Oliver Stone: 1988 Playboy Interview

Two Olivers made news last year: One, a gap-toothed lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines, became a temporary TV folk hero as he explained how he had tried to vindicate the "noble cause," by implication, of American intervention in Vietnam by promoting a winnable war against the Communists of Nicaragua. The other Oliver, a gap-toothed screenwriter and movie director, walked away with the year's best-picture Oscar for a landmark movie that preached the opposite point of view: that Vietnam was a tragic folly and that Central America could become the next generation's debacle.

It's a good bet that the second Oliver, the showbiz Oliver, will end up winning more hearts and minds than the military Oliver. For Oliver Stone, 41-year-old Yale dropout, former GI, doper, angry rebel and scourge of Hollywood, is now one of the true powers that be, with a body of work that has reflected—and perhaps affected—his generation's obsessions: war, politics, drugs, money.

Indeed, the fact that Stone went directly from his cathartic vision of the Vietnam war in Platoon to an up-to-the-minute drama on greed in America, Wall Street, says something about his sense of symbolism and timing. Or about his luck.

It was only after ten years of excuses, postponements, delays and rejections from every major studio in Hollywood that Stone, a journeyman screenwriter, finally got his independently produced, low-budget, no-stars Vietnam movie on the screen. The result was a film that has grossed $138,000,000 and garnered four Oscars—including best picture and best director. For a time, Platoon became a kind of movable Vietnam memorial as men wearing fatigues wept in movie theaters over the film's closing credits. Not a small part of its appeal was the fact that it was embraced both by veterans who felt that their agony had gone unappreciated and by war resisters who felt that the film captured, definitively, the waste that was Vietnam.

The portrayal of U.S. soldiers in Stone's script as emotionally volatile youngsters who drank, smoked dope and occasionally fragged their officers so unnerved the Pentagon that it refused to offer any technical assistance in the shooting of Platoon. From his right flank, Stone was barraged by columnists such as John Podhoretz, who damned the film for being "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country." But after a decade of pious, ineffective lip service from both left and right about the need to heal the wounds of Vietnam, Platoon emerged as a hardy curative. Platoon, the picture, became, in the words of Time, "Platoon the Phenomenon."

Back in Hollywood, the topic of Vietnam—a long-standing taboo in studio corridors—suddenly became chic. Platoon was followed by a parade of Vietnam-genre movies: Full Metal Jacket, Gardens of Stone, The Hanoi Hilton and Hamburger Hill. Studio executives and producers who for the past five years had wanted to talk only about teen comedies and middle-of-the-road spoofs now wanted projects with "social significance."

However belated his world-wide fame, Stone has been known to Hollywood insiders for a long time. The movies he has written or on which he has collaborated have nearly all been visceral, noisy, controversial. In 1978, his screenplay Midnight Express, about an American in the hellish world of a Turkish prison, won a screenwriting Oscar and launched his career—which nose-dived three years later with the flop of his second directorial effort, a gimmicky movie about a monster hand called, well, The Hand. Stone rehabilitated his career slowly, painfully, by writing and collaborating with a group of hollywood's quirkier, more demanding directors: John Milius, of Conan the Barbarian; Brian De Palma, of Scarface (a cult film today); Michael Cimino, of Year of the Dragon; and Hal Ashby, of Eight Million Ways to Die.

Although it kept him busy, Stone's screenplay work drew mixed reviews, and he built up a reputation as a violence-obsessed xenophobe. Stories about his days as a druggie and carouser circulated freely. Although respected, he was considered a wild card, and it wasn't until he managed to turn Salvador, his stinging film indictment of U.S. policy in Central America, into a small hit that Stone finally got financing for Platoon from a small independent company, Hemdale Film Corporation.

Stone went off to the Philippines with a relatively modest $5,000,000, shot the film with the Aquino revolution raging around his location, then came home with a classic. It was also on time and within budget.

His early personal history does not hint at the discipline or the toughness that were to become Stone's trademarks: The privileged son of New York Jewish stockbroker and a French Catholic mother, Oliver had a comfortable, conservative childhood. He attended prep schools and entered Yale with the class of 1969; there, he was a suddenly afflicted with the fear that he was on a "conveyer belt to business." Influenced by his reading—mainly Joseph Conrad—and the changing times, he quit Yale, bummed around the world and wound up teaching Catholic schools in Saigon in 1965. More exotic travels followed, then more romantic reading, and in a desperate, suicidal state, he returned to Vietnam in 1967 and enlisted in the U.S. Infantry.

Stone began his combat tour a gung-ho patriot. "I believed in the John Wayne image of America," he says. He earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster. But he returned from Vietnam an embittered anarchist, landing in a San Diego jail on dope charges just ten days after his discharge. A failed marriage, stints as a cabdriver and training at the NYU film school matured him personally; the collapse of the Vietnam war and Watergate matured him politically. Ending his carousing, drug-taking, "sexually wild" days, Stone has settled into a posh Santa Monica home, a new marriage and domestic concerns with a three-year-old son, Sean.

To find out about the twists and turns in Stone's life, Playboy sent free-lance writer Marc Cooper (who co-conducted the Playboy Interview with Salvadoran president José Napoleón Duarte in November 1984) to talk with him during the filming of Wall Street. Cooper's report:

"My first meeting with Stone was at his Santa Monica home—just hours before last spring's Academy Awards ceremony. 'I better win,' he said, grinning, 'or you guys won't publish this interview.' I assured him we were interested, win or lose. He immediately asked how I felt he had done on ABC's 20/20, on which he had described the Pentagon's refusal to help in the filming of Platoon.

"'I mean, the Army did come off as assholes, didn't they?" he asked.

"I didn't think he cared in the personal sense; it was a political question. Throughout our interview sessions, he would speak intensely, but he was monitoring each word, each turn of phrase as he spoke, always watching my face for hints of reaction. There was nothing personal or insecure about it—he had points to make and was looking for the best openings. His manner—broad, outward, forceful—is as potent as his films. But it seemed to me the way of a writer rather than a director. A writer with a mission. A writer with battles yet to win.

"We spoke through some of the location shooting of Wall Street, in the summer, between setups that included actor Michael Douglas and Stone's own toddler, Sean. The atmosphere was frantic, but Stone seemed totally focused and inexhaustible. Snatching time in Southampton as the production hurtled on, he pushed the two of us as hard as he pushed his crew, making sure we covered all the ground we had agreed upon. There was no room for distraction, for ambiguity, for drift. He was directed.

"Finally, as the interview concluded, Stone's inborn skepticism surfaced. Perhaps it was the cynicism he had acquired after ten years of betrayal and rejection in Hollywood. He pulled off the lapel mike and said gruffly, 'Hell, you guys'll probably concentrate on all the stuff that's not important. Then you'll cut out the politics.'"