Dog eat dog, Hayēs . . . You fuck other man before he fuck you. And you must fuck last.
—Turkish prisoner, Midnight Express
The Midnight Express was a code word used by foreigners, signifying the dream of escape from a Turkish prison; according to the author of the memoir Midnight Express, Billy Hayes, there was a train each night that whistled past the prison walls, behind which he had been unjustly sentenced to thirty years of his life. In these years, I identified strongly with that sense of imprisonment. Then suddenly, from a slow-motion jail cell, you jump on this train and just know you’re going somewhere! That’s really what a movie is. At a set time, it starts. If nothing happens, you don’t have a movie; go home, back to prison . . . but not now. I was going somewhere.
Hollywood, aka Los Angeles, on first inspection lay flat, shapeless, and ugly as my jetliner drifted down toward it in a harsh, polluted afternoon light. Just another day down there. The hand-me-down architecture of freeways and affordable housing was more like Flushing, Queens, than paradise, but the sea, the mountains, and the climate did make it special. And so far away from everything—East Coast, Europe, Asia. It had no palpable connection to another culture, or really to the past itself. Everyone came here to be reborn.
On closer inspection, LA looked like a seventy-year-old hooker, her thighs having engulfed how many screenplays buried in her vault, long forgotten, lost lives squandered in fantasy—writers, actors, directors, producers murdered by rejection, suicides by despair, or just living on as walking zombies in small apartments with thirty, maybe fifty years of diminishing hopes behind them, never having sold a treatment or a screenplay, not even an “option,” in all those decades. And yet they go on and tell anyone who asks, “I’m working on a screenplay.” I actually got to know a couple of these unrequited souls, and each one was still convinced he was about to score. There were so many aspirants ready to repeatedly plunge their faces between the old girl’s thighs, because she was simply there, so open, so generous. Surely, then, there was enough for a thousand snaking tongues, all flicking at the same time. The gorgon might have the face of a seventy-year-old extra, but you never saw it once you closed your eyes and sucked the juices of this California orange.
At Rent-a-Wreck, for something like $150 a month, I got a fairly reliable white ’68 Oldsmobile and checked into the Montecito in East Hollywood, a ten-story hotel dating back to the ’30s where many actors, some quite old now, lived on a $350–500 per month basis. I had enough for a month, then I still had enough to go weekly, for a total of six weeks. I was shown a clean apartment suite with high ceilings and simple solid furniture; I could write here, staring out at a liberating view of Hollywood Boulevard, sweeping south onto the freeways. It was the ’70s, and nightly, newly formed SWAT teams would stream out with their endless helicopters, searchlights, and loudspeakers, looking mostly for black criminals loose in the wild streets of Los Angeles. Somewhere in the hills lurked two terrifying white men collectively dubbed “The Hillside Strangler,” who liked to pick up girls in a car pretending they were cops and, after torturing them endlessly back at their garage, would flaunt their defiance, leaving them naked, strangled, and spread-eagled on a desolate Hollywood hillside.
When my money ran out, I’d finally do what I’d always dreaded—become a waiter. It was a doable thing, you could find a job, and if I could get on nights, I could write during the day. And if I could clear $1,000 to $1,500 a month, I could hang on. You see, here I was already negotiating with myself for another year or two of writing—and then what? That pit-of-the-stomach fear that I’d become that older waiter you’ve seen in so many restaurants, still smiling at life. What had he or she been at thirty? What dreams, expectations? And then, at forty . . . fifty? How do dreams freeze or die or just corrode? Or do you simply shrug, forget, and get on with it? It’s a living. It gets better every year. And if you do it well, with love, people will know that and appreciate you more and more. And if I’m working, I don’t spend or drink. And I like the nights. I like people. My mother always did. It could be my natural calling. I was never made for my father’s world of business.
It didn’t turn out that way. Los Angeles was shockingly generous to me, beginner’s luck in a casino. A memorable moment. Two weeks in, the phone in my ’30s hotel room rang. Daytime. I was writing. It was my new, conscientious William Morris agent, Ron Mardigian, who was representing me because of Robert Bolt’s strong recommendation to Stan Kamen, the most powerful agent in Hollywood at that time; William Morris was in its last years as an omnipotent power. Ron, a no-nonsense, straight-shooting Armenian American with a designer wife and three kids, lived in Pasadena, his tone always upbeat.
“Hey, Oliver, guess what?”
Uh-oh. No, I didn’t want to guess.
“Marty Bregman read Platoon. Loved it. He wants to option it, $10,000 in cash upfront. Against $150,000 if he makes the picture and five percent of the net. How’s that sound?” What do you think? “He wants you back in New York right away to meet with Al Pacino and Sidney Lumet. He wants this to be his next picture.”
Imagine the thunder and lightning of these words. “Pacino and Lumet”—New York institutions—and they like your script. These words, whatever the outcome, changed my life. How many miles does a writer crawl in a desert mirage to hear that? And a mirage it most likely is, but you don’t know it at the time, because you’ve never heard these words before. Yes, once with Robert Bolt and “The Cover-Up,” there was promise, but this was more real to me because these were New York people.
I suddenly had somewhere to go. The Midnight Express was calling, and I jumped on for dear life. Bregman, originally Pacino’s manager, was a respected New York independent producer of his films, as well as those of Alan Alda, also his client. He had a rich deal at Universal. He paid me, flew me back to New York first class, set me up in a modern company apartment close to his office in the 50s off Lexington, not far from where I’d just spent the last few frustrating years with Najwa. I was impressed with his busy secretaries, accountants (for his tax and money management business), and the massive electric door that opened only from the inside when he buzzed me in to his private office. He stood up, wearing braces; while the effects of his childhood polio were not as severe as Roosevelt’s, it no doubt made getting around difficult. He reeked of authority with a commanding, no bullshit New York sensibility. He brought in Al Pacino from a secret back office, who, like his Godfather persona, was restless, edgy, sensitive, and tough to read; he didn’t really look me in the eye, and I felt nervous. He didn’t speak much. He was sizing me up like he would a boxer in training. All that mattered was the part, “the play.” Everything else was “hanging around.”
Marty invited me to join him at the well-known Elaine’s restaurant uptown, introduced me with conviction as a coming young writer, and the conversation with his celebrity friends dazzled me. Marty was genuinely trying to make Platoon, but it was uphill all the way. Sidney Lumet, who’d directed Al in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon with Marty producing, had been sent the screenplay and said that as good as the script was, he was too old now to chase around a jungle like he’d done earlier in his life (which in fact he’d never done). He was a man of the New York neighborhoods through and through, a man of interiors and raw dialogue; 12 Angry Men (1957) was his first film. And Al, well, he was already in his mid-thirties, not close to the Platoon protagonist’s twenty-one. Marty, in that first phone call to me, had done his job well as the producer; he created excitement, which is crucial to birthing a project. But in this case, excitement was all there would be.
Platoon was being “read.” No question it had impact. “John Frankenheimer wants to meet.” “We’re setting up a meeting with you and Clint Eastwood.” “Fred Zinnemann wants you for something he wants to develop—he’s waited thirty years to do this project!” And on and on. My head was spinning with possibilities and, for the first time ever, a choice—a real choice. Some writers, I found out painfully, really have no choice in their lives. They’re destined only to do a certain thing—a personal experience, one book, one life, and that’s it; the rest is beating around the bush.
Nowhere in this process did a studio ever offer to actually buy Platoon. To them, my life, my most personal story, was a “read,” a sample to taste for my talent. There was no interest in actively filming Platoon. It was a “bummer, too depressing, too real. But Stone’s got something—he’s young, exciting.” My script was now circulating widely to A- and B- and even C-level producers. It seemed like it was everywhere. It was embarrassing to be so naked. I tried to develop a stronger protective skin; people were now talking about me when I wasn’t there.
