Natural born copycats

Eight murders have been blamed on Oliver Stone's 'evil' 1995 film. He tells Xan Brooks why Natural Born Killers left no blood on his hands.

On the morning of March 6 1995, teen lovers Ben Darras and Sarah Edmondson left their Oklahoma cabin and took the highway east. In Mississippi they came across a local businessman, Bill Savage, and shot him twice in the head with a .38-calibre revolver. They then swung across to Louisiana, where they gunned down convenience-store cashier Patsy Byers, paralysing her from the neck down. Darras and Edmondson were standard American brats who loved their hard drugs and their R-rated movies. After their arrest, it was revealed that they had prepared for the trip by dropping acid and screening Natural Born Killers on a continuous loop throughout the night.

1. Natural Born Killers
2. Production year: 1992
3. Countries: UK, USA
4. Cert (UK): 18
5. Runtime: 119 mins
6. Directors: Oliver Stone
7. Cast: Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Woody Harrelson
8. More on this film

No film in recent decades has stoked as much controversy as Natural Born Killers. No film-maker, if his critics are to be believed, has quite so much blood on his hands as its director, Oliver Stone. In the eight years since its release, Stone's picture has been confidently linked to at least eight murders - from Barras and Edmondson's wild ride, through the Texan kid who decapitated a classmate because he "wanted to be famous, like the natural born killers", to the pair of Paris students who killed three cops and a taxi driver and were later discovered to have the film's poster on their bedroom wall. The ensuing media storm ensured that the British Board of Film Classification sat on the film for six months before passing it for a theatrical release in February 1995. It also explains why we have had to wait until now for the release of Stone's director's cut on DVD.

Bankrolled by Time Warner, NBK dispatches psycho lovebirds Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) on a murderous, junk-culture joyride. Along the way it melds 35mm with Super-8, animation with back projection and stylised carnage with a thunderous rock soundtrack. The initial response was enthusiastic. The film sailed to the top of the US box office, with Variety dubbing it "the most hallucinatory and anarchic picture made at a major Hollywood studio in the last 20 years...a psychedelic documentary on the American cult of sex, violence and celebrity."

But as the body count mounted, the reaction turned icy. Mario Vargas Llosa publicly cursed the film at the 1994 Venice film festival. David Puttnam (who had previously worked with Stone on 1978's Midnight Express) labelled it "loathsome". In the opinion of the Daily Mail, NBK was simply "evil". "If ever a film deserved to be banned," it concluded, "this is it."

If the media were looking for a fall guy, they found him in Stone. To his critics, the director was a ready-made hypocrite: a rich kid who volunteered for Vietnam and then made Oscar-winning films (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) lambasting the war; a peace-loving Buddhist who freely admitted that movie violence was "cool". His film, too, was derided as hypocrisy in action: a supposed satire on screen violence that wallowed in two hours of stylised atrocity and then berated the viewer for getting off on it. Thus the director found himself cast as a wicked Svengali, with Natural Born Killers his murderous instruction manual.

Stone is not a man you would think of as a sensitive type. Eight years on, however, he admits that the flak left him shaken. "The controversy was huge, no question about it," he says now. "To my mind, almost everything that was important about Natural Born Killers was overlooked amid all that hysteria over the death toll, and all the nonsense about whether or not I was promoting violence or instigating murder."

Such "nonsense" came to a head in a legal action launched against Stone and Time Warner by lawyers acting for the paralysed Byers, and publicly supported by the author John Grisham, who had been a friend of the murdered Savage. According to the suit, the makers of Natural Born Killers were "distributing a film they knew, or should have known would cause and inspire people to commit crimes". Grisham agreed. There was, he said, a direct "causal link" between the movie and the murders. Therefore, "the artist should be required to share responsibility along with the nutcase who pulled the trigger".

The Byers action was finally thrown out of court in March 2001, and its dismissal rubber-stamped by the Louisiana court of appeal in June of this year. Stone, who says that Time Warner lost "a lot of money" fighting the case, is mightily relieved. "Once you start judging movies as a product, you are truly living in hell. What are the implications for freedom of speech? You wouldn't have any film of stature being made ever again."

