture.. I guess we'll never know. It would be good to preserve it though.. That goes for Kubrick's debut feature too.. Or Tarantino's, it shows a progression. I don't know maybe they were all just too embaressed by them.. Whatever the reason.. You gotta think of the fans man, the fans!!
Peace.

Quote from: MacGuffin

Quote from: themodernage02so of all Oliver Stones flicks, i've previously seen...
-PLATOON
-WALL STREET
-BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY
-THE DOORS
-JFK
-NATURAL BORN KILLERS
-U TURN
-ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

Run out and get "Talk Radio" and "Nixon" right now!!!

Man...add Any Given Sunday along w/Nixon and Talk Radio  to that  VERY impressive list and you got well accomplished body of work...Really good material ..i always love visual directors and he's  one of the best and gives great comm. tracks 8)

Quote from: MacGuffin
Run out and get "Talk Radio" and "Nixon" right now!!!

agreed. esp. w/ nixon. even if ur not a history junkie, there is so much to luv. u definitely see how he took what he learned from making jfk and applied it to nixon.

im a stone junkie, no doubt. i luv any given sunday. its one of 8 or so movies i watch monthly. visually it continues to amaze me. for no other reason, its a good movie to get ur adrenaline running and make u want to go smash sumthin. well, now that i think about it, all of stone's movies get u pumped in 1 way or another.

ATTN:  SMARTASSES!


i realized now that any given Sunday was on that list so no need to bring me out.........now back to the disscussion   ...And AGS  rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

are there any plans of releasing Persona Non Grata and Comandante at least on DVD?

I went to The American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, which is where Stone stayed while he worked on the documentary  (along with my 'paisano'  Rodrigo Prieto) . There is a little gold plate in the 'distinguished visitors'  section with his name on it,   and now I have an urge to see both documentaries...

Quote from: ebeamanOh my god, "Any Given Sunday" ruined my life!!! Noooooo!!!!! I haven't seen a Stone film since that one came out, he is a bad man....a good filmmaker I'm sure....but a bad man that I will avenge for making me a laughingstock of my whole school....him and the person who invented the word "semen".

Did I miss something here?

Quote from: ebeamanOh my god, "Any Given Sunday" ruined my life!!! Noooooo!!!!! I haven't seen a Stone film since that one came out, he is a bad man....a good filmmaker I'm sure....but a bad man that I will avenge for making me a laughingstock of my whole school....him and the person who invented the word "semen".

Tell us!! What do you mean?

Quote from: CinephileDid I miss something here?

Keep reading:
http://xixax.com/viewtopic.php?p=6179#6179

I used to be a HUGE Stone fan, then I kinda got out of him, but just recently I got back into him.  Here's what I think of his films.

Platoon- *** (I know, only 3? Personally, I think the movie is slightly overrated, mainly because of the B-rate acting by most of the people)
Wall Street- ***
Talk Radio- ****
Born on the Fourth of July- ***
The Doors- *** 1/2
JFK- ****
Heaven and Earth- ** 1/2
Natural Born Killers- *** 1/2
Nixon- ****
U-Turn- ***
Any Given Sunday- **

oh, what the heck...
Oliver Stone's America- *** 1/2 (that was one of the most insightful interviews I've ever seen, that's for sure)

So, all in all, I, too, would support a Stone forum.  He's almost as visually innovative as Scorsese...well at least he's along those lines.  He definitely has a style of his own, though.  Which is very respectable.  He is also a damn fine writer (Scarface, Midnight Express).

Oh, and another thing, nobody's mentioned Salvador yet, how come?

I saw Comandante this morning . It's  funny.  Stone wasn't thinking about getting a historical perspective on this, rather to understand Castro  as a person, and it works well in that aspect.  You get some fun insights, such as Fidel having a crush with Sofia Loren in his youth, his love life, his filosophical points of view , among other things.
When Oliver tries to get serious (I'm not saying this  to ridiculize him) ,  it looks like he didn't do the proper research . Even Fidel tells him this .  

He uses Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" as the concurrent musical vehicle.

Then he brings up  the JFK /Nixon subjects. Overall, seems that all the crew involved ,and even Fidel himself were having a lot of  fun doing this.

HBO, Stone set new 'Fidel' docu

HBO has scheduled a new documentary from Oliver Stone about Fidel Castro to replace an earlier version scrapped in the wake of a crackdown on Cuban dissidents. Airing April 14, "Looking for Fidel" will replace "Comandante," a documentary featuring Stone's interviews with the Cuban dictator that HBO sidelined. Stone was asked to re-interview Castro to address then late-breaking developments including the execution of three men convicted of hijacking and redirecting a ferry to the United States. Instead of re-editing "Comandante," Stone submitted the entirely new "Fidel" based on additional interviews conducted with Castro last May that specifically address the crackdown.

Quote from: MacGuffinHBO, Stone set new 'Fidel' docu

HBO has scheduled a new documentary from Oliver Stone about Fidel Castro to replace an earlier version scrapped in the wake of a crackdown on Cuban dissidents. Airing April 14, "Looking for Fidel" will replace "Comandante," a documentary featuring Stone's interviews with the Cuban dictator that HBO sidelined. Stone was asked to re-interview Castro to address then late-breaking developments including the execution of three men convicted of hijacking and redirecting a ferry to the United States. Instead of re-editing "Comandante," Stone submitted the entirely new "Fidel" based on additional interviews conducted with Castro last May that specifically address the crackdown.

Very interesting. I loved Commandante. When is it due? -> Edit: Nevermind.

Lukewarm Applause for Stone's Castro Doc

The world premiere of Oliver Stone's follow-up documentary on Cuban President Fidel Castro met timid applause from a half-full house at the San Sebastian International Film Festival on Saturday.

The festival kicked off Friday, with a warm reception for the world premiere of Woody Allen's new movie "Melinda and Melinda" an urban tale of sex, infidelity and miscommunication. Allen received the festival's lifetime achievement award, given by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar.

Stone's documentary, titled "Looking for Fidel," presents a more balanced portrait of the Communist leader and life on the Caribbean island than Stone's 2002 film "Comandante."

Despite ample publicity, the premiere attracted fewer than 200 viewers on the second day of the nine-day festival, where 19 films from Iran to Argentina are vying for the top prize, the Golden Shell. The film, by the director of blockbusters such as "Platoon" and "JFK," was not competing.

"It's a very spontaneous movie," Stone said at a news conference after the screening. "It's not a left-wing documentary, and I hope Americans will see it that way."

"It was made for educational reasons, not for money, but I've had enormous difficulties to in order to market it," he added.

Lukewarm applause marked the end of the hourlong piece, which attempts to give voice to all the major players in Cuba through interviews with prisoners, dissidents and rights advocates as well as Castro and his supporters.

"The documentary is politically balanced, and Oliver Stone is conscientious in his interview" with Castro, said Radio Televisao Portuguesa movie critic Teresa Nicolaua.

But while the first documentary was criticized for Stone's appearing too much on screen, critics said the latest goes overboard on Castro.

"Castro's answers are too long. It gets a bit tedious at times," said Nicolaua.

Viewers also complained about the dullness of the settings, with much of the film shot in Castro's office and the few outdoor scenes showing little variety from other films about Cuba.

Stone's first film on Castro was based on three days Stone spent with the Cuban leader in early 2002.

But the film faltered after the Cuban government abruptly cracked down on its opponents, arresting some 75 political dissidents and executing three men convicted of hijacking a passenger ferry in a bid to flee to the United States.

"Comandante" was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2003, but HBO postponed its release in cinemas as the events in Cuba were condemned worldwide.

The new documentary starts with an interview with Castro and then proceeds to the work's highlight: an interview, with Castro present and participating, with eight prisoners accused of hijacking a plane to try to enter the United States.

"I'm not in power. I'm just the spiritual chief for the majority of Cubans," Castro says.

Later, Stone talks to dissident leaders Elizardo Sanchez and Osvaldo Paya, who denounce the lack of liberty in the country.

"The most difficult part was interviewing the dissidents," said Stone. "Fidel Castro didn't wish them to be interviewed."

As expected, Castro is severe in his criticism of President Bush.

"Bush has appointed dangerous anti-Cuban extremists as men of confidence," Castro says.

He also jokes about the "exactly 734" assassination attempts the CIA has made on his life.

Castro, 76 years old and in power for 47 years when the film was made, is shown undergoing a medical checkup during which a doctor tells him he has the heart rate of a 30-year-old.

Quote from: MacGuffin

Quote from: themodernage02so of all Oliver Stones flicks, i've previously seen...
-PLATOON
-WALL STREET
-BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY
-THE DOORS
-JFK
-NATURAL BORN KILLERS
-U TURN
-ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

Run out and get "Talk Radio" and "Nixon" right now!!!

a year and some change delayed, i finally saw Talk Radio and Nixon.  enjoyed both, especially Nixon.  it was a dense sprawling epic of sorts, and while i didnt love it as much as JFK it was a reminded (after Alexander) where Stones talents lie.  great performances all around, especially Hopkins.  Talk Radio was also good, but claustrophobic and contained due to it having been a play i imagine.  although i usually have a problem with plays becoming movies of this kind, stone handles the transition well.  a year from now i will watch SALVADOR and HEAVEN AND EARTH.

Quote from: themodernage02SALVADOR and HEAVEN AND EARTH.

You can be okay never seeing Heaven and Earth, it's terrible.  Salvador is a masterpiece, see it now!!!!

Stone To Recreate Thatcher's Reign?

Movie-maker Oliver Stone is lining up another historical figure for his next biopic - former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The director is refusing to let the critical mauling and disastrous box office performance of his latest film Alexander - based on Macedonian warrior Alexander The Great - and is pursuing his current dream of bringing the British leader's life to the big screen. And Stone is determined to land Meryl Streep for the lead role. He says, "Margaret Thatcher is an amazing woman and a good subject for a film. I'm thinking about Meryl Streep to play the Iron Lady." Pals claim Stone - who's documented the lives of shamed President Richard Nixon, assassinated leader John F. Kennedy and rock star Jim Morrison - is now keen to focus his films on some of his female idols. One friends says, "Oliver is one of Baroness Thatcher's greatest fans. Alexander was slammed by critics, so maybe he think it's time to concentrate on a great woman for a film. Thatcher was one of the most powerful political figures in the world and her life has been as colorful as any superstar."

She had her honeymoon on the island where I used to live. I wonder if he'll shoot there.

You know you're struggling for material when you keep on doing biopics.

Quote from: wantautopia?You know you're struggling for material when you keep on doing biopics.

Stone to recreate Stone's life in Stone

Director Oliver Stone (JFK, Natural Born Killers) will soon commence shooting his own life story in Stone.  The film is said to cover his childhood up through his time in Vietnam and upto the filming of Stone.  James Garner will be playing the director.

damnit.  i wish baz was doing this one.

narcissistic bastard

Quote from: MacGuffinStone To Recreate Thatcher's Reign?

I hope he does this film. Everything I read about his future either says he's quitting feature films or has no plans to return to them anytime soon. Going into Alexander, I always had the impression it may be his last film and in ways, with the scope and subject, it would be a perfect ending film. Its just that the film is not up to par with his talent and frankly, I still go back to his earlier films instead of many of the new films because I really am bored with whats being put out today for the most part.

Isn't Alexander Stones's first  (no documentary) film set outside the 20th century???

Maybe he's just not good at dialogue, acting and all that stuff outside what he really know...One of the reasons everyone laughs in Alexander is because the dialogues sound so...boring...

Quote from: AlexandroOne of the reasons everyone laughs in Alexander is because the dialogues sound so...boring...

i dunno...i was laughing at the delivery.

i was also slitting my wrists during the 20 minute opening monologue.

Alexander the Great....Prime Minister Thatcher...Post Master General of Poland? Could it be next?

Oliver Stone 'Makes Peace' With Turkey

Oliver Stone said Tuesday that he regretted that "many hearts were broken in Turkey" following the release of his 1978 film "Midnight Express" and added that he had been misunderstood.

Officially, Stone was in Istanbul to promote his new historical epic "Alexander," but attention quickly focused on his 1978 film, which Turks complain tarnished the country's image abroad.

"Oliver Stone came to make peace," the daily Sabah said Tuesday.

In a written statement in Turkish handed out by the Turkish distributor of his film, Stone said he regretted "being misunderstood" and that "many hearts were broken in Turkey" over "Midnight Express." Stone also met Tuesday with Culture Minister Erkan Mumcu.

Although Turkey has long had a struggling human rights record, Turks say the film, which showed a young American being caught for drug-smuggling and brutalized by Turkish jailers, was grossly exaggerated.

In recent years, Turkey's government has pledged "zero-tolerance" for torture and even hopes the European Union will agree to extend membership talks with it at a summit later this week in Brussels, Belgium.

The 1978 film was first banned in Turkey, but has since been broadcast on Turkish television channels. Stone's "Alexander" reportedly cost US$150 million (euro112.6 million) to make, but has made a slow start at the box office.

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U.S. filmmaker and director Oliver Stone, right, meets with Turkey's Culture and Tourism Minister Erkan Mumcu in Istanbul, Turkey, Dec. 14, 2004. Oliver Stone said that he regretted that "many hearts were broken in Turkey" following the release of his 1978 film "Midnight Express" and added that he had been misunderstood. Officially, Stone is in Istanbul to promote his new historical epic "Alexander," but attention quickly focused on his 1978 film, which Turks complain tarnished the country's image abroad.

Quote from: MacGuffinU.S. filmmaker and director Oliver Stone

hmm.

Quote from: eward

Quote from: MacGuffinU.S. filmmaker and director Oliver Stone

hmm.

He actually hand-manufactures film stock in his spare time, so technically that is correct.

I know its posted at the top of this page how Stone apologized to Turkey but here is a recent (Jan. 7-13) article from LA Weekly featuring an interview with Billy Hayes, the man that actually wrote Midnight Express.

I only skimmed the article (and the one at the top of the page) so I dont really know what it's all about.. I've never seen Midnight Express.


Oliver Stone Apologizes to Turkey
And Billy Hayes, author of Midnight Express, reacts
by Paul Krassner  



Of all the movies I've ever seen, the Oliver Stone–scripted Midnight Express — which featured images of appalling conditions and brutality in a Turkish prison — was one of the most powerful. And now, just days prior to the European Union's decision whether to launch membership talks with Turkey, Stone has apologized for offending the Turks.

"It's true I overdramatized the script," Stone told reporters in Istanbul. "But the reality of Turkish prisons at the time was also referred to . . . by various human rights associations." Stone had been afraid of visiting Turkey since the release of Midnight Express (1978), he said, because of the effect it had on the country. "For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me, and I didn't feel safe there. The culture ministry gave me a guarantee that I would be safe, so I feel comfortable now."

Midnight Express was adapted from the book by Billy Hayes, an American who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of Turkey, and eventually escaped. Stone also did a week's worth of interviews with Hayes in a hotel room after he'd read the book.

"That was fun," Hayes recalled, "like being in a washing machine on tilt. And while some people find him a bit much, I love Oliver's energy."

I contacted Hayes to get his reaction to Stone's recent statement. "How," I asked him, "was the script overdramatized?"

"My biggest problem with the screenplay and the film was that you didn't see a single good Turk," said Hayes, "so the overall impression was that all Turks are like those depicted in the film. And, of course, this is not true. It doesn't take away from the fact that the prison was brutal and the legal system hypocritical, but that can be said of almost any country, particularly, and unfortunately, ours. Prison guards are not necessarily the cream of any society."

Did your biting the tongue off a fellow prisoner actually occur?

"The tongue-biting was the filmmaker's way of having the informer get his dramatically just reward. Actually, I tried to bash that sonbitch's head in but the guards stopped me. I don't have a problem with the intent of that scene, but it's so strange now to remember that kind of up-close and personal violence."

What would you say was most offensive to the Turks?

"The most offensive scene for the Turks was Billy's speech in the courtroom calling them all 'a nation of pigs,' etc. In fact, when I spoke to the court, knowing I was having my sentence changed to life, I was trying to hold on to my shredding sanity and wanted to affect these people who were taking my life away but really knew nothing about me as a person. I said something like, 'I've been in your jail four years now and if you sentence me to more prison I can't agree with you, all I can do is forgive you . . .' It affected them. The judge told me his hands were tied. They all looked upset. Then they sentenced me to life, which the kindly judge reduced to 30 years. Thanks. I think. Anyway, Oliver wanted to know how I could forgive people who had just taken my life away. I told him about trying to maintain my balance. He asked how I felt the next morning after sentencing. I told him I was furious. So he wrote that courtroom speech."

Was there anything that you thought should have been included in the film that was omitted?

"What was missing from the film was what I found in jail — a sense of self and the trite but true notion of appreciating each moment. I discovered my reason for being, which is simply to love. It took a lot of banging my hard head against the wall, literally and figuratively, to realize this truth. They didn't deal with it in the film but that made the entire experience worth it."

Tell me about Midnight Return.

"It's a follow-up book about the really weird part of my prison experience — returning to the U.S. and becoming a little mini-celebrity, with all that entails. Hope to get it published one of these days."

Can you give me an example of mini-celebrity weirdness?

"February 20th and 24th in 1980 I was mentioned in the Steve Canyon comic strip. From the bizarre to the surreal. How weird is that?"

Oh, yeah? Well, I was mentioned in Pogo and Zippy the Pinhead. You get used to it. Anyway, now I'll start waiting for Oliver Stone to apologize to Greece for Alexander.

Stone clocks in for 'Night' shift
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Oliver Stone is in talks to direct "The Night Watchman." The feature film is an adaptation of James Ellroy's script about a disgraced police officer who sets out to rid the police force of corruption. The project, which has been in the works for some time, is being refinanced, with Avi Lerner in talks to finance through his Millenium Films' banner. Spike Lee was set to direct Keanu Reeves in the long-gestating project but has since dropped off to helm "Inside Man" for Universal Pictures. Alexandra Milchan, Lucas Foster and Erwin Stoff are producing. The producers are awaiting a new draft of the script from John Ridley and will then move toward closing deals with Stone and Reeves. "Night Watchman" has been through several incarnations. At one point, David Fincher was in talks to direct for Regency Enterprises and Bruce Berman for Warner Bros. Pictures. Stone most recently directed "Alexander," which has grossed $167.6 million worldwide.

i guess i didnt realize lee had dropped this for the other one.  that sucks, although somebody letting stone make another movie after alexander is some miracle.

With a possible collaboration between Oliver Stone and James Ellroy, this could be a magnificent coming together. I dare anyone to read the novel L.A. Confidential and ask not just if the film holds up, but if the film even attempts to boil at the same level as the novel. While reading the novel, I kept thinking to myself how impossible it even was to attempt to make this into a film. Not only is the novel an explosian of ideas and language, but its size is so epic it can skip years in just a page and dwarf many other novels. When Bruce Willis had the idea a few years ago to adapt Ellroy's Cold Thousand not into a movie, but an HBO mini-series, he had the right idea. It still would have been tough. Its just the only filmmaker who is as impatient with images as Ellroy is with setences and story structure is Oliver Stone.

I'm really happy about this, GT is right this could be a fantastic collaboration. I wonder how Keanu will do under Stone's reign as director.

Stone says media has him wrong
Source: Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- Oliver Stone is mad as hell, and he's not going to take it any more.

Fed up with what he calls the Internet "echo effect, which goes on and on," the filmmaker sent out a press release Thursday from Los Angeles to contradict recent media reports about him.

"Contrary to recent reports in the media, I've never announced or intend to make films called 'Constantine,' 'The Night Watchman" or the life story of Margaret Thatcher," Stone's release read. "Nor, as also reported, have I fled the United States for France, 'apologized' to Turkey for (1978's) 'Midnight Express' or denounced my film 'Alexander,' which has now grossed $170 million internationally and will be released on DVD in two versions Aug. 2 in the United States, Latin America, the U.K., Australia, and other countries. Lest my friends are confused, I continue to live in the United States, where I am developing various film projects."

In an interview, Stone said that he had been developing an adaptation of the James Ellroy book "The Night Watchman" with writer John Ridley, but "it didn't work out," he said. "I'm no longer involved with it".

As for reports that he's planning to make a biopic of former British Prime Minister Thatcher, Stone said that stemmed from a joke he made at a news conference to promote "Alexander."

"I made a crack that the life of Margaret Thatcher would be great with Meryl Streep," he said. "It hit the news wires and the Internet. Can you imagine me doing the life of Margaret Thatcher?"

As for the speculation that the pending DVD issue of "Alexander" would be significantly different to tone down the homosexuality featured in the theatrical version, Stone said that in truth, Warner Bros. plans to release two versions of the DVD, the theatrical cut and a director's cut.

"There are a lot of changes, a whole new third act," Stone said of the director's cut. "It's 25% changed. We lose 20 minutes and put back in 12. ... It was a big job (that required) two more months of editing work."

Stone also asserted that Millennium Films chief Avi Lerner had announced this week at the Festival de Cannes that he had committed to produce a film about the Roman emperor Constantine that would shoot in Bulgaria. Lerner could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

"I have never heard of the project," Stone said. "I do like Avi Lerner. I faxed him, 'What are you doing?' But I haven't heard back."

Damn. He really may take another five years to make a film.

Oliver Stone Arrested on Drug, DUI Charges

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone was arrested for investigation of drug possession and driving while intoxicated, police said Saturday.

Stone, 58, was arrested Friday night at a police checkpoint on Sunset Boulevard after showing signs of alcohol intoxication, police Sgt. John Edmundson said.

A search of his Mercedes turned up drugs, Edmundson said. He did not specify what kind.

Stone was released Saturday morning after posting $15,000 bail.

A message left Saturday with Stone's agent David Styne was not immediately returned.

