When I returned to Los Angeles in early June 1986, I felt the difference right away. Word of mouth about my two films was spreading faster than I could believe; like fire, it jumps water and even oceans and doesn’t take long. And as I learned, not much can stop it. It was, whether I knew it or not, my time.
Salvador was now playing in its fourth week of a multiple run in six theaters. Not quite believing this yet, I drove past lines of people waiting for weekend shows at the hip Los Feliz theater on Vermont Avenue, my name unbelievably above the title on the marquee: Oliver Stone’s Salvador! Wow—why not Jimmy Woods? Who knew me? I’d never felt something like this before; couldn’t I just stop and enjoy this for a few moments? We were in our tenth week in Washington, DC, at the high-end MacArthur venue, as well as in Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Austin with middling business but exciting reviews. Even when audiences could see Salvador’s rough edges, they understood its heart. Private screenings were being set up by Hollywood stars, always a good sign—Dustin Hoffman, Redford, Streisand, Nicholson, Sydney Pollack. There were congratulatory phone calls, letters from such as Francis Ford Coppola. I was being told we were “one-of-a-kind,” “original,” and “fiercely independent.” The great divide is expectation. When you’re a known quantity in the film community, they, the insiders, think they know what to expect, and a certain “déjà vu” indifference sets in. In this case, there was only surprise.
I was, for that brief year, the unknown one, the unexpected. Although apparently not unknown to Pauline Kael. When she belatedly came out with her review in mid-July, she not only exonerated me from my past sins but actually kicked off a whole second wave for the film in New York theaters, packing the weekend houses. Marion Billings was quite surprised, as she had deliberately not screened it for Kael on its first pass because of her past antipathy to my work. But now Kael, who cultivated her capricious taste and outsize influence, wrote in The New Yorker, “Stone writes and directs as if someone had put a gun to the back of his neck and yelled, ‘Go!’ and didn’t take it away until he’d finished.” If only she knew.
She uncannily sensed the dichotomy in my political mindset: “As a revelation of a gifted filmmaker’s divided sensibility, there’s been nothing quite as spectacular as Salvador . . . a right-wing macho vision joined to a left-leaning polemic . . . Salvador has the tainted, disreputable, hard-boiled surface we expect from Oliver Stone, and the sentimentality that goes with it . . . The Oliver Stone who made this movie isn’t essentially different from the hype artist who wrote Midnight Express and Scarface, etc. . . . He’s working outside the industry, in freedom, but he’s got all this Hollywood muck in his soul.”
She clearly identified me with the protagonist: “He uses James Woods, perhaps the most hostile of all American actors, as the hero, who is called ‘Richard Boyle,’ but represents Stone’s convictions too.” With this I disagreed. Although I empathized with my protagonist, that didn’t mean I agreed with him. Richard was politically astute and, to a degree, a friend, but I never totally trusted him or liked his behavior on alcohol. With women he was actually shy and inexperienced, but Jimmy made him a lot tougher. Richard made me laugh many times, yes, but he was nothing I would emulate. Accepting the theory behind Kael’s criticism would make me part Boyle, as well as my other protagonists—Jim Morrison, Richard Nixon, Jim Garrison, and the rest. But does Jim Morrison’s character really resemble Richard Nixon’s?
Or, for that matter, what did any of these characters have to do with the self-destructive protagonists from my earlier work on Seizure and The Hand? I was always outside the characterizations, and that was the creative pleasure I derived, and still derive, from writing drama—not to have a fixed identity, to be free as a dramatist, elusive, unknown. But it seems through the years, as you build up an identity with different works, this freedom comes at a high price and is difficult to maintain, and trying to do so eventually wore me down. From this early typecasting by critics, “Oliver Stone” became for some this persona of a macho war veteran willing to break taboos, with little interest in women—and soon to be a “conspiracy theorist.”
In any case, Kael’s review started that strange process of making Salvador more acceptable in film circles, and made a difference at the box office and in the public’s reaction. The film would now start working its idiosyncratic way onto many “10 Best” lists and, to our great surprise, into Academy Award consideration. Paula Wagner’s husband, agent Rick Nicita, a co-founder of CAA, summed up my reentry and acceptance in LA when he told me in conversation, “Salvador is a great film, but the populace doesn’t want to deal with that now.” He told me the opposite of what more hard-boiled agents might say: “Keep making them without compromise, and one day, it will interconnect for whatever reason with commerciality, and there you’ll have a real hit. The only way is to keep turning them out. Do not change or cheapen them.” Strong advice, hard to pull off, but in that year of 1986, I was, without realizing it, closing in on the bull’s-eye.
I was also feeling, for the first time, a deeper connection to Los Angeles itself, because I was finally tasting the fruit in its garden. Hollywood, in its essence, is a town in search of a dream—a story to tell. There’s no actual city; there’s an industry, there are suburbs, there’s a rich culture of highly creative people. But unlike New York or Paris, it’s spread out and disparate, hard to locate. There’s a certain comfort and a relaxed “hacienda” style of life in Hollywood, no doubt, but without having a story told or about to be told, I find there is little substance or satisfaction for me.
Now, offers not only to write but also to direct were coming in, and I was suddenly in a whole new league when the venerable Zanuck/Brown Company, top-of-the-line Hollywood, which had done The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with George Roy Hill, out of the blue offered me a film called Shattered Silence, the fascinating, supposedly true biography of Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who’d given his life on a dangerous operation in Syria. Abby Mann, the screenwriter of Judgment at Nuremberg(1961), had turned in a good first draft years before, but in typical studio fashion, it had worsened in the hands of others. Dick Zanuck and David Brown had loved Salvador because it was “real,” with “real actors”; they were smooth, like born patricians who’d done things with style, producers who didn’t have to get “ugly,” and through whose doors my own scripts had passed several times without being noticed. Now they were chasing me.
I was at that point in my career where I was trying to be polite and make everybody happy—return each phone call, no matter who, read every script I was offered, and certainly, if I expressed enthusiasm, I wanted to back up my words with action. I didn’t want to be like the many producers who’d treated me poorly over these last fifteen years. To “develop” a script was a sacred obligation, it meant a major effort to actually make it and not waste the development money; it meant, if I didn’t write it myself, that I’d work closely with another writer—often without being paid for it. I abhorred the idea, from my father’s upbringing, of taking money without performing a service in return; it became clear that in Hollywood, this placed me in the minority. So later, when I told Zanuck/Brown that I couldn’t do their film as my next project, they backed off, disappointed. But a week later, to my surprise, they came back and said they’d wait for me to do it as a second project. I was uncomfortable with this, and felt guilty that I’d misled them into believing that I actually wanted to do the film, which I really didn’t. I’d come to think the material wasn’t really as good as I’d thought when I’d first read it. I’ve often found that once you do more research, “true stories” turn out to be not so true—or else there’s simply not enough there to justify the effort and the time you need to make a film. Feeling awful, I passed once more and did not hear from Zanuck/Brown again for several years. Incidentally, the Eli Cohen story was finally made as a six-part television series more than thirty years later and seemed to veer even further from the truth then.
The manic Peter Guber from Midnight Express was now back, offering me the war photographer Robert Capa’s story, stretching from World War II to Vietnam (“I’m very happy for you, Oliver! Now you should do something really big . . . something huge! A Lawrence of Arabia–type picture”). But could I really work with Guber’s partner, Jon Peters, again after The Hand? I passed, and Peter came back with Gorillas in the Mist (1988), the Dian Fossey story, which was later made with Sigourney Weaver as the brainy, sexy heroine. The piece, in my opinion, was polished and surface perfect—and at the same time a trap, because it was not me. Elizabeth pointed that out: “Don’t go fishing for a woman’s project like that.” I needed something as gritty, chaotic, and imperfect as I was.
Ned Tanen, the former president of Universal, who’d been our studio boss during the turbulent Scarface saga, which I did not bring up lest it ruffle the polite surface, invited me to lunch with my agent, Paula. He offered me an open invitation to come to him as an independent producer now at Paramount, forgetting that he’d turned Platoon down several times going back to Marty Bregman’s option on it in 1976. Nor did I bring up the subject of “Defiance,” which he’d never bothered to read and was sitting in cold storage, as I was sure this exotica would be of little interest to him. Although it was all very exciting to be courted by a powerhouse, Marty Bregman was a close friend of Ned’s, and I was still wary of his vengeful nature and did not push further. I’d been a screenwriter long enough to realize that doing business directly with a giant studio had its own drawbacks, such as going to “development hell,” as they called it, screenwriters endlessly cycling scripts that would get literally lost in a system where executives came and went, and with it, the difficult issues of “turnaround”—getting your script back in a reasonable way, costs inflated against actual cost, etc. My problems on Platoon with Dino De Laurentiis were freshly branded on my mind. And the reality was that I was still in a hole financially, carrying four places—two in New York (a house in Sagaponack and a Manhattan apartment), and a rented house in Los Angeles along with my original apartment—and I hadn’t received full payments yet on Platoon or, for that matter, Salvador. I was spending about $35,000 a month on rents, mortgages, my mother, food, cars, a wife and a child, and a new nanny (thankfully religious and married). Pines told me I owed future federal and New York State taxes. At three o’clock on certain mornings, lying there in bed, I felt like I was in the coils of a giant python of debt, beginning its deadly squeeze. Shades of my father.
In my mind, John Daly was still my base. I owed him my career so far. He very much wanted my next project, and he’d succumb to an occasional flash of paranoia when the possibility of my going to other companies arose. As in the boxing game, he expected me to stay with him. He thought we might do “Defiance,” my Russian dissident project, which he genuinely cared for. The fine actor Kevin Kline was available to play our composer, but I was now wary of my own script. “Defiance” wasn’t rooted in an American reality but was more an exotic experience, and now that I’d done two tough films back-to-back, I realized how difficult it would be to pull off the story in another culture.
