Chasing The Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game

I confess to being a major Oliver Stone fan; a devotee of his DVD commentaries, interviews and the two excellent biographies which have been released (by James Riordan and Matt Zoller Seitz, respectively). Due to that, I went into this memoir unsure that I would learn anything new about the man. I'm pleased to say that I was wrong, and that this is a true literary work rather than the typical star-kissed Hollywood memoir. To paraphrase one critic, Oliver Stone is the rare director who lived actual adventures rather than just watching adventure movies. It's telling that this book chronicles only his first forty years - if it covered his entire life it would probably run about a thousand pages. In many ways, this account of the first half of Stone's life is a roller coaster of trauma and recovery. The first earthquake was his parents' abrupt and traumatic divorce, which caused the figurative and literal loss of his home. It also caused the loss of his mother at age 15: she didn't die, but did abruptly abandon him and leave his life for several years. All of that contributed to Stone wandering a wilderness of depression as a teenager: so severe that, at one point, he became suicidal. Instead, he dropped out of college to become a high school teacher in Vietnam and a merchant marine, wandered Asia, the ocean and Mexico, then wrote a novel. After he dropped out of college for the second time and his novel was rejected, a despondent Oliver Stone felt he had no future and took refuge (as many kids have over the decades) in the military. Stone is the only major director who is also a combat veteran and the chapters on what he saw and experienced during the Vietnam War are haunting. He writes cinematically of the sights and sounds and smells of war - as a reader, one can tell that the vividness of the tragedy has never left him. His mental state after the war (what we now know as PTSD) is also harrowing. As a writer, Stone is simultaneously able to recollect his emotional state at the time while also taking pity in what such a young person had to endure. (I didn't even mention the stint in prison or the drug addiction!)Reading his own words, I did learn new things. For example, while James Riordan's 1995 biography shared that Elizabeth and Oliver Stone suffered several miscarriages and a devastating stillbirth in the years after Platoon, in this memoir Stone reveals his long struggle with infertility actually goes back to his first marriage. Told in his early twenties that he would never have children, he lived for years with the completely valid suspicion that he was robbed of parenthood due to Agent Orange exposure. Later, he writes of the expensive treatments and heartbreaks which occurred while he and his second wife, Elizabeth, struggled to get pregnant. That makes Stone's awe when his first child is born all the more precious. He writes about his son Sean with a tenderness and love reserved for no one else, and he's clearly a more tactile and affectionate father than his own ever was. As to the films, Stone spends considerable time not just on the production, but is also startlingly honest about before and after. Pre-production is a slog of location scouting, negotiating contracts and hiring crew. Post-production is a whirling tornado: he explains the intricacies of sound mixing, the headaches of various print quality (back in the pre-digital days), endless screenings with executives, the promotional campaign, waiting for and dissecting the critics' reviews, etc. Above all, the cloud that hangs over everything is money. Every cent in the budgets for films like Salvador was stretched to its breaking point. And if you've ever wanted to know what the personal financials of a major filmmaker were like in the 1980's, this book is for you. Stone not only flat out states his fees for various projects and his relationships with various agents, but even informs the reader at various points of his personal monthly budget and carrying costs. Perhaps the trades at the time covered Stone's purchase of a million dollar mansion after the success of Platoon  - now we know it came with a massive mortgage and he and his wife were living beyond their means. (That's Hollywood, baby!) The sheer volume of nitty-gritty detail about the movie-making process here is a contrast to, say, Woody Allen's memoir, where mentions of his films are tossed aside and the worst thing that happens on a film set is that someone got the wrong lunch order. Woody, of course, made different types of movies, but it's more exciting to read about productions plagued with screaming arguments, snake bites, and assassinations (Salvador advisor Ricardo Cienfuegos) than whatever happened on Shadows and Fog. Overall, this is a resplendent memoir which will surprise anyone who still believes in the image of Oliver Stone as a hard-partying, macho conspiracy theorist. He reveals himself in this book to be ambitious and talented, of course, but also vulnerable, raw, traumatized and at times self-punishing and emotionally naked. The only negative is that I was left wanting more: why did his marriage to Elizabeth collapse, what was the birth of his second son and his daughter like, what about Talk Radio, JFK, Natural Born Killers, etc.? Now that he's semi-retired from films, I hope he indulges himself as the naturally talented writer he is.