In 1999, the filmmaker pleaded guilty to drug possession and no contest to driving under the influence and was ordered into a rehabilitation program.

Stone's films include the recent "Alexander," "JFK" (1991) and "Natural Born Killers" (1994). He won Academy Awards for directing in 1989 for "Born on the Fourth of July" and in 1986 for "Platoon," which also won the Oscar for best picture. He lives in Los Angeles.

This makes me laugh

i predict Oliver Stone will be dead within a year.

I'm really surprised he was busted.  Oliver Stone doesn't seem like the type of guy to do drugs.

Quote from: soixanteI'm really surprised he was busted.  Oliver Stone doesn't seem like the type of guy to do drugs.

Oh, sweet sarcasm!

haha,

i am sad for this, i was watching alexander on a bus yesterday and it wasn't as bad as i remembered.  i regret being so harsh with it. forgive me oliver stone, wherever you are.

Quote from: cronopio
watching alexander on a bus

Watching a historical epic on a bus.  What a dichotomy.

I immediately laughed when I read that he was arrested on drug possesion and that he was intoxicated as well. Then I felt guilt. I love oliver stone and I was slightly sad that he wasn't in preproduction of any films. I just wish he didn't go out and do that stuff, if you have to take drugs or alcohol make sure your stick yourself in your house and don't go in a car. That's my rule, not that I drink much or take any drugs.

QuoteParamount Pictures will finance and distribute an untitled feature about the rescue of two Port Authority police officers from the rubble of the World Trade Center, says Variety. Oliver Stone will direct the film and Nicolas Cage will star.

Andrea Berloff, who recently signed to write Paramount's remake of Don't Look Now, has written the script. The Stone project is on a fast track with pre-production already started in New York.

Paramount isn't the only studio now moving briskly to tell the 9/11 story, adds the trade.

After optioning the Jim Dwyer-Kevin Flynn book "102 Minutes" in February, Columbia Pictures has already received a first script draft by Billy Ray, writer and director of Shattered Glass.

The project addresses the rescue attempts that took place between the moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. and the collapse of the first tower at 10:28 a.m.

The Stone-directed project will focus on a much smaller story from the fateful day. Cage will portray one of the two Port Authority police officers, Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, who were among the many rescuers who risked their lives by rushing into the smoking buildings; the duo were among the very few who survived the fall of the towers, thanks to the frantic rescue efforts of other rescuers who pulled them from the rubble before their oxygen ran out.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=10308

Stone assesses Sept. 11 project
The director vows to focus on heroism, not politics, in depicting a real-life WTC rescue.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Two men, a rookie police officer and his boss, are trapped 20 feet below a collapsed building. Their bodies are being crushed by massive chunks of cement and have begun to swell. Though they're relative strangers, they spend the next 14 hours goading each other to live, while their families worry over their fate and a ragtag group of rescuers tries to save their lives.

It might be a typical Hollywood disaster movie, but it's actually scenes from the script (obtained by the Los Angeles Times) of the upcoming film about Port Authority police officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, among the last people rescued from the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. And it is being brought to the screen by Oliver Stone, long seen as the nation's premier conspiracy-theorist-turned-director.

"It's not about the motives of the terrorists, or who the terrorists were, or the politics of 9/11 in any way," said Stone, whose involvement in the film (which will star Nicolas Cage) was made public by Paramount Pictures last week. "It's about people standing together and overcoming the problem. It's a no-nonsense, austere, vérité document of what they went through in those 24 hours, a procedural if you like, and it should be shot like that."

Word of Stone's participation immediately led to convulsions on the Internet, where bloggers cracked morbid jokes about what Stone might deliver, and whether the director — who proffered a revisionist theory of the Kennedy assassination in his 1991 film "JFK" — would be a suitable candidate to tackle one of the most sensitive topics in recent American history. Others winced at the timing of Paramount's press release one day after the bombings in London.

A year from now, when the film presumably will be released, close to the fifth-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, audiences might be wondering whether they want to shell out 10 dollars to relive the experience. The riveting and well-crafted script — by 31-year-old newcomer Andrea Berloff — is not political. But it is disturbing, with shots of people jumping out of the towers and characters dying under slabs of concrete. Stone's visceral style of directing could amplify the terror experienced by the policemen and, consequently, by the audience.

"[The project] came to me," said Stone, who says he was given the script by his Creative Artists Agency agent Bryan Lourd back in late December, although he wasn't offered the project until May. "If it hadn't come to me, I wouldn't have done it. [The script] just hit me between the eyes."

The director himself thinks that a film about 9/11 should have "been done right away. I don't think you should run from things. You should confront them. It's better for the country. Look at the English [reaction to the recent London subway bombings]. They took it and absorbed it and continued on. They didn't run around and call for huge pieces of legislation costing billions of dollars to defend our homeland and create a huge war in a foreign country."

That is just the sort of subtext that conservative Internet bloggers believe could infuse a film in Stone's hands. Given the narrative story arc of the script, though, it would be hard for a director to add explicit political content, with the two major protagonists spending most of the film in a hole, unaware that the towers have even fallen down.

While allusions to 9/11 have begun to filter through pop culture — most notably in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" allegory — the untitled Stone film is on track to become the first high-profile studio film to explicitly deal with the tragedy. Although Spielberg's film earned largely glowing notices, some reviewers were troubled by his use of 9/11 imagery, and others have begun to wonder whether the gritty darkness of "War of the Worlds" has turned off some moviegoers. Disaster films usually work on the principle that the on-screen mayhem is a fantastical occurrence, a freakish event that will be suitably confronted, and resolved, by the film's hero.

Hollywood has traditionally taken years to explore wounds to the national psyche. It took more than a decade from the start of American involvement in Vietnam for Hollywood to produce "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter," and another decade before Stone made "Platoon." Some episodes from American history — the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima — have barely been examined by Hollywood.

Stone, who's coming off the flop "Alexander," has long been a lightning rod for his controversial stances on everything from Kennedy to Castro. In the aftermath of 9/11, the director was excoriated by members of the press for suggesting that the attacks were a revolt against multi-nationals, "a rebellion against globalization, against the American way," he said at the time. He told the New Yorker about his fantasy of making a "bullet of a film about terrorism, like 'The Battle of Algiers,' " the 1966 film about the Algerian war in which director Gillo Pontecorvo's sympathies lie with the FLN terrorists. "You show the Arab side and the American side in a chase film with a 'French Connection' urgency, where you track people by satellite, like in 'Enemy of the State.' My movie would have the CIA guys and the FBI guys, but they blow it. They're a bunch of drunks from World War II who haven't recovered from the disasters of the '60s — the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. My movie would show the new heroes of security, the people who really get the job done, who know where the secrets are."

After Friday's announcement connecting the director to the project, bloggers had a field day with visions of a stereotypical Stone paranoid fantasy. "Is Hollywood so out of touch it thinks Stone's version of 9/11 is what America is clamoring for? After 'Alexander,' at that?" asked blogger Mickey Kaus, while another enterprising blogger on the Huffington post wrote up a fake version of the script in which the two lead characters discuss a possible conspiracy in highly inflammable terms.

In fact, the script, which might be the most coherent, moving piece of material to fall into Stone's hands in over a decade, appears to be a straightforward account of the rescue of Jimeno and McLoughlin (the latter to be played by Cage). The story also focuses on their families, and their ad hoc group of rescuers, which includes a born-again Christian former Marine, who drove in his Porsche from Connecticut to help out, as well as a recovering-alcoholic-former paramedic with an expired license and a couple of New York City police officers who at one point had nothing but a pair of handcuffs with which to dig Jimeno out. While waiting to be rescued, one of the policemen even dreams of Jesus.

According to one source close to the project, producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher ("Erin Brockovich") bought Jimeno's and McLoughlin's life rights out of their private development fund, after being brought the story by the late Debra Hill. Screenwriter Berloff has spent extensive time interviewing the real life participants in the drama. This is her first produced screenplay. The film was initially set up at Universal but is now being produced at Paramount.

The film project does bring Stone back to the blue collar terrain of some of his most successful works: "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July." He met with both Jimeno and McLoughlin. "I found them both to be courageous, deeply wounded people. They're both still suffering from the injuries," said Stone, who then quoted Jimeno. "Will said this is a testament not to the evil, but to the good that we as human beings are capable of. That's important. That's healing."

PREDICTION:


this film will be the same list as

mulholland dr.
the new world
the fountain
and of course inalnd empire
as this decades' defining moments in film....easily...

this material is perfect for stone........can't fuckign wait!!!

he might be able to top jfk

just do it in taste, respectfull, mindfull, and honerable......w/ stone's touch.

Quote from: MacGuffinStone assesses Sept. 11 project
The director vows to focus on heroism, not politics, in depicting a real-life WTC rescue.
Source: Los Angeles Times
[/size]

i know i'm one to lash out quickly, but i want you to know i honestly held back from writing this message.  please know that i come from a frame of mind that is very empathetic to the whole issue.  it's just too important not to say.

what a fucking sellout pussy, what ever happened to the guy that made nixon and jfk?  i really hope he's just telling the studios this and films something else.

i'm sorry if some of you guys get pissed off with this, i really am.   but please think about it for a sec...  it sounds like propaganda for the right, or even worse, opportunism to make a movie that cashes in on the biggest attack to mainland america in history.  that is horrible... and beyond tasteless.  i'm not saying a film on this subject matter shouldn't get made, just not with this rhetoric.

the sad thing is that it will win the oscar for sure.  now i know the thought of even considering that is sick.  but that's exactly the point, it is such an obviously sensationalized terrible mess of a film that will exploit all of your patriotic tendencies.  everyone in the states will make sure they go see this movie because they will tell you it's the "right" thing to do (just wait you'll see).  meanwhile, paramount pictures gets fat off of the sorrow, your sorrow.

if they really wanted to make a 9/11 for the right reasons, the film should challenge what everyone thinks of the events, not reaffirm what we already know.  he says it won't be political, but the very nature of the film is highly political.

he could do the heroism angle and still have a biting commentary, so many of his films in the past have had that noble and necessary quality.  maybe he would have had to wait twenty years to do the film i'm talking about, but alas, it's worth the wait.

-sl-

[EDIT]  if they did the right thing they'd give all the money made from this movie to the families of the vitims from 9/11.  stone and all the actors like cage should also do it for free (because you know, the very act of being involved in this project is an honor in itself!  you think they'll think this way?  or just want the paycheck?).  panavsion should donate the cameras, kodak should do the same for film and all the other companies that will profit should follow suit (so that the maximum profit could be made and redistributed to the people that this film will conjure up the darkest memories for).  if that happened then i'd change my tune a bit.  but shit, when there's money to be made, there's money to be made...

Quote from: socketlevelit sounds like propaganda for the right

Yeah, he should go back to the left.


With that off my chest; yeah, I agree with you.

Quote from: Just Withnail

Quote from: socketlevelit sounds like propaganda for the right

Yeah, he should go back to the left.


With that off my chest; yeah, I agree with you.

i agree, as well. though, i have faith in mr stone

socketlevel - you said they should make a film about 9/11 that challenges audiences to think about the incidents etc., what premise would you use?

Pena Joins the Force
Oliver Stone recruits Michael Pena to co-star with Nicolas Cage in untitled World Trade Center rescue drama.

Michael Pena, most recently seen as part of the ensemble of the critically acclaimed Crash, has been set to join the force. Pena will star with Nicolas Cage in an untitled World Trade Center rescue film from helmer Oliver Stone. The project will go into production later this year for Paramount Pictures.

Penned by Andrea Berloff, Pena will play a Port Authority police officer who, along with Cage's character, answers a rescue call in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The pair is trapped in the rubble when the buildings collapse and are among the few that are rescued from the disaster.

Double Features' Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher will be the producers on the film with Moritz Borman also taking producing credit.

Currently, Pena, repped by Innovative, is filming HBO's Walkout for helmer Edward James Olmos. His other credits include Million Dollar Baby, The United States of Leland and Buffalo Soldiers.

Quote from: Hedwig

Quote from: Just Withnail

Quote from: socketlevelit sounds like propaganda for the right

Yeah, he should go back to the left.


With that off my chest; yeah, I agree with you.

socketlevel - you said they should make a film about 9/11 that challenges audiences to think about the incidents etc., what premise would you use?

i really don't know... i've seen the conspiracy videos but they seem a little fishy to me.  so i'm not saying he should make a movie based upon extreme left ideals (which can be unfounded).  i think he should look at the issue objectively.  it is obvious that the rest of the world is not outright evil, there is dogma everywhere.  That's what the story should be about, dogma in the east and west.

stone should analyze where this anger and hatred for america comes from.  this is not a good thing, but is also not entirely unfounded.  it is true that part of the backlash comes from jealousy of the west, but it is also a backlash to western indulgence and how american foreign policy is horrible.  is this enough reason to launch an attack on new york, of course not!  but the issue isn't so black and white like every media outlet paints it.  and like with any other country, there are good people and bad people on both sides.  all this should be explored.  the rest of the world has a bittersweet reaction to the states.  i'm sure i'm not bursting any bubbles saying this either, a lot of people say they hate you guys yet still feast on your culture and try to emulate it.  that's pathetic, but at the same time the majority of your society is a little overly nationalistic (which is pathetic as well) and don't choose to see film, music, politics, and anything else as equal to their own.

who profited the most from the attack?  was it the middle east, hell no.  was it the american people, nope; it was the current american government.  they used the nationalism to launch a war that had nothing to do with the people who attacked new york.  yet this paranoia was the fuel to get the american people on their side.  that's sick, and should be explored in the film.  am i saying the american government had something to do with the attack, i doubt it, but why did they use this to propagate further hatred?

with all that being said, the pentagon issue should be explored.  that's the one which makes the conspiracy side of me question the events.  it was obviously not a plane, why'd they cover this up?

he should do an epic jfk and nixon approach to the events.  or then again, he should forget the events and explore the moments leading up to the tragedy and the ones that followed it with a critical eye.  objective and critical.  like how certain celebrities were condemned by their stance on the events, like bill mayer (spelling?) from politically incorrect.  it is also disturbing how legislation was introduced (because of 911) which took away americans' rights and freedoms.   there is so much more that could be explored that i could never even have the time or space to get into it.  but since oliver stone is making a film about such issues, it's his duty to do so.

most importantly, his job should be educating americans how all people in the middle east are not terrorists.  but equally important, educate people over seas how the american people are great, funny and not like their government; they can be empathetic.  secondly i think it is important to give a message that there are different ways to conduct life and society.  very often people think their country is the best in the world (sorry to say this is mostly regarding you guys), basically because they need to think their way of life is the only way to live.  that is weak and complacent.  this happens on both sides and in my country as well.  bill hicks said it best when it came to this topic.  he points out that difference is good.  the melding pot doesn't work, which happens in america, the middle east and anywhere people are affraid of the unknown.  the last message of the film should reaffirm that human nature needs to embrace difference.

so as you can see i'm ranting and going in ten different directions at once, and it needs to be filtered.  but any of these angles is far more interesting then the stupid one set out by stone.  were the firefighters heroes?  of course, we don't need nicholas cage to tell us that.

stone made the complexity of jfk palatable so i know he has it in him.  if anyone can do it he can.  he just seems to have lost the vision.

-sl-

oh yeah, the money made should go to the victims' families in new york and iraq.  sounds a little idealistic and perfect, yet it's not an impossibility.

Quote from: socketlevel

Quote from: Hedwig

Quote from: Just Withnail

Quote from: socketlevelit sounds like propaganda for the right

Yeah, he should go back to the left.


With that off my chest; yeah, I agree with you.

socketlevel - you said they should make a film about 9/11 that challenges audiences to think about the incidents etc., what premise would you use?

i really don't know... i've seen the conspiracy videos but they seem a little fishy to me.  so i'm not saying he should make a movie based upon extreme left ideals (which can be unfounded).  i think he should look at the issue objectively.  it is obvious that the rest of the world is not outright evil, there is dogma everywhere.  That's what the story should be about, dogma in the east and west.

stone should analyze where this anger and hatred for america comes from.  this is not a good thing, but is also not entirely unfounded.  it is true that part of the backlash comes from jealousy of the west, but it is also a backlash to western indulgence and how american foreign policy is horrible.  is this enough reason to launch an attack on new york, of course not!  but the issue isn't so black and white like every media outlet paints it.  and like with any other country, there are good people and bad people on both sides.  all this should be explored.  the rest of the world has a bittersweet reaction to the states.  i'm sure i'm not bursting any bubbles saying this either, a lot of people say they hate you guys yet still feast on your culture and try to emulate it.  that's pathetic, but at the same time the majority of your society is a little overly nationalistic (which is pathetic as well) and don't choose to see film, music, politics, and anything else as equal to their own.

who profited the most from the attack?  was it the middle east, hell no.  was it the american people, nope; it was the current american government.  they used the nationalism to launch a war that had nothing to do with the people who attacked new york.  yet this paranoia was the fuel to get the american people on their side.  that's sick, and should be explored in the film.  am i saying the american government had something to do with the attack, i doubt it, but why did they use this to propagate further hatred?

with all that being said, the pentagon issue should be explored.  that's the one which makes the conspiracy side of me question the events.  it was obviously not a plane, why'd they cover this up?

he should do an epic jfk and nixon approach to the events.  or then again, he should forget the events and explore the moments leading up to the tragedy and the ones that followed it with a critical eye.  objective and critical.  like how certain celebrities were condemned by their stance on the events, like bill mayer (spelling?) from politically incorrect.  it is also disturbing how legislation was introduced (because of 911) which took away americans' rights and freedoms.   there is so much more that could be explored that i could never even have the time or space to get into it.  but since oliver stone is making a film about such issues, it's his duty to do so.

most importantly, his job should be educating americans how all people in the middle east are not terrorists.  but equally important, educate people over seas how the american people are great, funny and not like their government; they can be empathetic.  secondly i think it is important to give a message that there are different ways to conduct life and society.  very often people think their country is the best in the world (sorry to say this is mostly regarding you guys), basically because they need to think their way of life is the only way to live.  that is weak and complacent.  this happens on both sides and in my country as well.  bill hicks said it best when it came to this topic.  he points out that difference is good.  the melding pot doesn't work, which happens in america, the middle east and anywhere people are affraid of the unknown.  the last message of the film should reaffirm that human nature needs to embrace difference.

so as you can see i'm ranting and going in ten different directions at once, and it needs to be filtered.  but any of these angles is far more interesting then the stupid one set out by stone.  were the firefighters heroes?  of course, we don't need nicholas cage to tell us that.

stone made the complexity of jfk palatable so i know he has it in him.  if anyone can do it he can.  he just seems to have lost the vision.

-sl-

oh yeah, the money made should go to the victims' families in new york and iraq.  sounds a little idealistic and perfect, yet it's not an impossibility.

don't thinkk this is weird or anything, but last night I dreamed you wqould say this

Quote from: Sleuth

Quote from: socketlevel

Quote from: Hedwig

Quote from: Just Withnail

Quote from: socketlevelit sounds like propaganda for the right

Yeah, he should go back to the left.


With that off my chest; yeah, I agree with you.

socketlevel - you said they should make a film about 9/11 that challenges audiences to think about the incidents etc., what premise would you use?

i really don't know... i've seen the conspiracy videos but they seem a little fishy to me.  so i'm not saying he should make a movie based upon extreme left ideals (which can be unfounded).  i think he should look at the issue objectively.  it is obvious that the rest of the world is not outright evil, there is dogma everywhere.  That's what the story should be about, dogma in the east and west.

stone should analyze where this anger and hatred for america comes from.  this is not a good thing, but is also not entirely unfounded.  it is true that part of the backlash comes from jealousy of the west, but it is also a backlash to western indulgence and how american foreign policy is horrible.  is this enough reason to launch an attack on new york, of course not!  but the issue isn't so black and white like every media outlet paints it.  and like with any other country, there are good people and bad people on both sides.  all this should be explored.  the rest of the world has a bittersweet reaction to the states.  i'm sure i'm not bursting any bubbles saying this either, a lot of people say they hate you guys yet still feast on your culture and try to emulate it.  that's pathetic, but at the same time the majority of your society is a little overly nationalistic (which is pathetic as well) and don't choose to see film, music, politics, and anything else as equal to their own.

who profited the most from the attack?  was it the middle east, hell no.  was it the american people, nope; it was the current american government.  they used the nationalism to launch a war that had nothing to do with the people who attacked new york.  yet this paranoia was the fuel to get the american people on their side.  that's sick, and should be explored in the film.  am i saying the american government had something to do with the attack, i doubt it, but why did they use this to propagate further hatred?

with all that being said, the pentagon issue should be explored.  that's the one which makes the conspiracy side of me question the events.  it was obviously not a plane, why'd they cover this up?

he should do an epic jfk and nixon approach to the events.  or then again, he should forget the events and explore the moments leading up to the tragedy and the ones that followed it with a critical eye.  objective and critical.  like how certain celebrities were condemned by their stance on the events, like bill mayer (spelling?) from politically incorrect.  it is also disturbing how legislation was introduced (because of 911) which took away americans' rights and freedoms.   there is so much more that could be explored that i could never even have the time or space to get into it.  but since oliver stone is making a film about such issues, it's his duty to do so.

most importantly, his job should be educating americans how all people in the middle east are not terrorists.  but equally important, educate people over seas how the american people are great, funny and not like their government; they can be empathetic.  secondly i think it is important to give a message that there are different ways to conduct life and society.  very often people think their country is the best in the world (sorry to say this is mostly regarding you guys), basically because they need to think their way of life is the only way to live.  that is weak and complacent.  this happens on both sides and in my country as well.  bill hicks said it best when it came to this topic.  he points out that difference is good.  the melding pot doesn't work, which happens in america, the middle east and anywhere people are affraid of the unknown.  the last message of the film should reaffirm that human nature needs to embrace difference.

so as you can see i'm ranting and going in ten different directions at once, and it needs to be filtered.  but any of these angles is far more interesting then the stupid one set out by stone.  were the firefighters heroes?  of course, we don't need nicholas cage to tell us that.

stone made the complexity of jfk palatable so i know he has it in him.  if anyone can do it he can.  he just seems to have lost the vision.