He compares the lawsuit to the infamous case of Dan White, the ex-cop who shot San Francisco politician Harvey Milk in 1978. "White used what was known as the Twinkie defence. He said that he had been eating too many Twinkies and that the high sugar content had prompted him to kill. And it worked! He got away with a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and served five years. But you can't blame the Twinkies in the same way that you can't scapegoat the movies. You can't blame the igniter. People can be ignited by anything. And yet this is something we're seeing more and more of in America today. It's a culture of liability lawsuits. The whole concept of individual responsibility has been broken up and passed around."

I wonder, though, where Stone stands on this thorny issue of liability. Does he feel any measure of artistic responsibility for the films he makes? "That's a very leading question. Because there is no partial responsibility. If you make a film that results in people getting killed, then you are guilty. Therefore I'm not accepting any responsibility."

Surely, though, he wouldn't dispute the idea that a film can influence its viewer. "Of course it can. Maybe it inspires you to change your love life, or to alter your wardrobe. But it's not a film's responsibility to tell you what the law is. And if you kill somebody, you've broken the law."

If NBK has an obvious ancestor, it is A Clockwork Orange. And yet when Stanley Kubrick's movie was linked to various copycat crimes in the early 70s, the director personally had it whipped out of circulation. "Yeah, but I think Kubrick was wrong to do that," Stone argues. "If it wasn't an admission of guilt, it was at least an admission of embarrassment. I'm a big fan of Kubrick, but he was a paranoid man. He reacted to the hysteria of the mob. He crumbled when he should have stood up and defended his work."

Not that Stone didn't suffer some qualms of his own. "When people are attacking you, you are naturally going to have some doubts. 'Why I am making films? Why has this movie been so misunderstood?' And yes, people may have been influenced by the film in some way, but they had deeper problems to contend with. So I felt terrible about it all. In the end I went and hid myself away in a darkened room for a few years." Really? Reading interviews at the time, he struck me as being positively bullish in his defence. The director chuckles. "OK," he says. "Maybe I was joking about the darkened room."

Before permitting the release of NBK in 1994, the censors insisted that Stone strip a whopping 150 shots from the film. The new version restores them all, from a loving camera zoom through a bullet-holed hand to a climactic shot of Tommy Lee Jones's severed head on a stick. The director concedes that on one level this makes the director's cut a more obviously violent film. But he stresses that the restored segments are so over the top that they emphasise his satirical intent.

In other respects, the director's cut plays much like the original: an exuberant shotgun wedding of the crass with the sophisticated that closes with an extended channel-surf through the hot media imagery of the day (OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the Waco siege). Viewed from our lofty 21st-century vantage point, it already seems something of a timepiece: a snapshot of a specific era in US culture; a tenuous accessory to crimes that have been duly tried, sentenced and consigned to history.

"Natural Born Killers was never intended as a criticism of violence," Stone explains. "How can you criticise violence? Violence is in us - it's a natural state of man. What I was doing was pointing the finger at the system that feeds off thatviolence, and at the media that package it for mass consumption. The film came out of a time when that seemed to have reached an unprecedented level. It seemed to me that America was getting crazier."

Since then, he has revised his opinion: "Oh, it's worse than ever now. The reaction of our culture to violence is more extreme than it's ever been. Just look at the events of September 11. I think that the media overreacted to it. Just like they overreacted to my little film."

The director's cut of Natural Born Killers is out now on DVD.

Source: New York Times

Film Violence: No Hollywood Defense

For years, Hollywood moguls and studio chiefs have sought to use their influence, voices and money for numerous political and social causes, from apartheid, AIDS and migrant farm workers to Democratic candidates for state and national office.

But the one issue over which the Hollywood hierarchy has direct control and responsibility -- violence in films -- has left industry executives uncharacteristically silent. In fact, the moguls and studio chiefs whose violent films are even more popular abroad than in the United States, seem like a herd of deer caught in the headlights of Washington's focus.

Left unspoken is a tenet that Hollywood executives are almost reluctant to acknowledge: violence sells.

In the aftermath of the killings at a Colorado high school in April, angry criticism among lawmakers in Washington has included accusations of Hollywood's irresponsibility and demands for controls over the marketing practices of the film, recording and video game industries.

President Clinton, who has raised tens of millions of dollars for the Democratic Party among the Hollywood elite, unexpectedly announced on Tuesday that he had asked the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to study whether the entertainment industry was implicitly luring children to watch violent films, listen to sexually explicit music lyrics and play video games that depict mayhem and murder.

Producers and studio executives here insist that Hollywood is an easy target, especially for lawmakers who are loath to take on the gun lobby. Moreover, executives say, holding the entertainment industry responsible for youth violence -- especially after the high school killings that took 15 lives in Littleton, Colo. -- is not just unfair but wrong.