Daly also liked my idea to stay with the Charlie Sheen character from Platoon, bring him back to the States, and follow his adjustments. I saw it as a film called Second Life, and I’d already written something like it years before—“Once Too Much,” a dark, melodramatic version of my own reentry, including my prison experience on my way back from Mexico in late 1968. But that story didn’t fit any longer, as I was now in the world of contemporary reality and no longer living a Peckinpah movie. There were contractual complexities in this idea as well; with Sheen in it, it would be considered a “sequel,” which would in turn necessitate hefty payments to Arnold Kopelson, who was already on John’s case for his Platoon fees. Arnold, quick to spot a buck, was already vigorously trying to sell a Platoon TV series to the networks, which worried me. Platoon was hardly China Beach, which would go on to be the defining Vietnam TV series and made quite a bit of money off its ability to be inoffensive to almost everyone.
John seemed preoccupied with the pressure coming from his expanding company, which was flirting with “going public”; he talked of selling me Hemdale stock at an option price. Yet John already felt overextended, with too many projects in development and new producers stacked up in the downstairs waiting room of his two-story town house. In his thinking, Salvador was already in the past. He calmed my concerns about its lack of financial success: “Come on, Oliver, it’s seen as a success as long as you don’t open your mouth and give them numbers. Be positive. The film’s done Hemdale a great deal of good on the Bel Air circuit,” where movie stars and studio executives created buzz about the latest film they’d seen in their private screening rooms. Salvador, John said, had only “been hurt by its perception as a political film, which is why we must carefully handle Platoon, keep the focus broad, not let it become just a war film.”
Meanwhile, there were more mundane things to address, like “Where’s my money, John?” Boyle was making ugly noises to our West Coast publicist Andrea Jaffe about reporting Hemdale to the Writers Guild for not meeting its minimum obligations. John had a blithe and charming way of reassuring me: “Of course Boyle and you are gonna be paid. Just have Bob Marshall sign those bloody pages.” And when my lawyer Bob finally sent some amended pages of a contract, John would grin at me and say, “My Lord, your guy must’ve been wearing a bloody mask when he wrote this thing, he was laughing so hard!” Which, in his Cockney accent, disarmed me.
It would be weeks, sometimes months, before anything could get resolved with John and his partner, Derek Gibson, who together were running a small factory like they were pub keepers—which, apparently, they’d once been. I’d learned this from a British producer who’d known them as partners in 1960s London’s East End, where they had a pub called The Spotted Duck or something similar, where boxers, gangsters, and their cohorts would hang out; and like true publicans, they’d dole out the cash sparingly while running the beer kegs. They actually at one point sold Platoon video rights to two different companies, which created quite a mess. But the film business was not a pub, and they could not keep it up, and soon, with numerous lawsuits past and present piling up like bar tabs, they found themselves getting into deeper and deeper shit until their company, Hemdale, went bankrupt in 1995. And yet, amid the chaos, John was pulling out gems like Hoosiers with Gene Hackman in one of his best performances as a small-town Indiana basketball coach, and Salvador, along with Platoon. And among the numerous projects he was developing was this exotic, difficult-to-finance Bernardo Bertolucci film in China—The Last Emperor, which would actually win the Best Picture Academy Award for 1987, John’s second in a row. Quite an achievement for a low-budget little town house overlooking Sunset.
And truthfully, I don’t think I’d ever been happier. I had two good pictures under my belt. I had a family I loved who had been on both shoots with me. Unself-consciously, I wrote in my diary of one particular Saturday: “Great day at home, at peace in my garden, books, correspondence, Sean, Elizabeth never looked lovelier, a picture editing, going to Germany and Stockholm for ‘Salvador’ promotion, another picture offered—a good time, Oliver, be grateful, friends, people I love, back on track with CAA. You garden as you go, run and jump in pool.”
I had another competing vision for my life. I was now forty, but it’d been there all along. I suppose it was a boy’s version of adventure, of a life fully lived. It was what sent me away from university life to the Far East to teach, and then into the merchant marine, and then to write a novel, and then enlist in the infantry. It spurred me on to explore the outer and then inner worlds. It was a pirate’s life I romantically saw, like Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate, one of my favorite 1950s movies. I’d be the captain with my chaotic crew—Seizure, Salvador, Platoon—roaming the eighteenth-century Caribbean from Port Royal, Jamaica, to ports in Cartagena and Havana, looking for that next vessel of a story idea, then board her and plunder her and get away fast before the big guns on the ships of the empire (Britain, Spain, Fox, Warner’s) could close in on me. Laugh as I sail under their noses—with speed, maneuvering, and small budgets. But I had to keep a wary eye out for those other treacherous freebooters like Dino, Bregman, Jon Peters, who’d sell you out for a pittance if there was something in it for them. Dangerous men, not to be crossed. Mine was a free man’s life, without a home, really, except for the wenches in the local ports, like Sabatini’s Captain Blood, who “was born with a gift for laughter and the sense that the world was mad.” Thus it remains a split in my soul—the home, the hearth, and then out into the wind with your crew—Odysseus’s “I am become a name.” Could this be? Could I live two different lives? Like those hard men I’d worked with in the merchant marine twenty years before—six months on land, six at sea; unsettled, eccentric men who remained free in their souls yet tormented. In the next years, I’d live out this split in my natures to its fullest.
The editing of Platoon was going relatively smoothly for a change, with none of the interference I had on Salvador. A month later, I’d assembled a rough cut at two hours and forty minutes, but no one saw it except for my editors. As with every rough cut I’ve done, I was again plunged into despair, so disappointed with myself. Nothing outside the war action scenes seemed to work. Where were the characters? Chris Taylor/Sheen was passive, underdeveloped; Barnes/Berenger was okay, but Elias/Dafoe was talking way too much in his one political dialogue. I ran through a hundred changes in my head I wanted to try right away, but this is where you need to slow down and chip away. Cutting too radically, I’ve painfully come to learn, is a huge mistake—like giving up what you’ve written out of pure pique. Very few directors like their rough cuts; they’re shapeless reminders of our powerlessness. I had to cut my own fat down—take it off my body, if necessary, but in slower stages. Flagellate myself. We chipped away, little by little. Three weeks later, I showed a new cut at 2:20 to my inner circle—John, his partner Derek Gibson, Charlie Sheen, Bob Richardson, Elizabeth, and a few others. We’d added Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as a “temp” (temporary) soundtrack idea to inspire our Salvador composer, Georges Delerue. It worked. The music was a knockout from the beginning, with its tragic sense of loss. John was emotional and Elizabeth was crying, and that was my meter; even John’s sour-faced partner, Derek, who never smiled, was beaming. It seemed so “real” to them as an experience. It still needed work—portions were slow—but we were confident. We’d make some changes and show it to Orion West.
A week later we marched into the same Orion screening room where Mike Medavoy had yanked Salvador after a few reels, decrying “Mr. Bloodlust Stone.” Medavoy and the veteran Sal Lomita, who’d been a post-production specialist at United Artists since the 1950s, were now there with a few executives. Nervously I sat off to the side. It still seemed too slow, and I saw numerous things I had to fix. The film ended, and Sal, who’d been through so many studio battles, bless his soul, was the first to say, “Greatest war film I’ve ever seen!” No hesitation. “It’s everything Apocalypse should have been”; they’d distributed that, but I don’t think it was a fair comparison, because our intentions had been different. Medavoy, a cool customer who never went overboard in his emotions, quietly told me, “You really are a great filmmaker . . . in a class all your own,” as if he was amazed that this was the same guy who’d made The Hand. John Daly and Mike Medavoy were now the two heaviest allies I had. They set up a New York screening the following week for their East Coast partners. Unlike a studio hierarchy, Orion was a real five-man team, all partners in their own right, investing in their own company. Besides Arthur Krim, the urbane, dignified Eric Pleskow, his chief production executive, would be there; also business affairs chief Bill Bernstein, and Arthur’s law partner from the old days, Bob Benjamin—as well as the icy foreign sales chief, Ernst Goldschmidt, and presumably the entire domestic and international sales force, which was in town for other reasons. “Better be good,” Pleskow warned Sal.
It was climax time. We trimmed and refined and went to New York on a humid early August day and walked into a postage-stamp-sized screening room on the west side of midtown at 4 p.m. In trooped Krim and company. How many times had Krim done this since he’d first headed United Artists in 1951 then formed Orion in 1978? All those great Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas UA films (Paths of Glory, Sweet Smell of Success), the other independents—The African Queen, High Noon, Marty, In the Heat of the Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, Midnight Cowboy, and currently Hannah and Her Sisters. There’d be no surprises for him. Krim represented what I’d loved about movies—their independence and intelligence. If I couldn’t live up to his esteem, I’d never be who I wanted to be.
His projectionist, however, was a dour, defensive antagonist who put me on edge right away. We were still on twelve single reels, not yet having combined them into the standard 1,500–2,000-footer. And sure enough, this “veteran” projectionist missed every single one of the twelve changeovers, causing the picture and sound to cut awkwardly into the incoming scene. I was miserable, furious; any director would’ve objected, but now I was a fatalist. The picture ended. There was no Sal Lomita there to embrace it. Arthur Krim shook my hand and smiled. “Powerful picture,” he said, and retired to his office with the others. They thanked me courteously; they seemed moved, but who could tell? I was asked to come back the next day.
Back in LA, John was uncharacteristically nervous, telling me not to worry, he “could pull the picture” from Orion and take it to Paramount, where he could get a better deal. The two of us had been here before with Orion on Salvador and were realists who knew we might have to scrape our way through again. I screened it the next day for Marion, Arthur, Alex Ho, and others; they seemed overwhelmed. The picture was undoubtedly “working.”