-sl-

oh yeah, the money made should go to the victims' families in new york and iraq.  sounds a little idealistic and perfect, yet it's not an impossibility.

don't thinkk this is weird or anything, but last night I dreamed you wqould say this

verbatim?  lol, that's sweet.  you should take that shit on the road.

either i'd imagine you love xixax so much that you went online in your sleep or, shit guy, that is just weird.  no offense taken.  but, to what extent did you dream it? and more importantly, do you consider it a nightmare?

-sl-

Quote from: socketlevel

Quote from: Sleuth

Quote from: socketlevel

Quote from: Hedwig

Quote from: Just Withnail

Quote from: socketlevelit sounds like propaganda for the right

Yeah, he should go back to the left.


With that off my chest; yeah, I agree with you.

socketlevel - you said they should make a film about 9/11 that challenges audiences to think about the incidents etc., what premise would you use?

i really don't know... i've seen the conspiracy videos but they seem a little fishy to me.  so i'm not saying he should make a movie based upon extreme left ideals (which can be unfounded).  i think he should look at the issue objectively.  it is obvious that the rest of the world is not outright evil, there is dogma everywhere.  That's what the story should be about, dogma in the east and west.

stone should analyze where this anger and hatred for america comes from.  this is not a good thing, but is also not entirely unfounded.  it is true that part of the backlash comes from jealousy of the west, but it is also a backlash to western indulgence and how american foreign policy is horrible.  is this enough reason to launch an attack on new york, of course not!  but the issue isn't so black and white like every media outlet paints it.  and like with any other country, there are good people and bad people on both sides.  all this should be explored.  the rest of the world has a bittersweet reaction to the states.  i'm sure i'm not bursting any bubbles saying this either, a lot of people say they hate you guys yet still feast on your culture and try to emulate it.  that's pathetic, but at the same time the majority of your society is a little overly nationalistic (which is pathetic as well) and don't choose to see film, music, politics, and anything else as equal to their own.

who profited the most from the attack?  was it the middle east, hell no.  was it the american people, nope; it was the current american government.  they used the nationalism to launch a war that had nothing to do with the people who attacked new york.  yet this paranoia was the fuel to get the american people on their side.  that's sick, and should be explored in the film.  am i saying the american government had something to do with the attack, i doubt it, but why did they use this to propagate further hatred?

with all that being said, the pentagon issue should be explored.  that's the one which makes the conspiracy side of me question the events.  it was obviously not a plane, why'd they cover this up?

he should do an epic jfk and nixon approach to the events.  or then again, he should forget the events and explore the moments leading up to the tragedy and the ones that followed it with a critical eye.  objective and critical.  like how certain celebrities were condemned by their stance on the events, like bill mayer (spelling?) from politically incorrect.  it is also disturbing how legislation was introduced (because of 911) which took away americans' rights and freedoms.   there is so much more that could be explored that i could never even have the time or space to get into it.  but since oliver stone is making a film about such issues, it's his duty to do so.

most importantly, his job should be educating americans how all people in the middle east are not terrorists.  but equally important, educate people over seas how the american people are great, funny and not like their government; they can be empathetic.  secondly i think it is important to give a message that there are different ways to conduct life and society.  very often people think their country is the best in the world (sorry to say this is mostly regarding you guys), basically because they need to think their way of life is the only way to live.  that is weak and complacent.  this happens on both sides and in my country as well.  bill hicks said it best when it came to this topic.  he points out that difference is good.  the melding pot doesn't work, which happens in america, the middle east and anywhere people are affraid of the unknown.  the last message of the film should reaffirm that human nature needs to embrace difference.

so as you can see i'm ranting and going in ten different directions at once, and it needs to be filtered.  but any of these angles is far more interesting then the stupid one set out by stone.  were the firefighters heroes?  of course, we don't need nicholas cage to tell us that.

stone made the complexity of jfk palatable so i know he has it in him.  if anyone can do it he can.  he just seems to have lost the vision.

-sl-

oh yeah, the money made should go to the victims' families in new york and iraq.  sounds a little idealistic and perfect, yet it's not an impossibility.

don't thinkk this is weird or anything, but last night I dreamed you wqould say this

verbatim?  lol, that's sweet.  you should take that shit on the road.

either i'd imagine you love xixax so much that you went online in your sleep or, shit guy, that is just weird.  no offense taken.  but, to what extent did you dream it? and more importantly, do you consider it a nightmare?

-sl-

word for fucking word, this is so freaky I can't take it anymore I'm crying

Stone Casts Trio
Thesps join first 9/11 feature.

Variety reports that Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has added more cast members to his forthcoming 9/11 feature film. Maria Bello (Secret Window) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (Mona Lisa Smile) will play the wives of the true story's two main characters. Michael Pena (Crash) also has been cast in one of the lead roles.

The untitled pic stars Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLoughlin opposite Pena as Officer William J. Jimeno. The two N.Y. Port Authority officers were trapped in the rubble when the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001.

The Paramount film recounts the efforts to rescue the two officers, who were the last survivors to be found.

Filming kicks off this fall in New York.

Quote from: MacGuffinMaggie Gyllenhaal

:onfire:

Sept. 11 Pic Set for 8/11
The Oliver Stone-directed World Trade Center-themed film will hit theaters one month before the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11.

Paramount Pictures has selected August 11, one month before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, as the release date for its upcoming Oliver Stone 9/11 pic...currently referred to as Untitled World Trade Center, according to Daily Variety. The studio chose the date so that it did not look like it was trying to commercially exploit the disaster.

Starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena, the film centers on the last two people pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center. The true story centers on John McLoughlin and William J. Jimeno, two Port Authority officers who were helping people escape from the Center when they suddenly became trapped in the rubble themselves. The pair was ultimately rescued. Andrea Berloff penned the script.

The touchy subject matter has already had the project being produced under a shroud of scrutiny. Many were worried that Stone might introduce his own politics into the storyline.

Currently Universal Pictures is also mounting a 9/11 pic, although that film centers on doomed American Airlines Flight 93, which went down in a field in Pennsylvania. Paul Greengrass is helming Flight 93, which many expect to hit theaters before the Stone project.

Absolute glee Stone is committing to a project. Considering how bad the reviews were for Alexander, I expected him to likely drop out of film altogether. He seemed that disgruntled. Its excellent to hear he is getting back on board for new work so quickly. America cinema needs him.

Quote from: MacGuffinMany were worried that Stone might introduce his own politics into the storyline.

If he doesn't, I can't imagine any reason to actually watch this movie.  Oliver Stone, minus politics, equals "Alexander".  And any 9/11 movie, minus politics, equals pointlessness.

Much as I admire Stone, I'm actually looking forward to Paul Greengrass' film a little more.  If he can give it the "Bloody Sunday" treatment and not let it get glossed over (the TV version, "The Flight That Fought Back", made me want to throw up, then hit something, then throw up again), he should actually be able to do justice to the story, without making it a) exploitative, b) offensive, or c) jingoistic.

Quote from: polkablues

Quote from: MacGuffinMany were worried that Stone might introduce his own politics into the storyline.

If he doesn't, I can't imagine any reason to actually watch this movie.  Oliver Stone, minus politics, equals "Alexander".  And any 9/11 movie, minus politics, equals pointlessness.

Odd considering his most political films are factually his most off base films. I recently went through the outcry on print following JFK's release. Though I do believe others were involved in the assassination of JFK, it ws probably not as pitch perfect as Stone may want us to believe. Masterpiece the film is, its strength is really in the dramatic recreation of the assassination. A generation's feelings were finally being realized about one of the most significant events in American history.

I'm really an Oliver Stone enthusiast though. The best American filmmaker working now.

Quote from: polkabluesMuch as I admire Stone, I'm actually looking forward to Paul Greengrass' film a little more.  If he can give it the "Bloody Sunday" treatment and not let it get glossed over (the TV version, "The Flight That Fought Back", made me want to throw up, then hit something, then throw up again), he should actually be able to do justice to the story, without making it a) exploitative, b) offensive, or c) jingoistic.

Agreed.  Bloody Sunday is one of the best visceral, in-the-moment retelling of events I've seen.  The politics in that film were also portrayed brilliantly.  If he can bring a similar quality to Flight 93, it would be pretty awesome to see.  I hope he tones down the camera a bit... I think it suits 9/11 less than it did Bloody Sunday.  The fact that, as a Brit, he could do such a great movie on Bloody Sunday means he may be able to give it a perspective that Stone, as an American, might not be able to.

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetOdd considering his most political films are factually his most off base films.

Well, "JFK" was really an amalgam of assassination theory, "Natural Born Killers" is essentially a fantasy film, though highly politically charged,  "Nixon" was outright historical fiction (I mean that in the literary sense of the term, not in a demeaning way), and "Salvador" (which I still consider his best film) is both political and very factually accurate.  So really he's all over the place.  I just feel like Stone's voice as a director is so integrated with his opinions as a political person that any attempt to separate the two ends in, if not outright failure, at the very least a film without any real reason to exist.

I'm not saying I want Stone's 9/11 movie to be a conspiracy theory movie like "JFK" was (it's going to be a while before any director will be able to get away with that), I'm just saying that if he's going to be avoiding any political commentary at all (as he suggests in statements regarding the film), it shouldn't even be Oliver Stone making the movie.  There are other directors who can make this story into a personal, character-driven tale of courage and heroism; that's not what Oliver Stone does well, and that's certainly not what I want to see when I go to an Oliver Stone film.

You're essentially correct. His films are broad opinions. Thing is, I'm not sure if its really a 'political' opinion he is giving. Political filmmakers stick closer to fact than he does. (ex. Costa-Gravas) Stone is a social commentator who shows many ideas of thought in his films. I also wish he never loses that in a film he makes so yea, I definitely agree with you, considering a few points.

demme compared him to michael moore, but it wasn't meant to be an insult.

Quote from: The Gold TrumpetYou're essentially correct. His films are broad opinions. Thing is, I'm not sure if its really a 'political' opinion he is giving. Political filmmakers stick closer to fact than he does. (ex. Costa-Gravas) Stone is a social commentator who shows many ideas of thought in his films. I also wish he never loses that in a film he makes so yea, I definitely agree with you, considering a few points.

"Social commentator" is probably the best possible way to describe him (which definitely puts him in a similar field as Michael Moore), though I would argue that his commentary is implicitly political.  I once heard politics described as an individual or group's attempt to dictate history ("dictate" in the sense of a stenographer).  That seems to be Stone's method; he's dictating a draft of history through his films.  

And the difficulty with fiction based on history, as opposed to documentary, is that you can't really go through it like a fact-checker, saying this is accurate, this is off-base, this is true, this is false... so much of it (and this applies to directors like Costa-Gavras as well, though he's much more subtle in his messages... not counting "Mad City", anyway) is non-verifiable.  It's tough to say any historical movie "sticks with the facts", when none among us can say for certain what the facts are in any case.  It's analysis of available evidence, or speculation based on bits and pieces of available information.  Whether or not the history that appears on the screen aligns with the history that appears in the history books (themselves politically motivated) is always a conscious decision, one which is defined by, and defines, politics.

First, the comparison to Michael Moore. I resent it. Moore, even if he has forgotten it, is still a documentary filmmaker. The availability to use fiction the way Stone can is not in his corner. I think Moore's imprudence to inject commentary at the expense of fact is not a good quality for his profession.

But, sure, both are highly political and want their films to be more than artistic interpretations but legitimate commentary. I do think other filmmakers take historical fact more seriously than Stone even if its still interpretation and sometimes guessing when telling the story.

Anyone hear Oliver Stone's political rants lately? Until recently, I hadn't but I did hear him throw some kind comments G.W. Bush's way. But, hurrah, he's back to what we expect of him. He isn't going to be joining Dennis Miller.
-----------------------------------------------

At an HBO Films panel on "Making Movies That Matter," Oliver Stone opined that huge corporations that make mediocre movies are part of what made Osama bin Laden plan the Sept. 11 attack. "They control culture," he said of the corporations, in comments quoted in the New Yorker. "They control ideas. And I think the revolt of Sept. 11th was about 'F-- you! F-- your order.' "

"Revolt? It was state-sponsored mass murder, using civilians as missiles." Hitchens said later he thought Stone was "a moral idiot as well as an intellectual idiot." Stone said later, "This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy."  (Source: Leah Garchik, "The Stars Weigh In," San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 2001.)

------------------------------------------------

"Don't believe most of the stuff you see in the movies," Oliver Stone told a Brown audience on December 1. Hollywood, said the director of Platoon and JFK, is controlled by "chickens" and "concentration camp guards." History books are no better, Stone warned, in a speech that was part of the Ivy Film Festival. "Most historians are ass-kissers and tenure seekers," he said.

Drawing comparisons to Vietnam, Stone accused the U.S. government of withholding the truth about the war in Afghanistan: "Bin Laden was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who told [President] Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the Saudis." Then, Stone claimed, there's the cover-up involving ground zero: limbs getting cut off bodies for jewelry, a man walking off with $132 million.

Nicolas Cage Talks "9/11" Project
Posted:   Wednesday October 12th, 2005 5:31pm
Source:   iF Magazine
Author:   Garth Franklin  


 
Currently finishing up work on "The Wicker Man" remake, Nicolas Cage spoke with iF Magazine and discussed his next project - the Oliver Stone directed film about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"I've met with John McLoughlin. I've spent some time with him and talked through some things. I spent some down at the Port Authority and met all the other surviving members of the tragedy that were there. I'll sort of also talk through it with Oliver. I get the feeling from Oliver that the work they've done on the screenplay that that they want to make it pretty cinema-veritae so it'll feel like real time, unfolding" said the "Ghost Rider" actor.

He continued - "It's going to smack of reality, and they're going to try and make it as real as they can. I'm happy to say that Oliver and I have been trying to work together for many years. It hasn't happened, but I'm happy to say that with this one, because it's so positive about the human condition - the buildings themselves really, it's not about them. It's really more about this sample of men when the buildings came down where they went to survive and how they coped".

Custer Gets Stoned Again?
Morning Star buzz.

According to a posting at The Studio System, Oscar winner Oliver Stone appears to be attached to direct and to executive produce Son of the Morning Star for the Mount Film Company. The project follows George Armstrong Custer, the legendary U.S. Army officer who led the 7th Cavalry in its vainglorious last stand against an alliance of Plains Indians at the Little Big Horn in 1876.

Based on Evan Connell's book, Son of the Morning Star was previously produced as a TV miniseries starring Gary Cole and Rosanna Arquette. The current script by Mark Wheaton has previously been described by Variety as being more of a "political thriller" than a Western. Therein could lie the hook for Stone.

Morning Star producer Thom Mount also produced Stone's Natural Born Killers.

Stone had once been attached to helm Marching to Valhalla, based on Michael Blake's novel about Custer, and was reportedly eyeing Brad Pitt for the lead but that project was never produced.

Its too easy of a fit to believe right now. Stone has been tied to so many political projects in the last 5 years that I'll await better sources.

Quote from: MacGuffinStone had once been attached to helm Marching to Valhalla, based on Michael Blake's novel about Custer, and was reportedly eyeing Brad Pitt for the lead but that project was never produced.

"I never noticed how hot Custer was."

The only guy around who should be playing Custer is John Hawkes.  I mean, come on.

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fus.ent4.yimg.com%2Ftv.yahoo.com%2Fimages%2Fhe%2Fphoto%2Ftv_pix%2Fhbo%2Fdeadwood%2Fjohn_hawkes%2Fdeadwood_johnpjohnson.jpg&hash=1d55379d6431fcddd8489808771503a60ca93671) (https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kshs.org%2Fexhibits%2Fblc%2Fgraphics%2Fcuster.jpg&hash=0105d9ad65de4f23347ce287e6d84bfdad16e468)

More on that Wall Street sequel
Source: Moviehole

And yes, it is a sequel.

When IESB first got word from Michael Douglas, himself, that another "Wall Street" movie was in the works, some wondered whether the Oscar Winner was actually referring to a straight-up hell-yeah bring-that-shit-on sequel, or a - boo! hiss! - remake, with Douglas's involvement probably limited to executive producing.

Had a chat to someone at FOX this past weekend about the film, who confirmed that it's indeed in the works and that it's a sequel. Thank god.

It's Douglas. It's Oliver Stone. It's Ed Pressman, producing.

"It's a continuation of the Gordon Gecko story....set twenty-odd years later", I'm told. "Basically, it'd start with Gecko coming out of jail - everything caught up with him, as it did most people like him at the end of the 80s - and then having to apply his ways to the very changed world."

Apparently, both Douglas and "Wall Street" director Oliver Stone are in the "early stages" of writing the film.

As for whether Chuck Sheen will return, to reprise his role from the first film, doesn't sound like it. "No idea, but doubtful. Heard nothing on Sheen. I assume, maybe, the only other person that might return is Sean Young - amusingly enough - as Douglas's wife. Have to wait to see the script, though".

Oliver Stone to make Venezula coup film: Chavez

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday that Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone was planning to film a movie about the 2002 coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted the former army officer.

Chavez, a harsh critic of the United States, says U.S. authorities were behind the botched coup that toppled his government for less than two days. U.S. officials dismiss his accusations.

Stone, who won best-directing Oscars for Vietnam War movies "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July," and directed a 2003 documentary, "Comandante," about his meeting with Cuban President Fidel Castro, a Chavez ally, would team up with British producer John Daly, who worked on "The Last Emperor" Chavez said.

"Top news -- two filmmakers join forces to make movie about the coup in Venezuela," Chavez said during his weekly Sunday broadcast. He said his government had given them permission to announce plans for the movie at the Cannes film festival.

An alliance of politicians and dissident military officers assumed power in Venezuela on April 12, 2002, following reports Chavez had resigned after more than a dozen people were killed when gunmen opened fire during a huge opposition march.

Chavez insisted he never resigned and he was returned to power by supporters and loyal troops on April 14. The coup has been a recurring theme in Chavez's war of words with Washington, which portrays the Venezuelan leader as a menace to democracy.

Relations between the United States and oil supplier Venezuela remain tense, particularly as Chavez cultivates alliances with U.S. foes like Iran and Cuba and blasts U.S. foreign policies as "imperialist domination."

The State Department announced last week the United States would no longer sell arms to Venezuela, insisting the South American nation had failed to cooperate in global efforts to fight terrorism.

Stone denies directing Venezuela coup film

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone said on Monday that he was not directing a movie about the 2002 coup in Venezuela despite an announcement to the contrary by President Hugo Chavez.

"Rumors that I am directing a film about the 2002 coup in Venezuela are untrue and unfounded," Stone said in a statement released by his publicist.

On Sunday, leftist firebrand Chavez told the South American country that Stone was making a film about the short-lived coup that Chavez says was planned by United States Washington denies the charge.

Relations between the United States and oil supplier Venezuela remain tense, particularly as Chavez cultivates alliances with U.S. foes like Iran and Cuba and blasts U.S. foreign policies as "imperialist domination."

"So there will be a movie," Chavez said during his weekly television talk show. "Could it be that the government of the empire will try to prevent the filming of a movie about a coup that they themselves planned and carried out? Let's see if they can."

Dissident military officers joined with opposition politicians to seize power in Venezuela on April 12, 2002, following reports Chavez had resigned. The power grab came after more than a dozen people were killed by gunmen during a huge opposition march.

Chavez, insisting he never resigned, was returned to power by supporters and loyal troops two days later. The coup has been a recurring theme in Chavez's war of words with Washington, which portrays the Venezuelan leader as a menace to democracy.

Stone won best directing Oscars for Vietnam War movies "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July," and directed a 2003 documentary, "Comandante," about Cuban President Fidel Castro, a Chavez ally.

Oliver's acid trip down memory lane
Source: NY Daily News

Guests this weekend at the Park Regency hotel may have been surprised to sniff some funny-smelling smoke drifting around director Oliver Stone's suite, but they shouldn't have been.

"I like ayahuasca," a hallucinogenic tea, said Stone, who's also spoken of his love of pot. "And I liked LSD, and I liked peyote."

The director of "Platoon" and "JFK" thinks tripping is so beneficial, he once spiked his father's wine with acid. The gonzo filmmaker tells Chris Heath in the new GQ magazine that he was just trying to help - like the time his father lent him one of his favorite French prostitutes for the young director's first sexual experience. It was left to his mother, he added, to teach him the delicate art of self-satisfaction.

But Stone got serious to direct "World Trade Center," starring Nicolas Cage, about two Port Authority cops trapped in the collapse of the towers on 9/11. "The script was very emotional - it got to me," said the moviemaker, a Trinity School and Yale grad who served in Vietnam.

In fact, it was the uniform jacket he wore to Martin Scorsese's film class - and Stone's angry attitude - that he claims provided Scorsese with one of his greatest inspirations.

"Whatever it was," he said, "he certainly used it in 'Taxi Driver.'

"I'm sure that factored in, because I was driving a cab. He may not have known about it, but the seething part, and I used to wear an Army jacket, and I looked a lot like [Robert] De Niro going to class."

Quote from: Oliver Stone
In fact, it was the uniform jacket he wore to Martin Scorsese's film class - and Stone's angry attitude - that he claims provided Scorsese with one of his greatest inspirations.

"Whatever it was," he said, "he certainly used it in 'Taxi Driver.'

"I'm sure that factored in, because I was driving a cab. He may not have known about it, but the seething part, and I used to wear an Army jacket, and I looked a lot like [Robert] De Niro going to class."