The train was moving fast, and off my Bregman disappointment, I was quickly hired by a dynamic thirty-five-year-old Irving Thalberg type—Peter Guber, a young prince at Columbia with a music partner in Casablanca Records, who had the then hip late-’70s disco queen Donna Summer and the king, Barry White, along with electronic composer Giorgio Moroder all under contract. Peter had just delivered a $50 million hit in The Deep with Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset. He’d go on to make millions off the gigantic Batman series, and numerous other films, and then run Columbia for Japanese Sony when it bought the studio, and once satiated with films, he’d become a co-owner of four sports teams, including the basketball champion Golden State Warriors. Several people had told me the same thing—“Peter gets things done!”
I walked into his office at the Burbank Studios, which was decked out Casablanca-style with fake palms. He was a Boston-accented working-class guy who started mid-sentence to share his excitement over a kid he’d seen on TV—Billy Hayes. “You see this Long Island kid? He was on the news, landed at Kennedy, mom, dad crying, the works. So this kid escapes from a shithole Turkish prison where he’s doing thirty years for smuggling this tiny amount of hash back to the States.” (Actually it was two kilos.) “Make a little money for college. Innocent kid basically, knows nothing, first trip outside the country, right? They beat the shit out of him! Everything in the world happens to him—and then he escapes from this island prison on a rowboat . . . that’s right! A rowboat, believe it or not. Gets back to the mainland, then runs through a minefield across the Turkish border into Greece—right? Unbelievable! Great story! Tension—like you wrote Platoon. Every single second, you want to feel that tension!” Guber stared me right in the eyes, sharing his willpower. He knew I could do it. He put a book in my hand. “Had this written. I own it” (by which he meant the rights to the story). He pointed to it, written by Hayes and a professional ghostwriter, William Hoffer. “Go home, read it, tell me you want to do it—you got the edge this needs, dark, hard!” Pause. He took a breath.
“Then I want you to meet the director I want for this. He’s coming in day after tomorrow. From England. Alan Parker. Did Bugsy Malone. Lots of talent. Right?” I hadn’t seen it, but I certainly agreed with him. “Then you go meet Billy in New York, get some face time with him, then go to England, write it there.” It was exciting to be in a room with Peter, even if you couldn’t get a word or two in; fifteen minutes and you were out the door, and he was into his next meeting.
I read the book. Very interesting story as told by Hayes. At the Columbia studio, I screened popular prison films to explore the structures—Cool Hand Luke, Papillon, The Great Escape, Brute Force . . . A day or two later I was ushered into a room at Columbia with the British team—Alan Parker, his producer Alan Marshall, and Peter’s choice for the executive in charge of this film, David Puttnam, handsome, suave, a Tony Blair–like politician. Peter liked his class. Apparently I’d already been rammed down their throats, and they were cautiously positive, frosty in the British manner, and later, apart from Peter, expressed their collective relief to be out of this nonstop maniac’s office and looking forward to working in London, as far away from Hollywood as possible.
Parker was a top British commercial director who’d won acclaim for his first film, Bugsy Malone (1976), an eccentric movie featuring a young Jodie Foster, in which all the characters, 1930s gangsters, are played by child actors; Parker had co-written it—so he seemed capable of backing me up if necessary. We’d all meet again in England. A deal was struck, and I was back on a plane to New York, to the Regency Hotel. Over the next three or four days, I went over the story’s details closely with Billy Hayes. Having experienced my own terror over being buried in a prison on my return from Vietnam, I felt great empathy for Billy as he told me his tale of innocence lost. Trying to make a little extra money for college and for his supposed girlfriend, he’d made a huge mistake, and he was sorry for it, but he’d learned a hard lesson. His experience in prison was both horrifying and oddly humorous. The Turks at that time were notorious in Amnesty International dossiers for an infamously corrupt prison system. On one hand, you could live like a king behind bars; on the other, without money or connections, you’d rot away. And Billy was a foreigner without money; at his nadir he was actually resentenced from four years to thirty for two kilos of hash. All my antennae were firing in his defense. But the truth was, I never really examined the things Billy told me in depth. I assumed it was all true because this boy had been through so much suffering; I wanted it to be true.
I left for England, rented a flat in Kensington, and without much ado set to work at Alan Parker’s Great Marlborough Street office in Soho—a glum Charles Dickens workhouse with huge windows looking out onto a grimy courtyard where it often rained. Parker was a cold man, matching the sun that rarely showed up during a bitter winter of union strikes and general discontent. Having grown up in the social class system of England, Parker had a serious chip on his shoulder, both despising the upper classes and wanting their accolades. As far as he was concerned, Americans were loud, vulgar, and overly emotional. I suppose in the brief conversations we had, he took an instant aversion to my six-foot, long-black-haired self, my broad smile, and my Vietnam background. (I find in all relations in an ego-ridden business like film, it truly helps to be short, unless you’re an actor. The physically bigger people are automatically assumed to have an advantage over the person who thinks in such a way.) I also think the fact that I was comfortably bilingual in French estranged him; it’s an instinct only, but I’ve found that many British look down on French people as emotionally “de trop” (too much)—whereas the English are proud of sitting on their feelings.
But whatever it was, it was clear from the outset I was there only to work, starting early mornings in his shop, an hour off for a sandwich lunch along Wardour Street, and then back to the typewriter into the evenings until 8 or 9 p.m. Sometimes, to catch a play, I’d leave earlier as Parker stared at me through the glass partitions. I was being paid the princely sum of $30,000 (against $50,000 if the picture was made). The cherry on top was the per diem of $100 a day in cash, which was then a small fortune in inexpensive London; it was the first time I had cash to burn, and burn through it I did—clothes, meals, theater, nights out, dinners with beautiful women when I could find the time, which I did. And eventually a British lover who actually enjoyed having sex.
I didn’t realize it then, but Parker’s plan, I believe, was to indulge Guber’s appetite for this American screenwriter, get my first draft in six or so weeks, and then get rid of me, with Alan or another Brit making this into the true British-only production they really wanted. The only obstacle was the material itself: it was essentially American, and Billy Hayes was Long Island, and I was what I was.
Going through that cold winter in this depressed pre-Thatcher England, I worked lonely, long hours, excited by the script, and turned out a first draft I liked in five weeks, which I handed over to Professor Parker on a Friday, then went out and got pissed during “pub hours” on their powerful “special import” beer. I’d done my best, but if I’d known how precarious my situation was, it would only have hurt me deeply. I’m glad I didn’t. Actually, Alan’s longtime producer from commercials, the hard-faced Yorkshireman Alan Marshall, talked to me several times as a human being; he was working class in a warmer way than his director. Also Alan’s veteran secretary knew him well and sometimes gave me some helpful information—and hope. But everyone treaded softly around the boss.
When I showed up Monday morning for my expected scolding, Parker met me right off, looked me straight in the eye, which was rare, and said with a hint of happiness, “It’s good.” Which meant, in his shorthand, “It works.” Both Puttnam and Marshall fully agreed, surprised that I’d delivered. With Parker more involved, I went back to work for another three or four weeks of revisions, wherein the script grew to a fat 140 pages, over which Parker now glowed with pride, saying to me more or less, “You’ve done your job. You’ve given us a script we can finance. You’re done.”