Then I went up to Orion and met with Eric Pleskow and the sales, marketing, and promotion chiefs. Krim was not there—was this a signal? Eric was an Austrian, warm, semi-compassionate, with a handsome thatch of silver hair and an elegant accent. He could also be very cold when he had to be. But when he compared Platoon to his experience of seeing All Quiet on the Western Front, I knew he was sensitive to the horrors of war and the change young men go through. It was “big stuff” to him, “important,” and he felt it should come out in the December 18–21 “corridor,” and then “let it settle in through January and February; otherwise, in November, it might get blown off by exhibitors.” The marketers, Charlie Glenn and Bob Kaiser, were thinking all the top TV shows would be interested in doing pieces—60 Minutes, Ted Koppel’s Nightline, and the rest. Ernst Goldschmidt, the foreign salesman, was quiet, probably not sure how this film would play abroad. I assumed Krim wasn’t there because it wasn’t that important a deal to him. He’d adopt a wait-and-see attitude. But he had told me “powerful picture,” so I’d take it as it comes.
I came out flying, high off the meeting, in my naïveté not questioning, as a veteran filmmaker would, how widely would Orion release the film at Christmas, how much would they spend on advertising and promotion. High figures would indicate strong confidence in the film’s chances, but I was just happy they liked it, and trusted to that. Later, I’d hear from a producer who’d been at one of the LA screenings that week and ridden the elevator down with Medavoy and other Orion executives; they’d speculated out loud, “I don’t know. Tough picture to sell. What do we do with it?”
In other words, Orion liked it but wasn’t investing much money in its box office chances. Thus a limited release in three cities, six theaters, on December 18 was planned, and then . . . we’ll see. But in those days, a limited release meant quality and wasn’t necessarily tagged with the “difficult film, little money” label it’s come to stand for. And whatever happened in those screenings got out fast, the pulse, which was already exciting enough for me, quickened by way of the phone calls to our editing rooms, which doubled as my office, cutting into my time—no assistant to respond to notes, letters, requests.
Indeed, my life was getting crazier, and I was being stretched thin. Against my common sense, I fell in love with another project Daly wanted me to do—“Tom Mix and Pancho Villa,” based on a semi-fictional adventure novel by the notorious Clifford Irving, brought to John by two German independent producers. I say I fell in love because there was such a deep romanticism in this fantasy of a young Tom Mix, later to become the star of silent westerns, running off to join Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution; it certainly bore similarities to my youth and going to Vietnam at nineteen. Mix goes through a hell of a lot of fighting, growing up, and loving two different beauties—one Texan, the other Mexican—on his hard-earned journey to wisdom, Mexican-style. Perhaps I was a lost cause freak; not merely the Mexican Revolution, but what else was Vietnam but a botched and not even just cause?
I wrote my draft of “Tom Mix” in eight or so weeks in this blitzkrieg period of reading scripts, meeting numerous producers, pondering actors for Tom and Pancho—and of course still editing Platoon. For every film I’d make, I’d find, conceptualize, and develop probably five others. Writing was and should be—but is no longer—an R&D process that allows for rumination and failure, much failure. Studios were generally able to underwrite that process, but not anymore, unless the property is an established franchise.
I liked my “Tom Mix” script, but I didn’t love it. In these stages, a film is a wonderful fantasy of what you’re going to do with it. You dream it, but you never have to go through that hard day-to-day reality of shooting it. It is, in its way, a modern version of the Odyssey’s Lotus Eaters, a dangerously tempting time, the fruit hanging low. With “Tom Mix,” the Platoon follow-up “Second Life,” and also potentially “Defiance,” I had three projects with John Daly. Enough.
I’d also sparked another idea for Mike Medavoy called “Company Man,” about the spooks I’d seen in places like Honduras and Costa Rica when I was researching Salvador; these were ex-military guys, sometimes working for the CIA, trying to make a buck buying and selling anything. The whole Orion crowd went for it with the proviso “As long as it’s not anti-US. Don’t rub our faces in it, Oliver.” So I had yet another deal; it was exciting, but it also made John Daly crazy because he was so competitive with Orion. And it was another obligation for me, and I was already overloaded. What was I thinking? I loved ideas. I had so many pent up over the years, all those treatments and scripts—I was a fountain, awash in origin stories. But each of these ideas took time, imagination, development. I commissioned some drafts to be written by others, and a good amount of time was given over to meetings, describing my ideas to other writers. I began to see Hollywood as the confluence of many streams converging in the great river of a final product that might be the work of several creators—a collective consciousness, so to speak. It didn’t often work out that way, however—in fact, quite rarely, as the outsourced drafts did not live up to what I’d dreamed. But as my oil strike was now gushing, it couldn’t be easily capped. So I kept going. Make movies, Oliver. Now is your chance.
Even Dino De Laurentiis wanted me back. The owner of some three or four hundred negatives of films dating back to the 1940s, he was newly recapitalized with a distribution company of his own, and with his customary chutzpah, he invited me up to his new mid-Wilshire office, which was the size of a football field. There he was, the tiny five-foot, four-inch dictator behind his huge desk, his large, dark-green-rimmed glasses and gravelly voice and Italian accent—“You make a good movie, this Platoon—I make a mistake.” He shrugged—that’s fate. His only regret was the loss of revenue to him, not the pain he had caused me. “But you know, Oliverre, you welcome back in the family”—spoken like a true don. He owned the rights to the remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954): “Action! Octopus—underwater—big story. Jules Verne. Genius!” It had been one of my favorite kid movies, no question, but it seemed far-fetched to redo an illustration that’s been done well. The real thrill was in exploring new ground.
“Dino,” I replied, speaking with a firmness I had not been able to muster in our previous encounters, “what’s done is done. But you must realize that I’ve made two films now with John”—on both of which he’d called John to question his sanity—“and I’m loyal to him. I’m in his family now,” which was technically not true but sounded like something a killer like Dino would understand. Not that it made much difference, as he reassured me, “No problem! I make the film with John—this ‘Tom Mix’ I do!” How he even knew about it was not the issue; it was his assumption that he could acquire it, as he could most everything.
We would see. Dino would cross my path again, a character for the ages, his appetite for something King Kong–size unquenched. Leaving his office, I realized Michael Cimino’s name never came up; Dino must have already put the disappointing box office numbers on Year of the Dragon out of mind. For that matter, Michael never contacted me about Platoon. I thanked him in the film’s credits and with the media, I pointed to his original inspiration for me to try again to make the film. Years later, I tried to help Cimino produce a poetic and solitary fable about a wild white stallion that he wanted very much to make. I was able to secure him a $14 million commitment from the independent producer Mario Kassar, who by then had made The Doors with me. It was a good amount of financing, and Michael, after the failures of The Sicilian and The Desperate Hours, needed a break to get back in the ring. But—Michael being Michael—he wanted a bigger budget, more than $14 million, and after a while, I gave up.
And then there was Ed Pressman from The Hand and Conan, who came to me with a generous offer to write and direct something we could do together about our native city, New York. I’d always had a soft spot for Ed, who’d been a gentleman, though ineffective as my producer on The Hand. Still, I liked him as a friend. The 1950s quiz show scandals, which Robert Redford would make into the excellent Quiz Show in 1994, had always fascinated me. How could these producers and contestants be so dishonest to the little people like me in my pajamas, watching huge sums of money being won through cheating? It was another ugly lie, and we’d been hypnotized by it. Because I was busy writing “Tom Mix,” Pressman and I hired my NYU classmate Stanley Weiser (Coast to Coast,1980) as our scriptwriter.
But soon thereafter I dropped the quiz show scandal for another story, because I realized the subject of Wall Street and big money was the new “action” in my hometown. My father’s relatively gentlemanly world of investing was still there but rapidly receding; I saw this film as a collision of the old and the new. Increasingly the media were sensationalizing young entrepreneurs being busted for “insider trading.” I had one friend in his early thirties who’d already made a fortune—millions of dollars, which seemed impossible then for somebody so young—who made it sound like having sex. It was vulgar, exciting. Stanley and I screened the 1957 Clifford Odets classic Sweet Smell of Success, and we worked closely to develop our ideas. The older, tougher guy (Burt Lancaster) in our film would be this big shot, Gekko, and the younger guy (Tony Curtis) would be the “kid” who went along—until he didn’t. Stanley, a New York “wise guy,” set to work on a first pass that August.
I’d previously turned down Ed Pressman’s offer to adapt his Reversal of Fortune book by Alan Dershowitz (based on the mysterious “true” story of New York socialite Sunny von Bülow’s suspicious death), but he convinced me I could make some extra money, which I needed, by co-producing the film with him. After meeting with the charming Old World agent Paul Kohner, we decided to ask his client Billy Wilder, then eighty and retired, but with the mental vigor of fifty, to direct. In person, Wilder was sardonic and tart. He hadn’t seen Salvador but said, “You should be a leading man instead of this masochistic line,” and then completely demolished the von Bülow tale we were offering him, saying it had no old-time story essentials, “twists, turns, conflicts, emotional involvement . . . Every script they bring me is a beautiful woman, but if I don’t get an erection, there’s nothing I can do.” He shared stories of Europe in the 1920s with Kohner, and then told us what he really wanted to do . . . if we truly believed he could still direct a great film. Of course we believed! From his shelf he pulled out a coffee table book on Le Pétomane, an 1890s Frenchman infamous for his musical farting on stage. Wilder, thankfully, would never make that movie.