What a fucking asshole.  Yeah, and Paul Schrader followed him around and took notes too.  I wish this cock would just fry his brain once and for all-- I see no end to this decade-plus of irrelevant filmmaking.

Quote from: Weak2ndAct on July 23, 2006, 03:21:35 AM
What a fucking asshole.  Yeah, and Paul Schrader followed him around and took notes too.  I wish this cock would just fry his brain once and for all-- I see no end to this decade-plus of irrelevant filmmaking.

And I see no end to your endless posts of irrelevant bashing. A lot of people don't like Oliver Stone. Your just winning the douche race by trying to attack him every chance you get. No worries. I see by your recent posts Grind House has to be a relevant film to look forward to.

GT: Dude, seriously, get off your high horse.  You don't find it a tad ridiculous that Stone would claim to be the inspiration of one of the most iconic characters in cinema?  I am no Stone-hater, in fact I love a whole lot of his movies-- sadly though, I think he's been lost since 'NBK,' and hasn't had a great one since.  I've seen them all, and am consistently disappointed by his recent efforts.  Please, by all means, stick up for Alexander, Any Given Sunday, U-Turn... even the docs aren't anything to write home about.

And as for your 'Grind House' comment... you're just a petty, nitpicking twat.  There's 'relevant,' and then there's 'fun'.  Though I suspect you don't know what the latter is.

Haha, I find it a tad ridiculous that you think you know any better than Oliver Stone in this situation. Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader. It was filmed by Martin Scorsese. That means that Scorsese had control over attire, which means Scorsese could have been influenced by Stone to clad Travis Bickle in an army jacket. Since Scorsese also calls Taxi Driver a personal film, it means he could have been in contact with Schrader while he wrote it and was throwing ideas back and forth with him.

The point is, I don't know as you don't either. I'll guess that since Scorsese and Stone are friends that Oliver Stone at least has a better idea. Yes, I barked at you. I didn't mind doing so either. You launched an attack based on the fact you can't stand the guy.

Can I truly defend Oliver Stone since Natural Born Killers? Absolutely. Nixon is one of his best dramas while Any Given Sunday is one of his best pure filmmaking efforts. I dare anyone who is not an admirer of intricate and perfect editing to not marvel at how great that film is (general statement, sure, but I'll argue it anyday). I also think it is Oliver Stone's update of the storytelling scheme he started in The Doors. It is also an update of similar themes. Both films deal with Americana landmarks and both are equal portraits of their greatness and destruction. Anytime you do want to actually begin discussing these movies, let me know.

In the end, you're right. I'm never going to be able to enjoy genre fillers like "Grind House". I hate that those types of movies that are focused on just being enjoyable rides. I hate that Quentin Tarantino regards them as less than grade B genres. I also hate the film, "U-Turn". Oliver Stone called it a grade D genre film. He only wanted to make it enjoyable and weird at the same time. I couldn't stand that movie. Oh, wait, I did like it. Haha, your telling me I don't like fun movies because you have no argument. Awesome.

Oliver Stone Takes a Blast at Bush

Filmmaker Oliver Stone blasted President George W. Bush Thursday, saying he has "set America back 10 years."

Stone added that he is "ashamed for my country" over the war in Iraq and the U.S. policies in response to the attacks of Sept. 11.

"We have destroyed the world in the name of security," Stone told journalists at the San Sebastian International Film Festival prior to a screening of his latest movie, "World Trade Center." The film tells the true story of the survival and rescue of two policemen who were trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, after they went to help people escape.

"From Sept. 12 on, the incident (the attacks) was politicized and it has polarized the entire world," said Stone. "It is a shame because it is a waste of energy to see that the entire world five years later is still convulsed in the grip of 9/11.

"It's a waste of energy away from things that do matter which is poverty, death, disease, the planet itself and fixing things in our own homes rather than fighting wars with others. Mr. Bush has set America back 10 years, maybe more."

The director of blockbusters such as "Platoon," and "JFK" said the U.S. reaction to the attacks was out of proportion.

"If there had been a better sense of preparation, if we had a leadership that was more mature," he said. "We did not fight back in the same way that the British fought the IRA or the Spanish government fought the Basques here. Terrorism is a manageable action. It can be lived with," said Stone.

Stone rejected allegations that U.S. authorities may have known about the attacks in advance and said the real conspiracy came after.

"I think that conspiracy-mongering on 9/11 is a waste of time," he said. "The far greater conspiracy occurred after 9/11 when basically a neo-cabal inside our government hijacked policy and went to war. That was as broad a conspiracy as we can get and it was about 20, 30 people. That's all, they took over and all these books are coming out and they are pointing it out," said Stone.

"This war on Iraq is a disaster. I'm disgraced. I'm ashamed for my country," he said. "I'm also ashamed that America has attacked itself with its constitutional breakdowns. I'm deeply ashamed."

In the United States' favor, Stone posited that it's not responsible for all the world's problems.

"You can't see that the United States is responsible for all the evil in the world because you can see so many dictators and so many bestial acts all over the world now. .... There is something in the human heart, the international human heart, that is evil," said Stone.

"That's the evil that turns its mind and ears on humanity and is able to say `I can kill a person in the name of God or religion.' This is not a human being, this a fanatic. And I fear that fanaticism is the result of our overreaction to 9/11," said Stone.

Oliver Stone's real 911 movie
Source: Moviehole

Finally, Oliver Stone's going to be let off his leash to tell a 'real' 911 movie.

The "World Trade Center" helmer has decided to tackle a second film about the events of September 11 – this time opening fire on America's response to the terrorist attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan and hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden.

According to Variety, "Jawbreaker" will be written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose most recent credit was the controversial ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11. The script is based in part on a memoir of the same name by Gary Bernsten, the CIA's pointman during the invasion, who coordinated the efforts of the CIA and Special Operations Forces to end Taliban rule.

Stone and Par bought the book months ago and kept it hush-hush so that "World Trade Center" could open unencumbered in the U.S. and overseas. A first draft was written by Ralph Pezzullo, who co-wrote "Jawbreaker" with Bernsten.

"This will be partly about the ground war in Afghanistan, among other things," Stone said. "We've been discreet because we didn't want 'World Trade Center' to be affected unnecessarily by political bullshit about Afghanistan."

"World Trade Center" was marketed as a heroic rescue tale, but Stone recognizes it will be harder to avoid political discussions on "Jawbreaker." In a memoir heavily vetted by the CIA (there are pages of blacked-out lines), Bernsten details feeling stymied by bureaucrats in President Bill Clinton's administration who prevented operatives from engaging a growingly malicious Al Qaeda and Bin Laden presence. While Bernsten describes how he and his cohorts were stunningly told to stand down when they had Bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, he writes approvingly of President George W. Bush's handling of the invasion.

But Stone, an outspoken critic of Bush's decision to invade Iraq, said Bernstein's tome does look skeptically at the situation, too. "Gary might be a defender of the administration, but he certainly had very clear criticisms of bureaucratic snafus in Afghanistan," said Stone.

Also compelling is Stone's choice of Nowrasteh, whose "Path to 9/11" script met a volley of critical salvos for injecting fictional scenes. The mini, which was nearly pulled by ABC in September, was pointedly criticized by Clinton for unfairly painting his administration as indifferent to Bin Laden. Nowrasteh wrote and directed 2001 telepic "The Day President Reagan Was Shot," which Stone exec produced.

Stone just returned from a whirlwind nine-country, 22-day tour to launch "World Trade Center" and said he felt high levels of skepticism and scrutiny on a film he felt was devoid of political context.

"They were watching every nuance of the film, trying to decide if I was being pro-Bush, anti-Bush, too patriotic," Stone said. "It's the least political film I've made, and looking at it politically blinds one to the heart of the movie."

Stone said the intention in "Jawbreaker" will be to create compelling drama, not a polemic.

"It has the potential to be very exciting. There's a lot of action and a thriller element that we're still trying to bring out," Stone said. "I'm not looking to make a political movie, but it always seems to come down to that with me."

Wow, the second film sooner than later. I'm glad. Stone has the re-edit for Alexander to do (which I want to see) and then he should go directly into making this film. The details sound fantastic and looks like he will be back throwing his old punches. The first since Nixon. One thing I worry about is the star talent that will be in this film. He needs them to get his projects financed and usually he picks good talent but his picking in Alexander and WTC have been questionable.

From BBC Online:

"Stone plans Afghan invasion film

Stone's other films include Nixon, Wall Street and Salvador
Director Oliver Stone is to follow up his 9/11 drama World Trade Center with a film about the subsequent US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The film will be partly based on a CIA officer's best-selling book Jawbreaker, which also chronicles the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

Stone has aroused controversy with films including Platoon and JFK.

But the film-maker told Variety magazine that the new movie would be "compelling drama, not a polemic".

Jawbreaker, by CIA officer Gary Berntsen, includes the suggestion that the US bungled a chance to find Bin Laden.

World Trade Center, which tells the story of two police officers trapped in the rubble of the Twin Towers after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, received largely favourable reviews in the US.

Stone has called it "the least political film I've made".

The 60-year-old won best director Oscars for Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon, and a best screenplay honour for Midnight Express."

Armstrong,Stone to chat at music event

Director Oliver Stone and composer Craig Armstrong will participate in a keynote Q&A session at the 2006 Hollywood Reporter/Billboard Film & TV Music Conference, to be held Nov. 14-15 at the Beverly Hilton.

At the Nov. 14 session, Stone and Armstrong will discuss their collaboration on the feature "World Trade Center," which recently won Hollywood Movie of the Year honors at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Stone's award-winning career includes Oscar and Golden Globe awards for his direction of "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Platoon" and his screenwriting for "Midnight Express"; he also received Golden Globes for directing "JFK" and writing "Fourth of July." He won an Emmy as the producer of the HBO film "Indictment: The McMartin Trial."

Stone's other films include "Any Given Sunday," "The Doors," "Wall Street," "Evita," "Natural Born Killers" and the documentaries "Persona Non Grata," "Comandante" and "Looking for Fidel." His features as producer or co-producer include "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and "Blue Steel."

Armstrong's honors include a Grammy for the score of Taylor Hackford's "Ray," a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello Award for his music in Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet," a BAFTA and an American Film Institute Award for his work on Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge" and a second Novello for his music for Phillip Noyce's "The Quiet American."

Formerly a student at the Royal Academy and resident composer at Glasgow's Tron Theatre, Armstrong also is known for his pop work with Madonna, U2, Massive Attack and Pet Shop Boys. He has released two solo albums, "The Space Between Us" and "As If to Nothing," on Massive Attack's label Melankolic; he also has released "Piano Works" (Sanctuary) and "Film Works" (Family).

Why doesn't Stone make a film about the assassination of President Garfield? 

Oliver Stone
The three-time Academy Award-winning director on Kennedy conspiracy theories, Platoon's illegal birth and why he stuck to the facts when filming World Trade Center
Source: Guardian Unlimited

Mark Lawson: Welcome to the Guardian interview with the three-time Academy Award-winning director and writer Oliver Stone. We're going to talk about his work tonight, which over the last 40 years has dealt with America's critical emergencies, from the Kennedy assassination to the Vietnam war, to Watergate and the Nixon years, to most recently, with World Trade Center, the 9/11 attacks. Welcome, please, Oliver Stone.

We'll talk about the films in a moment, but the first thing that struck me on the way here is that tomorrow, after nine years, the report into the death of Princess Diana is published in London, addressing all the conspiracy theories - was she murdered, etc. And Oliver Stone flies into London the night before? Are we supposed to believe that's a coincidence?

Oliver Stone: I believe I was told part of the revelation tomorrow. What I had to do with it you'll find out. What was more shocking to me when I arrived today was, the first thing I saw at Heathrow was a banner headline saying "Strangler loose in Ipswich". I thought, how British. Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock's Frenzy - it was kind of a throwback.

ML: I mentioned in the introduction that you've dealt with the big American political subjects from Vietnam to 9/11. There's one gap so far, which is Iraq and Bush. Probably for a lot people here, the dream next film from you would be Bush or Iraq, or both. Is it going to happen?

OS: That's a very flattering comment because I feel World Trade Center is an opening for me into this world. And I really am interested in the "post" period, the 9/12 on. I'm not sure the answer lies so much in Iraq, I think that's a result. For me the answer lies in the interim step, in Afghanistan. I think there's a lot of light to be shed on the nature of that war, how it came about militarily and politically, and also the nature of the war with Pakistan, India and Iran. It's a great subject matter. It leads to Iraq but that's the third phase. And there are already many movies about Iraq in terms of the internet and documentaries - in a sense, it's been usurped by television, as 9/11 was, to a certain degree.

ML: Before we talk about World Trade Center, do you know what the next film will be?

OS: No. It's the same thing for any film-maker who works at it. It's a period of uncertainty. We've been developing three or four things. We do a lot of work in research and development - we hire, we write screenplays or have writers write them; sometimes the screenplays take a long time, sometimes they're quicker. You need an actor, a budget, a studio. It all has to blend; it really is like an experiment. Nine out of 10 things do fail, or four out of five. So it's that period right now and it's a tough period, but we work just as hard doing nothing as when we're filming.

ML: We're going to start with the most recent thing you did, World Trade Center, the story of two men from the New York Port Authority Police Department caught in the collapsing World Trade tower.

[runs clip]

ML: I think that film surprised a number of people who've followed your career. As you know there are numerous books of conspiracy theories about 9/11: the American government did it, Israel did it, it wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon and all the rest of it. But you've pretty much gone with the official facts of the story.

OS: We followed strictly the story of these four people - two husbands and two wives. Their story is corroborated. We also had 40-50 rescuers on the film who worked there. We're dealing with facts here, authenticity, we're dealing with what we know. Eyewitnesses would tell us, "This happened that day." I talked to John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno and their wives many times. I don't think they ever expressed to me even once any opinions about politics or Bush. It wasn't about that. In fact, John, because he'd been at the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, all he said was that in the confusion that day, he thought it was a truck bomb. It never occurred to him that it was a plane. And to the end, that's what they thought. There's a wonderful moment when Will Jimeno comes out of the hole and says "Where'd the buildings go?" They didn't know. If you're operating within the parameters of these 24 hours, you must adhere to what they know. This is a subjective movie - it's seen from within, from their point of view. But it's also from the point of view of their wives, from without, through the television, so it's subjective and objective. It would have been wrong to go to politics. Plus, we had a lot to do - there were three rescues, devastation, survival, life in the suburbs amid the worsening news, all this in 24 hours. You have to understand the tension - two wives at home realising that there would be no survivors. That's a great story in itself. Then there's the marine who rescued them, that's another great story. What time do you have to cut away to other things, much less want to?

ML: I understand that. You're entirely true to the story, but if I'd had to guess which aspect of 9/11 you would have chosen to dramatise, I don't think I would have chosen this. It's the one optimistic part of the story - that some people did survive it.

OS: There were times in the 90s when things were so prosperous... I mean, when Reagan was still around, I made Salvador attacking the Reagan administration in Central America. Perhaps I'm a contrarian. It seems to me 2006 is a far darker time than 2001. Those of you who remember that day would have seen how united the world was - the world was with America, had great empathy with America, and did again, maybe not as much, for the war in Afghanistan. But that has all changed. Now we have serious problems - more deaths, more terrorism, more constitutional breakdown in my own country. It's a disgrace, what's happened. And that's much more serious to me than the 2001 was-there-a-conspiracy-or-not. I don't know enough about it and I'm sure there's a lot of leaks and messy stories, but I've been through these arguments. But al-Qaida claimed they did it, over and over again. They claimed the credit, and the motive is very clear. They succeeded in creating a panic, a mental instability in the world and that had tremendous consequences because it was fuelled by George Bush's administration's reaction. So they've won. It's the opposite of the JFK killing - there you had a man, an uneducated, single guy who said, "I didn't do it. I'm a patsy." He disappears with the Dallas police for almost 48 hours, all his transcripts are destroyed, or are missing, and he's killed. It is the opposite of this story. It's a Reichstag fire kind of story. There's no motive, and who benefits? This is the key question and never gets addressed by the press. They always follow the scenery - that's what Ruby and Oswald were. I always say follow the money. Who benefited, what was the motive to get rid of John F Kennedy? I think there's a big difference. So why waste time with conspiracy theories? If you're going to politics on this issue, go now. But we don't know everything. If I'd made a movie in 2004 about the politics of the Bush war, I'd be shamefaced today because there's so much new information that we didn't have in 2004. Every month in the US there are about 10 books - [Bob] Woodward['s Bush at War, etc], The 2% Solution [by Matthew Miller], The Looming Tower [by Lawrence Wright]; every book has deepened my awareness of what really happened and it's not so simple as going after Osama bin Laden. If I make a movie - and we're not journalists, we're film-makers and dramatists, we have to look for the overall meaning and pattern of an event. That takes time.

ML: But it seems to me you are moving towards that film.

OS: Don't rush in where angels...

ML: The reason why I chose that clip from World Trade Center was that another surprise for me when I saw it was that, when I think of an Oliver Stone film, I think of the huge expansive camera movement, reminding us how wide the screen is. This was very, very different.

OS: This was a very tough picture to do, as hard as I've ever made. The lungs alone took a beating. But then you're working with two men in a hole. You have two actors - Nic Cage hasn't been this quiet in a long time. You basically have half a body and a head - it's a pickle in a jar. It's not easy. And Seamus McGarvey, our Irish-Scottish DP, lit this thing - you could see the expression on Jay Hernandez's face, but this was a very dark hole. It's basically a conversation between light and dark, because then we'd cut to the suburbs. We timed it so that you had 10 minutes in the hole the first time -very dark, very cold - then out to the suburbs where it was a really beautiful day, then back to the hole; eight holes with diminishing time periods from 10 minutes down to about two or three minutes. But our biggest problem was the third act, because once they're rescued by the marines - I don't know if you've all seen the movie...

ML: You've just given the ending away.

OS: There are three rescues in the movie - the marine, Will and John, and each one was a big number in itself. It took five hours to get Will out. People think that when you see somebody it's easy to rescue them but on the contrary, it's even more difficult; people can get killed because the spaces are so dangerous and narrow. We wanted to show the heroism of the first responders - it was their job but they went into those positions and risked their lives. And it becomes more than a story of two men, it's the story of collective effort.

ML: Let's take a look at a second clip. We're now going in chronological order, starting with Platoon.

[runs clip]

ML: I'm interested in the shape of your career because there had been work before Platoon - there were screenplays and some directing. But in 1986, when you were 40, that's when your career really seemed to begin and you became a director. Was there something that happened?

OS: Yeah, I think I got angry and fed up. I had done Midnight Express, Scarface and Conan, but I really was a director at heart, and I wanted to break through. I'd had two failures up to then, two horror films. They were similar in theme, actually, and I vowed never to do a horror film again. Jamais deux san trois. It would be a disaster for me to do a horror film - I'm not a natural born sadist, actually, and I think you have to be to do a good horror film. You have to scare the shit out of the audience, you have to really want to. I don't know if I could. 86 was a banner year.

ML: You'd served in Vietnam. Had you always known that that would be a big subject for you as a film-maker?

OS: It wasn't made, you know. It had been written 76 and turned down for 10 years. It was a bit of a stale joke. Frankly, when I got the opportunity from an English producer called John Daly... he actually read both scripts, Salvador and Platoon, and asked which one I wanted to do first. Which of course to a young film-maker is like a dream. I picked Salvador first because I was so convinced that Platoon was cursed - it had been started so many times but not got made, so I thought it was not going to happen. It was [Michael] Cimino on The Year of the Dragon, which I wrote with him, who convinced me to pull it out of the closet and go with Dino De Laurentiis, who reneged on his promise. I got another lawsuit but I got it back by the skin of my teeth. And then John Daly walked into my life. God bless the English for making those two movies - they were made illegally, almost fraudulently in Mexico. Salvador was made on a letter of credit issued to an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie - on our slate on Salvador, you can read the word Outpost, which was supposed to be the movie he was doing. Years later, of course, for other reasons, the banker was indicted, the letters of credit were questioned and so forth. But I do think you need government tax help - Britain benefited enormously from this. I don't know what's going on now...

ML: It's in the balance at the moment.

OS: You had a great system for a while.

ML: One of the subjects of Platoon and also Born On The Fourth of July is the number of people who were destroyed by the Vietnam war - the suicide rate being higher than the death rate for example. Did you ever come close to being destroyed by it?

OS: I'm very lucky that I got to make three movies about it - I think that helped enormously. I think there are a lot of successful Vietnam veterans in civilian life who are doing very well on the surface but are very bottled up inside. People who killed people, who killed civilians...Vietnam was a charnel house, there was a lot of indiscriminate killing, probably more so than in Iraq. But that's the nature of war. Platoon is fundamental, it's almost biblical. I was in three different combat platoons, and looking back I have to say there were people who were predisposed to kill anything, and other people who are predisposed to restraint, and it's not an easy equation because there are times when you are under pressure and you kill. It was a bit like a western. And of course, there are the kids who fall in the middle, like my character, the Charlie Sheen character in Platoon. Sometimes life is that way. And the kids in Iraq - who I hear are better soldiers than we were, and there are more Christian-trained and born-agains - they're all encountering this fundamental problem now. Their hatred of the enemy has reached the point where many of them hate the civilian population and they don't know the difference any more.

ML: Do you get angry when you look at people in America, from the president downwards, who got out of the war?