Novel. Fresh. Bold. Reading about Oliver's parents is an unexpected treat, especially his warm sensuous European mother. His parents' real WWII romance in occupied Paris is a tale that will increasingly fall out of memory and could be a movie in itself. Oliver, maybe you will make it as a richly characterized independent movie?I grew up watching Oliver's exciting movies with my family, and I have seen many distracted teenagers and college students sitting glued and riveted to every moment of Midnight Express. Midnight Express hit the world like a shaft of lightning in 1978 and transcends its genre by considerable miles. I would rank Midnight Express among the best ten or twenty movies ever made for sheer storytelling and excitement. He never looked back. Between 1983 and 1993 he had Platoon, Scarface, Year of the Dragon, Wall Street, Born on the 4th of July, JFK. Even lesser movies like the Doors and Natural Born Killers had the landmark adrenaline and headlong operatic storytelling. They also had perfectly placed music. Who could forget the Talking Heads's "This Must be the Place" when Bud Fox is rocking it in "Wall Street"? Stone also has one other novel, "A Child's Night Dream," a youthful, searing expression of intense feeling that is basically a first draft of "Chasing the Light."I would also point out my personal favorite movie, "Alexander" (2004) a potent portrait of Alexander the Great. It is much better than anything you have seen by David Lean. Oliver digs in; never lets go. His great insight and understanding of Alexander's personality are clear. The critics flat out didn't get it. I think they were jealous because the movie is so good. If the critics don't get it that could mean the movie is a masterpiece. It is Stone's masterpiece. My favorite screenwriter and director of all time.

I watched “Platoon” the first week it came out in 1986. The painful reality and rage of the American soldier in Vietnam was shown on the screen for all to witness. Oliver Stone was a grunt in Vietnam in the deadliest fifteen months of the war, it would have been impossible for any other screen writer and director to have given such authenticity of young American soldiers fighting in that wretched war, not only with the enemy, but also among themselves. I was nineteen in 1972 when I was an Army Dust-Off helicopter crew chief in Vietnam. I was with the 57th Medical Detachment, I participated in one hundred Med-Evac missions--landing in water knee deep rice paddies, jungle holes and fire bases to evacuate wounded soldiers, those killed in action or just plain sick, we had no place to hide as we descended, approached and landed on a hot landing zone. Being in Army Aviation, our living condition in Long Binh Vietnam were much more comfortable and civilized than the conditions the infantry grunts had to endure in the jungle. However, as Oliver showed in Platoon, there was tension between the group of soldiers who supported Elias and others who took side with Barnes, we had a similar loathing among us in my Aviation unit in Vietnam. I belonged to the Elias type group. We were divided between “The Heads vs The Juicers.” Marijuana, heroin, alcohol, racism, death and pain--were all in the mix. As a Vietnam Veteran I am deeply grateful that Oliver Stone was able to tell the Vietnam Experience in his movie “Platoon”. The Vietnam war was no Silvester Stallone’s “First Blood Part ll”, Chuck Norris’ “Missing in Action”, or John Wayne’s “The Green Berets”. Oliver Stone’s movie “Platoon” was Vietnam.

I’ll have to admit, I was slightly disappointed when I learned that Oliver Stone’s autobiographical ‘Chasing the Light’ only covered his life up to his breakthrough success with Platoon. He made several great films after that, including some of the most fascinating and controversial of that generation: Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. What he’s given us here, though, feels neither truncated nor incomplete. Stone is interested in the forces that shaped him as a person and an artist, as well as the seeds of his mad ambition, which partly manifested themselves in his tempestuous filmmaking experiences. It’s a self-portrait: raw, emotional, brutally honest. Here we have the antithesis of the cliched shallow, ego-stroking Hollywood autobiography, as the writer-director lays bare his flaws and failures alongside his hard-fought victories.From a happy, sheltered upbringing in New York’s Upper East Side – his stoic Jewish father worked on Wall Street, his vivacious French mother courted the Bohemian society – to his parents’ crushing divorce, on to his nomadic wanderings around South-East Asia, which led to him volunteering to fight in Vietnam, Stone’s early journey is joyful, sad, and a whirlwind of broken dreams and stirring passions. The way he describes himself, his spiral into aimlessness, we can see the adversities accumulate, forces that could either break a young man or forge him into something vital. It took time, heartbreaks, perseverance, and help along the way for him to find his personal spark in the creative process and fan it into screenplays that would blaze with his particular vision.Even after he’d gained his foothold in Hollywood, he had to fight an uphill, Sisyphean battle every time, often to no avail. And the successes along the way, like Midnight Express and Scarface, inflicted wounds, both professionally and personally, that he carried into future projects. Lessons learned the hard way. At times Stone was his own worst enemy, by his own admission. Hubris, cocaine, naivety, arrogance, bad choices: his honesty is welcome, his self-analysis illuminating. I knew, by reputation, that he could be abrasive, but I didn’t realise how fragile his confidence could be. He’s a complicated guy, no question, and to his credit he digs deep to try to grapple with those contradictory forces.Greek mythology has clearly had a profound influence on him. The way he approaches this literary self-portrait reminds me of his treatment of Alexander the Great – firstly, identify the forces that shaped what he would become, and then weave them throughout his life story, sometimes in non-linear fashion, with flashbacks, asides, and stream-of-consciousness passages. He never loses sight of those formative influences – his parents, their divorce, mythology, movies, combat, politics, etc. – and it’s a pleasure to see him address them at the various stages of his arduous climb to the top. Salvador and Platoon were the double-whammy that thrust him to the front ranks of American filmmakers in the mid-eighties. What’s clear from his behind-the-scenes accounts of those productions (and indeed the crazy journeys of the projects to production) is that he earned every bit of his success.Chasing the Light is a riveting read. There’s rarely a dull page in this frank, fiercely self-aware autobiography. I’ve been a fan of Oliver Stone’s work for years, both as a writer and director, and this book has only bolstered my appreciation. It’s a scintillating chronicle of an artist’s almost Homeric struggle to discover, and eventually to blaze onto the screen, his own maverick, personal vision.Highly recommended.