That weekend Alan actually invited me to his home in the country outside London for lunch in a large house with his wife, kids, dogs—a dream world; he was kinder to me, and seemed genuinely happy for once. The next time I saw him, several weeks later, he was in LA on the edge of a “greenlight” from Columbia, asking me to do another set of revisions over some two weeks that brought the script to a manageable 110 or so pages. The budget was tight, around $2.3 million, Columbia’s lowest one that year, a definite dark horse, but we had a new gambling studio head in Danny Melnick. And at that price, it was approved for shooting in Malta. The catch was that the elaborate ending, with a sea and land chase to the Greek border, had to be eliminated and replaced with a less interesting, almost accidental self-defense killing by Billy of a brutish prison guard who has hounded him from the beginning; Hayes then changes in to a guard’s uniform and walks out the door to his freedom on a street in Istanbul. In real life, Hayes never killed anyone, but this made for a strong “movie vengeance” ending. I far preferred the original, in which he doesn’t take a life, but yielded to the pressure to get it made. If I hadn’t, Parker would’ve written it himself. Guber was hot, so was the script, and “this kid Parker’s got a great eye” was the mantra in Hollywood. The forces had aligned. The Midnight Express was rolling!
I wouldn’t be invited to the set in Malta or, for that matter, to the film’s spectacular international premiere at Cannes the next year. Parker wanted the limelight, and he certainly got it. He would be offered large projects. The screenwriter must learn the art of detachment, which is difficult when strong emotions are involved. I buried myself quickly in another project, which was offered to me as soon as I finished. Word was out that Midnight was good. I was wanted. I was golden, “on the come” in Vegas terms. For someone who grew up with the only child’s insecurity and doubt of my family life, this was quite a reversal and an affirmation, and so necessary to balance the toxic effects of continual rejection.
The offer to write Born on the Fourth of July immediately came from Marty Bregman in New York. Although he hadn’t made Platoon, Bregman knew in his bones Born on the Fourth was right for Pacino, and he knew I was the one to write it. Marty was a great salesman, a 1930s Jewish kid from the Bronx who hauled his polio-weakened legs around on braces and wielded his cane like a weapon of war. His strength was clear, compounded by his New York accent and an edge of anger: “Don’t cross me, kid, or I’ll break you.” He was also dark and handsome like Bugsy Siegel—altogether a dramatic persona you don’t forget. He’d become a major figure in my life, both good and bad, but right now I was “his boy.” He felt he’d discovered me with Platoon, and he’d test me to my limits with Born.
He’d optioned the book by Ron Kovic in the centennial year of 1976, when it emerged to a front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review. It followed the agonizing story of an all-American Long Island boy who grows up in a large family defined by an unthinking patriotism, joins the marines, and is terribly wounded in Vietnam. The heart of the book is about how Kovic adjusts to his life turned upside down. There’d already been an adaptation developed by a hot young writer who’d never lived through something similar, and it skewed in all the ways “intellectuals” think of war. I knew I could do it, but I didn’t want to. I was scared. I didn’t want to identify with this boy’s suffering. And besides, the writing of it, the production itself, would be so traumatic and difficult to achieve—I foresaw rewrite after rewrite under the painstaking Bregman. You suffer too much with a producer like that, but sometimes—not always—you get to a higher place. And sometimes you end up a broken, masochistic lump of despair. Marty was good with a script, no question, but he was also, less happily as I would find out, a major “control freak.”
The story was epic, encompassing 1950s suburbia through Vietnam and Kovic’s return into the 1970s—twenty years of American life. I actually had written a return from Vietnam story in ’69–’70 about a young one-armed veteran who gets into trouble with the law—“Once Too Much.” It was a cautionary screenplay with Sam Peckinpah–like violence. But it wasn’t right, too melodramatic; the truth was better. When I first met Ron Kovic in his wheelchair on his thirty-first birthday, July 4, 1977, at the Sidewalk Café in Venice, California, he was like his book—painfully blunt, poetically so, his words softened by his gentle voice and tender eyes. He was a handsome man with a thick black mustache like my French grandfather’s, and piercing black eyes full of sensitivity and perception, his mind on fire. His compassion was mixed with great anger. I realized here was the story—a tortured monument of a human being right in front of my eyes. This would be Al Pacino. We talked for two hours, and I knew he was my anchor for the screenplay, that I could be “safe” with Ron—that I wouldn’t fail. Coincidentally, when I first arrived, Ron had been talking to a group of veterans on the busy terrace, among them an Irish American journalist who’d been in Vietnam and told me a little of his own amazing story. Richard Boyle was a personality as outsized as Ron; I would file his tale away and, years later, actually return to it as the basis for my film that became Salvador. Two films were born that propitious day.
When Billy Friedkin fell in as the director of the Kovic movie, all the pieces fit. Along with Francis Coppola, Friedkin was in the top tier of new Hollywood directors. Apart from the older quality filmmakers like Kazan, Jewison, Pollack, Lumet, George Roy Hill, Mike Nichols, then on everybody’s list, there was a new breed of films around with directors like Spielberg and Lucas—but Friedkin and Coppola were then working at higher altitudes with no net. After making two monstrous successes with The French Connection and The Exorcist, Friedkin had suddenly failed at the box office in 1977 with the expensive Sorcerer, and Born on the Fourth of July was the perfect choice, to my mind, for him to do his penance. Bregman flew me to Paris, where Friedkin, along with his wife, the great French actress Jeanne Moreau, was licking his wounds as many offers were being thrown at him.
Friedkin came to our suite at the luxurious Plaza Athénée, the preferred base for film-centric Americans abroad. He seemed like a lanky, basketball-playing teenager, determinedly American with his Chicago accent, intent, concentrated. It was that famous concentration I sensed in his films. You can know a director’s mind by watching his film unfold—the pace, the reasoning, the emotion. In two long sessions, Billy lived up to his reputation for analysis, getting to the dramatic point on our second day. Kovic’s book was written in a dreamy, time-fractured, impressionist style, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, beautiful on paper and very moving, but probably disorienting and confusing to an audience trying to absorb the visual story points; the audience never really knows the story as well as the filmmakers do, and they can lose the surface thread easily if they have to think “Who is this? Where am I? What happened to that other character?” while still trying to follow the basic storyline.
Friedkin exclaimed, “Oliver, forget all this jumping around in time—tell it in order . . . literally. Just cut the bullshit. The film’s corny Americana—but make it good corn.” And that, in essence, solved my dilemma. Because it made me back up and start at the beginning—in Massapequa, Long Island, in the backyard, playing baseball in the 1950s, the long summer days.
I returned to my new one-bedroom condominium with a small terrace on the twenty-fourth floor, overlooking West Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard in all its laid-back decadence. It was clean, modern, sterile—but it was mine. I was offered $50,000 against $100K on Born with a small net backend, and I prepared myself to write, going to screening rooms (in pre-video days) to watch classics such as Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) and Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Additionally, Midnight began shooting in September of ’77, which brought in more money, and for the first time, I was deluged with offers to write quality material for directors like Richard Lester and Fred Zinnemann—six quality offers in my first ten days back in LA. I soon found a business manager for life in Steve Pines from the Bronx, who guided me in how to handle an abundance of money I’d never seen before. There was reason to be optimistic. In 1976 my income had been $14,000, but in 1977 it shot up to $115,000. What a year I’d had. This train was moving fast.
I worked faithfully for months with Kovic, reliving his rise, fall, rise again. It was at times so difficult for him; he’d act out entire scenes for me in his head, sometimes crying quietly from the pain remembered. His young life on Long Island, the isolation of the veterans’ hospital, the alienation of coming home, the lack of contact with his past, his old friends from school, a desire to flee to Mexico. A scene with his devastated Polish Catholic mother and working-class father, or confessing he’d shot his own man. He’d go there in his eyes; I’d follow. It was difficult to watch and share. Every moment anchored to that wheelchair was an echo chamber for Ron, every sound, every feeling existing “from here to eternity.” He was obsessed, overly so I felt then, because in my American upbringing, strong emotions were supposed to be kept in check. One couldn’t make everything in a movie hyper; proportion was necessary. But what else could Ron be? He’d been driven crazy by this wound to his spine—half-dead the rest of his life. When later I studied Buddhism and they talked of “mindfulness” as a supreme virtue in this life, I thought of Ron and the necessity of staying in his mind to survive. So many vets in wheelchairs died early because they wanted so badly to get out of that confinement through drinking, drugs, excess, whatever. I would have. I would have died.