OS: I am beyond it. 2002 was the year I got upset. He was moving troops to the Middle East before the UN resolution. Now they're re-examining that whole period and the Colin Powell speech, but there were troop movements before Powell's speech. Once they moved there, you knew something was going to happen. And [former White House anti-terror adviser Richard] Clarke and various people have verified it, that Bush had the thing on his mind, he wanted to go to war, it was a given. It angers me greatly because when Bush went to Vietnam just four weeks ago, they asked him, "What did the Vietnam war mean to you?" And of course, this is the guy who sat out the war, draft dodged, as did Cheney, six or seven times. And he said something to the effect of, "I think it proves that if you stick in there, you'll win." That was his lesson from Vietnam.

ML: We move now to an earlier president, John F Kennedy. This clip I've chosen, it's part of a very long scene, and is my favourite Oliver Stone scene. It's a speech which I think is one of the great speeches in cinema and I want to talk to you about the writing and the directing of it. But here it is, from JFK.

[runs clip]

ML: The reason I chose that is I want to get at this business of getting what's on the page to what's on screen. It's an enormously long and complex speech, and it's exposition, which is what people always say you can't do in movies. So can you talk a bit about planning that visually?

OS: It was a 12 to 18-minute speech. I offered it to Brando, and I'm glad he didn't do it - it would have taken 30 minutes. It's actually two scenes, it was really complicated editing. Jim Garrison sees Fletcher Prouty in the middle and at the end. We ended up collapsing that in the middle. The secret, I think, to why many people have liked it is not only John Williams's music, but it's coming at the end of the first half. In Holland, there was an intermission after this scene so it gives you time to absorb this. Really, it's about Garrison going from this small, local investigation in New Orleans and jumping up another level - a quantum level leap. He never met Fletcher Prouty but he met a man similar to Prouty, who told him a similar story. But the man vanished. He's no longer operative. Fletcher was somebody I met separately. He'd written several books about it, including The Secret Team. He was chief of special ops, one of the key guys in the cold war. He was involved in at least 25 to 50 CIA missions in Tibet to Guatemala, everywhere. He supplied the hardware - the CIA didn't have the military weapons at the time. Something smelled bad to him that year and he quit, and he was discredited by the administration and by journalists, not for any correct reason. They spread the usual disinformation about him and Garrison. He told me the story from his point of view. I'll never forget that day.

ML: How carefully was it planned in advance?

OS: This was shot on the fly. We did it in two, three days. It was the last scene in the film. [Donald] Sutherland is the fastest talking actor in the world, he's very authoritative at that speed. It was a hell of a lot of dialogue, but I wanted to get it all in. Because Garrison is learning it as we learn it. And Garrison's jaw is dropping, "This is much bigger than I ever thought, how can I go on?" Garrison was the only public official who did anything. It is as a result of his beginning something that we have some records, and those records are invaluable. He also attracted the attention of the private community and they gave him a lot of help. But he could not get all the facts together. I didn't change what Prouty told me - this is based on what he said.

ML: That account in the film is very exciting. Do you believe that that account is what happened, that it's correct?

OS: I don't know who did it but I believe it was a military operation. The shooting, the autopsy, the brain, the Zapruder film - you shoot the guy coming towards you so you get the second shot, the third shot. You don't shoot him going away from you. The pressure's enormous, the sound's enormous and Oswald was not a great shot. And the [6.5mm] Mannlicher-Carcano was a piece of junk. I mean the story was just so ridiculous. The Zapruder film is evidence enough - there are two smoking guns. His head flies backwards, he was shot from the hedge. And they talk about this bullet that hits Kennedy and [Texas governor John] Connally 11 times - it's the most ridiculous bullet in the history of the world. In fact, a British audio group did a test a year ago - this is the English saying this - and said they're 99.9% sure that there were four shots. And the Americans came back a few weeks later and said, "The British are off on this." They always do that. This is a contentious thing, but bottom line: I don't know who, but I know it could not have been one man because too much went wrong at a high level. It was planned, there were a lot of red herrings and misdirections. As Prouty said himself, that whole thing about the military group is typical of a misdirected operation. All this stuff had been worked out in the 50s - you saw this time and again in assassinations in Latin America and everywhere. This is black ops. Who did it? Somebody with military capability. Why? I presented several motives in the film but I can't tell you the answer. But I would say Cuba and Vietnam and the détente with the Russians, with whom Kennedy in 1963 signed this historic agreement on nuclear weapons. That really was potentially the beginning of the end of the cold war. All this had occurred after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Fog of War, as good a film as it is, never mentions why the Cubans were so paranoid about an American invasion in October 1962. Why did they have Russian missiles coming into Cuba? Because they were frightened of our 1961 invasion. There is always cause and effect. Cuba was a big issue and Kennedy was backing off. He was making this new relationship, partly with De Gaulle, with Khrushchev. The world balance was changing. He did announce that he was coming out of Vietnam, whatever contrary evidence is presented. He had no intention of running for re-election on Vietnam, he knew it was a dead duck. So out of these factors, the military-industrial complex, as described by Eisenhower at the beginning of the film, was threatened. This guy was going to win the election in 1964 and the nutcase, his brother Bobby, looked like a 68 potential. This was a serious business, to stop the Kennedys.

ML: You mention Bobby Kennedy. There's a recent book, endorsed by Gore Vidal and others, suggesting it was a mob killing because Bobby went after the mafia.

OS: I know Gore, and I've talked to him about it and we just cannot agree. The mob has no history of doing this kind of thing, except for one time, maybe, with Roosevelt. They seem to be close order killers - they do The Godfather style shootings. This was an organised thing. The mob did a lousy job in Cuba - they missed Castro how many times? The good work they did was with Lucky Luciano in the second world war, when they were called upon, with the labour unions and strikes and stuff like that. But the mafia has never been a very successful ally of the CIA, unless they have some involvement with drugs, with I don't know enough about.

Cut from a report off another site:

"Oliver Stone may have another 9/11 movie in the works.

Apparently the scribe of The Path to 911 is attached to write the screenplay, and now, EMILIO ESTEVEZ is involved, in an acting capacity.

The news comes courtesy of a pal at Chapman/ Leonard, the studio equipment facility, who worked on BOBBY with Estevez. Emilio keeps in touch with some of them - one who works with my brother in law - and mentioned the STONE project this week. Its called JAW BREAKER."

There is two news stories to this. Obviousy, Emilio Estevez looks like he got a job. While not a significantly known great actor, I actually don't mind the idea of him likely playing a politician. With his look and manner he could be very good at it. The second news story is that it looks like Jaw Breaker is actually developing and may be Stone's next film which is good news for all of his fans. I could have seen this film not coming to be with potential costs and its certain controversy.

Stone rolling with new ad against war
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Oliver Stone has been tapped to direct a proposed TV commercial questioning the Bush administration's military strategy in Iraq.

The veteran writer-director was hired by activist groups MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org to helm a 30-second spot derived from video of U.S. soldiers and their family members speaking out against the war. Members of MoveOn will select one of 20 video interviews on its site, as well as on YouTube, for Stone to turn into a commercial.

"We have leaders in Washington who say they're 'supporting our troops' -- but the people who suffer most from their policies are the troops themselves," Stone said. "I decided to participate in this project because, as a veteran, I know that America needs to listen to our servicemen and women."

The videos under consideration can be viewed at pol.moveon.org/videovets. The commercial is expected to air in the coming weeks.

Oliver Stone unveils ad calling for Iraq withdrawal

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone, whose movies voiced the frustration of the Vietnam War generation, on Thursday unveiled a political ad calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

But those expecting a broadside from the man who made the searing anti-war films "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" some 20 years ago may be disappointed.

The 30-second television spot, sponsored by the MoveOn.org political action group and VoteVets.org, features a simple but impassioned plea by John Bruhns, a former infantry sergeant who fought in Iraq during the 2003 invasion and its aftermath.

"We were told to liberate these people. They were shooting at us," Bruhns says to camera. "To keep American soldiers in Iraq for an indefinite period of time, being attacked by an unidentifiable enemy, is wrong, immoral and irresponsible."

Ron Kovic, the author of "Born on the Fourth of July" who was shot and paralyzed in Vietnam, supplies a brief voice-over, saying "Support our troops. Bring them home."

The ad will air nationwide on CNN starting on Thursday for a week. It appears just after the veto by President George W. Bush of a bill from the Democratic-controlled Congress that would have set dates for withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Stone, 60, who fought in Vietnam in the 1960s, was asked to direct the ad for MoveOn.org, which says it has 3.2 million members in the United States campaigning for an end to U.S involvement in the four-year-old war.

Although Stone does not appear in the ad, he said the parallels between U.S. involvement in Iraq and Vietnam were obvious.

"I made three movies about Vietnam and I thought it was behind us," he said on Thursday. "This is a bad summer repeat of a war that happened 40 years ago. We must listen to the soldiers who are coming back."

Stone is one of only a handful of directors to tackle the events of September 11, 2001 and the fallout of the attacks.

His 2006 feature "World Trade Center" was seen as a surprisingly patriotic film that focused on police officers sent to rescue those trapped in New York's twin towers but who ended up buried in the rubble themselves.

Asked if he was planning a movie about the war in Iraq, Stone said; "It's not my generation's war."

"I'd like to do a picture about the politics behind it though. I find that fascinating."

Stone's MoveOn.org ad:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e83_1178298326

Oliver Stone May Return to Vietnam With 'Pinkville'
Source: Cinematical

Back in October we learned that Oliver Stone's next film would be Jawbreaker, another 9/11-related project based on the book by ex-CIA Gary Bernstein. It seemed to make sense at the time, because Stone had just released the 9/11-based World Trade Center. Jawbreaker is likely still going to happen, but there is now another project that the director is possibly taking on first. According to Latino Review, Paramount Vantage has picked up Pinkville (aka "One Day in March"), which will be Stone's return to a subject he knows very well: Vietnam. The studio had been in a bidding war with UA, but Paramount, which handled production on World Trade Center and is also handling Jawbreaker, won out.

The pic, which may star Sean Penn and Channing Tatum, is set around the events of the My Lai Massacre. On March 16, 1968, more than 500 Vietnamese (or 367, depending on the source), including unarmed women, children and elderly, were slaughtered by American soldiers who were given a "search and destroy" order. The horrible mission was eventually reported to the American public in November of 1969, and the news led to increased outrage concerning the Vietnam War. Stone already used the massacre as inspiration for a major scene in Platoon, but apparently he feels there's still more to say, and specifically to say, about the events.

Pinkville, if it happens, will mark Stone's fourth film to directly deal with the Vietnam War (if you don't count his student film, Last Year in Viet Nam, or a less-direct film like Nixon), following the "trilogy" of Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth. It should be a welcome return for the filmmaker, as he is, at least to me, associated with Vietnam (and the '60s and conspiracy theories) in the way that Woody Allen and Scorsese are associated with New York. Plus, the subject matter can now be made to have a different relevance -- both Penn, who starred in the Vietnam film Casualties of War, and Stone are probably interested in displaying parallels between that war and the current war in Iraq.

Ahmadinejad turns down chance to star in Oliver Stone film
· JFK director sought access to make documentary
· President dismisses him as 'part of the Great Satan'
Source: The Guardian
 
His thirst for the limelight has driven him to launch a multilingual blog and issue a string of headline-grabbing statements.

But Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was surprisingly camera-shy when his extrovert persona drew the attention of Hollywood, turning down a request by Oliver Stone, the director of JFK, Nixon and Platoon, to make a documentary film about him. He dismissed the American film-maker as "part of the Great Satan", the Iranian regime's standard term of abuse for the US.

Mr Ahmadinejad's aides said Stone had requested special access to the president after contacting his office through intermediaries in the Iranian film business.

The 60-year-old director has made two documentaries about Cuba's Communist president, Fidel Castro, whom he considers a friend, and another about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

However, Mr Ahmadinejad, who has often criticised Hollywood as a bastion of pro-Zionist interests, was unimpressed by Stone's radical credentials after viewing the films.

"While it is true that Oliver Stone is considered to be among the opposition in the US, the opposition is still part of the Great Satan," the president's media adviser, Mahdi Kalhor, told the semi-official Fars news agency.

"We believe that the American cinema system is devoid of all culture and art and is only used as a device. In the last two years, the global arrogance [Iranian shorthand for the US and Britain] has made a lot of effort to portray their own image of Ahmadinejad, not the one which exists in reality. Hollywood and other Zionist media react to phenomena they don't like through different processes."

Mr Ahmadinejad's adviser, Javan Shamghadri, said Stone's request might be reconsidered if he could secure the rights for Iranian film-makers to make a documentary about the US president, George Bush, and the CIA without harassment.

Iran has complained repeatedly about how the country is depicted by Hollywood. Stone's 2004 film, Alexander, a biopic about Alexander the Great, was heavily criticised because of its sympathetic portrayal of the ancient Macedonian king, who is disliked in Iran because he is held responsible for the destruction of Persepolis, seat of the Achaemenid dynasty, in 330BC. This year, Iran protested to the UN about another film, 300, which portrayed the battle of Thermopylae between the Spartans and Persians in 480BC.

Quote from: MacGuffin on July 02, 2007, 10:34:58 AM
Mr Ahmadinejad's adviser, Javan Shamghadri, said Stone's request might be reconsidered if he could secure the rights for Iranian film-makers to make a documentary about the US president, George Bush, and the CIA without harassment.

if the iranian film-makers are kiarostami, ghobadi, or a makhmalbaf, this no-tie-wearing mofo's adviser may have a point there.

but in truth he would send the ratner equivalent.

Stone Hits Back at "Great Satan" Tag
Source: IMDB

Moviemaker Oliver Stone has responded to Iranian critics who called him "part of the Great Satan" as they refused his official request to make a movie about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Doors director approached Iranian officials at the beginning of 2007 and revealed his plans to turn the life of the country's leader into a biopic. But with Iranian/American cultural relations at a new low thanks to the portrayal of Persians in films like 300 and Stone's Alexander, Middle Eastern film authorities have denied the filmmaker access to Iranian locations. Responding to Stone's request, Ahmadinejad's media advisor has said, "While it is true that Oliver Stone is considered to be among the opposition in the U.S., the opposition is still part of the Great Satan." The director is taking the snub in his stride, stating, "I've been called a lot of things, but never a Great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well and I only hope their experience with an inept, rigid idealogue president goes better than ours."

Wall Street Crashes
The 20th Anniversary Edition of Gordon Gekko's claim to fame hits.

On September 18, 2007, Fox Home Entertainment will release Wall Street (20th Anniversary Edition) on DVD. The film follows an up-'n'-coming hot shot in the stock business that gets persuaded into a life of treachery from the big wig on Wall Street, and will feature bonus materials and extra features, and will be available for the MSRP of $19.98.

The Wall Street (20th Anniversary Edition) DVD will feature the following bonus materials:

On-camera introduction by Oliver Stone
New Interviews with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas
"Greed is Good" Featurette
"Money Never Sleeps: The Making of Wall Street" Featurette
Extensive Deleted Scenes

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fdvdmedia.ign.com%2Fdvd%2Fimage%2Farticle%2F796%2F796046%2Fwall-street-20th-anniversary-edition-20070810110036853-000.jpg&hash=3bf64454f91bb24eeacb1ef68b370fc8de92fc5a)

Is that the first DVD cover with a quote from a character and not a critic?

Quote from: Ravi on August 14, 2007, 02:23:41 PM
Is that the first DVD cover with a quote from a character and not a critic?

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OLIVER STONE IN CONVERSATION


The San Francisco Film Society is co-sponsoring Oliver Stone In Conversation with Ruthe Stein at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on October 11. Tickets are $18, but Film Society year-round members can get them for $15  Oliver Stone, of course, is one of this country's most controversial filmmakers, having directed World Trade Center, Platoon and Natural Born Killers as well as Comandante (SFIFF, 2003) and Salvador (SFIFF, 1986).

http://www.jccsf.org/content_main.aspx?progid=1856&catid=542

Oliver Stone Visits My Lai for New Film

Hollywood director Oliver Stone arrived in Vietnam to research his next film about the Vietnam War, which will focus on the My Lai massacre, local media reported Thursday.

Stone arrived in the central city of Da Nang on Wednesday afternoon and went straight to the site of the 1968 massacre in Quang Ngai province, where U.S. troops killed more than 300 Vietnamese civilians, including many apparently unarmed women and children, Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reported.

The incident provoked international outrage and undermined U.S. support for the war.

Stone, a Vietnam veteran and multiple Oscar winner, has produced three previous movies on the Vietnam War, including Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth.

Stone was accompanied by producer Nicholas Simon, Tuoi Tre reported.

"We came to survey the field as part of the preparations for our new movie project, Pinkville," the newspaper quoted Simon as saying.

Oliver Stone: Life after 'Wall Street'

Fortune sits down with the Academy Award-winning director and discusses the lasting legacy of his classic film and its famous lead character.


NEW YORK (Fortune) -- With buyout kings swimming in wealth, markets in turmoil, and Ray-Bans back in fashion, it might seem like Wall Street has stood still since 1987. But to Oliver Stone, the creator of Gordon Gekko and director of the epoch-defining "Wall Street," times have certainly changed.

"Gordon Gekko couldn't manipulate the markets like he did back then," he says. "It's so big, so huge, that to be a minor player, you need to be a major bank."

Since its release in December, 1987, "Wall Street" has been required viewing for anyone working in finance and a standard way of framing the go-go '80s of junk bonds and power ties - an era that some say has returned during the recent private equity-led mergers and acquisitions boom.

With a twentieth-anniversary DVD released on September 18 and a sequel currently in development, "Wall Street" is again a topic of conversation.

The film is best-known for its lasting character, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, who netted an Academy Award for Best Actor for the role. And its most famous line -"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good," typically shortened to just "Greed is good" - is a favorite of headline writers and Wall Streeters alike.

But Stone - who won the Academy Award for best director for Vietnam-themed films "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July" and was nominated for "JFK" - worries that people frequently forget the film's ending, when Gekko is charged by the SEC with insider trading.

"I'd just say anyone who took away that greed is good has missed the point," he says. "The movie speaks for itself. People who walk out of the movie and think 'he's such a great guy,' they need to think and ask themselves on what terms am I willing to do that?"

The meat of the film, as Stone sees it, centers on Bud Fox, a young stock trader played by Charlie Sheen, who gets swept into Gekko's favor with a few questionable stock tips, but eventually turns on him when Gekko attempts to takeover Bluestar Airlines, where Fox's father is a union leader.

"Really the main motivation was my father," says Stone, 61, who was raised in New York. His father worked as a broker during the Great Depression at Hayden Stone (no relation), a firm that became part of Shearson American Express in the 1970s. "He took me to the movies, and he would bemoan the lack of a good business movie. Businessmen were generally lampooned."

Inspired by the Robert Wise's 1954 film "Executive Suite," which Stone calls the best business movie ever made, he decided to tell a story that would resonate with his father, who died in 1985.

Stone and co-writer Stanley Weiser met with business tycoons like Ace Greenberg, Ken Lipper, and others to consult on the script. Real-life charcters like Carl Icahn, J. Tomlinson Hill (then at Morgan Stanley, now at Blackstone), and Ivan Boesky collectively inspired the Gekko character.

Gekko's aesthetic - the fine suits, the penthouse office - was most directly inspired by Asher Edelman, a corporate raider and avid art collector.

"When I grew up, men didn't talk about how much money they made," says Stone, "and take great pride, and swell like peacocks. I find this personally tasteless and disgusting."

The characters played by Hal Holbrooke (a broker who attempts to mentor young Bud Fox) and Martin Sheen (Fox's union-leader father) represent "the positive forces in the market," says Stone. "Especially the old stockbroker. He keeps trying to teach Bud Fox the ethics of the business. Hal Holbrooke represents my father, who always said Wall Street can do a lot of good. It is not simply a function of making money."

Although "Wall Street" was released to tepid reviews and earned just $40 million at the box office (about a third as much as that year's top hit, "Three Men and a Baby"), it enjoyed a renaissance in 1990 when the cover of Newsweek magazine asked "Is Greed Dead?" after '80s icons like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky ran afoul of insider trading laws.

Today's financial crimes, however, don't interest Stone. "The biggest dramatic story is Enron," he says. "It was a corporation that existed to do nothing. But frankly I read the books, and I still can't understand what they did. It's very hard to do a financial movie, to make stocks and bonds sexy and interesting."

Stone was approached to work on a "Wall Street" sequel for 20th Century Fox, being produced by the original film's producer Ed Pressman and written by Stephen Schiff of TheNew Yorker . But he backed off to pursue other projects. Stone spoke to Fortune from Bangkok, where he's researching a movie called "Pinkville" about the 1968 My Lai massacre.

"I'm on to something else," he says. "Because of the nature of the modern business world, I found it very difficult to bring this character back as a significant figure. That's not to say it can't be done, as a good writer is working on it."

Even with names like Steve Schwarzman buzzing around the street, and with players like Carl Icahn still around, Stone thinks big corporations have replaced the flamboyant tycoon as the true players.

"You just don't hear about the buccaneers anymore," says Stone. "I try to follow business to some degree, but I think there's way too much business news."

Of course Kal would catch the Oliver Stone interview from Wall Street and post it. Haha, just kidding. Great find and many thanks!

Stone to produce another 'Escobar'
Film, slated for '08, is the second of its kind
Source: Variety

Antoine Fuqua will direct "Escobar," a biopic about the notorious Colombian cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar that aspires to be the first of two rival pics on the subject to make it into production.

Oliver Stone will produce with J2 Pictures partners Justin Berfield and Jason Felts, and James Reach.

Fuqua, Stone and J2 are up against "Killing Pablo," an adaptation of the Mark Bowden book about the hunt for Escobar that Joe Carnahan will direct. Bob Yari is financing that project, with Javier Bardem and Christian Bale attached to star.

Carnahan isn't immediately available, however, because he's committed to directing George Clooney in "White Jazz," a high-profile adaptation of the James Ellroy book.