''When people become outraged, they look for someone to blame it on,'' said Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, the studio's lobbying arm, in Washington. ''And movies, being so high-profile, become an inviting target.''

But this hardly explains the resolute, and surprising, silence of most top executives in town. Mr. Clinton's most vocal supporters in Hollywood, David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who run Dreamworks, declined to talk about violence. A spokeswoman at Warner Brothers, which has produced films like Oliver Stone's ''Natural Born Killers,'' with its brutal and horrific murders, and the jokey but violent ''Lethal Weapon'' series, said Mr. Valenti would handle all questions about violence.

Similarly, executives at several other major studios said, through associates, that they would not discuss the issue.

One top producer, who makes his share of violent films and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said simply: ''By going after the movie business, it's like taking a high-powered rifle into a field and shooting a cow. The cow is standing there. It's the easiest target in the world. It's as simple as that. What do we do? We make movies. We make excitement. We don't make movies to create killers.''

Although their underlings are silent, corporate titans like Time Warner's chief executive, Gerald Levin, and Seagram's chief executive, Edgar Bronfman Jr., have briefly spoken out and accused Washington of trying to use Hollywood as a scapegoat, and indicated that the entertainment industry's output is not an important factor in the violent behavior of children.

Mr. Levin, whose conglomerate includes Warner Brothers and the WB network, criticized the political opportunism and moral arrogance of Washington for faulting Hollywood but failing to deal in any major way with the gun issue. And Mr. Bronfman, who owns Universal Studios, has accused Washington of finger-pointing and chest-pounding on violence issues.

But, within Hollywood itself, the issue among those who actually green-light films seems more complicated. For one, the movie business, and perhaps the nation itself, has an ambivalent attitude toward violent films in contrast to movies that deal with sexual issues. It is commonly known in Hollywood, for example, that movies dealing with sex have a far more difficult time with the the Motion Picture Association's ratings board than those that are extremely violent.

Just recently the creators of ''American Pie,'' a light-hearted comedy that opens next month, about Midwestern teen-agers struggling with sex, were compelled to go four times before the Motion Picture Association's rating board to finally get an R-rating as opposed to a prohibitive NC-17, which would have effectively killed the movie commercially.

By contrast, the ratings board fails to raise substantive questions about extremely violent films like ''Natural Born Killers'' and ''The Basketball Diaries'' and, more recently, ''Pulp Fiction,'' ''Con Air,'' ''Payback,'' ''8 MM,'' ''Scream'' and numerous others. All were awarded R-ratings.

Why are films dealing with sex given more rigorous treatment by the ratings board than those that are violent?

''We're dealing with subjectivity here,'' Mr. Valenti said. ''Sex is easier to define. There are only so many ways to couple. Language is easier to define, too. But what is too much violence? The ratings board has to decide. Is 'Schindler's List' too violent? Is 'Saving Private Ryan' too violent? What about 'The Wild Bunch'? There are so many ways that violence can be committed.''

But Irwin Winkler, a veteran producer of films like ''Rocky'' and the four other ''Rocky'' movies, and classics like ''Raging Bull'', ''The Right Stuff'' and ''Goodfellas'' , said pointedly that the ratings system had failed to deal with the violence issue.

''I don't understand the ratings board,'' he said. ''If you cut off a woman's breast, it's probably not as terrible as showing her nipple. They're very free about violence and puritanical about sex.''

So far television has responded a bit to Washington's accusations. At the WB network, executives recently pulled the series finale of ''Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,'' because it dealt with a high school graduation ceremony that exploded into violence. The episode will be shown later this summer.

At the same time, CBS decided not to pick up ''Falcone,'' a Mafia series, for its fall lineup but held out the possibility that it could be shown later in the year. Leslie Moonves, the CBS network president, said: ''We felt a responsibility not to put it on now. It just didn't feel right.'' The network has, however, several action shows with violence on the air.

What impact the current debate will have in Hollywood is, of course, unclear. No one expects studios to stop making violent films as long as many of them are so successful, especially overseas. (The recent ''Lethal Weapon 4,'' for example, took in $130 million at the domestic box office, barely making back its cost. It also took in $155 million abroad.)

''I do sense that there is an unusual sensitivity now to this issue -- and I hope it's more than lip service,'' said Steve Tisch, a producer of movies like ''Forrest Gump'' and ''American History X.''