Clearly I was deeply influenced by Ron—his power, his integrity. He was far more mature than I; he had to be after a thousand nights in a Bronx hospital bed. Despite some major setbacks, he’d stayed sane through his suffering and become the most compassionate human being I’d yet met. My father’s sarcastic side, which had rubbed off on me, didn’t always register with Ron until he began to understand me. The first time we went to his hometown, Massapequa, Long Island, and I saw the cramped rooms he grew up in, I was taken aback by the low-cost 1950s postwar housing, which was built far smaller than I was accustomed to. I gently mocked his favorite restaurant in town—Tony’s, a meatball and spaghetti joint, red tablecloths and dripping wax candles. I’d dined in some better New York Italian places, and when I took “Ronnie,” as I came to call him endearingly, to these places, he made sure to tell me he preferred Tony’s in Massapequa.
Ron was everything I hadn’t been growing up in 1950s New York—a Boy Scout, baseball star, wrestler; he had several brothers and sisters, his dad was a grocery store manager at the A&P, his mom regularly went to church and hung crucifixes on the walls of their home. He was a true believer, and the call to serve from President Kennedy’s inauguration speech in 1961 deeply moved him. So much so that when he graduated from high school, he volunteered for the marines in Vietnam. In contrast, I’d admired Barry Goldwater, the conservative candidate in ’64, for his straight-talking ways—a by-product of my dad’s influence. He had preferred Nixon in 1960 and thought Kennedy was another untrustworthy “egghead” Democrat without solid experience.
Ron, among others, changed me. His story, unlike my own, was mainstream American and could touch the world if there was such a thing as a collective heart. Ron introduced me to a network of veterans living in Los Angeles, helping one another. There was a lonely desperation to these men. I had avoided them; the reunion thing chilled me, as well as the thought of getting together with other vets to feel sorry for ourselves. But to my surprise, these raw encounters allowed me to feel truly the collective experience we’d been through. This calmed me, and in later years I made an effort to go to my own school reunions, as well as reconnect with several veterans in different states. I was, in my way, exorcising Vietnam by talking about it with others, not dismissing it as I had for years. The films I would make helped that process, and as time went on, I’d meet veterans and others in national political groups, speaking openly about the folly of that war. There was hope at that time in the 1970s—it seemed there’d be no more Vietnams. It was possible we could actually learn something from that war. And until Reagan in 1980, no leading figure would defend its purpose.
Meanwhile, word of mouth for Midnight Express was growing in Europe. The film was shown to an electric response at Cannes in May ’78, where it became an immediate scandal when audiences were shocked by its intense and unpredictable violence. The Turkish government objected loudly and formally to its depiction in the film. (Turkey’s tourist revenue, in fact, would end up taking a significant dive.) Critics were divided, but the ones who loved it gave it box office reviews. I wished I’d been invited to Cannes, but clearly Parker did not want me there. But even from afar, it was my first experience of a “hit” of any kind—it goes faster than I’d ever imagined. The moment it was shown in Cannes, and then all the little screening rooms in all the cities worldwide where prints and labs existed, it was talked about, whispered about, it was hot—it was on lips and in eyes. Movie exhibitors and distributors took up the echo: “Have you seen Midnight Express yet?” And without waiting for an answer, the person on the receiving end knows—good or bad, it’s simply “to be seen.” This is the role of “Did you see?” It’s rule number one, I’ve come to learn, and it isn’t logical. It never is. Every filmmaker knows if he’s experienced it, and at the same time, every one of us knows, no matter how hard you’ve tried, it makes no difference whether someone likes it or doesn’t like it, as long as they see it and are talking about it. And not some praiseworthy film no one really wants to see. People wanted to see Midnight Express because it was simply on fire.
Back in the US, in spite of this heartening news from abroad, I’d failed to anticipate the difficulties in store for Born. Pacino and Friedkin both professed to “love” the script. But there was a pause as the studio read it. “Was it commercial? A wheelchair film? Even with Al Pacino?” There was another Vietnam film in the pipeline, Jane Fonda’s Coming Home, which many thought was a similar story, especially as the filmmakers had interviewed Ron Kovic extensively before his book was published. But Coming Home was a relationship movie with Fonda as the puzzled, hurt wife of Bruce Dern, returning from combat, unrecognizably alienated, and committing suicide; parallel to this storyline is Fonda’s growing attraction to Jon Voight as an angry paralyzed vet at the hospital where she volunteers. It was a strong film from Hal Ashby, and it won acting Oscars that year for Fonda and Voight—but it wasn’t going to make any money, and that is the cruelest bottom line in Hollywood, always has been. You can “talk” all you want about a film, but it’s just “talk,” not money. And who really wanted to see a paraplegic veteran who can’t fuck Jane Fonda and yells out his anger at a world that’s betrayed him?
Friedkin gave up early on the making of Born. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t—that Marty Bregman couldn’t get it properly financed. He chose instead to direct Dino De Laurentiis’s The Brink’s Job about an armored car robbery, which turned out to be forgettable. I was furious at Billy for giving up and “selling out,” and wrote him a passionate note asking him to reconsider. Sadly, he never rose again to the heights of his early success.
I poured my remaining hopes into Al and Marty’s replacement director, Dan Petrie. He was a compromise choice, a veteran mostly of TV films who would later make the excellent Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981) with Paul Newman, but he had the placid personality of an insurance executive putting out fires—no crisis here. So with Petrie in, Bregman had gone out and successfully raised German tax shelter financing of some $6 million, and on that basis Universal agreed to distribute the film.
We plunged into rehearsals, theater-style, for two long weeks with Al and a fully cast film in a Broadway-area studio. As with Robert Bolt, I went back to Screenwriting 101, forcing myself to reexamine each word, nuance, scene, at times embarrassed by my work, constantly rewriting to accommodate Dan and the actors. Best of all, I watched a white-hot Pacino doing a modern version of Richard III in a wheelchair, ripping the world apart for its robbery of all he held dear. Al was truly a remarkable actor, and Lindsay Crouse was powerfully real as his girlfriend; she made the written words come off the page in ways that surprised me (“Did I write that?”). The same was true of Lois Smith as his mother and Steven Hill as his father. I was so proud, so excited, yet I knew, without acknowledging it, that Al was now a thirty-eight-year-old man. He was, in truth, a theatrical Ron Kovic. It would certainly have worked for the film’s later scenes, but he’d never be seventeen or twenty-one again, evoking that mood of
So bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
We were so close—a week or two from location shooting in Massapequa—when the German tax shelter financing collapsed. It often happens like that on a film, dramatic throughout. But to see everything actually crash down and disappear in a day after months of intense work is devastating. Suddenly, our cast and company were wandering around in a daze as we somehow expected Bregman to find an alternative source of money. But it wasn’t happening. I took it personally, so ashamed. No one wanted this film, even with the magnificent Pacino. No one had seen what two dozen of us had seen in that rehearsal hall, how brightly, despite his age, the light of true greatness had shone on Al, who never felt he was too old for the part.