"Escobar" is based on "Mi Hermano Pablo," a book written by Roberto Escobar Gaviria, who served as his brother's accountant and confidant and whose company, STL Holdings, committed the life and literary rights of the Escobar family.

David McKenna, whose credits include "Blow" and "American History X," is working on a rewrite under the supervision of Stone and Fuqua.

"Escobar" has its financing in place, according to J2 partners Berfield and Felts. Production is slated to begin the in first quarter of 2008 in Colombia and Puerto Rico, and Jere Hausfater will handle international sales through Essential Entertainment. Pic will be introduced at the American Film Market.

Stone, who has covered the drug-smuggling terrain as a screenwriter on "Midnight Express" and "Scarface," also knows a thing or two about winning a biopic race: His movie on Alexander the Great got into production first, halting a rival film on the Macedonian conqueror that Baz Luhrmann was to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio was to topline.

Carnahan has worked for five years on "Killing Pablo." Awareness of the subject was recently heightened by "Medellin," a fictional film that was part of an ongoing storyline in the HBO series "Entourage."

While Carnahan and Yari downplayed a rival's emergence in announcing that their Escobar film was on firm footing, the "Escobar" producers said theirs is an honest depiction of Escobar's rise to become one of the world's richest men by leading the Medellin drug cartel and inflicting terror upon Colombia.

"Joe Carnahan's notion of us poaching his territory and rushing for a pre-strike start is false. We've been working with Robert and a half-dozen consultants for a year and a half to tell an accurate story," said Berfield, the former "Malcolm in the Middle" star who's also mobilizing a feature about Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia.

Berfield said that while Escobar's brother is a consultant with a first-hand perspective on how his brother built a drug empire, the sibling doesn't have script approval.

"My brother will be portrayed as a ruthless head of the Medellin cartel," Escobar Gaviria said in a statement. "This is just 10% of the story. The other 90% is the story others trying to portray him simply don't have."

Stone said: "This is a great project about a fascinating man who took on the system. I think I have to thank 'Scarface,' and maybe even Ari Gold."

"Escobar was Robin Hood, a saint to some, and the devil to others," Fuqua told Daily Variety. "He's a fascinating study in contrasts... He came from the wrong side of the tracks with nothing, but when he died was worth $3 billion... He was one of the most successful criminals we've ever seen, and that's why I find him such a compelling subject for a movie.

Biopics often seem to happen in stereo, and there's a lot of pressure not be runner-up. That lesson was underscored by the fate of two films about Truman Capote's quest to write "In Cold Blood."

The Bennett Miller-directed "Capote," which came out first, drew acclaim and an Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman. The Douglas McGrath-directed "Infamous" came second and fizzled. A similar struggle is being waged by rival movies about Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician who was murdered along with S.F. Mayor George Moscone by Dan White, who like Milk was a city supervisor.

Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron finally turned a corner on a 15-year quest to adapt "The Mayor of Castro Street" with a reteam of "The Usual Suspects" director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie for Warner Independent Pictures, but that duo is busy making the Tom Cruise starrer "Valkyrie." Gus Van Sant, once attached to "Castro Street," is mobilizing his own Milk project for an early 2008 start. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen are producing, funding comes from Michael London's Groundswell, and Sean Penn has shown an interest in toplining the film.

Fuqua last directed the Mark Wahlberg starrer "Shooter."

Oliver Stone quashes Iran visit report
The director says that while he's open to making a documentary on the country's controversial president, he has 'no plans at this time' to travel to Tehran.
By Robert W. Welkos, Los Angeles Times

A spokesman for Oliver Stone said today that the Oscar-winning director has "no plans at this time to go to Tehran," despite recent reports suggesting that he could soon be traveling to the Iranian capital for a project about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Stone "is open to making a documentary" about Ahmadinejad, Steven Rubenstein, president of Rubenstein Communications, said, but he is considering a number of projects at this time.

Stone had been slated next to direct "Pinkville" for United Artists, but the project, centered on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, was put on hold due to the writers strike, Rubenstein said.

Last summer, Stone applied for permission to travel to Iran, but his request was rejected by Iranian officials. The Tehran Times reported at the time that Medi Kalhor, the Iranian president's media advisor, called Stone "a part of the great Satan," a name first given to the United States by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

But now the Iranian press is reporting that Ahmadinejad had personally reconsidered and approved Stone's visit "if certain conditions were met." These conditions, the Tehran Times reports, stress that "Stone would not be allowed to invent any scenarios. [Instead,] he should only use incidents from the president's real life in the film."

The film project has been variously referred to in the Iranian media as "Ahmadinejad's Adventures" or "The Truth About Ahmadinejad."

Stone has developed a reputation in Hollywood for taking on controversial topics, such as "Nixon," his 1995 film about the late Republican president who was at the heart of the Watergate scandal, and "JFK," his 1991 film about the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. His films "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Platoon" were critical of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Stone joins hostage-release mission

With its fearsome record of kidnapping and violence, Colombia's largest guerrilla army might seem a nightmare group to encounter. But not to Oliver Stone. The American filmmaker is jumping at a chance to meet with a group the U.S. classifies as a terrorist organization.

Leaving the glamor of Hollywood far behind, Stone arrived in the steamy Colombian city of Villavicencio on Saturday as part of a mission led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to retrieve three hostages held for years by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

"I have no illusions about the FARC, but it looks like they are a peasant army fighting for a decent living," Stone said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press at his hotel bar. "And here, if you fight, you fight to win."

Stone is part of an international delegation expected to fly by helicopter as early as Sunday into the country's eastern jungles, an area the size of France, to collect the captives: former congresswoman Consuelo Gonzalez, Clara Rojas and her young son Emmanuel, who was fathered by one of her guerrilla captors.

When asked if he's concerned the heavily armed guerrillas could turn on him, he joked: "Well, if they took us, they would be swapping three hostages for 10," referring to himself and observers from five Latin America countries, France and Switzerland, along to supervise the release. "If I were them, that would make sense.

"But seriously, no, I'm not worried. The FARC knows there would be universal condemnation if they did that," said Stone, whose arrival has ramped up the media circus that already surrounds the pending handover.

More than 150 journalists have camped out in Villavicencio's airport since Thursday, waiting for the rescue operation to begin.

The mission seemed unlikely to be completed Sunday as originally promised by Venezuela, as rescuers were still awaiting word from the rebels on the exact location of the release. Meanwhile a rocket narrowly missed an air force cargo plane as it was landing in southern Colombia, underscoring the difficulties involved in crossing live battle lines.

The famous director's presence in this violent country, struggling through its fifth decade of civil conflict, is a worry to his Colombian and Venezuelan guides. They prohibited him from leaving his hotel in Villavicencio, a town rocked in recent years by turf battles between rival drug traffickers and far-right death squads.

Chavez personally invited Stone to join the rescue delegation after the pair, who say they are mutual admirers, met for the first time earlier this week in Caracas.

Dispatching rescue helicopters from Venezuela on Friday, Chavez joked that Stone was President Bush's emissary to the operation, while Stone called Chavez "a great man."

The hostage release could improve prospects for hundreds of other rebel-held captives, Stone said, including three U.S. defense contractors whose four-year confinement he said he has closely followed.

"This release could be a new start, a break in the ice — and the release has been well-propelled forward by Chavez," said Stone. "The important thing is that we build momentum so everyone can be released."

The mission also gives Stone a chance to get the lay of Colombia's political landscape for two upcoming movies.

Footage from the liberation will form part of a documentary on "North America, and that includes our relations with South America and people like Chavez and Castro," he said, without giving details.

He is also producing of one of two rival Hollywood biopics about Pablo Escobar, history's most infamous cocaine trafficker, who was gunned down in 1993 after a bloody war against the Colombian state.

The movie, which Stone hopes to film in Colombia, is based loosely on a book by Escobar's brother, Roberto.

"Escobar is still very controversial. Many people hate him but many people love him," said Stone, who first rendered the drug-smuggling underworld as a screenwriter for "Midnight Express" and "Scarface." "To some, he was this Robin Hood figure, giving money to the poor."

Stone: my part in hostage baby saga
Oliver Stone, the maverick American film director, speaks exclusively about his bizarre role in the abortive attempt by Hugo Chavez to release hostages held by the Colombian rebel group Farc
Source: The Observer

Oliver Stone, the maverick Hollywood director, has returned from the jungles of Colombia to launch a scathing attack on America's 'secret war' in the country and blame US President George Bush for the failure of an international mission to free hostages held by armed rebels.

Speaking exclusively to The Observer, the Oscar-winning maker of films including Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Wall Street gave the first full eyewitness account of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's effort to secure the release of captives from the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

Stone also spoke out in defence of Chavez, whom he called 'an honest man, a strong man and a soldier', and condemned the United States for treating Latin America like a backyard to 'throw trash, piss, do whatever the hell they want'.
Farc said last month that it was prepared to release into the hands of the left-wing Chavez two women politicians - Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez - held hostage for six years, as well as Rojas's four-year-old son, reportedly born of a relationship with a guerrilla fighter. Colombians hoped it might be a step towards peace in their decades-long civil war. If Farc was willing to make this gesture, many believed, it could pave the way for a broader agreement for the release of all 46 hostages, including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three American defence contractors and dozens of local politicians and military and police officers.

Chavez sent helicopters to the city of Villavicencio on the edge of the Colombian jungle. He rallied support from Latin American governments which made up an international verification commission. An acquaintance of Chavez who worked with Stone on his film Comandante, about the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, invited the director to witness the rescue for his next documentary, a study of the US relationship with Latin America.

At first Stone was told to remain in his hotel for his own safety in case he became a kidnapping target himself, but he soon ventured out and passed time in town talking to 'coke dealers and murderers'. His trip ended in frustration as he watched Chavez's negotiations unravel. 'Chavez played a poker game where he was trying to really make this work, and I think that he couldn't do it alone,' said Stone from his home in California. 'From where I was standing, he was beating the drum to rescue these hostages and to break the ice in the ongoing war between the state and the rebels. I thought that it was a significant first move, and there was resentment towards him for this on the part of Colombia and the United States.'

He says Farc had promised to provide coordinates for the location where the helicopters could go to pick up the two women and the child. Each day began with the hope that at last the hostages would be freed and for four days each day ended in discouragement for their families. Finally, on New Year's Eve, Farc announced it was 'suspending' the handover. It was not possible, it said in a letter to Chavez, to continue because Colombian military movements were compromising the safety of the hostages and their captors.

This was vehemently denied by Colombia's President, Alvaro Uribe, who is credited with improving law and order in recent years, but is also accused of close ties with right-wing paramilitary groups. He claimed that Farc was not in possession of the four-year-old boy, called Emmanuel, who had actually been living in a state-run orphanage under the name Juan David since 2005. On Friday the Colombian government said that DNA evidence proved this to be true, and hours later Farc confirmed that it had placed the child in the care of 'honourable people' while a humanitarian agreement for a hostage release was hammered out.

Stone, speaking before Farc's statement was released, denied that the discovery of Emmanuel in the orphanage was a major blow to the rebels' credibility. 'Even if it were true, I would say to you, so what? What would be the motive for Farc to create such a build-up and not release the hostages? That would be such bad intention, such bad faith, that it would condemn them from the whole world, and if that was the truth I would be surprised and upset with them.'

Stone, 61, served in the US army in Vietnam, was wounded twice and received the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He has won Oscars for his Vietnam dramas Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, as well as for his screenplay for Midnight Express. Among his other best known films are Salvador, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Alexander and World Trade Center. He is a trenchant critic of US foreign policy.

He blamed the collapsed deal not on Farc but on President Uribe and his American backer. 'It's Colombia's fault, Colombia did not want it to happen, and I think there were other outside forces, like Bush. Uribe went to great lengths to justify his behaviour that day. For the President to fly down to this place and give a long press conference and have his general give a long talk feels like a lot of over-justification to me. I think there was a lot at stake in getting Chavez out of the hostage situation. I heard that day from two rival sources that Uribe had made a phone call to Bush the day before or that day. The Bush phone call is significant.'

Stone continued: 'I said at the time, shame on Colombia, shame on Uribe, and I meant to say shame on Bush, too. I think Bush has a spiteful attitude towards Chavez, as does the American establishment. They want to see Chavez fail. The New York Times had an article the next day saying: "Chavez's promised hostage release fizzles, his second major setback in weeks." If that's the headline, that's certainly a surprise to all those people who were down there, including the families of the hostages. It was a genuine effort to free them.'

Uribe's war on drugs has been waged with the support of Bush's programme to eliminate one of the most plentiful sources of cocaine in the world. Stone regards it as another chapter in America's long history of interference and exploitation in Latin America, supporting dictators when in its own self-interest. 'America seems to treat it as its backyard. I guess people do all kinds of things in their backyards. They throw trash, piss, do whatever hell they want, let the weeds grow. I think we've always had that idea, that it's ours.

'Colombia is the last one we have left. It's a big investment, I gather we're talking almost a billion a year now. It is the equivalent of a secret war. In my time it would have been shocking, the equivalent of the Laotian war or the Cambodian war. The country is crawling with military equipment and American equipment and supervisory technologies - satellite technology, information technology. It exists for the Farc, I think they know that. They're very paranoid; they're right to be. Every Colombian that I spoke to was scared of the military in some way or another; they're the most dangerous people, not the Farc.'

Farc is regarded as a terrorist group by the US and the European Union and is thought to be holding up to 3,000 hostages in the country's eastern jungles. But Stone refused to condemn it outright. 'I do think that by the standards of Western civilisation 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 terrorising 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.'

Farc has said its intention to release the two women hostages still stands but it has returned to an intractable demand: the demilitarisation of two municipalities in southwestern Colombia to negotiate an exchange of the hostages for jailed rebels. Uribe has repeatedly refused that demand and, given his apparent political victory in the case of the boy Emmanuel, is unlikely to change his position any time soon.

As they waited in vain for the handover, Chavez quipped that Stone was Bush's emissary; Stone in return called Chavez a 'great man'.

Asked to explain this description, he said: 'Because he's really made a difference. You sense a revolutionary spirit throughout Venezuela. He doesn't seem like a tyrant to me at all, he doesn't seem even like a strongman, he seems like a man who respects the law. He's abided by the constitution far faster than Bush has abided by our constitution.'

Stone also said that he was impressed with the socialist President at close quarters. 'America has heavily invested in publicising anything negative about Chavez, but I have to admire him in person as an honest man, a strong man and a soldier.'

don't trust anyone taking a clear side in the Colombia.

Oliver Stone to make Chavez doc
Venezuelan President subject of director's film
Source: Variety

It looks like Oliver Stone enjoys being in the company of presidents. The helmer is following up his Bush biopic "W." with a documentary about Venezuela's controversial President Hugo Chavez.

Stone has been working on the untitled doc for six months and is hoping to have it ready for next year.

"It's about Chavez and the South American revolution," Stone told Daily Variety in a reference to the wave of leftist pols elected to office in Latin America in recent years.

Stone was with Chavez in February during the dramatic rescue of hostages that Chavez helped to broker from the militant Columbian FARC group. The doc will not focus on the rescue but rather the opposition Chavez has faced at home and abroad, especially from the Bush administration, which has been vocal in its distaste for the populist socialism espoused by Venezuela's president.

Stone is also working on a second doc, details of which he is keeping under wraps. He did, however, deny rumors that he's planning to make a film about Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There have been reports in recent months that Ahmadinejad had authorized Stone to come to Iran and document him.

Stone's previous docs include "Comandante," about Cuban President Fidel Castro, and "Persona Non Grata," which began as a project about Yasser Arafat but eventually became a wider-reaching primer on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, after interviewing the now-dead Arafat proved an impossible task.

News of Stone's latest documentary comes as the helmer flies to the Middle East to present "W." as the opening-night film at the Dubai Film Festival today.

"Bush met his fate and destiny in the Middle East, and his policies changed something in the region," said Stone in a reference to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I hope the film can help the Arab world understand him better and show them something more then they already knew."

Stone attended the Dubai fest in 2006 with his 9/11 drama "World Trade Center."

The fifth Dubai fest is starting as speculation mounts about the rapidly expanding emirate's susceptibility to the global economic recession.

Much of Dubai's spectacular growth has been built on the back of leveraged debt. With relatively minimal natural resources in oil and gas, Dubai has been seen by some analysts as more vulnerable to the credit crunch than its richer Gulf neighbors.

Fest organizers are hoping to assuage some of the naysayers with a glitzy event. Stars expected to attend the fest include Nicolas Cage, Salma Hayek, Laura Linney and Danny Glover.

Stone: Hugo Chavez has 'intoxicating' energy

CARACAS, Venezuela - U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone said he sees Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as an energetic, principled champion of change in Latin American and hopes to capture the spirit of his drive to roll back U.S. influence in an upcoming documentary.

After two weeks of filming in Venezuela and elsewhere in South America, Stone said Thursday night that he probably has enough material "for two documentaries."

"The film's about the spirit of the changes in South America," Stone told The Associated Press in an interview. "It's to capture the spirit of this thing, which frankly is huge. ... There is something going on here, and it's outside the IMF, it's outside American control — that's what interests me."

Chavez takes the lead in the film, Stone said, "but the supporting cast is enormous."

Stone also interviewed Chavez's left-leaning allies in Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia — all of whom have participated, he said, in the region's "liberation from the United States."

The 62-year-old filmmaker accompanied Chavez to the lot where his grandmother's house once stood, and to political rallies where he connected with crowds of admirers.

"The pure energy of the man is intoxicating," Stone said.

In their interviews, Chavez discussed world affairs, the oil business, socialism and independence hero Simon Bolivar — the inspiration of his movement.

"This is what I like about Chavez: He's a big man, he thinks big," said Stone, who described the Venezuelan president as a "world-changer."

The changes he has helped lead, Stone said, are "sweeping all over the place."

"Bolivar is back."

The Oscar-winning director said the documentary, as yet untitled, should be released in a matter of months. The film follows "W.", Stone's critical biopic about President George W. Bush .

The director said he hopes President-elect Barack Obama takes a different approach toward Latin America and "should meet with Chavez."

Oliver Stone Drops Out Of 'Wall Street' Sequel, Still Hopes To Visit 'Pinkville'
Source: MTV

One man who will not be coming to save "Wall Street" is Oliver Stone. Last fall, as the economic situation went from bad to straight up scary, Fox announced it was fast-tracking development of a sequel to the director's 1987 classic about ruthless businessmen in shiny suits. Now, in an exclusive interview with MTV News, Stone revealed he will have nothing to do with the project.

"I dropped out," he said. "I didn't want to do another 'Wall Street' movie. I think everything I had to stay came through."

There was a time, however, when he and fellow scriptwriter Stanley Weiser discussed picking up the story again. "We invested this a while ago," Stone said, "but we couldn't come up with the right way to go about it. I think there's an interesting movie to be made in there. I'm just not interested because it's so complex now. I don't think people can understand security derivatives. But these types of people [on Wall Street] — essentially it's the same mentality."

One project that Stone is sticking by is "Pinkville," a feature about the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which was set to film with Bruce Willis, Woody Harrelson and Cam Gigandet until the writers' strike interrupted development in late 2007. "'Pinkville' is not dead," Stone said of what would be his fourth film about that war. "I own it. I could activate it again. I don't know if the time is right now with the Iraq War still going on, but I love that project and it's an important one. My Lai is a forgotten piece of history that's crucial to remember. You never know, these things come alive."

For now, however, the Oscar-winning director has no definite plans to jump back into a feature film after last October's Bush biopic "W" (out now on DVD) and is instead focusing on a pair of documentaries. The smaller of the two centers on Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, while the larger one remains shrouded in mystery.

"It's on the concept of history," Stone said. "I don't want to talk about it too much. This is not Ken Burns style. This is not America first, ethno-centric stuff. This is about the serious, objective view of the place of empire."

Both documentaries were financed abroad and conceived to play on the small screen. But Stone is skeptical that either one will ever cross airwaves or cable lines in the States. "It's not necessarily made for American television," he said. "Eventually they might find their way to DVD here. But MTV might show it — you never know! MTV History will come in. Talk to your bosses."

Oliver Stone in Talks for Helter Skelter
Source:Variety

Liz Smith, reporting on behalf of Variety (see below), is hearing through the grapevine that Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers, W) is circling a big screen version of "Helter Skelter."

The director is currently "in talks" with Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecuting attorney during the Charles Manson trial. Nothing is confirmed, however. Stone revisiting the '60s and taking on Manson? Feels like a natural choice.

"Skelter" was made into a tele-film in 1976, with Steve Railsback (Lifeforce) as Manson, and again in 2004, this time starring Jeremy Davies. Jim Van Bebber also made a pretty haunting Manson film of his own entitled The Manson Family.


AUGUST marks the grim 40th anniversary of the murder of actress Sharon Tate, and four others at the hands of Manson Family cult members. This terrible event closed the 1960's in a full circle -- a decade that had begun with such promise. It ended in assassinations, riots, upheaval and finally mass murder in Hollywood. So far nobody has had the bad taste to make a feature movie about the Manson slayings. Television offered up two films on the killings -- one back in 1970s, and another in 2004. But Oliver Stone, who goes where others won't, is said to be in talks with Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecuting attorney on the Manson case, to put the latter's book, "Helter Skelter" onto the bigscreen. If nothing else, it might be fascinating to see Stone turn the Manson saga into a convoluted conspiracy plot -- I mean, he even did it with "Alexander."

Maybe this makes me a sick twisted fuck, but I'd be in heaven if he does this...

I don't buy it. Apparently Vincent Bugliosi and Stone have a backhistory where the former doesn't much appreciate the latter. And while Liz Smith does represent Variety, she dumped this item in her gossip column. When she was affiliated with E! network, they would report a ton of movie deals based on her gossip coverage that never came to be true at all. 