Ed and I did go on to co-produce Reversal in 1990 with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons (who won an Oscar for his role), but of much more satisfaction to me was my continuing relationship with the Berlin UFA–trained Wilder over lunches, dinners, and much laughter. Salvador and Platoon, when and if he saw them, were likely a little too real for him, and when he’d ask me, “Now what are you going to do?” and I’d tell him, I could count on his “Oh, no! Kennedy’s brain splattered all over the place again! Three hours! Are you crazy? Won’t make a dime.” When I later told him I was doing Nixon (at three hours and fifteen minutes), I wish I could’ve photographed his expression. “Oy vey! Career suicide!” I didn’t really know what Billy thought of me, but I do think he loved, as with Le Pétomane, my shaking things up. As he would say, “Épater la bourgeoisie!”
The music for Platoon was struggling to be born. We’d used, rather extensively, songs from the 1960s—“Tracks of My Tears,” “White Rabbit,” “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Groovin’ ”—that were popular with the troops. The costs for using published commercial hits at that time were still reasonable, but the more success these type of films enjoyed, the more prohibitively their costs would rise. For our original music score, Georges Delerue, inspired by Ran, the Kurosawa film, was delivering the rhythms I was looking for—Oriental, atonal, and eerie at times. But his theme on piano to replace our Adagio for Strings temp track was only okay, not really moving in comparison to Samuel Barber’s original classic. Barber’s piece is really a simple melody; Delerue’s version moved around too much and sounded too manipulated. This is where friendships in the film business come apart. Although Georges was wounded, he kept working on it right up to the recording session in Vancouver, where we’d gone for budget reasons. There I rejected his final attempt and asked Georges to just conduct the original Barber Adagio himself; he accepted and did it beautifully and with heart. He would have to take his name off the film, he said, but I pushed him very hard not to do that, as I felt he had contributed several other pieces of music that enhanced the final movie. Nonetheless, it marked the end of our warm relationship after only two pictures.
Insofar as we still had the same amount of post-production money, the editing of Platoon was done at one of the cheapest film labs in Hollywood, Consolidated Film Industries (CFI), inside ugly, industrial rooms. Why, given the amount of time filmmakers spend in them, are editing spaces so grim? Ridley Scott, my original choice to direct Conan, loved Platoon and Salvador, and now advised me, “Don’t do a slick mix,” by which he meant the Hollywood tendency to strive to make everything easy on the ear, smooth —too smooth. This was both blessing and curse. Too many sound mixes as a result featured a sound that was unable to truly “disturb” (that is, awaken) audiences in good ways, or else was intended to disturb them in conventional, manufactured ways. As our final sound mix was done on a very tight two-week schedule, this was a delicate matter. You have three mixers, all audio experts, overseeing their giant electronic board, and if the ego of the chief mixer is fragile, it can, in the confined dark space of a couple of pressurized weeks, blow up—especially when the director changes his mind, which, frankly, he must do as he goes along. And that is crucial for any director to understand—the need to keep your independence, not to be stampeded, maintaining your ability to simply say no. I insisted, for example, on bringing to the final mix, for comparison purposes, the “temp dub,” which we’d done on the fly weeks before, using music we liked, random sounds from the production shoot, and whatever struck our taste; this was our “guide track” to facilitate the editing process, and would generally annoy the mixers.
In our final version, after hours of labor, the resulting reel was sometimes so well mixed that I found it became boring, Muzak neutral, and it didn’t deliver the raw edge I’d felt in the work print. Or maybe the bombs, grenades, and rifle fire tired out the ear and we needed a change; or I might prefer the original, difficult-to-hear dialogue over the smoother but less believable dialogue track the actor has dubbed himself with. There are hundreds of such details on each twelve- to twenty-minute reel, and dozens of key decisions to make each day, involving far more tension than you’d imagine, almost, I think, comparable to the pressure I’d felt on the production of the film itself. It becomes a highly subjective experience for the director, and the good directors, over the objections of their experts, must travel there, go to their subjective side, and trust it, even if it’s costly or “nutty” insofar as it’s outside the conventional approach. You may not be able to tell the specialist specifically what you want, but you can spot what you don’t want—and then it’s your job to say “No!” whether to the mixers, the producers, the editors, or the composer himself. I repeat this because it’s important: don’t put something in your film if you don’t like it, because you won’t like it now or in ten years when you see the film again. It will haunt you to the end of your life. “Just say no.”
And even then, when you’re nearing the end of your low-budget two-week stint, you’ve cleared out at least two days to finally see and hear a good print of the whole mix in one go. And then, well—flaws become visible in so many new ways, you may want to jump in and make fifty to one hundred more fixes. Or, as I’ve heard told, some directors with great clout have even fired the original mixer and started over! The mix is a motherfucker no matter how you cut it. Sound is truly a 50 percent yin-yang marriage to the picture, which separately on its own now lives or dies in the lab in the timing and coloring of the first acceptable “answer print.” This process of reprinting the film can take either a week or a month or more, depending on the director’s eye, but one day—finally—there will be that married “answer print” of sound and picture copulating together, and it will be the very best your film will ever be. You’re now ready to ship to fifteen hundred or two thousand theaters in one mass printing.
But then you discover the distributor might make only five to fifteen “pristine” (first generation) prints for their best runs, in the largest moneymaking houses, and unless you watch it closely, the lab will run off inferior release prints at less cost for the multiplexes, prints that are a second generation removed from the negative. And then, after these quality-control battles, many an obsessed director must have the courage to go out and look at the film in actual movie theaters. There you may experience issues you cannot control—theater owners cutting projection light down, darkening your film to save money on the bulbs; or a lazy projectionist, running six to ten films at once, failing to correct an out-of-focus print; or simply the cranks in the audience who love to complain about the sound being too high, and because of those three people complaining, the house manager and projectionist lower your incredibly sweated-over mix to barely decipherable levels, so that you lose 30 to 40 percent of your sonic impact! I’ve lived through many hells in different theaters, written dozens of instructions, policed, monitored, begged to get the film out in the way we made it—to much frustration and only modest avail.
All this has changed with video, streaming releases, digital projectors replacing film, and the disappearance of release prints; this has simplified the experience by making the technology easier to control. I wish I could get back all the angry, wasted energy I put into protecting my film prints. But even now, when I go into a stranger’s home, I cringe when I see a new seventy- or one-hundred-inch giant smart screen (made more for news and sporting events) replaying a film at thirty frames per second instead of twenty-four frames, which is the speed at which we make the film—and which can be easily corrected, though it never is, through the controls on the TV. If film survives in any form, it will be because of collectors, people who care with the same passion accorded to centuries-old paintings.
It was ten years since I’d stood sobered at the Statue of Liberty at that enormous July Fourth celebration in New York Harbor; I remembered my vows to some ancestral force that was guiding me through life. So much had changed since then. How much happier I was now, with my child dozing in my arms on a Saturday afternoon, my beautiful wife sliding into the room, our two smiles saying the same thing—what a treasure we had together.
We’d found a new house in the Santa Monica flats on two lots, which gave us a backyard with a pool and guesthouse. It also had a real basement of three rooms like in East Coast homes, and inhaling the moist ocean air a mile away, I could walk peacefully at night with the dogs around our neighborhood of gingerbread houses where everyone seemed to be in bed by ten. It was a far cry from New York for sure, and maybe I was falling into that peaceful middle-aged suburban slumber I’d always heard about but never experienced. How would I know? The times were changing. In the ’80s, credit lines and money were loosening; we bought this house at the heady price of $1.2 million, which meant we were carrying a $10,000 mortgage each month, which also meant that Liz and I were again living beyond our means. Time was required to write a screenplay, and screenwriting yielded a poor ratio of manpower to financial reward. As if on cue, my father visited me in a dream at that time, sitting on my bed while I was sleeping, saying with his devilish grin, half-meant or not, “The last person I ever thought would come through was you . . . you moody little shit.” It gave me chills and guilt; my father could instill that directly. And guilt drove me through much of my life, trying to please other forces outside myself. I seemed to have grown past that, or so I hoped.
I thought maybe I wanted to live the life of Robert Young in Father Knows Best or Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons. I wasn’t truly sure. Inside me was the demon, waiting to go back out to sea, hating this hoopla of meeting people, selling them, justifying myself. Of course, not all was a 1950s–1960s TV show. Although she seemed healthy, Elizabeth had, from the time we spent in the Philippines, suffered serious parasite damage. Now, with the stress of a new house and the impending release of our film, an ulcer was found in her intestines. There were hidden rivers there. The internist said it would take a year more or less to cure her.
My mother came out to visit and, at a restaurant one night, clashed with Elizabeth. Having been strongly influenced by my father’s Republican views, Mom had never really liked Salvador as a film because she couldn’t agree with any of the revolutionary feelings in it; despite her loving and highly charitable nature, she reverted sometimes into a silly, reactionary older woman, who, on this night, said in admiration of my new movie Platoon that war was a good thing, shaping the species after a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” model: “It made Oliver stronger.” Elizabeth coldly cut that off with “My father was killed in Korea,” and left the table without further discussion. Mom was a paradox to me until her dying day. She loved the Reagan people for their social elegance, but her French peasant upbringing was in conflict with her own snobbishness, which was acquired in a class-conscious France. Mom believed that an “upper class” should be in charge. Elizabeth, the former radical, did not want my mom to overstay her welcome, and I eased her transition back to New York.
On my fortieth birthday, apart from the blessings of a family, nothing could have pleased me more than the Salvador video finally hitting the stores. Now everyone could see it. This was like the paperback book that would reach those who didn’t read hardbacks. It was still the early days of video, and within two weeks, 110,000 copies of Salvador were sold, in addition to the rentals. This meant approximately $6 to $7 million in orders. I no longer felt so ashamed about Hemdale losing money on the film; I could be proud. The film was continuing to open in various countries six months to a year after its American release. At the San Sebastian Film Festival in northern Spain, I sat with five thousand excited young people in a giant indoor “velodrome.” As the film ended with Elpidia and Jimmy being separated, the crowd was up on its feet yelling, cheering in an amazing show of support I’d never experienced before. Magic wings were carrying me wherever. It was selling out in Sweden, and at the Irish Film Festival, the hot young filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa) compared my conversion from making “previously dubious” films as “equivalent to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.” Words can suddenly balm years of pain. England would finally break down and show it in January. And it actually did great business in London off glowing reviews (though nowhere else in the UK). Japan would never give in, to the best of my knowledge, but Germany, another big market, finally opened the film on the heels of Platoon.