Stories had it that Al had lost confidence in Dan as a director; in those days, Al was extremely suspicious and tough on directors he hadn’t previously worked with, trusting mostly his own instinct. Soon we all stopped coming to the rehearsal hall, and the prep week to start locations on Long Island was canceled. Al playing seventeen and going to the prom was going to be a stretch anyway. Our company, which had been so close, simply dissolved. Nothing to do, no place to go in the mornings, no film. Marty’s office was a tomb. He’d aged a lot in these weeks. Al was then rumored to have accepted Norman Jewison’s . . . And Justice for All (1979) as his next film. Nor would he return Ron’s or my calls. Nor, for that matter, did he return Bregman’s calls. It was over.
Ron was broken apart for weeks—months, really—and couldn’t help but turn some of that rage on me for giving him hope. And truth be told, Ron had become a little “glamorized” by his Hollywood hopes, and at times I’d grow irritated with him for “falling for this shit” where you believe a picture’s made before it really is. One night, back in Los Angeles, we argued ferociously. Pissed, I walked away. He screamed at me like a possessed wraith, and chased me in his wheelchair down the Venice boardwalk. He scared me. Days later, when he was calm, I promised him, “Ron, if I ever make it in this business, I’ll come back and make this damn movie!” Ron always remembered that and reminded me years later. To him, it became prophetic. To me, it was a dead weight. My heart, already crushed by the gloomy fate of Platoon, was like a mother’s stillborn baby, ready to be vacuumed out. I hated this town so much—such cowards! They don’t like, they don’t want my films! They don’t want the real Vietnam!
But the worm does turn, and 1978 was actually signaling, unrecognized by me, the start of a Vietnam wave. Coming Home was followed by The Deer Hunter, a film from a relative newcomer, Michael Cimino, which came out of the blue, out-shocking Midnight Express with its violence and American homeland message. It became the film of the year. And Apocalypse Now would follow at Cannes the next year, in 1979, and then Stallone’s Vietnam veteran in the Rambo series (1982 and 1985), and Chuck Norris looking for American MIAs in the Missing in Action series (starting in 1984), all moneymakers. But to me it seemed the Vietnam excitement was coming and then going, and Platoon, as well as Born, were just not fated to be the right films at the right time. I was stoic; “my Vietnam” had burned out. No self-pity here. But Platoon had opened doors for me, and I was grateful and busy.
Unlike Ron, I had Midnight Express to attenuate the pain. The film opened in October 1978 to glorious business all over the country, as well as in Europe and Asia. Columbia was shocked and pleased as the film ultimately grossed worldwide something close to $100 million. The Golden Globes was the first stop on the Oscar path, to which we were clearly headed to compete for Best Picture against Deer Hunter, Heaven Can Wait, Coming Home, and An Unmarried Woman. Some critics were scathing, inflicting personal pain. Pauline Kael destroyed Parker and me for having made a “mean-spirited, fake visceral sadomasochistic porno fantasy”; Kael went on at great length to express her hatred. I felt misunderstood, but looking at the film years later, I recognized the ruthless sense of violence in myself. Yes, because I’d been there—in war, in prison, in the merchant marine, at various times in civilian life I’d seen some of the worst of the human race. Why not show it? This was not “fake” at all. I was partly a beast—because I’d served “the Beast” over there. I’d killed in its name. Why deny it? I didn’t condone it, but if I’d been as oppressed as Billy Hayes was in that prison, I knew I would use any weapon I had to get out. And I’d yell at the phony judges at the trial, condemning me to thirty years. And I’d bite out the tongue of the man who’d betrayed me! I had, since Vietnam, so much bottled up in me for years, I felt justified in releasing my unexplored rage—my own “wrath of Achilles.” In the film, Billy Hayes, arbitrarily resentenced from four years to thirty, explodes in the courtroom:
I just wish you could be standing where I’m standing right now and feel what that feels like, cause then you’d know something that you don’t know, Mister Prosecutor. Mercy. You would know that the concept of a society is based on the quality of that mercy, its sense of fair play, its sense of justice . . . but I guess that’s like asking a bear to shit in a toilet. For a nation of pigs, it sure is funny you don’t eat ’em. Jesus Christ forgave the bastards, but I can’t. I hate. I hate you. I hate your nation. And I hate your people. And I fuck your sons and daughters, because they’re pigs. You’re a pig! You’re all pigs!
Excessive, over the top? Yes, let alone talk like that in court. No one would have the guts. According to the real Billy, he “forgave them for what they did,” which he revealed much later, after the movie was released, and which, considering the source, sounds suspiciously Christ-like. But the point is, my lines shocked the audience in an unaccustomed way. In movies, the protagonist being sentenced for his innocence cannot attack; he must accept the injustice of this world. This supposedly makes him vulnerable, human. But with the director’s approval, I defied convention. I wanted Billy to be raw, human, and vulnerable, and lose his temper, get angry, really angry. The hell with good taste! As for Billy at the time, he wanted the film to be made at all costs and expressed no dissatisfaction with the script that I heard about. I had an instinctive confidence the audience would know these feelings because we’ve all suffered injustice. We’ve all been in some way Jean Valjean—and Inspector Javert as well. And for sure, that courtroom scene, as well as several others, is still remembered for its shock value alone. Once you see it, you cannot ignore or forget the feelings and images in Midnight Express.
The backstory to the Oscars competition is the misery that hunt entails for everyone. Back then it was a “big deal,” but nothing compared to what it became in the 1990s, when Harvey Weinstein and Miramax took the art of promotion one step further. There was always the unfounded rumor of “buying votes,” as there’s a lead-up chain of events beginning with the Golden Globe awards in early January. The Globes are given out by a coterie of foreign journalists in Hollywood. A rather meaningless group of publicity-creating writers without real readership in their home countries, they had nonetheless accumulated “standing,” which all producers chased after as a signifier of social popularity, like a high school election. There were also the film critics’ awards in New York and Los Angeles. They had their own signifiers among themselves, mainly self-contained, I believe, until “Harvey,” as Weinstein was always known, penetrated that circle. They often skewed to the less commercial films, or to put it another way, films not necessarily waiting to be seen by a real audience. Midnight was way too vulgar and successful for their consideration.
Deer Hunter was, as I said, the big shocker of 1978, with its definitely mythic and unrealistic characterization of American POWs being tortured by the evil Vietnamese, incessantly jabbering in harsh, guttural exclamations. This irked Alan Parker and David Puttnam, who were riding into town as the avant-garde of the new wave of British directors and their films—Ridley Scott (The Duellists), Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire), Franc Roddam (Quadrophenia), Adrian Lyne (Flashdance), and Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields). The British were good, sprung from the world of commercials, their camerawork brooding, smoky, different, their actors superb, and they could do it cheaper. And here with Midnight, Parker and Puttnam had pulled off something highly exotic with a new Middle Eastern aura and atmosphere, our senses magnified by the whiny tension chords of Giorgio Moroder’s music. And yet here were the Americans again, with Deer Hunter, self-involved with their bloody Vietnam syndrome. Had we, Parker and Puttnam thought, not suffered enough at the hands of super-mogul Peter Guber’s gigantic ego or that screenwriter with the damned Platoon script? Enough already. Theirs was a deep-seated, particular dislike for things American (except for the money, of course), and over time, Puttnam’s career was damaged by his criticisms of the Hollywood system.
The January night at the Golden Globes took a peculiar turn for me. There’d been several parties in the days leading up to the ceremony where I finally met Brad Davis, the hot new star of Midnight Express; he seemed a volatile, angry young man who grew in the part. He was close to the real Billy Hayes, and the three of us ended up sharing alcohol, quaaludes, and some cocaine, which was making its reappearance in Hollywood as a party drug back in vogue, I believe, for the first time since the 1920s. There were always private users, but this was a popular, just-below-the-surface public thing with younger actors beginning to enjoy it. It was sexy, innocuous enough, and fun. It sparked great energy and laughs, and was nothing more to me—at first. A terrific burst of “friendly fire,” yes, but I already had great energy. So I’d do it here and there, including at the Globes, which was known as a fun and unexamined party, not at all like the Oscars.
