Labor Day weekend couldn't have begun better for Oliver Stone. On the day of its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in the Colorado mountains, ''U-Turn,'' his 13th film as a director, was reviewed glowingly by both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. In Variety, Todd McCarthy wrote, ''Few, if any, directors with as many films under his belt as Stone has, are displaying this kind of stylistic urgency and restlessness, without the slightest speck of Hollywood complacency in evidence.''
The opening credits of ''U-Turn,'' which will be re-leased in early October, bill it as ''an Oliver Stone movie,'' as opposed to the weightier ''films'' of the last decade. After years of facing down attacks for his controversial subject matter, Stone has for once spun an old-fashioned yarn, entirely devoid of political or social agenda.
But few things ever go easily for Stone, and over the weekend, festivalgoers' responses to his vicious, star-studded, neo-noir black comedy set in the Arizona desert were decidedly mixed. Saturday afternoon, following a mostly deferential Q. and A. session between Stone and a group of college students, Salvador Litvak, a redheaded graduate of U.C.L.A.'s film program, approached the 50-year-old film maker privately.
''Did you all discuss the film among yourselves?'' Stone asked him. ''What did they think?''
''Well, to be frank,'' Litvak said, ''about half didn't like it. They're wondering: 'He's Oliver Stone. He can do anything he wants. And when he has that kind of opportunity, why does he do . . . this? Why isn't he making a righteous film?' '' After Litvak had gone, Stone sighed. ''I can't escape the image,'' he said. ''Because I'm 'Oliver Stone,' they expect a certain thing.''
Among the film directors who achieve fame enough for their names to register with the general public, Oliver Stone is the rarity who has escaped the bounds of his profession. A self-styled iconoclast, adventurer and revisionist historian, he has increasingly aspired over the years to the status of celebrity thinker, becoming a passionately contentious participant in public debate on the issues engaged by his films. But he has been so passionate, and so insistent, that the messenger has often overwhelmed the message, allowing his detractors to paint him as a crude, polemical celebrity ranter. Last winter, the initial critical acclaim that greeted ''The People vs. Larry Flynt'' -- which Stone produced but did not direct -- was quickly drowned out by vociferous denunciations from Gloria Steinem and others who objected to its sympathetic portrayal of the controversial Hustler publisher. The film subsequently sputtered at the box office, and its failure to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture was also seen as part of the backlash.
''The media make you into a god, and then they kill you,'' says Richard Rutowski, Stone's best friend and frequent collaborator. ''And Oliver has been experiencing a difficult death.''
In recognition of the easy target Stone has made of himself, mounted on a column in an open area of his offices is a large likeness of his face painted on a dartboard, a gift from an agent. ''They got me,'' Stone says. ''I feel like, as far as my career is concerned, I have to prove myself all over again. How do I show people that I'm not a cartoon?''
After the disappointing indifference of audiences to ''Nixon'' and ''Heaven and Earth,'' and the public-relations nightmare of ''Natural Born Killers,'' Stone, a three-time Academy Award winner who rarely seems to lack bluster or self-assurance, found himself at an uncertain crossroads. Studios were reluctant to bankroll politically volatile material like ''Memphis,'' a version of the Martin Luther King Jr. story that would question the guilt of James Earl Ray in King's assassination. When he chose to direct ''U-Turn,'' his co-producer, Dan Halsted, viewed it as a necessary move, explaining, ''I wanted Oliver to make a movie that wasn't going to be reviewed on the op-ed pages.''
Stone's work has always inspired strong responses. In 1991, when Pauline Kael retired as film critic for The New Yorker, she quipped, ''The prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much.'' To this day, however, the film maker still clearly suffers most from the success of ''J.F.K.,'' whose enormous worldwide popularity served only to intensify the virulence of critics, pundits and historians who misconstrued or objected to his dramatic method, his heroic depiction of the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison or the various paranoid solutions the film proposed to the Kennedy assassination. No film purporting to portray American history has been so much discussed, or reviled, since ''Birth of a Nation,'' D.W. Griffith's epic mash note to the Ku Klux Klan.
Stone's participation in the fray only made it worse. ''He didn't have to go everywhere screaming his head off that it was all true,'' notes Don Murphy, who produced ''Natural Born Killers.'' ''The film makes a really cogent argument that the official version of Kennedy's death is bull, and he should have just stopped there. But he wanted you to accept his version, which wasn't very cogent.'' A Hollywood executive who does not know Stone personally says: ''He's a genius director, but what's frustrating is, he's not a genius. His movies don't make arguments -- they spew. If he made half as many movies in the same amout of time, he would make great films for the ages.''
In one of the more striking coincidences of the art-life continuum, ''Nothing Sacred,'' a 1937 film written by Ben Hecht, features a bullheaded, hypersensitive newspaper editor named Oliver Stone. Asked to describe him, Fredric March, who plays his star reporter, says: ''He's like a cross between a Ferris wheel and a werewolf. But with a lovable streak -- if you care to blast for it.'' It is a characterization that until recently might just as easily have applied to the real Oliver Stone. Restlessly energetic, an inveterate partier and womanizer, capable of extraordinary charm and eloquence, Stone could also be unpleasantly confrontational, short-tempered and obstreperous. But the past year and a half has been a time of self-doubt and re-examination for Stone. His professional quandary and a mellower private life have led to an evident softening.