In the United States, December 1986, the date of Platoon’s opening, was fast approaching. I was traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York. The adrenaline was mounting. Waking up at 4 a.m. with anxieties, I knew it could all still backfire. The huge Academy screening in Los Angeles was packed, which indicated real curiosity in this low-budget film people had heard about, and aside from the older members for whom it was too violent, the response was enormous. That was the first signal with an audience. I don’t remember going to a single test screening; I don’t believe there was one. Dozens of calls and requests for meetings were pouring in from everywhere, including foreign journalists and producers, even though I still had no office and was working out of my new house. The movie had its own wings now; they were built years before in Danny’s small New York apartment, where a dreamer, quite broke, wrote down this flow of ideas, based on a combination of personal experience and his love of Greek mythology. That screenplay had lasted, and it was the key to this moment, the thread through the labyrinth that had gotten me out into the light of day. I must never forget that.
Orion seemed to be more excited than before. They were talking about “nominations” and saying “it might make sixty million.” I didn’t want to think about that because, as my father had taught me, there’s always a 1929 to wreck your hopes. Charlie Sheen’s father, Martin, who’d once been slated to star in Salvador, called to congratulate me but asked me to reconsider my ending—“Don’t let the boy shoot the guy in cold blood.” Morally, he was right. But then it wouldn’t have been a war, would it? Charlie dismissed his father’s objection as old-fashioned, as he was now beginning to sense the change in the wind of his career, sniffing the money and power that would come with it.
My press interviews were endless, as journalists tried to strip away who this “preppy time bomb” was, “the boy who went to Vietnam because he wanted to,” etc. It actually tears away at you. You’re trying to be courteous and responsive and feel as if you must make the journalists happy, which can be a major mistake. Endless people, meals, mostly praise, tension self-created, all these marinate in an atmosphere of great comfort, and I began to understand what Tennessee Williams meant when he complained that comfort, not poverty, was “the wolf at the door.” Especially in a movie age, it becomes a creature unto itself; self-consciousness eats at the purity of your original drive.
Needing very much to keep a focus, I continued working with Stanley Weiser on our script about Wall Street, which we now called “Greed.” We visited with several top financial executives, as well as the lower-level brokers and the Securities and Exchange officials who were investigating white-collar crime. It was another world. The hidden venality and viciousness reminded me of the violent, money-hungry cocaine world of Miami. In fact, several successful Wall Streeters I met, in their thirties and forties, were snorting coke. One tough executive, whom we hired as a consultant, was working for the notorious Drexel Burnham firm, led by Mike Milken, and his language reflected their reputed attitude. He’d talk of “ripping out” someone’s guts or throat, giving and getting blow jobs, and so forth. Gutter talk, but telling; we put it into our script. One young friend of mine, making millions of dollars, already had a town house on the Upper East Side, fancy cars and bikes, and was renting big-time in the Hamptons—while doing cocaine with regularity. He’d boast, “You wouldn’t believe the amount of money I made this week.”
I’d say, “Yeah, but nothing like what I saw on Scarface.”
He’d scoff, “Really? I pulled a million two last year. This year, my partner’s projecting eight to ten million for the firm . . . and it’s legit—you don’t have cops up your ass, or guys who’ll stick a shiv in your back when it’s turned . . . You know Sammy?” he’d mention some name. “I introduced you to him at Jim’s garden party? He took out twenty-five mil on selling his company. Took him three years to build it up. He’s going to another one now, a bigger start-up, more money. He says he’s aiming for a hundred-mil buyout.”
My eyes were popping. “How old is he?”
My friend said, “Thirty-two. And he’s cool, too. You can do blow with him, smoke one of your shit reefers, and get down.”
It was an ego business, and my friend suggested it was even darker and more corrupt than anything I’d seen in Vietnam or Miami. He warned me that a big shot I just met was “ultimately looking how to fuck you, Oliver. And he will befriend you to befuck you. The name of the game is, he wants to explode inside you.” Money was sexual to these young men, and a successful act of seduction was rape. It was man as beast; these young players loved the thrashing and the blood. It was a million miles from my father’s stately, sober investment world. What the hell happened to the modesty associated with having money?
We already had bidders for a script no one had read. The young, brilliant production chief at 20th Century–Fox, Scott Rudin, wanted to be in business with me. Warner Bros. vice president Billy Gerber jumped in with his proposal. This infuriated John Daly when I revealed my plans to him. He wanted to get in, but when I told him the budget for shooting in New York would run upwards of $15 million, he thought I was corrupted and losing my marbles—“Gawd’s bloody ’ell, this film should be made for less than ten million”—though John didn’t say how. I became more excited as I sensed this script was really going to work and get made. It became my main focus outside of Platoon.
With six weeks to go until opening, our marketing meeting in New York was worrisome because, in a way somewhat like the Salvador campaign, nothing really was ready. Platoon had no national trailer and an abstract poster (called a “one-sheet”) that I had doubts about, and which we’d soon abandon. Also, it had become clear that some Academy members thought the film was just too brutal and preferred Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters or the excellent Merchant Ivory film that year, A Room with a View. The critics, in their year-end awards, were favoring Hannah and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which I could understand. Platoon was going to be on some, but hardly all, year-end Top 10 lists; it would never be a unanimous critics’ choice. I’d been there before with Midnight Express and Scarface.
And as I delved deeper into the situation, it became clear that Platoon was the innocent victim of an old simmering feud; Orion was pissed at Daly and Hemdale for not having put up $600,000 in prints and ads on an earlier film that year, At Close Range with Sean Penn, which had flopped. They wouldn’t approve anything until this debt was settled. The shit only got deeper, as it always does, when the story now involved Orion owing Daly payments on the foreign rights of Terminator. Orion was not acting overly concerned; after all, they were opening our film in only three cities, with a supposedly wide rollout later. Daly, on the other hand, gambler that he was, was quite willing to pull Platoon and take it to his new hypothetical “ally,” Paramount. This kind of “switching” companies was part of John’s modus operandi as an independent producer, but it would eventually land him in dangerous waters. If he had been a pirate in another century, which he was in spirit, he was doomed to hang from the highest yardarm.
But unknown to us, the political currents were shifting subtly in our favor. When Salvador had been released in the spring, Reagan was still succeeding in selling his Contra war in Nicaragua to the US public, and there was the looming likelihood that US troops would find a justification for a limited invasion of Nicaragua, as they had in Grenada in 1983 and would later achieve in Panama in 1989 to catch General Noriega. But when Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA contractor, was shot down and arrested in October on a cargo overflight of Nicaragua, the pro-Contra story began to unravel fast. Reagan’s administration was deeply implicated in a secret $30 million sale of arms to Iran, of which at least $18 million was funneled to a slush fund for Reagan’s “Contras” fighting the legitimate Nicaraguan government. It was actually far darker than revealed at the time, but the surface of the scandal alone would essentially undermine his last two years in office with indictments.
Salvador, condemning US support for death squads, now seemed on point, and Platoon, calling out the madness of Vietnam, was opening at a most favorable juncture. Not only could it be perceived as a tribute to the men who had fallen there, but also it had enough red-blooded action to satisfy the need for violence in American bones. Yes, in the film American soldiers burn down a Vietnamese village and kill some villagers, but true to the paradox of that war, we showed the soldiers evacuating the villagers to safety, in one image a child riding the shoulders of a big GI. And yes, American troops would turn on one another and kill, but this platoon could be written off as an undisciplined unit, with draftees in it, which couldn’t be considered an example of an elite army unit, like the Airborne. And lastly, in our portrayal, the platoon’s drug use was not overdone and didn’t interfere with their combat ability—only their mindsets—and could thus be overlooked. In other words, the film was raw and provocative but, given the conditions of war, “understandable.” Our timing, December 1986, was as good as it gets.
Platoon opened in six theaters on Friday, December 19, in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, and from the first show at 11 a.m. at the Loews Astor at 44th Street and Broadway, it was a runaway train. Arthur Manson, our fatherly marketing adviser, described a line down the block, mostly men, veterans, quiet, waiting, shuffling. He said the screening itself was muted. But the movie’s effect was clear afterwards—from the men who continued to sit in their seats after the lights came up to those few crying alone. Across town, at the tony Loews on East 66th Street, it was another type of hushed crowd, mostly men as well, drawn by the reviews. It seemed Platoon could be both action film and critical success.
The reviews were out of this world, not just impressive but impassioned. The all-important television reviewers were near perfect, as Roger Ebert called it “the best film of the year,” and Gene Siskel, who’d not cared for any of my previous work, was gushing. Richard Corliss of Time magazine gave us an entire page of love-hate: “A document written in blood that after almost 20 years refuses to dry.” He was saying that it was going to open wounds again, it would be controversial. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “a major piece of work, as full of passion as it is of redeeming, scary irony.” As for the screenplay, he said, “It’s less like a work that’s been written than one that has been discovered,” calling the film “a singular achievement,” while the LA Times’ critic wrote, “a Goya with a camera . . . drives a stake through the heart of every Rambo clone.” The Washington Post reviewer in January said about me, “In the past year, with Salvador and Platoon, he has gone from a screenwriter who seemed to bring out the worst in the directors who hired him to one of the five or six American directors who matter.” And David Denby of New York magazine, who had once been brutal about my work, wrote that Platoon “culminates in the explosion of surreal horror that Francis Coppola labored for in Apocalypse Now,” calling it “the kind of Vietnam movie that many of us have longed for.” Denby captured the ambivalence of the village scene when he said: “The My Lai–type massacre we have been expecting doesn’t quite happen, but it doesn’t need to. Stone has shown us the bottom, the worst. Appalled, we know how committing murder might feel good . . . With this movie, Oliver Stone completes his amazing transformation from bum to hero.”