So as the speeches and the television awards dragged on for three hours before the big film awards in the last hour, the three of us, Billy, Brad, and myself, did cocaine in the men’s toilets of the Beverly Hilton ballroom; several other parties of people were also stepping in and out of stalls that night. And at our table, front-center, first row—thank God this was in the pre–live TV broadcast days—we were laughing among ourselves, having a great time as Parker glared at us. He was, as I said, not a happy man, and I suppose the prospect of waiting around for Cimino to win the director award for The Deer Hunter further darkened his view of the world.
So it was after a few hits of coke, a quaalude or two, several glasses of wine over three hours, that finally my name was called for screenwriting adaptation. Not that I was surprised, because many people had told me I’d win. I felt like a racehorse they were betting on, and I’d come in on a two-to-one bet. The applause was tremendous in my ears, the ballroom floating in the pure joy of this moment. My rebel side had been restive the whole night, or perhaps since I’d seen Parker’s glum face earlier, and it reminded me of all the indignities he’d piled on me. Who knows? The devil was in me that night. And here we were, at a ceremony with all the people who’d rejected Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July and lavished applause on a bunch of television cop shows up for awards. I’d seen the shows, disliked most of them, representing the triumph of Nixon’s “law and order” world, jailing the underclass, the black, the Spanish as “bad guy” drug dealers, outsiders. All these actors and producers being lauded for fawning over cops. I hated the whole self-congratulatory air of the night.
There was something else growing inside me, but I couldn’t articulate it. I’d seen it in Vietnam. That the US was always quite ready to lecture others on how to behave, be it about drugs or human rights, while ignoring our own giant appetite for drugs at home. I’d always despised bullies, at school, in war, and now I was finding them here, in my dream city—Hollywood. But far more subtly. The biggest bullies quietly control the airwaves, the content, the attitude, and you do not veer too far from what is “thinkable.” So when I got to center stage to accept my Golden Globe and have my moment, I started to explain to the audience what I was really thinking, which wasn’t necessary, but certainly Brad’s and Billy’s faces were egging me on. I was trying to say something like this, which is far more articulate, probably, than what I said.
“Our film’s not just about Turkey . . . but our society. You know, we arrest people for drugs, and we throw them in jail . . . and we make heroes of the people who do that . . . and . . .” It was going on. Seconds. It wasn’t clear. My tongue was dry and heavy in my mouth, and I was trying too hard to explain my concept of how we condemned people to jail without recognizing what we were doing to ourselves as a nation. But it got so lost because I hadn’t written it in advance, and I was more zonked than I thought. I was losing them. I now heard a dead silence in the room . . . then the hissing started, and it grew.
The next thing I recognized was the exit cue music as co-hosts Chevy Chase and Richard Harris, both formidable partiers in their own right, were coming from stage left and right to get me, that is to “accompany” me offstage as quickly and politely as possible—as the hisses and boos rang out in an ascending chorus. My message was clearly lost. I was embarrassed when I walked back to our film’s table, which was, as I said, front and center. I was not uncomfortable with what I was trying to convey, and perhaps some had understood me, but they were silent as the awards pounded on to their conclusion. Parker, flushed with red wine, glared at me, while Puttnam and Guber avoided my eyes. Brad and Billy just smiled neutrally and moved on to the next round of applause.
Cimino indeed won Best Director for The Deer Hunter. Then Heaven Can Wait received Best Picture–Comedy, which brought Warren Beatty to the stage in his peak splendor as producer, co-director, co-writer, and actor. And then, surprisingly, Midnight Express upset Deer Hunter for Best Picture–Drama. That shocked us, and Peter Guber and David and the two Alans, Parker and Marshall, took their turn on stage. And then the music wound up the exit cue, and after three long hours, the tuxedoed crowd stood up to leave.
Parker wasted little time coming right up to me, vindicated. “You just blew it, Oliver. That was your Oscar. Think you’ll ever get one now? The worst thing is—you hurt the film.” He was so palpably angry, wanting to punish me; the actor Tom Courtenay could have played him perfectly as the class-hating communist commissar in Doctor Zhivago, or the overbearing British POW in King Rat—same voice, characteristics, and look, with all the meanness of a British school and class system that had eaten at his soul. Puttnam chimed in something like “this is really going to hurt us,” and even Peter Guber, to whom I felt more loyalty than to the others, stopped and, though delighted by the picture’s win, commiserated without personalizing it: “I wish you hadn’t done that. Congratulations anyway.”
The room emptied, no one seeking me out. I went home sad and still ashamed. The Oscars were still two and a half months away, but I had blown it. For our picture, perhaps. I’d certainly destroyed my own chances, but that was okay. I hadn’t gone up there, as Parker thought, to fish for an Oscar. I wanted to share my feelings; what a mistake that was. Feelings. So dangerous when you express them.
My agent made light of it the next day. There was actually a kinescope made of that night, in the years before the show was telecast widely around the world, which I saw twenty-five years later on YouTube, although it’s since been removed. It made me laugh. What a fool I was. Not for what I said but for saying it so badly. But Hollywood at that time was actually far less hysterical and more tolerant than it’s become. The incident was simply noted in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. I was talked about—“Stone must’ve been high!”—but it was funny, part of the general loosening mood with a younger generation coming on in the later 1970s—the “Young Turks,” as Jane Fonda labeled us. And with no TV broadcast, there were, after all, only about a thousand people in that ballroom, so it never grew into a shaming event, as it would today.
And I kept getting offers of real money. I was being chased. Producers who once considered me with the attention span given an insect were now looking right at me, valuing my thought process. The glamour and fast lane of Hollywood were intoxicating. At a party given in their New York town house by Arthur Krim, head of Orion Pictures, and his wife, Mathilde, a pioneer in AIDS research, I was amazed that all these known faces—Yul Brynner, Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Barbra Streisand, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Liza Minnelli, William Holden, Natalie Wood, and so on—could all be here, in the flesh, at one time.
To me, movie stars you see in Cinemascope frames are not quite real. They should rarely come down to earth, stay hidden, unreal. So I’d meet them, shy, intimidated, and drinking more to calm my nerves, probably made a repeated fool of myself trying to be witty or provocative in order not to be considered boring. Then they’d drift on. Who knows what they thought? Do people really listen at these things? I wonder. But first impressions are given and taken—often wrongly, which is ridiculous in itself. Any person needs a few “takes” at the least. Now that I’m older, when I meet someone at a party, I tell them frankly, “No, I don’t remember you, but that’s good. It gives us a chance to try again. I’m Oliver. Now who are you?” Parties are indeed minefields.
Arthur Krim and his partners were the highly respected owners of United Artists since the early 1950s, then sold it to a huge insurance company (Transamerica), and broke away to form Orion Pictures in 1978, which became the industry’s foremost independent distributor, with full access to the Warner Bros. network of theaters. And they were the first to offer me an opportunity to write and actually direct my next picture. I was in heaven.
A group of Armenian American investors was also offering me a small fortune to write a big-budget genocide film set during the First World War; the millions of Armenian deaths were a terrible, little-known tragedy of that era, but the investors’ filmic intentions were marred by their hatred for Turks, for which they wrongly admired me as a result of Midnight Express. I couldn’t possibly go back to another Turkish horror story.