''The biggest internal movement I recognize,'' his friend Rutowski says, ''is humility. It's hard to see. He has a lot of crazy energy that comes from his imbalances. But he's tasted it.'' The birth of a daughter, Tara, by his Korean girlfriend, Chong Son Chong, while not pushing Stone to monogamy, has signaled a serious new personal commitment, as has his increasing involvement in Tibetan Buddhism. ''I'm readjusting the balances in my life,'' he says. ''I had a lot of demons, and they expressed themselves in the work. But there is a lightening of the load.''
Part of Stone's stock-taking includes the October publication, alongside the release of ''U-Turn,'' of ''A Child's Night Dream,'' a novel he wrote at age 19 between dropping out of Yale and enlisting to go to Vietnam. A stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows an alienated young man named ''Oliver'' from New York, across Asia and into Mexico, the book displays a rage and naive ambition that while disarmingly revealing will almost certainly expose the film maker to further derogation. Yet if Stone is frustrated by mainstream hostility to his desire to explore what he calls the ''dark side'' or ''shadow areas'' of life, he can usually count on a sympathetic reception from one group: in the absence of a meaningful contemporary counterculture, young people find his independent, antiestablishment stance uncommonly attractive.
At American University in Washington, undergraduates flock to a history course taught by Peter Kuznick titled ''Oliver Stone's America.'' (Garry Wills, who recently wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly proclaiming Stone a 20th-century Dostoyevsky, offered a similar class at Northwestern.) Last fall, when Stone visited as a guest lecturer, he stood at the podium, black reading glasses pushed down on the bridge of his nose, projecting a relaxed, benevolent professorial authority. The lecture hall overflowed with excited students, including a cheerful sophomore named Kristen Young, who wore a tight, white T-shirt pulled up to expose her navel. The Vietnam War fascinates her, she said. Her father served in 1968 and came back a changed man. ''He can't really talk about it.''
Asked if she is swayed by any of the conspiratorial possibilities laid out in ''J.F.K.,'' she responded enthusiastically. ''Oh, yeah. It was L.B.J. L.B.J. didn't want to end the war. It was a power trip.''
When another student brought up the subject in the Q. and A. session, Stone made it clear that his film never claims that Johnson murdered Kennedy, reprising his litany on the artist's right to provocative ambiguity. ''You have a responsibility to read a book,'' he told the class. ''You're not going to sit through a three-hour movie and say, 'That's that.' I'm brainwashing the young? I don't have that agenda.''
In large part, what students respond to and what grown-ups distrust is Stone's sheer pyrotechnical virtuosity. As a film maker, Stone has evolved a powerful, kaleidoscopic style, deploying the textures of disparate film formats and stocks, mixing black-and-white with color, interjecting associative, or dissociative, imagery within a scene to shift back and forth between perspectives or to suddenly dissolve the boundary between sober exposition and grotesque expressionism.
Stone is eager to discuss the effect of form on content. ''I've always appreciated the dream state,'' he explains, ''and to be honest, I've questioned reality. Especially when you get to people like Nixon, or the J.F.K. murder. I'm all for facts, but there's so much dispute about the facts that the Kennedy murder to me borders on dream, or nightmare. And the nightmare state that took over the country traumatized it. Whatever they say, something happened that day. His head was blown off at high noon, I believe, for specific reasons.
''Anyway, that nightmare leads somehow to Vietnam and to Watergate and up into the Reagan era, and it really is almost like the dream state possessed the country. So, what do film makers do? We inhabit the dream state. And movies that are good are vivid dreams, in a sense. I never remember plot points. I always remember the mood of a movie and the feeling of a movie. And I suppose that in approaching it, in approaching reality as dream, I have offended certain literal-minded people. Because they think history exists with predetermined borders. I'm not so sure it does.''
In Hollywood, anyone whose films provoke the intense reactions that Stone's do is a valuable commodity. For all the fire he has drawn, Stone remains an incontrovertible A-list director in the eyes of the studios, and his turn away from politics has only whetted their hope that he will forsake his edgy material for their own, more commercial projects. Prior to shooting ''U-Turn,'' his friend the producer and director Lili Zanuck reports, he ''literally read everything in town.'' Dreamworks SKG, the new studio owned by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, offered him their inaugural movie, ''The Peacemaker,'' a political thriller, but Stone's ambivalence prevailed, and he turned it down. Lisa Moiselle, a producer who once worked in Stone's office, remembers him repeatedly warning his script readers and interns, ''Don't go Hollywood on me!'' But among the films he is now considering are a drama about life in the N.F.L. and, at the behest of Tom Cruise, who has wanted to work with Stone again since ''Born on the Fourth of July,'' a sequel to ''Mission Impossible,'' the ultimate in big-screen Hollywood entertainment.