To be “a hero” is a boy’s natural dream—but to be called out as one, while still in midlife, gave me an enormous internal thrill. All the years when I thought I was wrong, when I was told I was bad—all this time, maybe I was right. That’s the kind of self-congratulatory thinking I was going through. Why not? I would soon enough experience the other side of that coin again. But for now, it was important to enjoy it all. I sensed on that opening day that this was a peak experience that would probably never come my way again. To have great notices and do business and be forty years old and in good health—it was so rare.
I appeared on ABC’s Nightline that evening with Ted Koppel and his guests—the tall, Lincolnesque David Halberstam, who’d been an early skeptic of the war as a correspondent for the New York Times (and who would write a glowing review of the film); and Jim Webb, assistant secretary of defense, who’d written a great novel about Vietnam, Fields of Fire, and once served as a lieutenant in a marine platoon. Webb would criticize the film as an aberration. American soldiers did not behave in this way. Obviously, we differed. He’d been an officer, and as I earlier described, I had little contact with their world—or they with mine. Nightline turned out to be relatively tepid, as are most American television news shows, with their commercial breaks and time limitations. Also I too was somewhat superficial, trying to avoid unnecessary controversy, emotional, and, as “a hero,” just grateful to have made the film. A first-timer, so to speak, in the limelight, very unlike my radical side, which had emerged during the failed Salvador PR campaign.
I was flying at a high altitude. Tom Cruise, even then the embodiment of a young superstar from Risky Business and the top-grossing film of the year, Top Gun (which ironically I’d been asked to write back in 1983), came to town with his soon-to-be wife, Mimi Rogers; they saw Platoon, and afterwards we went to dinner. The agent we shared, Paula Wagner, had gotten him interested in “Greed,” which no one had actually read yet—but it didn’t matter, it was simply assumed that the script would be there. My Lord, such things had never happened to me before. What a turnaround from being ignored. But because he was already committed to Dustin Hoffman and director Barry Levinson to start Rain Man, Cruise wanted to know if I could possibly wait for him until the fall to start “Greed.” Unfortunately, there was an actors’ union strike expected that June, a situation that was coloring all the studios’ production schedules. I’d flirted with Michael J. Fox, a huge star at that point, and Matthew Broderick, and I’d even made a vague commitment to Charlie Sheen—more like “Do you want to do this with me?” Scott Rudin at 20th Century–Fox was adamantly against my waiting for Cruise because Hoffman was “always delayed” (which turned out to be true; Rain Man was shot more than a year later). But there was no question in my mind that Cruise was the right choice for my Wall Street movie. He could play brash, energetic, go get ’em at any cost, cut any corner, and unlike Charlie, he was 100 percent all there, committed to being a star.
Ironically, earlier that day in the hotel lobby of the Regency on Park Avenue, I’d crossed paths with Warren Beatty, who called out to me. “Heard your movie was very good,” he said. “You writing something?” He was such a handsome devil.
“Yeah, for the spring.”
“About what?”
“Money.”
“Cast yet?”
“No.”
His eyebrows went up. “Think of me.”
I teased him, “But with you it takes two years of rewriting.”
He smiled, went out the revolving door into the street.
So when I met with Cruise that night, I couldn’t imagine a better marriage than Tom as the young broker and Warren as the old fox. Beatty and Cruise in the same frame at that time in their lives. Would it have worked? Made more money? Possibility is a strong aphrodisiac.
Platoon kept growing beyond my expectations. The New York Post ran a full page of pictures and “People in the Street” reactions: “Lines not seen since ‘The Godfather’ in ’72!” CBS put together a special, flying three members of two different platoons I served with in the 25th Infantry and the 1st Cavalry Division to New York for a moving reunion that paid heed to the emotional needs of a country that now wanted, out of a sense of guilt, to make it up to the misunderstood Vietnam veterans by pouring out their gratitude. Or maybe it was really a Reagan-era moment when America was trying to feel good about itself again.
Time magazine, then still a major force in our culture, planned a cover story on the movie and kept Marion in suspense until the last moment on whether it would actually appear; either it was going to be Reagan’s prostate or us on the cover of the January 18 issue. It turned out to be us. Now we were hitting all segments of the population. On La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, I saw lines a block and a half long of African Americans, Asians, hip, young, old. America’s darling TV host Jane Pauley was saying, “Never have I been so deeply moved.” Jane Fonda, an avid antiwar activist, said she broke down and cried when she saw the soldiers leaving the burning village with the Vietnamese kids riding their shoulders. It was a unifying experience. After I did a highly successful Oprah Winfrey show, one of the producers called out, “You should run for president!”
What made this entire period different from anything I would ever experience again was the slow rollout of the film; in its odd way, it was an accident. Orion was known to make offbeat movies at lower prices, but they wouldn’t distribute or spend money on them with confidence. With Platoon, they were caught with their proverbial pants down. Arthur Manson was upset that Orion didn’t have the bookings or the materials ready to go wider quickly at the New Year. Exhibitors were already calling on the very first weekend, trying to book Platoon, but they couldn’t get it. Manson, through his personal contacts, managed to get screens in Chicago and San Francisco for that New Year’s, but still, it went very slowly. We were “leaving money on the table,” he said, meaning that the enthusiasm dies down unless the movie can be seen when it’s most talked about.
You could argue that Orion’s Eric Pleskow was able to make tougher deals with the exhibitors on a slow rollout, and thus extract a higher percentage of the gate. And that they’d had great success this way distributing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. Yet I’m sure even Pleskow and Krim were much surprised when the film kept going, week after week, through January, into February, and, remarkably, all the way through March and beyond. Women began to attend in significant numbers in the third week of the run, and the film kept gaining momentum. I was naïve in the sense that I could never have imagined so many people existed in the United States, much less the world, and with the exception of fantasy blockbusters, I doubt this could ever happen again in this country, as time will never go quite that patiently again, nor will people postpone their gratification to see a movie.
On March 30, Oscar day, some fifteen weeks after Platoon had opened, the gross was over $100 million—and would go on into April to total a cumulative $130 million–plus domestically. Truly, for a highly realistic film with violence and no children’s audience, this was a miraculous phenomenon, not only across the US, but across the world. Considering that John Daly had made the film for $6 million and owned all the rights and was releasing it with only minimal expenditure, the profit worldwide was enormous for that time, the film grossing as much as $200 million to $250 million at the theatrical box office, in addition to the sale of the ancillary rights for video, television, and such.
Naturally Platoon had its detractors. Pauline Kael, priding herself on her role as the Wicked Witch, poured her acid on the film, which she found “overwrought” with “too damn much romanticized insanity.” She emphasized that I was “a very bad writer” but added, “Luckily, he’s a better director than writer.” Kael had particularly hated the “preppy narration extolling the nobility of the common man,” calling it “a grown man’s con” and me a “hype artist,” and thus, I felt, denying me the validity of my experience partly because I’d been to a “prep school.”
At the end of Platoon, flying over the wounded and dead, Sheen’s last words were voice-over: “Those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.” So many people, young and old, have told me over the years how moved they were by these words that it’s hard to reconcile this with Kael’s contempt for the narration. Well, if I was such a lousy writer, I wanted to be a “good” lousy writer. And I wanted people to be moved by that lousy writing. Kael’s criticism would become the basis of a backlash from her devotees, who constituted a small, self-referencing colony in the film world. Their spotlight was now on me, no matter what I did—and Kael had set that spotlight, well before her praise for Salvador, on Midnight Express. Another kind of reaction set in over the years, with many “film buffs” telling me that Salvador was their favorite of my films, conspicuously bypassing Platoon, which I was okay with, as long as they liked at least one of the films I’d made.
At a Q&A at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, fully packed to the rafters with its staid portraits of past Harvard presidents looking down from high wooden panels, there were polite, intelligent questions about the film’s “morality” and so on until a slightly drunk, red-faced graduate raised his hand: “I appreciate the love fest and all; it’s a well-made movie and all that, but I was a patrol leader in Vietnam, and your story is absolute crap! The guys over there were straight, there were no drugs in the field, they were good men. Your film’s an insult to them.” He was shaking with emotion, and as I went about my counterargument, he kept interrupting with “Come off it, pal! Rape? There was no sexual intercourse in combat!” And again, when I was referencing Salvador and Reagan’s paranoia about communists crossing the Rio Grande, he cut in with “What about the Chinese rolling over Tibet!” There was big applause on that. I was going through a form of baptism by fire once again, but I was ready for it, as each argument had to be countered with the specific. To my mind, the issue wasn’t about the behavior of individual units or soldiers in Vietnam, which follows human nature; it was about the corruption of a military system that had been fed on monstrous lies.
At the International Berlin Film Festival in mid-February, the reception was quite controversial. At the packed screening for some fourteen hundred journalists, I heard booing and some cries of “Scheisse”—shit! There was far more applause, but a large segment of West Germans, as I found out, despised the heavy American military presence in their country and equally detested US foreign policy; they were contrarians looking to knock down a “big shot” American film that could be interpreted as glorifying war with its music and many beautiful images.