I took meetings with people such as Jane Fonda, one of my idols for her outspokenness on Vietnam. She’d defied every convention of that era and come back from “exile” with Klute, Julia, and now Coming Home, and had her own determined way of doing things, including a production company run mostly by like-minded females. I wanted to work with her; in fact, I was probably goo-goo-eyed in love with her image when we met. Her strong face and voice echoed Henry Fonda’s iconic charisma, and now she wanted to adapt Paul Erdman’s The Crash of ’79 about the end of our financial system. And she really wanted me “specifically”; at the least, a good actor makes you feel that way. I so wanted to do anything to be closer to her, but when I read Erdman’s book, I knew I could never make it work; it was fascinating, informative, but not dramatic. How could I commit this form of suicide for Jane? She was married to Tom Hayden anyway. Reluctantly I passed, and of course she forged ahead with her remarkable willpower and made the costly and messy Rollover (1981) with Kris Kristofferson. I watched Fonda from the sidelines over the years as she spoke out on so many issues, engaged in different lifestyles, an icon of this era. I felt so publicly conservative next to her; my true feelings were still subversive and slow to gain confidence, but I was getting ready to explode against the rules of that time.
Barbra Streisand, the queen of Hollywood in terms of her wealth and status from albums and movies, invited me out to her gigantic Malibu ranch one Sunday with her boyfriend Jon Peters, who was restless and somewhat uncomfortable in the role of second banana; that was clear. A former “star” hairdresser, he’d produced, with Barbra, the successful A Star Is Born (1976) and was hungry for more, and actually, to my surprise, I’d be in business with him shortly. Barbra was clearly one shrewd, sharp-eyed woman, yet I was somewhat surprised at her delight in showing off her property, exterior and interior, to her half-dozen guests, especially in displaying her antiques and particularly her jewels, which she fished from various boxes. She had that Jewish mother’s delight in shopping and talking of the great bargains she’d found, not that she needed to; it was simply in her blood. Unknown to some of us, she had directorial ambitions that would soon emerge—quite successfully. Like Jane and other Hollywood actresses, she possessed the quality of “being powerful”—and possibly dangerous for your soul—which I found exciting and sexy to be around.
John Frankenheimer, a groundbreaking, tempestuous, highly emotional man then struggling with his career, had made some of my all-time favorites in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). I was invited to his studio office, and when I provocatively questioned his latest choice in making a bad horror film, he blew up and told me to get out. It was embarrassing, of course, and I felt terrible. Years later, after we got to know each other and I’d made a few films which he told me he much admired, he humbly asked me to present him with a career achievement award at the film editors’ annual banquet. I delivered a heartfelt speech not long before his death, which clearly touched him and his wife. I meant every word of it.
The meticulous, patient Austrian director Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, 1952; Julia, 1977) wanted me for his dream project on mountain climbing, which was his primary hobby. Fit and lean in his sixties, he was so . . . how do you say, punctilious, methodical in his filmmaking, as if he were step by step climbing that mountain. But his story, from the novel Solo Faces by James Salter, was hopeless as drama, lacking the primary tension that a movie, unlike a book, needs. I had to say no, and when he finally made that film with Sean Connery (Five Days One Summer,1982), it died. He came back to me later for another project he’d wanted to make for some thirty years—André Malraux’s Man’s Fate—but that too seemed more dream than reality. Actually, I believe Michael Cimino also wanted to make it, and had secured the rights. But when Michael’s next film, the unusually expensive Heaven’s Gate (1980), bombed miserably in theaters, he never got to make it. There were so many dashed dreams in Hollywood.
I was now a commodity in demand. Even my name, the ring of it—O-L-I-V-E-R S-T-O-N-E—was coming back at me like an echo. It’s remarkable the way words take on another meaning. I was starting at times to wonder: Am I still in this body, is this a real trip now? Was LSD consciousness coming back at me? I had become, without thinking about the business side, one of the sought-after new names you wanted to get on your screenplay in order to get it made. I heard the words “brilliant,” “genius” behind my back, and it made me feel great, surer of myself. For the first time in my life, I could walk into a Hollywood party and immediately people would know who I was. It’s quite something, if you’ve been a cab driver or a GI in Vietnam who was expendable for sure, to have a party stop—for just that moment. “Who’s that? Oh—yes! That’s Herman Melville. He did Moby Dick. He’s a genius. What’s he doing next? The Odyssey, I think.” Whew! “Respect, mang,” as Tony Montana would say. Can’t buy it? Fuck the rich millionaires! We were the creative ones. You had to earn the recognition, and the less they knew you, and the newer you were, the greater you became. It was a “fabulous” (and I use the word in all its sincere and superficial flattery) entrée to another act in my life.
I always wondered what was it like to be introduced at the court of Versailles to Louis XIV. Well, Hollywood in the late 1970s was my Versailles. Nothing ever came close again. It marked a sort of social peak in my life. Until then, I’d lived in hope and penury, and shame too, and near death. So forgive me for getting as high as a kite, to use a metaphor that accurately conveys my state of mind.
The parties would go from showy business events to intimate and naughty. There was a night at a small dinner party of drinking and drugs I remember for its novelty of watching the brilliant, witty Gore Vidal try to seduce Mick Jagger, whom he wanted to star in the movie of his new novel Kalki, which of course he wanted me to adapt—and suggesting we might have a threesome. I could write it at his villa in Italy in Ravello. Surely, why not? Cocaine was flourishing. It came in with the disco scene of Barry White and Donna Summer, it was fast and smart like the music business; movies, if anything, were too square, unhip. Cocaine sparked great energy and laughs, and there didn’t seem to be a real downside. Not then. We were young, and we had money to burn. This is what my mother dreamed would be her life—in fantasy. And she certainly lived it out in parties after her divorce. But she was never satisfied, and she would, in coming years, come out to parties with me.
There was a part of me that truly enjoyed the style, the bubble of it all. Witty conversation with knowing people, the possibility of a deal, the excitement of money, the seduction of a new subject without the actual work. Subtly dangerous females who smile at you, slinking up out of the background; so many beautiful young women were always migrating to Hollywood like new flocks of birds, struggling for winter’s warmth. What was glamorous at night might easily turn sad in the morning. With partying and flirting, like my mother, I could never be satiated. But my father’s side beckoned me back to work, which was sometimes hard after a long night. Mostly I managed each day, six days a week, alone in my apartment, to adhere to a writer’s schedule.
The nights I stopped by a Sue Mengers dinner party were a social experiment in her blunt New York style of being so outrageous as to provoke amusing reactions from her favorite guests, as well as the occasional outsiders she’d allow in, to study their reactions as if they were fish in a bowl—like me. She was the queen super-agent of her time. Around her tables would be Streisand, Jon Peters, Ryan O’Neal, Candice Bergen, Ali MacGraw, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Ray and Wendy Stark, a young Robin Williams, Neil Simon, Walter Matthau, Gore Vidal, and on and on; many of them were her clients. Sue would arrange for one of them, Michael Caine, to star in my first Hollywood-directed film, The Hand, for which he would be handsomely paid, or, as he put it later in time, “I needed to put two more rooms over my garage.” Although Caine was one of the best raconteurs I ever heard, Matthau was the champion storyteller; he’d add vinegar to all his comments. To hold a table of these stars and make everyone laugh is, believe me, a supreme art of conversation to be admired, although oddly Neil Simon, who was probably the most successful comedy writer of his time, hardly ever spoke or facially reacted, a surprising bore. Robin Williams, on the other hand, perhaps out of nervousness, would deliver hilarious monologues and skip the conversation part. In that regard, Matthau and Caine would’ve survived and thrived in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal drawing rooms of eighteenth-century London, which, I believe, were as tough as it got for wit. And Sue was, by her own admission, a vicious gossip with a tongue that could destroy reputations, but people loved her nastiness and feared her for it. I would see her over the years, right up to her death in 2011, and I’d certainly commit several social faux pas, which she tolerated from me because she continually courted me to join her as a client. I never did. I was somewhat scared of her. I would never have survived eighteenth-century England, undoubtedly run through in one duel or another.