''The major thing he's doing,'' theorizes Variety's editor in chief, Peter Bart, ''is he has to re-establish his credentials as someone who can make a more conventional, accessible, popular picture. You can't be thought of as a guy who's a one-trick pony. Many of us would love to see him sustain his momentum, and it is some concern to us -- we're rooting for him.''
In Telluride, Stone complained that the college students who felt let down by the lack of substance in ''U-Turn'' don't understand the degree of hostility and resistance he currently faces. ''I can't live for students,'' he said. ''They're too high-minded.'' They may be cheered to know, however, that no matter what genre Stone chooses to work in, he's never far from his obsessions. Discussing his concept for ''Mission Impossible,'' he describes it as ''a vehicle to say something about the state of corporate culture and technology and global politics in the 21st century. It's a big commercial picture, and Tom Cruise is a movie star, and in a sense, that gives me some camouflage. I can't always be out there leading with my chin.''
Blockbusters aside, it would be a mistake to think that Stone was making more than a temporary withdrawal from the overtly political. Among the projects in his development pipeline are several that are certain to raise hackles, including not only the Martin Luther King Jr. film but also scripts about the Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. ''The important thing is to feel you're going forward,'' Stone says, ''instead of into obfuscation, drunkenness, druggedness. There are examples of film makers who have taken downturns. I don't feel I've taken a downturn in the last 11 years.''
Last December, when I visited the set of ''U-Turn'' in Arizona, Stone seemed unusually composed, even in the amped-up milieu in which he prefers to shoot. Without the pressure of making a high-profile movie, Stone had decided to return to the guerrilla-style conditions under which he made his first films, trying to complete ''U-Turn'' in six weeks for approximately $20 million, or less than half the time and expense of his previous films. An impressive cast, including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Clare Danes, Joaquin Phoenix and Billy Bob Thornton, was signed up for the ride.
On the dusty main street of Superior, a sleepy town stuck in the 50's, Stone was an inspiring commander, engaged and accessible, taking suggestions from cast and crew alike. The smaller scale did not impinge on the numerous camera setups required by Stone's fragmented style: rarely venturing beyond six or seven takes per setup, he still shot more than 25 times as much film as he used, a ratio more appropriate to a film with a schedule two or three times as long. Between setups, rather than retire to his trailer, he would stay to confer about further details or head down the street with an assistant director to plan the next one. Over the course of several hours on a sunny afternoon, he managed to cover a conversation between Sean Penn and Jon Voight from some 20 different angles.
Later, for a short hallucinatory sequence meant to emanate from Penn's subconscious, Penn wandered into town while, from the opposite direction, the grips ran at top speed, pushing a dolly bearing Robert Richardson, the cinematographer -- who was wielding a silent-era hand-cranked camera -- down almost the entire length of the bumpy street, careening wildly from side to side and sliding to a final stop just in front of Penn, who stared unblinkingly into the lens. The shot was repeated several times, and on each take Stone ran alongside the camera, urging them on, all the way down the street.
''In Tibetan Buddhism,'' according to Stone, ''they allow for wrathful deities -- they protect you from forces of destruction.'' Smiling, he continued: ''I'm working on that. Because I have a lot of people who just don't like me, who have never met me, who don't know me. They just sort of have an image of me. You want to be liked -- we all do -- you want to be loved as a person, and it doesn't happen that way, because you make certain films that you think are honest, but they really tick people off. And you pay the price in your life. Sometimes I walk into a restaurant or something, and I just feel a lot of the vibes coming out.''
The following night on the set, a Saturday, thinking his job done for the weekend, Penn's makeup man went AWOL, causing a nearly two-hour delay, while the second cameraman inadvertently overexposed the brief scene that Stone and Richardson had delegated to him. The director, however, maintained his calm, continuing without public outburst or interruption.
While it was still daylight, walking toward the storefront where the next scene was to be shot, Richardson gently mocked the new, user-friendly Oliver Stone. ''It's an old story, isn't it?'' he asked. ''Monster goes Zen. No explosions on the set, no one has anything bad to say.'' His eyes grew wide, and with exaggerated urgency he wondered, ''Where did the monster go?''
As Richardson finished speaking, Richard Rutowski's Jeep appeared in the intersection before us, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust. And in one of those moments that all of a sudden seem charged with significance, Rutowski leaned out the window, accidentally offering an answer to the cinematographer's rhetorical query.
''Bob,'' he said, ''Bob.''
Richardson looked over at him.
''Some things,'' Rutowski intoned, ''never change.''
Later, they shot an easy setup, Richardson holding the camera on his shoulder, following Penn from behind as he walked down a side street. After the first take, Penn turned around and called back to Stone, ''Oliver, I'm not going to do this shot again unless you skip toward the camera with me.'' Stone laughed, but Penn wasn't kidding. With some cajoling, the director walked over to the actor, joined hands with him and, after a signal from Penn for Richardson to roll film, together they swung their arms forward, and, for a moment, two of Hollywood's most famously surly, enormously talented, easily misunderstood figures went skipping along the asphalt, smiling, to the delighted disbelief of the assembled crew.
Source: New York Times