The press conference after the film was rough. Hundreds of journalists packed into a hot hall, flashbulbs in my face, again the introductory applause and strong booing. One idealistic woman attacked immediately with “Why do you have Charlie Sheen kill the bad sergeant?”—leading her to the criminality of the American war effort. Another woman asked, “Why are there no women in the film?” A man made a statement: “This is nothing but a boring old war movie, why do you make it?” An upset Swiss journalist kept rudely cutting in, not letting me answer, grinding her axes. Simultaneous translations were going on in various booths in Italian, French, Russian, Japanese. It was a wild ride as a press conference. Suddenly here I, a dissident from the Vietnam War, was representing the USA. The film, nonetheless, went on to do spectacular foreign business everywhere without exception, even Germany.
Meanwhile, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, along with conservative celebrity icons like actor Chuck Norris, attacked the film as a disgrace to the American fighting man. Dale Dye, no friend to war protesters, responded strongly on our behalf. Parade magazine, a national Sunday supplement of great popularity, was edited by Walter Anderson, an ex-marine officer who told a Vietnam combat photographer, who then told me later, that this magazine would never give Platoon an inch of coverage because it was a disgrace—and Parade never did, nor in fact did it ever cover any of my later films. There was a twenty-fifth-hour attempt to discredit me as a fraud who’d never served in Vietnam. The story, put out by some veterans, bubbled up out of a newswire service when Dale Dye, keenly on the lookout for such things, caught it fast. He was worried. “Oliver, what’s going on? They’re saying there’s no military record for Oliver Stone?!”
This was strange. It took me a few beats to think it through. “Yeah. Because I was William Stone there.” And then they found the records, and the story vanished.
In that year and the next, boxloads of letters came to me—many of them heartfelt, moving, and so many of them similar. “My husband/son/father came home quiet, never the same again, never talked about the war, never wanted to see a movie about it . . . but when we finally saw your movie, we talked/he cried/he went back several times to see it.” Or sadly sometimes, more than once, a suicide followed within days of someone’s seeing the film. And the relative writing me the letter wasn’t blaming the film but was actually thanking me for letting them understand why their loved one possibly killed himself. On several occasions, I made telephone calls to veterans in hospitals dying from some form of cancer or war wounds. There were letters asking for film clips to be used in criminal trials where PTSD was a defense. There were letters from nurses, grateful we’d shown the gore and toll of combat. One black author of a Vietnam book was up in arms, claiming we’d portrayed the African American troops as particularly cowardly, shirking combat, which was simply not true; each soldier, black or white, was an individual drawn from my experience.
There were surprisingly detailed letters from men asking if the bloody attack at the end of the film was based on the January 1, 1968, 25th Infantry battle at “Firebase Burt,” the area also known as Suoi Kut on the Cambodian border, which it was, and amazing new details were given me, foxhole by foxhole. Our company commander, a captain I’d barely seen or known when I was in his unit, got in touch with me with his corrections—namely that he’d never called in an airstrike on our perimeter. And yes, there were other letters in which I was called out for participating in “war crimes,” saying I should be charged or surrender to the authorities.
In Hollywood, I was flattered with praise, way beyond my Midnight Express experience. Steven Spielberg wrote me, “It’s more than a movie. It’s like being in Vietnam.” Marty Scorsese was quoted as saying, “It’s good to see our country can still produce directors like him. He has a unique style, and he’s become a real personal filmmaker. No one else is doing the things he’s doing. He’s out there by himself.” And Elia Kazan had told someone I knew that Platoon was “the film of the year,” which was most heartening. Even Brian De Palma, normally a cold man, was quoted as saying, “Seeing Platoon get through the system makes the soul feel good.”
Jackie Kennedy wrote me a beautiful letter: “Your film has changed the direction of a country’s thinking. It will always stand there as a landmark—like Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring,’ like Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense.’ ” She invited me to visit her New York publishing house. Perhaps I could write something for them? I had no idea then that in a few years I’d be tramping, with muddy boots, through her manicured garden when I made a film on the brutal murder of her beloved husband. The Reagan White House, according to Orion, had shown Platoon four times in special screenings. Taxicab drivers in Manhattan were calling out my first name as I walked past: “Hey, Oliver! (or Ollie!) Great film. Tell it like it is, buddy!” “I am become a name”—that beautiful line from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” echoed in my memory.
While I was visiting the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for research purposes, the PA system suddenly announced, somewhat embarrassingly, “Everybody! The director of Platoon is down here with us on the floor, making another movie!” And all these brash, powerful New Yorkers froze for like a minute to break into excited applause. If only my dad could’ve seen this. The high-end Ogilvy & Mather British advertising firm, which would never grant me an appointment in the early ’70s when I was trying to sell our advertising reel, was now offering me $50,000 to do an American Express card commercial. In my mind, that was the height of American praise—to be plastered all over airports and magazines. But it felt wrong to commercialize this painful collective experience, and I turned them down. Even the Polish underground movement against their Soviet-supported government reached out to me for help. It was getting to be too much.
In late January at the Golden Globes (where I’d embarrassed myself in 1978), I lost the screenwriting award, without regret, to my old mentor, Robert Bolt, for his script of The Mission. The picture had finally come out after more than ten years of delay, a lush, cerebral epic produced by Fernando Ghia, now overshadowed by his partner, David Puttnam, who’d produced Midnight Express and gone on to do Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields. I congratulated all of them, because I thought The Mission was one of the great films of that year; but sadly, the theme of the Jesuits in the Amazon jungle in the early eighteenth century was not a topic for modern audiences, and the film lost money. Ending up in the red had nothing to do with The Mission’s quality, only its subject matter—a price to be paid over and over again for those of us who veer from the margins.
Later that evening, when Tony Curtis called out “Oliver Stone” as Best Director, I was relaxed as I glided up to the stage. The Golden Globes were now a widely televised event, and this time I was sober and prepared. I had my list of names in my head, thanking and acknowledging the Vietnam veterans and “John Daly, who gave me a shot when I was unemployable,” and “Elizabeth, my wife, whose unwavering love brought me through the dark years.” The strong applause surged and carried me in its redemptive glow for weeks.
When the prestigious Directors Guild Awards rolled around in mid-March, untelevised, I went out of my way to acknowledge the long line of DGA past winners. I praised Elia Kazan, who was receiving a lifetime achievement honor, and his Viva Zapata! as a major inspiration for Salvador. I spoke of “the giants of my youth . . . their lights shine no less dimly as an example to us—we’re in the tradition of Wyler and Wellman, Stevens and Ford, Huston and Hawks, Billy Wilder and so many others who’ve created a lifetime’s body of work.” The DGA gold plate is enormous, and holding it, I felt solid—like the writer-director I’d wanted to be since NYU. I’d arrived. I could honestly, for the first time, call myself successful.
On the plane to New York after the Globes, I saw Al Pacino. He looked beaten, older than I remembered him from our strange partnership on Scarface, where he’d asked for my support but never gave me his. He seemed distantly happy for me and said, “You’ve grown into your success . . . you deserve it. You’ve been around.” He, on the other hand, was openly sick, he said, “of getting my head cut off”—in movies like Revolution, Author! Author!, and Cruising, on which he’d had a difficult time with Billy Friedkin, who was originally going to direct Born on the Fourth of July; Pacino was now working on the fifth writer’s draft of a picture that would never get made and would become the embodiment of all the defeats we face in a volatile profession. But Pacino was still the street Hamlet to me; Al didn’t miss much with those big shiny eyes and a savagely instinctive actor’s radar for the very moment he was in. I find this to be a most crucial aspect of acting. “We communicate with our eyes,” Napoleon said; my own eyes were always far too small for the screen, but nature’s choice pleased me.
Perhaps that’s why I preferred to be behind a camera or a pen. That was changing now, as I had to become the public face of Platoon, and in a larger sense, the Vietnam War itself. I had to develop a more public persona, for which I had little training, having shied from debate societies in school. It was on-the-job training. In Washington, I made my first National Press Club appearance, which, in comparison to times still to come, went smoothly. I spoke, among other things, of the need to remember the war, almost fifteen years past now. I spoke of “moral amnesia.” And I defended the violence in Platoon by defending its realism as opposed to the sanitized, unrealistic violence we see in television and movies. “The point is that violence ruins you, in some sense, forever. It takes a piece of your soul.” To judge from the violence that continues in today’s films, it’s become even more realistic and gruesome than in previous years, but its meaning is largely lost when one American soldier on that big screen can still manage to kill ten or twenty Somalis, Libyans, or Taliban before expiring. Why can’t Americans just die miserably like everyone else?
Shortly thereafter, I received “the call” I’d heard whispers about, “the call” that comes out of the blue, never chased. It comes or it doesn’t. Mike Medavoy, who handled his affairs, had set it up. “Marlon Brando’s going to call you,” Mike said. “I showed him Platoon —”
“Oh, okay.”
“He brought Michael Jackson and Liz Taylor.”
“Oh, okay.” Was I glad I wasn’t in that screening room. Distracting to say the least.
“He’ll tell you. You’ll like him. He’s a good guy.”
Less than half an hour later, when that high, self-conscious, nasal-strained voice came on the line, it had to be him, but sometimes you still have to wonder if it’s a prank. Brando—“Call me Marlon”—clearly grasped the root of the film and its success. “You can understand how you go outside all moral restraints” was the way he put it. Platoon was “a watershed film that will sweep the Oscars.” He understood the dilemma that most fascinated me: Would my protagonist, myself, cross the line into immoral behavior—into sadism even? He seemed to identify closely with the village scene in which American soldiers humiliate the Vietnamese peasants.
I kept thinking: he sounds just like Brando, his voice from On the Waterfront, but . . . It was a long call, as he meandered to his second point. He wanted me to work with him on his pet project about the infamous 1864 massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado, an outgrowth of his passion for the cause of Native Americans. He launched into a fascinating monologue with the visceral power of the one he did in Last Tango in Paris, to “butter up your ass like a pig,” vividly describing how US soldiers took the Native women, “cut their tits and cunts off, stretched them across the pommels of their saddles.” The way he spoke was as if he was doing it himself with a skinning knife, his voice elemental with rage, clashing between his own male and female sides in his imagery of savagery, pure savage cruelty.