One thing is certain. I don’t think there is a single American filmmaker working today who could write a book half as good as this. Stone has an erudition, a cultural bandwidth and a self-awareness that comes across on every page. The son of a successful Jewish businessman and a French mother, he was brought up bilingual, bi-national and privileged. Not many directors could devote several pages to Homer these days or discuss a montage in Pierrot le Fou. Maybe only Paul Schrader could do that.Chasing the Light (great title) covers his childhood, his parent’s divorce, his tours of duty in Vietnam, his alienation from almost everything, his anarchism, his drug addiction, his paranoia, his marriages, his failures and successes. After Vietnam, where he got wounded and saw the man he killed, he lived frugally and wrote feverishly like some beat poet, somehow ending up with Robert Bolt as his mentor. Bolt taught him the practicalities of screenwriting and he also got Stone a serious agent. Consequently, his script for Platoon made the rounds and while no one wanted to make it, everyone recognised Stone’s talent as a writer - his script for Midnight Express earned him his first Oscar. He was suddenly an A-lister. There were scripts for Milius's Conan the Barbarian, De Palma's Scarface and Cimino's Year of the Dragon.Stone -who seemed to be stoned a lot of the time - covers all this with unflinching honesty. Until the raw and thrilling Salvador, the combative, opinionated and iconoclastic director was always just an inch away from rejection by the Hollywood establishment. But the book has an inevitable trajectory, running at a canter towards his Oscar-winning triumph with Platoon.One hopes for a second volume.

Biographies that start at the beginning generally make me want to skip the first few chapters. Not here. He is perceptive about his childhood and the effect of being an only child who learns that his image of his parents and their marriage was built on lies. How he learns to forgive and to find himself is fascinating.This is the story of a man coming to know himself better and to do so he has to follow his passion. He is neither humble nor arrogant, but ruthlessly honest. So revealing about himself and the crazy industry he finds himself in!As Stone's background is in writing ( later writing screenplays ) this is in a different category from the usual film star or film director biography. He cleverly makes you want to read on, and to do so will mean buying the next volume.

This is a notch above the usual self agrandizing drivel most biographies fall into. Stone has a genuinely different take on the world - the early years before he made it are worth reading alone. It's a book that shows this big name director has a heart and is very self aware of his fallings which is very refreshing. Cracking read

Oliver Stone could really be considered as one of the toughest writers and film directors in history. He has survived immense trauma. He served in the Vietnam war and later briefly spent time in an American jail on drug charges. And at some stage in his life he was addicted to weed, cocaine, tranquilizers, and he drank a lot. All these substances sometimes fuelled his writing, and his career started as a writer, writing scripts including Midnight Express and Scarface, before moving into directing. And how he managed to get his first films funded is amazing, the battles he went through, the highs and the lows. It is real on the edge filmmaking. Absolutely fascinating. His book only covers the period up until he'd completed writing and directing his Vietnam film Platoon, a work of genius that he won Oscars for, and I'm hoping he will write a follow up book about his career since then.