I kinda wish it would be true because Stone has the lens in which to look at this beyond a docu drama study of a gruesome murder. I saw a wonderful documentary a few days ago about a Manson follower who described the atmosphere in which things started out normally and were reflections of general 60s counter culture, but slowly Manson yielded his influence on the group and everything escalated to a nightmare level. Stone has a mindset still in the 1960s so he could understand the initial lure the followers had where a lot of people would demonize and judge them from the outset.

Damn it....oh well I'll still have my fingers crossed. It would fit well in his oeuvre of 60's films and could have that intense similarity in the way its shot to 'Natural Born Killers' which gets a director's cut version of the blu-ray disc this year. Just so you know GT. Not sure how you feel on that specific film.

Quote from: SiliasRuby on May 19, 2009, 09:36:13 PM
Damn it....oh well I'll still have my fingers crossed. It would fit well in his oeuvre of 60's films and could have that intense similarity in the way its shot to 'Natural Born Killers' which gets a director's cut version of the blu-ray disc this year. Just so you know GT. Not sure how you feel on that specific film.

Natural Born Killers is a magificent film to me. Just behind Nixon as far as quality goes, but the new Blu Ray edition will feature the same old director's cut that is available on almost every DVD. The interesting addition is a short documentary about how Stone would make the film today if he had to.

I don't imagine a Natural Born Killers style for Helter Skelter though. The story certainly becomes intense, but it's about the escalation to violence for Manson and his followers. It all begins as 60s counter culture with sexual and drug experimentation, but Manson's control starts to take over and he ascends to a cult like figure in the group. He never started as leader. At first, he was just one of many, but it eventually led to him leading all the people. Then it became a full out nightmare. I imagine the structure of Stone's The Doors where that film starts out simple enough, but the story just continued to get wilder and more intense as it went along. Finally the story hit a crescendo when full hedonism was on display in the final concert.

Of course the escalation with Helter Skelter would be more intense and feature greater heights of violence and debauchery, but the style of Natural Born Killers was about painting all the characters as caricatures of media's inherent evil. The style was hyper realistic because part of the film is satire, but also part of it is semi surrealism about the effects of drugs on the psyche. I don't think Helter Skelter would exist in such a realm. I also wouldn't want Stone to play copycat of one of his best films either.

Quote from: Gold Trumpet on May 19, 2009, 10:18:38 PM

Quote from: SiliasRuby on May 19, 2009, 09:36:13 PM
Damn it....oh well I'll still have my fingers crossed. It would fit well in his oeuvre of 60's films and could have that intense similarity in the way its shot to 'Natural Born Killers' which gets a director's cut version of the blu-ray disc this year. Just so you know GT. Not sure how you feel on that specific film.

Natural Born Killers is a magificent film to me. Just behind Nixon as far as quality goes, but the new Blu Ray edition will feature the same old director's cut that is available on almost every DVD. The interesting addition is a short documentary about how Stone would make the film today if he had to.

I don't imagine a Natural Born Killers style for Helter Skelter though. The story certainly becomes intense, but it's about the escalation to violence for Manson and his followers. It all begins as 60s counter culture with sexual and drug experimentation, but Manson's control starts to take over and he ascends to a cult like figure in the group. He never started as leader. At first, he was just one of many, but it eventually led to him leading all the people. Then it became a full out nightmare. I imagine the structure of Stone's The Doors where that film starts out simple enough, but the story just continued to get wilder and more intense as it went along. Finally the story hit a crescendo when full hedonism was on display in the final concert.

Of course the escalation with Helter Skelter would be more intense and feature greater heights of violence and debauchery, but the style of Natural Born Killers was about painting all the characters as caricatures of media's inherent evil. The style was hyper realistic because part of the film is satire, but also part of it is semi surrealism about the effects of drugs on the psyche. I don't think Helter Skelter would exist in such a realm. I also wouldn't want Stone to play copycat of one of his best films either.

I realize it now. The previous film I saw 'The Manson Family' was shot in the same sort of style 'NBK' was shot in and now that I think of it more, it didn't necessarily work...I've read up a lot about manson and I consider myself a expert on few things. One of those things is the time of the late 60's early 70's and the counterculture that started to go downhill after the rolling stone concert in altamont in '67. This would be a heavy huge treat for me IF Oliver does this. He could heavily elevate what has only been averagely done. When's your birthday GT? I would love to get you the Director's cut of 'NBK' on Blu-ray if you like.

Quote from: SiliasRuby on May 19, 2009, 11:19:32 PM
When's your birthday GT? I would love to get you the Director's cut of 'NBK' on Blu-ray if you like.

haha, that's considerate because from you I believe it's sincere, but I need the Blu-Ru player first. I'll pick up the DVD though.

You can get the directors cut of 'NBK' used for a Dollar on amazon...
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Born-Killers-Woody-Harrelson/dp/B00003BDXG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1242795628&sr=1-1

pretty simple and cheap for my SECOND favorite film of Stone's that he has ever achieved.

Well, the Helter Skelter rumor was squashed. Stone's production company denied involvement so in the end the cynics were right, but I must admit philosophizing about the would be film was starting to get fun.

I just watched Born On the Fourth of July again recently and holy god that movie is amazing. But for me, easily the best part is the whole opening sequence following Ron before he goes off to war, ending with him running in the rain to get to the dance. That is just a perfect beginning-- the story is told so efficiently, Tom Cruise is amazing, and all the music choices are spot on (especially Moon River). I want to cry every time I see him running to get Kyra Sedwick. It's like a full feature length film condensed into 30 minutes... Unbelievable. I'm sure this has all been talked about on this board but I couldn't find any specific BOTFOJ talk.

Any opinions?

Born on the Fourth of July is essential. It was the film where Oliver Stone became a premiere director. His four films before were depedent upon the success of the script and actors. Wall Street is overrated and Talk Radio is fun, but forgettable. Platoon and Salvador succeed because of the breath of their scripts. They are exhausting in pinpointing the docu drama ends of their situations. Stone doesn't have to do much but allow the camera to follow the action. The films are set in specific points of time so Stone doesn't have a lot of time and space to manage. The simple journey of the characters and the stories made both films.

In Born on the Fourth of July, the story is structured and has more levels of emotional fufilment. The beginning part isn't meant to be just endearing and romantic, but an embodiement of the romantic dream on celluloid. It's suppose to be realistic but remind you of other romantic films so your idea of what will come will be affected. The audience expects a dramatic story, but not one that goes to the depths of hell and despair. The beginning of the film is meant to give an optimistic feeling to this dramatic story, but halfway through the audience starts to think things will not turn out so good. The amazing turn is that at the end Oliver Stone returns to the style of the dream embodied with Kovic becoming a major figure in Veteran rights on the national stage. In the end, he fufills his mother's dream and becomes an important person, but reality costs him a lot in the process.

Stone plays with styles and tones very well here. The film most remiscient of mixing realistic circumstances with an age old drama was the Best Years of Our Lives. It epitomized a lot of controversial aspects of World War II but was still wrapped up in positive themes. For Stone, just filming the story wouldn't have been good enough so he started to work with styles and approaches in the storytelling. His films began to comment on structures and styles within film.

I've been reading 'Helter Skelter' and I think that if I was in charge of Hollywood and Stone's next project I really would want him to do it. These characters might be only known extremely for those in the know about the case or have read the book.

Dream Cast For Helter Skelter movie directed by Oliver Stone based on the aforementioned book and the book 'Manson in his own words':

Charles Manson: A mid 30's Jim Caviezel. He's already played Jesus so this is the obvious next step. Or an slightly older Zac Braff or Wes Bentley
Vincent Bugliosi: Kevin Spacey or Guy Pearce
Susan Atkins: Megan Fox
Bruce McGregor Davis: Jesse Eisenberg
Lynette 'Squeaky' Frome: Lindsay Lohan
Charles 'Tex' Watson: Emile Hirsh
Catherine Gilles: Ashley Greene
Kitty Lutesinger: Vanessa Hudgens
Nancy Pitman: Shenae Grimes
Linda Kasabian: Leighton Meester
Catherine Share AKA Gypsy: Kristen Bell
Sandra Good AKA Sandy: Amanda Seyfried
Steve Grogan AKA Clem: Connor Paolo
Ruth Moore Moorehouse AKA Ouisch: Zoe Kravitz
Robert 'Bobby' Beausoleil: Zac Efron
Leslie Van Houten: Isabel Lucas
Donald Shorty Shea: Chris Bauer
Larry Bailey: Jeffery Ballard
Defense Attorney Ronald Hughes: Jeff Bridges in a heavy zz top beard
Mary Theresa Brummer: Evan Rachel Wood
Patricia Krenwinkel AKA Katie: Mischa Barton
John Philip Haught aka Christopher Jesus aka Zero: Shia Labeouf.
George Spahn: An extremely old John Goodman, makeup needed for decrepidness or an overweight James Cromwell

The actors playing Roman Polanski, Leno Libianca and Rosemary Libianca, Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate, Steven Earl Parent, Abigal Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Jay Sebring will have to be played by unknowns or non stars for some respect of the dead and famous. More cameos made by tough guys such as Russel Crowe or Gerard Butler could come in for some of the police detective roles. The main coroner could be played by Ken Jeong in a complete strait role. Look up the actors you are unfamiliar with on imdb.

They would need to get the rights to the beatles' songs 'Helter Skelter', 'Baby you're a rich man', 'blackbird', 'Cry Baby Cry', 'I Will', 'Honey Pie', Revolution' and 'Sexy Sadie' as well the rights to Charles Manson's Album "Lie: The Love and Terror Cult". The score would be done by Trent Reznor having a slight connection to the lore of the murders. He bought the Tate house and recorded "The Downward Spiral" there. With The Black Keys and Arctic Monkeys recording tracks specifically for the film.

Thinking about the script I was hoping for a collaboration between David Koepp and Oliver Stone although I think Oliver would have a couple of writers already ready in the wings to collaborate with him on this material. As far as a DP I'm thinking Robert Elswit, Robert Richardson, or Rodrigo Prieto.


Thoughts? Or did I just waste a lot of time?

i'd change a few of those casting choices. a matter of personal taste. i agree this would be a dreamy project. i would make it a rock opera.

I thought hard about those choices. It's tough to find young people that would fit a specific age. But what are your other thoughts about the cast? Anyone else have any ideas...?

oh i would definitely cast vincent gallo as charlie. he's just perfect for the part. everything about the way he looks, talks, acts. dude was born to play charles manson. gallo could even perform some of manson's music for the soundtrack, that'd be great. the rest of the cast i'd have to think about for a while. all i know is that Lohan, Fox, Spacey, Hudgens, Bell, Kravitz, Efron, and Labeouf would be nowhere in sight. no offense to your choices. casting unknowns would be fun.

Thats what I've been told and I thought it would be a much more realistic movie that way with unknowns. But it would certainly be made faster if those names were cast and it would make them a much more interesting circus. Zero, the guy labeouf would play, dies from a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head while playing russian roulette.

haha. yeah. no doubt that would be entertaining. i want Julie Taymor to adapt it into a musical.

wasn't jeremy davies going to be manson at one point?  he would do the best job, hands down.

Gallo was pretty much cast in a project on Manson, but left due to a payment dispute. He would have been pretty terrific. My girlfriend is pretty certain Gallo would make a great Rasputin, I'm inclined to agree.

Quote from: socketlevel on September 02, 2009, 10:56:32 PM
wasn't jeremy davies going to be manson at one point?  he would do the best job, hands down.

He was.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383393/

It's a pretty stellar performance in a middling TV movie. Check it out sometime.

Stone In Talks With Iran For Ahmadinejad Documentary
2 hours ago | WENN | See recent WENN news »

Moviemaker Oliver Stone is in talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to star in a big screen documentary - just weeks after he wrapped filming his insight into the life of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

On Monday, Stone came under fire from U.S. commentators for walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival with Chavez at his side as he premiered South of the Border.

The documentary-style film focuses on the Venezuelan leader and the South American revolution - and Stone is now eyeing a study of Iran's newly re-elected president.

Ahmadinejad is under fire from many of the world's leaders over Iran's nuclear weapons program and his criticisms of the West. The legitimacy of his second presidential term is also in dispute after hundreds of demonstrators were injured as they protested against his election victory earlier this year.

And Stone has been in talks with Iran to document the politician, but schedules have so far been conflicting.

He explains, "I was very interested because I thought we were going to go to war in Iran. If we had been more successful in Iraq, I have no doubts that we would have been more involved in the Iranian situation now." »




Less thrilled about the prospects of this project (if true). To be successful, Stone would have to get very critical and I doubt Iran would allow for that. They originally refused Stone outright to film there but now are loosening a little, but who knows what little is in their books? It may have to be a portrait like the General Idi Amin Dada film made years ago.

Last few minutes of his birthday. He's not a perfect filmmaker, but he's my man. Somebody on this board has to love the man.

Here is the best compilation video of his career: http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/06/oliver.stone.bush.movie/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

dude i fucking love him, i've watched all his movies and JFK/NIXON are two of my all times. He defined a generation of film editing (good or bad) with NBK.  even when he missteps, he does so with huge ambition.

I LOVE HIM!!!!! I can't get enough of the guy! JFK is one of my favorite films of all time.

Also, Do you think this guy on the cover look like a young Oliver?
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fecx.images-amazon.com%2Fimages%2FI%2F51D4SCR3SFL._SS500_.jpg&hash=db168bc81a8b3c14cf1ce347991c8c78a7b543e3)

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.

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

(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fecx.images-amazon.com%2Fimages%2FI%2F51EOAZ5CnfL._SS500_.jpg&hash=14cac86ca9823f400d0a9723b7ac0e56d6e518f4)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would be happy with this since Labeouf would be replacing Channing Tatum and Labeouf held his own in Wall Street 2. However, I can't take remarks on a commentary track as news just yet, but this very well could happen.

Stone, LaBeouf Considering Pinkville
The Wall Street 2 director-star combo have discussed the 'Nam drama.
December 28, 2010
by Jim Vejvoda

Director Oliver Stone revealed in his commentary track on the Blu-ray release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps that he and that film's young lead, Shia LaBeouf, have discussed reuniting for Pinkville, a Vietnam War investigative drama about the My Lai massacre of March 1968.

Stone said that he and LaBeouf discussed reteaming for Pinkville while they were making the Wall Street sequel. According to the helmer, LaBeouf is interesting in exploring the subject matter because his father was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.

Pinkville was set to begin filming in Southeast Asia in December 2007, but was shelved at the 11th hour due to the then-impending Writers Guild strike. Stone had assembled a cast that included Bruce Willis, Channing Tatum, Michael Pena, Woody Harrelson, Xzibit, Michael Pitt, Toby Jones, Jason Behr and Cam Gigandet.

Given his age and his dad's role in the war, it seems likely that LaBeouf would want to play Hugh Thompson, the role Tatum was initially set to play. Thompson was the U.S. Army helicopter pilot who stopped the massacre -- where G.I.s cut down as many as 500 My Lai villagers, many of them unarmed women, children and the elderly -- by placing his chopper between the soldiers and the surviving villagers.

http://movies.ign.com/articles/114/1142158p1.html

Hell, Wall Street 2 was pretty awesome. Sure, it had problems, but it's fair share of awesome moments.

Probs:

- moto race (wtf!!)
- Carey Mulligan had a major suckage issue
- not as informative as it should've been on investment banking.

Awesomes:

- Gordon Gecko and Josh Brolin combo
- I can't believe it but Shia
- susan sarandon's storyline

Eli Wallach ftw

Quote from: Pas on January 04, 2011, 08:28:37 PM
- susan sarandon's storyline

Could have been cut completely.

I loved it cause I see clienta exactly (exactly 100%) like her every fucking day. Ex-teachers and nurses who flipped houses and made a killing and are now broke and crying in my office cause I can't even lend them 10k

Sarandon's storyline is fine. She is a minor character with two significant scenes and she exists to give coverage to how other areas of the nearby Wall Street economy was effected. If her character played into the end by coming back in a way which pretentiously lifted up her importance (i.e. making her a bigger symbol), then it would have been a problem. However, in this story, the story arch is mainly about building up various levels of calamities between the characters to show how it effects different parts of their life. Sarandon is an extension of Shia and Wall Street's problems.

It's a really unnecessary subplot. We didn't need her story to see that ordinary people took a hit financially the last two or three years. There was some alright stuff in there as far as acting, inside the boardrooms, etc..but I found it overlong and spent too much time away from Gekko's character. And a girl who dates a guy just like her daddy and it's supposed to get us? Lazy. Don't get me started on the super-imposing and split screens. 

Stone borrows from Eisenstein. It's about writing stories to support vertical editing and vertical plots. It's not enough that stories and characters exist for themselves. You can argue enough characterization exists for the main characters in just the scenes, but Eisenstein (late into his career) and Stone believe if you're talking about social or historical stories, you have to have characters which represent other tentacles of the social order and how the main disorder of the story is affecting those realms. Since the major hit of the Wall Street fallout was the housing market crisis, I don't think two scenes to show that is a big deal. But extending the story out allows the story to be analyzed for more contradictions within the characters and the social implications of the story. I think doing this allows a film to elude easy moral messages and make it harder for easy acceptance or criticism.

Sarandon is also a continuation of Martin Sheen's character from the first film. Bud Fox was given naivety and good background to offset his greed actions in the film. In this film, Langella represents more of a Sheen father figure who represents a good idea of business conscience, but Sarandon represents a deep greed influence for Shia to show the times have changed and the Bud Fox's of today are no longer innocent people. She is also the first measure of disconnect between Shia and Carey Mulligan. She wants to trust him since times have become tough and she keeps telling him to stand firm against Sarandon and he keeps jollying her around a little bit because she is his mother and desperate. It makes the later breakup scene more believable and not just based on one big mistake. You can start to streamline the beginning of the distrust.

Wow GT, nice.

It's not Pinkville, but it's not a bad project to have lined up. For a lot of people's money, Don Winslow is the great untapped crime novelist. Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese have tried to adapt him before and I hear his dark comedy (Savages) about the drug trade in California and Mexico is pretty great. One of Stone's better social films was Salvador which investigates the Latin American drug world to a highly effective and comedic twist. I can't make projections about this film, but I am pretty excited it's next up for him. I'm also happy someone like Jennifer Lawrence over the next up-and-coming model/actress is lined up for a major role.

http://www.deadline.com/2011/02/oscar-nominee-jennifer-lawrence-to-star-in-oliver-stones-savages/


Oscar Nominee Jennifer Lawrence In Talks For Oliver Stone's 'Savages'
By MIKE FLEMING | Thursday February 10, 2011 @ 6:14pm EST

Oscar-nominated Winter's Bone star Jennifer Lawrence is in talks to star in Savages, the Oliver Stone-directed adaptation of the bestselling novel by Don Winslow. Shooting will begin in June.

The book is a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-style love triangle between two best friend pot growers and O, the wild child girlfriend they share.  O will be played by Lawrence, who has become widely courted for roles since  studios saw her performance as the teenager desperate to save her family home in Winter's Bone.  Somehow, sharing a bed with O created no discord in the relationship between brainy botanist Ben and Chon, a hardcore ex-Navy SEAL who returned from Afghanistan with top-quality pot and a total lack of remorse for killing to protect his pals. They live a quiet lucrative existence in Laguna Beach, growing and distributing their primo pot. Stone has been meeting with top actors to play Ben and Chon, a list that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Aaron Johnson, Tom Hardy, James Franco and Tron Legacy's Garrett Hedlund. He's also courting Benicio Del Toro for the role of an Mexican drug cartel enforcer sent to muscle Ben and Chon out of business. When they resist, O gets kidnapped and the ransom is every ill-gotten cent they've made. They hatch a complex plan to get her back and then disappear.

Several studios are chasing the CAA-repped project, which was developed privately to streamline the process. Sure enough, Savages has a shooting script by Winslow & Shane Salerno, less than a year after Stone came aboard. Since then, the book went on to become a bestseller that ended the year on many Top 10 lists, including The New York Times. It has been a breakout for Winslow, a former private detective who has been knocking on the door in Hollywood for years—his novel The Winter of Frankie Machine once had Martin Scorsese and then Michael Mann poised to direct Robert De Niro, and several of his other books had been optioned at one time or another by studios. Moritz Borman is producing with Stone. and Eric Kopeloff. Salerno is executive produc

ATTN: Cbrad

http://www.movingimage.us/films/2011/03/13/detail/a-day-with-oliver-stone/

Oliver Stone In Talks With Universal, Taylor Kitsch For 'Savages'
BY MIKE FLEMING; Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Savages, the Oliver Stone-directed adaptation of the Don Winslow novel, is zeroing in on a distribution deal. Universal is in poll position with two others in the running. Along with Aaron Johnson, Stone is in talks with Taylor Kitsch to play the two Laguna-based pot growers arm-twisted into working for a Mexican cartel when they kidnap O, the free spirited best friend of the growers. Kitsch, best known for Friday Night Lights and a showy small role as Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, just starred in jUniversal's Battleship after completing the title role in Disney's John Carter of Mars. The distribution situation should be resolved within the next week, but I'm hearing Universal will wind up with the picture.

Aside from Johnson and Kitsch, I've heard Stone is looking at Salma Hayek to play the cartel matriarch, an iron-fisted beauty who becomes intrigued and practically maternal over the kidnapped gal. But business is business, and the drug kingpin is suddenly plagued by a problem: someone is ripping off her drug shipments. What she doesn't know is it's the guys she's trying to muscle. Kitsch plays Chon, an iron-hard former operative who is a remorseless killer and seems to only have room in his heart for his growing partner and O. Jennifer Lawrence has fallen out of the O role because of her commitment to The Hunger Game, and Stone is looking at candidates like Olivia Wilde, as the director works on honing the script written by Shane Salerno and Winslow.