His anger was very real, but I knew I didn’t want to do this massacre film. I’d just done Platoon and Salvador; I wanted an escape from cruelty. I suppose he sensed that, and he was blunt in suddenly asking, “You can give me a quick yes or no. A short thrust of the knife to the belly is better than a slow carve up the back.” A poet of a man, resignation in his voice; he knew. I said with some hesitation, “I’m not too keen on doing it.”
He wished me well on “Greed,” which would soon be retitled Wall Street. “It’s a great idea, but is it commercial?” Who knew? I didn’t really think about that. I told him it “was an honor for me you called. Growing up, you were one of my idols.” He laughed, I believe moved, but how many times had he heard this? We made vague promises of getting together. A legend. I never thought I’d talk to or see him again, but actually I would—in a face-to-face that was passing strange.
So I’d come to this moment in time. Success was a beautiful goddess, yes, but was I being seduced by this vindication, this proving myself to my father; was it the acceptance, the power? What did I really believe? I’d made it a moral issue that America was truly wounding itself in Vietnam with our struggle between pro-war/antiwar, right/left, Barnes/Elias, but was I avoiding the larger moral issue of the wholesale slaughter of 3 to 4 million Vietnamese people—and all that implied? What had really happened to America? It was no longer just about Salvador or Vietnam. My mind was still scared of this confrontation; it was a mind that would have to evolve further, assume greater risks. One baby step at a time.
Oscar night was Monday, March 30, 1987. It’d been so emotional that first time—seeing Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, two of them gone now. This was my second date, but I was as excited about it as in 1979. No more was I the scriptwriter. I was the filmmaker. Our underdog status was long gone, and it felt, frankly, like we couldn’t lose. Why feign surprise when everyone was telling me the same thing? The veteran publicity man from Warner’s, Joe Hyams, informed me, “Stanley [Kubrick] just saw the picture and loved it.” Joe was dead sure: “You’re gonna win, kid.” This time I’d keep my head to the earth. I wouldn’t be spun or wooed by Oscar again into another hubristic downfall. I’d stay rooted in my family. When I’d returned to Los Angeles and seen Sean waiting for me at home and he gave me a happy hug—“For Daddy,” he’d say, prompted by Elizabeth—the world at that moment would come to a fullness I’ve rarely experienced. That was the difference between 1979 and 1986. It was my happiness.
Nonetheless, before the awards show, I took a Lysanxia, a tranquilizer, which would help navigate this torturous three-and-a-half-hour journey. First the red carpet and the reviewing stand with the inimitable Army Archerd of Variety announcing each arrival. Kathleen Turner, Jane Fonda, Sigourney, Sissy, a parade of dresses, the royalty of some magic kingdom walking past the yearning masses screaming out their names—“Over here! Over here! Oliver! Oliver! Here, here!” Girls in Platoon T-shirts jumping up and down. Then Elizabeth and I, accompanied by my mother and her handsome gay date, producer and partygoer Andy Kuehn, were escorted to our seats in the very first row in the full glare of the TV cameras. Platoon was nominated for eight awards, among them my original screenplay. I was also up separately in the same Original Screenplay category with Richard Boyle for Salvador—that rare occurrence of competing against yourself. Richard was sitting with Esther a few rows back (she was a long way from that trailer in Santa Cruz), trying to figure out a way to cash in on all this glamour, which he did, talking his way into a professorship in film at an inland California college, a “gig” he milked for at least twenty years before he moved back to the Philippines, where life was cheaper. In another section, his former antagonist, Best Actor nominee Jimmy Woods, was glowing alongside his horse-riding girlfriend, whom he’d marry, and soon divorce. Jimmy knew he had a real shot at the crown.
Each time the TV cameras cut to me for my reaction, as if I was bound to win, it felt like a new form of public torture. Supporting Actor went to my Hand star Michael Caine for Hannah and Her Sisters, not to Dafoe or Berenger, who canceled each other out in the balloting. I lost out on both my films for Original Screenplay to Woody Allen for Hannah. Bob Richardson lost out on Cinematography, but we did win Sound for our British pro, Simon Kaye, and we won Editing for Claire Simpson.
As my time approached, I did get nervous and skipped out twice to the lounge area, where Elizabeth steadied me, patted me down, and I took another half pill—what was wrong with me? There was no profound answer. It was just pure fucking nerves. It would take years to steady those nerves; only repetition could do it. Would I make it tonight? I could see myself dissolving in sweat in front of millions; talk about embarrassing. I suddenly felt like bolting out of there. Liz gripped me, calmed me.
The Foreign Film award was given to a Dutch film, The Assault—and its director blathered on, it seemed, forever. Then Best Actress went to Marlee Matlin for her moving performance with Bill Hurt in Children of a Lesser God, directed by one of the exceptional female directors at that time, Randa Haines; Marlee is deaf, and her acceptance won hearts.
When Elizabeth Taylor stepped onto the stage to award Best Director, the audience hushed with excitement. She was the best, and you knew it when you saw her. My dream girl of the 1950s and 1960s, still so glamorous, the heart of the movies. David Lynch, who directed Blue Velvet, was sitting not far away, and years later, he revealed how much he really wanted to win “just to be kissed by Elizabeth Taylor.” She began by reading the five directors’ names—Lynch, Allen, Roland Joffé (for The Mission), James Ivory, and me. And suddenly, in one of those bizarre moments when a breeze suddenly blows through the window and your body temperature drops back to normal, I felt calm, so calm, feeling this great moment for what it was—a spot of heaven.
“And the winner is . . .”
The camera, for some reason, was on my mother’s date, Andy, with his mustache, who actually looked a bit like me, and then—
“Oliver Stone!”
The camera found me. Is this a dream? And yet, I was sentient. “Kiss Liz twice,” Mom was saying to me across my wife’s knees. Which Liz did she mean? I kissed my Liz. My mother meant the other one. The applause sounded deafening, the gods had found me this moment—and millions of people were laying eyes on me for the first time in their lives.
Then I was gliding across the stage, and I felt cool and easy, making sure to kiss Liz Taylor on both cheeks, as the French do.
“Thank you for this Cinderella ending, but I think through this award, you are acknowledging the Vietnam veteran, and you’re saying that, for the first time, you understand what really happened over there, and you’re saying that it should never ever in our lifetimes happen again.” There was strong affirming applause. It was a big moment. USA Today called it “the classiest, evocative speech.” And then I went on, almost defiantly. Was I going too far now? Was I going to blow this too? “. . . And if it does, then those American boys over there died for nothing, because America learned nothing from that war they called Vietnam.”
Although there was resounding applause and more affirmation, in view of the upcoming Panama invasion and the first Iraq War, how wrong I was—but at least I tried. Then I thanked my colleagues, and with Queen Elizabeth guiding me to the wings, I returned to my seat to see the next two categories coming up fast. Best Actor was presented by an aging, emaciated Bette Davis with great theatricality, but not to Jimmy Woods, who many felt deserved it—and how sweet it would’ve been—but deservedly to Paul Newman, a no-show who was finally receiving it on his seventh nomination for The Color of Money.
And then Dustin Hoffman came out. “And the Best Picture of the year is . . .” (envelope) “Platoon!” I know it sounds repetitious, but it bears repetition because I’d need to remember this moment when my storms came; the ugly duckling had just been transformed into a swan.
Platoon, at the start, had been a thousand-to-one low-budget shot—all those turndowns, all those years of indifference—the men of Vietnam spread all over the country tonight—it was all spinning through my heart. Arnold Kopelson came to the stage alone, as had been determined, denying John Daly his true reward, as well as Alex Ho, but Arnold wanted to be the only producer up there. I watched from my seat, and despite my fears of his going on too long and pretentiously, he offered a simple and moving thank-you.
As the show wound down, I returned backstage, where Liz walked me into the first of four media rooms and bade me good night with her movie goddess smile, and the next day sent me a bucket of red roses with a witty note, “From the other Liz.” Always saucy and sexy. Endless photographs of Dustin, Bette, myself, the other winners—and into the press questions. By now I was a trained seal, and when asked for my reaction to the denunciations of Platoon by some conservatives and the VFW, I gave it back to them without rancor.
Then the parties, the faces, the bonhomie, Dale Dye in his full white marine uniform calling for “Bravo Two!” to form “at attention!” at the Hemdale party at La Scala. I was standing with my mother and wife and John Daly next to Arthur Krim and his wife, Mathilde. My mom, having met Liz Taylor and Bette Davis and Jennifer Jones, three of her favorite actresses of all time, was in paradise. Michael Douglas, with a mustache, was hugging me. Jimmy Woods, Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, all of them—Richard Boyle, Paula Wagner, Mike Menschel, Steve Pines, Bob Marshall, our banker Frans Afman, Gerald Green, Arnold Kopelson, everyone who’d played a role—Bob Richardson, Alex Ho, even members of our team in the Philippines were calling in. I could do nothing wrong that night short of vomiting on the cake, but I held myself with dignity; I wanted to remember this happiness.
I’d been chasing the light a long time now. I’d felt its power. I was now forty years old, proverbially at the halfway point. It’d been a remarkable two-film journey from the bottom back to the top of the Hollywood mountain. With Salvador, I’d slung the stone hard and far, and it had given me a foothold. And with Platoon, I’d managed to crest into the light. Money, fame, glory, and honor, it was all there at the same time and space. I had to move now. I’d been waiting too many years to make films. Time had wings. I wanted to make one after the other in a race against that Time—I suppose really a race against myself in a hall of mirrors of my own making.
Thirty years now, I look back and realize I had no idea then of the storm that was coming, but I did know instinctively that I’d reached a moment in time whose glory would last me forever.