In the week of the Oscars in April 1979, Barry Diller, the freezing-cold head of Paramount, gave a glittering party. I was still nervous, unsure of myself, when Diane Keaton, who was another one of the top female stars at that time, warmly welcomed me, so unassuming and kind. And then of course there was her then partner, the man who knew the power of appearances, indeed was the ringmaster of all of them. Remarkably handsome, six foot two with those sparkling eyes, Warren Beatty knew he had the gaze of the whole room and could play that for all the genuine, adorably fake shyness he layered into his performance. At that time his bouffant hair was out of Jon Peters’s Shampoo—today it’d make you laugh, but then it was stunning—as he was heading for the Academy Awards for his film Heaven Can Wait. The stars were aligned, and he was already setting Barry Diller up to make his great historical epic Reds, which would almost break Paramount.
A cool, casual hello came out of him, shared with a possible competitor in Midnight Express, and then “Jack,” his buddy, was in my line of sight . . . just ineffably “Jack,” the guy next door. Everyone knew Jack from New Jersey, or thought they did. But in all the times I’d meet and talk to him, and be fascinated by him, never did I think I knew him—or, for that matter, comprehend the meaning of his beat, Jack Kerouac dialogue. Literally. As close as I’d pay attention, I never understood his long, loopy spiels. And although I’d see people listen and laugh, I’m sure most of them didn’t understand what he was talking about either. That’s the power of Jack Nicholson’s mystique.
When the Academy Awards finally arrived on that Sunday night in April, it was a new peak. I was on Mount Olympus, nervous because everyone, despite my Golden Globes fiasco, told me I’d win—hot, sweaty in my tux, slipping in and out of my chair to check my appearance in the downstairs men’s lounge as the ceremony dragged on into its third hour. I was in my thirty-third year and self-conscious. Christ had supposedly died at this age, thus creating in my mind a dividing line beyond which you aged in mortal fashion.
It was glamorous from beginning to end, the afternoon pickup at my apartment building by the limousine, the drive downtown, the enormous outdoor red carpet, television interviews, cheering fans, the music roll, the beginning of the Fifty-first Academy Awards! It felt like an intersection of time that night, a changing of the guard. It was a fantasy to see Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, and John Wayne all at once. Grant, as impeccable in real life as he was on the screen, smiled warmly to me, as if he knew me. And the long-lashed Olivier received an Honorary Lifetime Oscar and, trying to outdo Shakespeare, for once undid himself, giving a flowery, over-the-top, poorly written imitation of Shakespeare. But who cares—he was Laurence Olivier. And then at the end, to present Best Picture, came his opposite—John Wayne, striding alone onto center stage. He was still a big man—six foot four. Dying from cancer, wearing a bad wig, his lungs wheezing with difficulty, he remained a monument of a man; everyone in the room knew it. And by this time, any resistance to his woeful politics was gone. Big John mispronounced most every name and title of the Best Picture nominees. He particularly mashed the name “Cimino” into something that sounded like “Simoncitto,” some immigrant off the boat from Sicily, and then gave the Oscar to the dark Deer Hunter to thunderous applause. It was the chosen one that night, and I was oddly torn. The moment was beautiful, the vision complete; and for me, I guess the Hollywood version of Vietnam—with Jane Fonda and Jon Voight winning the best acting awards for Coming Home, and Apocalypse Now coming out the following year—was now complete. Clearly, neither Platoon nor Born on the Fourth would ever be made, nor did it seem necessary to make them any longer, and that was okay with me. Vietnam was buried—I was at peace with it. It was a glamorous ending to this chapter of my life.
My turn came up earlier. Lauren Bacall, accompanied by Jon Voight, regally walked on to bestow the awards for screenwriting, both adapted and original. She put me back into the Bogart-Huston era, still looking like a lynx with those slits for eyes and that 1940s smoker’s voice. My nerves couldn’t help but take a quantum leap upwards. God help me now. Remember, this audience doesn’t want a lecture on the War on Drugs; anyway, most didn’t agree with me, or they wanted a crackdown on drugs, or they just didn’t want to think about it. On the contrary, the US was clearly drifting toward an expanded prison system, and the fight against crime and terrorism was a popular theme. So be cool, man, say what you gotta say quickly and get off. This was on TV now, going out to hundreds of millions across the globe. Don’t fuck this up, Oliver. Midnight had won only one Oscar so far—for Giorgio Moroder’s tense, driving score. Neil Simon, sitting close by, the most financially successful dramatist of his time, was my competition for adaptation of his own play,California Suite; sitting separately were Elaine May and Warren Beatty for their rewrite of the original Heaven Can Wait.
“And the winner is”—that grand cliché of a pause as Bacall opens the envelope—“OLIVER STONE!” Wow. Cheers breaking all around. I knew this moment was special. I memorized it. I planted it in my heart—like a tree that would grow. I started walking toward the stage. Nothing fancy. Just walk up there, don’t stumble on these stairs.
Mom was at Studio 54 in New York, partying with a coterie of gay friends who went wild. She’d taken me faithfully to the movies throughout my youth, the young French girl still dreaming of American cinema. Now her only son had achieved this pinnacle of success. She enjoyed it far more than I, which irritated me then but makes me happy now. Dad stayed home to watch, but had fallen asleep and missed it; it was way past his bedtime, bless him.
My speech this time was considerably better delivered than at the Globes, but the meaning again was botched, as I naïvely wished for “some consideration for all the men and women all over the world who are in prison tonight.” Considering that this generality includes some genuine psychopaths and cold-blooded killers was beside the point, because who really listens or cares? I was just another writer up there making a case, my hair tumbling messily down to my shoulders, and presenting a slightly stoned, out-of-it expression. But I was young enough to strike a chord and briefly be remembered in a profession in which, I would discover, writers are profoundly interchangeable. I thanked my colleagues and got off. Lauren and Jon stayed on to give the screenwriting prize for originals to Waldo Salt, Nancy Dowd, and Robert Jones for Coming Home.
Backstage was brutal, nothing like I expected. Lauren abandoned me, stars were moving left and right to get ready for the next number. Cary Grant smiled at me again. There was Audrey Hepburn! Then Gregory Peck! Then Jimmy Stewart was congratulating me, the warmest of men. Then fifty photographers were popping flashbulbs in my face in one room, and in the next, another fifty reporters were throwing tough questions at me like grenades. I did my best and, soaked like a sponge with sweat, gratefully returned to my seat for the finale with John Wayne.
I went on to the Academy Ball and other parties, giddy, drinking, ending up quite high and drunk at a Hollywood Hills mansion where so many people congratulated me it became a blur. Alan Parker’s face loomed up somewhere that night. A begrudging congratulations. Nothing more needed to be said between us—for years. I remember chatting with a cerebral Richard Dreyfuss, who’d won the acting award the year before for The Goodbye Girl, then being embraced by Sammy Davis Jr., who was hugging me and “spreading the love, baby!”
And then, out of the smoke and music, near three in the morning, emerged a goddess, now older but still desirable, her voice strained and hoarse enough to seduce any Odysseus shipwrecked on her island. Kim Novak was Circe, able to turn men into swine, but alas, she preferred her dogs and horses on her Northern California ranch, where she lived in reclusive splendor. As I talked with her quietly on the couch, she seemed to me a woman who, never satisfied with men, had found her lonely island. I yearned for her without saying it, and felt her isolation. She was amused by men, accustomed to being desired, but could never be mortal. She preferred her dream.
Three short years ago, I’d been in the gutter. Now I was on a mountaintop I’d never thought possible. And in three more years, I’d be back in the gutter.