From the get go, this project had the making to be fun. I've avoided the novel, but the more I read about it, the more I believe it will also be a very good movie. Stone wants a project that will put him back into the hornet's nest of Latin America corruption and when I read about the characterization boundaries of the two lead characters, I see tenets of Stone's vertical work at play. Final result? Film could be a hybrid of his early film, Salvador, with more story and style elements. The film also should get good studio backing so Stone would have a lot more filmmaking means than some of his recent films.

Benicio Del Toro Joins Oliver Stone's 'Savages'
Aaron Johnson & Taylor Kitsch Look Set To Star
Source: The Playlist

It's kind of funny how things work sometimes. Last month when Jennifer Lawrence first entered talks to star in Oliver Stone's "Savages," a handful of other names were mentioned for roles at the time including Benicio Del Toro. In subsequent reports—including the announcement of Lawrence's departure due to "The Hunger Games"—his name again seemed to be absent, but lo and behold he's the one left standing.

Deadline reports the Benicio Del Toro has signed on Oliver's Stone's thriller "Savages."  Based on Don Winslow's book, the story follows two pot growers—Ben and Chon—who square off against a Mexican drug cartel when their shared girlfriend O is kidnapped and held for ransom. Del Toro will play an enforcer for the cartel. Sweet.

Additionally, it appears the roles of Ben and Chon are locked. An offer was floated to Aaron Johnson with Taylor Kitsch also recently linked to play opposite him. Deadline reveals that the duo are now set to star, with Johnson as Ben and Kitsch as Chon. Meanwhile, Olivia Wilde is one actress of a handful vying for O, while Salma Hayek is being eyed for the part of the matriarch of the cartel.

We'll pretty much watch anything with Del Toro in it, but the material seems like some great pulpy fare and it looks like Stone is assembling a pretty killer cast. Production on "Savages" is aiming to start in June.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/benicio_del_toro_joins_oliver_stones_savages/#

I really wish he would make a serious mexican drug cartels movie, not some pulpy fantasy about two pot growers standing up to a cartel.

Pulpy, yes, but from what I understand, there are dimensions to how the pot growers try to do something and what it entails. On paper, it reminds me of Salvador. That film was just suppose to be about the exploits of Richard Boyle and his manic personality, but it had other things working for it. What Savages will have working for it, I don't know, but I'm not going to be so chill about writing off the topic potential of this film at all.

It would be wonderful to see a no holds barred look at drug cartels in Mexico and I'm sure Stone would love to make that film, but in a recent interview, he listed off over a number of films he tried to make in the last 15 years and couldn't because of studios "gray listing" him. Like Wall Street 2 and bank corruption, he has to find other ways to tackle some bigger subjects these days.

Sounds much better than the Epix show he announced last year which didn't take me too long to forget about. I would watch this because I am somewhat familiar with this world and what goes on. A fascinating issue, indeed.

FX Developing Conspiracy-Themed Drama Series With Oliver Stone & Virgin Produced

FX has closed a deal for a drama series project executive produced and directed by Oliver Stone. It hails from Virgin Produced, the production arm of Richard Branson's Virgin Group, marking the first major scripted TV sale for the fledgling company.

Adam Gibgot will write the project, which centers on a secret group known as Darkhorses who manufacture fake news stories on grand scale to service powerful clients' agendas. The project, whose research included interviewing a real Darkhorse, was developed internally at Virgin with Gibgot. Stone, well known for tackling conspiracy theories in his movies, Gibgot and Virgin pitched the drama to several cable networks before setting it up at FX in what the producers said was a competitive situation with Showtime. Fox TV Studios will produce. Stone is slated to direct the potential pilot and executive produce the series, which was packaged by CAA. Last year, he signed a development deal with Epix to turn Bruce Wagner's novel Still Holding into a drama series.

Virgin Produced, which recently released its first movie Limitless on the feature side, has been ramping up its TV production operations. Its scripted TV development is overseen by head of scripted television Michael Forman. On the unscripted side, the company recently inked a a first-look deal with E!

http://www.deadline.com/2011/03/fx-developing-drama-series-with-oliver-stone-and-virgin/

this could be really cool.

I would do anything to work on this project.

Universal to Distribute Oliver Stone's 'Savages'
The filmmaker has been slowly putting together the acting pieces for his latest pic, an adaptation of a Don Winslow novel.
Source: THR

Universal has closed a deal to distribute Savages, the latest project from Oliver Stone. The filmmaker has been slowly putting together the acting pieces for his latest pic, an adaptation of a Don Winslow novel, which made it attractive for studios to toss their hats into the distribution ring. Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), Taylor Kitsch (Battleship), Benicio del Toro and Salma Hayek are in various stages of discussions to board the project. Stone and Shane Salerno wrote the script, which follows two laid-back beach-bum marijuana dealers run afoul a Mexican cartel run by a ruthless female boss who, in order to force her competition to submit, kidnaps the duo's mutual girlfriend. Jennifer Lawrence was in talks to play the girlfriend, names O or Ophelia, but bowed out when she landed the lead role in Lionsgate's Hunger Games. Stone is eying a June shoot.

John Travolta, Uma Thurman And Blake Lively Join 'Savages' Cast
Source: Deadline


EXCLUSIVE: Oliver Stone is putting together a killer cast for Savages, the drama based on Don Winslow's bestselling novel.  Stone is arranging a Pulp Fiction reunion of John Travolta and Uma Thurman, as the two actors are in talks to join the ensemble cast.  Also joining is  is The Town's Blake Lively, who beat out a group of young actresses to play the role of O. Travolta will play Dennis, a burned out DEA agent, and Thurman will play O's mom, Paqu.

They join Taylor Kitsch, already set to play who'll play the role of former Navy SEAL Chon (Kitsch has already begun training with the real SEALs); Aaron Johnson, who plays the role of Ben;  Salma Hayek, who'll play the role of Mexican cartel queen-pin Elena; and Benicio Del Toro, who plays the vicious cartel enforcer Lado. The script is by Winslow and Shane Salerno. There are several more roles to go.

Universal Pictures is financing and distributing the film, which begins production in early July. Savages focuses on the relationship between best friend Laguna pot growers Chon and Ben, who live a cozy life with their trippy galpal, O. Their pot is so good that the Mexican cartel tries to coerce them into working for the cartel. When they refuse, the cartel kidnaps O and charges a heavy ransom to get her back. The growers pay the ransom by covertly ripping off the cartel's own shipments, a most dangerous game.

http://www.deadline.com/2011/04/john-travolta-uma-thurman-and-blake-lively-join-savages-cast/

Oliver Stone Reveals Sidney Lumet & Al Pacino Nearly Made 'Platoon'
Source: The Playlist

For director Oliver Stone, "Platoon" would mark the beginning of the meatiest part of the director's career. The Vietnam film, the first in a loose trilogy (followed by "Born On The Fourth Of July" and "Heaven & Earth"), made a star out of its young lead Charlie Sheen, and it went to the Oscars that with year with eight nominations, walking away with four wins including Best Picture and Best Director (not to mention that Stone's other film that year, "Salvador," also earned two nods). It would be Stone's second Oscar (he won for writing "Midnight Express" in 1979) and it established the writer/director as a major voice. But as he tells it now, he nearly didn't make the film. In an interview with EW about the film's 25th anniversary BluRay release, Stone reveals that a powerhouse acting and directing duo seriously considered making "Platoon" in the 1970s. "It was written in '76 and was almost made then by Sidney Lumet and [Al] Pacino. Then there was a period in '84 when Michael Cimino was going to produce it and Emilio Estevez was going to play the role, actually. [Kevin] Costner passed on it, I believe, because his brother had been in Vietnam," Stone said, confirming that Costner and Mickey Rourke were at one time in the running for Barnes, the role played by Tom Berenger. So why didn't it happen? "The '76 version was just not considered upbeat enough. It was too realistic, which is why Sidney Lumet liked it. So who knows? And then I wrote 'Midnight Express,' which was my big breakthrough in Hollywood," Stone explained. "And at that point, 'Platoon' was stashed away in a closet because no one wanted to make a realistic movie. And then you had films like 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Deer Hunter.' And the feeling was our moment had passed. So I was sad about it —really heartbroken. I forgot about the script for a while, thinking it would never get made. And then Michael Cimino [who also directed 'The Deer Hunter'] said I should bring 'Platoon' back and he would produce it. This was in '84. And I thought it was going to happen, but [producer] Dino DeLaurentiis f—ed us over, big time." How did he get fucked over? "He was only willing to go so far. The script was mine and he hadn't paid for it, really. He considered it his, but he hadn't paid. We had to threaten to go to court to get the movie back. It's a miracle it eventually got made. It's also a miracle that it was received well because it was supposed to be past due. We'd had 'Rambo' and a bunch of other Vietnam movies. And the thinking was no one wanted another Vietnam movie." Well, while the pairing of Lumet and Pacino on a Vietnam movie is something we'll have to leave to a parallel movie universe, everything certainly turned out well when Stone finally took the film. Check out the EW interview for more bits of info about the film including the apocalyptic draft of the script he wrote in 1969 that involves the underworld that he sent to Jim Morrison as well as other trivia, including the fact that Keanu Reeves turned down the movie because he thought it was too violent. Huh.

Never been a big fan before, but I just saw Dancer in the Dark for the first time, and it was one of the best films i've seen in a very long time. Also saw Dogville and Breaking the Waves a couple of days ago and loved them both. He is a fascinating filmmaker to say the least.

Quote from: Pastor Parsley on February 03, 2005, 02:05:59 PM
I still can't begin to imagine the ego that it would take to even consider, let alone actually going through with, adding "Von" to your own last name.

He added it when he attended film school, just for the sake of provocation (that says it all, I guess).

I bet his film teachers loved him..

opps! first time lost on xixax.......

what's the direction to the von trier thread?

Man i bet you just really got GT's hopes up.

yeah, I bet I did

sorry for hiljacking your thread, GT

Let's keep bumping it until he lol's.

what was the last good film stone has made, U-turn? I never saw it. Definitely hasn't had anything going for him in the 2000's. I've kinda grown to despise him as a person, he seems so pretentious

Wall street 2 and W. were both good movies.

But his last great movie is any given sunday, so ya it's been 15 years since i've loved something he's done.

yeah, but before any given sunday he had a spectacular, really, SPECTACULAR run: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the 4th of July, , The Doors, JFK, Heaven & Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn and Any Given Sunday.

All those films, wether you like them or not, wether you think they're pretentious or whatever, are filled with intelligence, top notch craftsmanship and at the same time using experimental techniques in both editing and cinematography (some of bob richardson's best work), a long list of brilliant actors all giving incredible performances not once but usually two or three different times (just of the top of my head there's tom cruise, charlie sheen, willem daffoe, jim morrison, meg ryan, kevin costner, tommy lee jones, joe pesci, sissy spaceck, donald sutherland, val kilmer, james woods, woody harrelson, juliette lewis, robert downey jr., tom sizemore, anthony hopkins, joan allen, bob hoskins, sean penn, billy bob thornton, claire danes, joaquin phoenix, dennis quaid, pacino...fuuuck), etc...This guy was on roll and it's no wonder he's still exhausted.

Also, W. was pretty good too. I'm always amazed at people that say they love cinema and fail to recognize what a major talent this guy is.

Hah, definitely a lol from the outset. Especially considering the original mis-post was for two films I think are terrible. That juxtaposition was right.

Then it turned into the usual casual condemnation about Oliver Stone. Especially considering all Reelist could do was say a good recent Stone film was one he had never seen. Since Stone doesn't rate high in the "respectability" factor, it happens a lot. People objectify Stone films to be what they aren't so criticism is easy. Some people call his allusions obvious or heavy handed when that's the point so it can collide against all the other allusions. Most criticism just misses a lot of the boat of what Stone is actually doing. Still, everyone (especially me) is guilty of criticizing films too simplistically sometimes so I don't take it with any real strain.

For me, Any Given Sunday is very good and W. and Alexander Revisited are great films. His late 1980s and early 1990s stretch was a great run, but there are elements to both those newer films that are developments over some of his more acclaimed films. I'm not implying total development, but he wanted his stories to take on more multiple factors of storytelling interest that some of his earlier films just lacked. I've written about it a number of times so I don't want to regurgitate ideas.

I saw one of the revisted cuts, i don't know if it was the 2nd or 3rd cut however. It was much better than the theatrical but not great by my tastes.  which of the two recuts do you mean GT? I'll check it out.

JFK is in my top 10 of all time. It's one of those movies that impresses me on all fronts. I can watch it over and over and over. The speach made by costner at the end, when he looks directly into the camera and says "it's up to you" still gives me goosebumps. It is a masterpiece.

Alexandro i agree with about 75% of the titles you mentioned. I'm not a huge fan of heaven & Earth and the doors. both are good movies but not great. I still haven't seen salvador.

Actually, both The Doors and Heaven & Earth are my least favorites too, and I don't consider them great, but they're definitely up there in terms of quality and ambition, and flaws and all, they have that energy of a filmmaker during his golden years that is always exhilarating. Going back to acting, Tommy Lee Jones is great in Heaven & Earth, and Jim Morrison is one of Val Kilmer's best performances, perhaps his best. I often find myself choosing what to watch and wishing he had more movies. His two best ones, JFK and Nixon, are just too dense and long to watch them casually.

is W. anywhere near as good as Nixon? I'm really, really, really not interested in seeing it.

Nowhere close. Partially because i think W. was made too early.

Also, Nixon aims to be a tragedy in the classic sense while W. is clearly defined as a kind of cosmic joke comedy on Bush.

No, W. is not as good as Nixon, but that isn't saying much. It's a bad comp and Nixon may be Stone's best film. Stone said Nixon was a full orchestra work while W. was a chamber piece.

Still, how was W. made too early? Unlike most typical biographies of political leaders, the film isn't attempting to cash in on Bush's greatest problems or be a rundown of his greatest controversies (which will continue to leak out over time). It has references to a various numbers of things, but big political situation wise, it mainly focuses on just his situation of going into the Iraq War. That already was well defined enough to be relevant for fiction.

The film has a purpose of trying to paint a psychological portrait of Bush over the course of his history. It allows small moments to both underline and contradict his personal history and the unlikelihood of him ever becoming history with the way the film is structured and how it travels over large periods of history in short time to just show specifically different moments of Bush's life, it's obvious the film is trying to be specific about more anecdotal moments to associate with the personal Bush.

If films were made to cover other Bush controversies, it is likely they would have to be more along the lines of single subject films. I never understood the purpose of clustering a ton of big subjects together because it just minimizes the importance of each historical event, but it happens. A positive for W. is that it doesn't.

Oliver Stone Teaming With Son, Sean, For Mysterious Iran-Set Documentary
Source: Playlist

A couple of surprises here. First off, apparently Oliver Stone's son Sean decided way back in the spring of 2010 to follow in his father's footsteps, and has been working on a feature film titled "SecretStone" about a group of filmmakers working inside a haunted psychiatric hospital who quickly discover they are not alone. Generic, we know, but cast your famous father in the film and you'll have us paying attention. It's some kind of meta-horror, found footage, faux-doc thing and STYD have dug up the trailer for the film (now called "Graystone") which will be looking for distribution at the American Film Market in November. It looks pretty terrible, proving that talent isn't necessarily genetic.

Anyway, it looks like the father-son duo are set to reunite behind the camera, with reports from the local Iranian media that Sean is currently in the country prepping a documentary of some sort with Oliver soon be joining him there. "Sean Stone is in Iran to make arrangements for filming a documentary," a producer is quoted as saying (dubious, we know). "He will talk about his plans on Wednesday."

Stone, the senior one, isn't adverse to touchy subjects, having previously released documentaries on controversial leaders Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Over the years he's also been plotting a film about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, last expressing his desire to follow through with his plans in 2009. Could that project be back in the cards? We're sure we'll hear more soon enough, and if that's indeed the case, Stone is likely to be garnering the most controversy his career has faced to date.

Next up for Stone is the adaptation of Don Winslow's "Savages," the illustrious cast of which boasts Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Aaron Johnson, Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch, Olivia Wilde, Benicio Del Toro and Demian Bichir. A September 28, 2012 release date has been set for the currently shooting film.

Doing anything with your son when they're an adult is always a bad idea. You're gonna get made fun of, Oliver!

Oliver Stone to Direct 'Power Broker' Film for HBO (Exclusive)
Nicholas Meyer will pen the script for the telepic based on Robert Caro's Pulitzer-Prize winning book about how Robert Moses reshaped the face of New York.
Source: THR

HBO is getting political with director Oliver Stone.

The premium cable network is developing a film based on Robert Caro's classic nonfiction book The Power Broker. Like the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning tome, the project will tell the story of how Robert Moses reshaped the face of New York.

Moses, who at one time was dubbed the city's "master builder,' was among the most powerful men in 20th century urban planning and politics, having influenced New York's infrastructure as much as any other individual.

In addition to assuming directorial duties, Stone will executive produce with former studio chief Peter Guber and Sopranos vet James Gandolfini.

Gandolfini's managers Nancy Sanders and Mark Armstrong are attached as co-executive producers, with Nicholas Meyer (Collateral Damage, The Prince of Egypt) on board to pen the telepic.

Quote from: S.R. on September 08, 2011, 04:43:44 AM
Doing anything with your son when they're an adult is always a bad idea. You're gonna get made fun of, Oliver!

Roman Coppola added some great stuff to Dracula.

After Melancholia i am pretty sure that von Trier is my favorite director alive.

Sorry, Paul.

ok, that's great and this Melancholia movie seems to be the tits, but

WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH OLIVER STONE!?!!!!

Similar enough filmmakers I guess.

Hey i saw Red State last night and liked it a lot! What do you guys think about Barry Sonnenfeld ?

Oliver Stone Blasts Obama's 'Bush-Style Eavesdropping Techniques'; Says Edward Snowden Is a Hero
Source: Toral Film

Edward Snowden is "a hero" and the rest of the world should stand up to the United States and offer asylum to the NSA whistleblower, director Oliver Stone said in a Fourth of July appearance at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Thursday.

"It's a disgrace that Obama is more concerned with hunting down Snowden than reforming these George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques," said the outspoken, politically-charged filmmaker during an afternoon press conference at the Thermal Hotel in Karlovy Vary.

Stone, who won an Oscar for directing "Born on the Fourth of July" in 1989, spent his Independence Day in the Czech Republic, showing two episodes from his television series "The Untold History of the United States" and blasting the U.S. for the "global security state" he said it has created.

"To me, Snowden is a hero, because he revealed secrets that we should all know, that the United States has repeatedly violated the Fourth Amendment." Stone said. "He should be welcomed, and offered asylum, but he has no place to hide because every country is intimidated by the United States.

"This should not be. This is what's wrong with the world today, and it's very important that the world recognizes and gives asylum to Snowden. Everyone in the world is impacted by the United States' Big Brother attitude toward the world."

Throughout the press conference, Stone resisted the moderator's attempts to rein in his long answers, which were full of details from the last 70 years of U.S. foreign policy. "It's the story of a great country that loses its way when it becomes obsessed with national security," he said.

He also told the room of mostly European journalists that their countries should resist U.S. pressure. "We need countries to say no to the United States," he said.

"The United States is the dominant power in the universe, with its eavesdropping abilities, cyber abilities ... It's what they call in the Pentagon 'full spectrum dominance.'

"And the world is in danger with our tyranny."

In addition to screening episodes of "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States" dealing with the atomic bomb and the War on Terror, Karlovy Vary presented the "ultimate" cut of Stone's "Alexander," as well as "Scarface," which he wrote.

"Untold History" debuted at the New York Film Festival last October and aired on Showtime in November. Stone said he and coauthor Richard Kuznick are working to get a book based on the series into high school libraries.

But he also pointed to "Savages" as proof that he can make apolitical movies, and he insisted that he is now drawn to subjects to make political points.

"I'm a dramatist," he said at one point. "I don't do movies for ideological reasons, I do them because they interest me."

Later, at a public Q&A following the screening of the two episodes of "Untold History," he repeated, "I don't consider myself a political activist, though I've become one in many ways."

Then he drew connections between the two episodes -- one in which Harry Truman said he knew he was doing the right thing when he dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and other in which George W. Bush spoke of good vs. evil.

"America is possessed with a religious conviction," he said. " ... We think we're special, but we're not.

"There seem to be madmen running the country. Mad men. They wear suits, they wear ties, they talk nice like Obama or tough like Bush, but what's the difference? They're mad men."

I'm not sure how easy it is to find this online, but I was surprised when I found it.  Mostly because I had forgotten about it.  Not a big Stone fan, but it could be good.

The Untold History of the United States (http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/oliver_stone_the_untold_history_of_the_united_states_2012/)

Oliver Stone to Helm Edward Snowden Film
Source: Variety

LONDON — Oliver Stone and long-time producing partner Moritz Borman have nabbed the rights to "The Snowden Files, The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man," written by journalist Luke Harding.

Stone will pen and helm the film, drawing from Harding's account of events surrounding the Guardian newspaper's reporting of the disclosures provided by Edward Snowden.

Stone has started to write the screenplay and Borman is fast-tracking it as a European co-production to start filming before the end of the year.

The book was described by the New York Times as "a fast-paced, almost novelistic narrative that is part bildungsroman and part cinematic thriller."

Stone said: "This is one of the greatest stories of our time. A real challenge. I'm glad to have the Guardian working with us."

Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The story of Edward Snowden is truly extraordinary, and the unprecedented revelations he brought to light have forever transformed our understanding of, and relationship with, government and technology. We're delighted to be working with Oliver Stone and Moritz Borman on the film."

prediction: it will be called 'Snowden'.

It will of course and like so many other Oliver Stone movies, it will have no resemblance to the real events. I think his heart is in the right place, but he makes it all up.