Mr. Winkler echoed Mr. Tisch. ''I think people are taking it seriously now, partly because they're being attacked.'' But he added, ''I don't think people took it seriously in the past.''

Source: New York Times

Man Is Guilty in the Killing, For Sport, of a Firefighter

A 22-year-old Long Island man was convicted yesterday of murdering a total stranger -- an off-duty New York City firefighter out for a jog -- for no reason other than pure, random sport in January 1997.

After three days of deliberation, a jury in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead convicted the man, William P. Sodders, of one count of second-degree murder in the shooting death of James Halversen, 30, in Centereach, N.Y., on Jan. 3, 1997. Mr. Sodders is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 4. He faces a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.

It was not known whether Mr. Sodders's lawyers planned to appeal, and they could not be reached for comment last night. But for prosecutors, the conviction concluded a case that was particularly chilling because Mr. Sodders had intended to shoot a stranger just for the thrill of it. ''We're gratified with the jury's decision,'' an assistant District Attorney, William T. Ferris, told reporters yesterday outside the courthouse in Riverhead. ''They made the correct decision in this case. We're very thrilled.''

Mr. Halversen joined the Fire Department in 1992. Assigned to Hook and Ladder Company 174 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, he quickly established a reputation as a free spirit who relished all sorts of challenges, be they sports or the strategy of firefighting. He was also regarded as a family man and a tireless worker who took after-hours jobs as a roofer and handyman to help support his family.

On Jan. 3, 1997, Mr. Halversen drove from his home in Centereach, his golden retriever at his side, for his usual jog at the Centereach High School track. But a few hours later, his wife, Rosalie -- who was eight months' pregnant with twins -- found her husband unconscious at the track and shot several times in the chest and legs.

A few days later, Mr. Sodders was turned in by his father, Patrick Sodders. Mr. Sodders said that his son's girlfriend, whom he identified only as Nicole, had told him that she knew that the younger Sodders had been in the vicinity of the high school track on the night of the murder.

Father and son worked as mechanics at the same bus company on Long Island. But the elder Sodders described his son, an 11th-grade dropout, as a violent young man with a history of psychiatric problems, who used drugs, bullied his brother and sister, and enjoyed violent movies like ''Natural Born Killers,'' which depicts random violence. And because he feared that William would harm Nicole -- the mother of his son's infant daughter -- or family members, he decided to contact the police.

During the trial, Mr. Ferris told of Mr. Sodders and a friend, Eric W. Calvin, going out driving on Jan. 3 ''looking to hurt someone.'' He said that Mr. Sodders test-fired a 9-millimeter handgun on the way to the track, and chose Mr. Halversen as a target.

At the track, Mr. Ferris said, Mr. Sodders bent over, pretending to tie a shoelace as Mr. Halversen approached. Finally, the prosecutor said, Mr. Sodders rose and fired point-blank, striking Mr. Halversen in the chest. There was no robbery, no exchange of words, no demand of surrender, prosecutors said.

Mr. Sodders then returned home to eat dinner and watch a television movie with Mr. Calvin, Mr. Ferris contended during the trial.

At several points during the trial, Mr. Halversen's widow wept openly. Many members of Mr. Halversen's fire company attended the trial as well, and displayed a picture of Mr. Halversen at the station house.

Yesterday, after the verdict was rendered, Lieut. Brian Foley of Hook and Ladder 174 said that the firefighters were relieved that the ordeal was over.

''This was like a weight lifted,'' Lieutenant Foley said.

Source: New York Times

Oliver Stone Doesn't Want to Start an Argument

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

3 Charged in Killings Over Cocaine Dealing

For the third time in a year, the Manhattan District Attorney has dismantled a violent gang of young cocaine dealers who plied their murderous trade on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

This time, the gang of 22 men and women called itself Natural Born Killers, an apparent reference to last year's Warner Brothers movie about serial killers. Of the 22 people indicted yesterday, 17 were taken into custody in morning raids. Two indictments charged them with three homicides, conspiracy, drug dealing and gun running in what investigators said was a thriving $70,000-a-week crack-cocaine business near two schools in Manhattan Valley.

The indictment illustrated the resiliency of drug gang activity even after previous crackdowns. District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said the gang sprang up last July to fill the void left when the police broke up two other crack-selling gangs, Young City Boys and Young Talented Children. In the two months that followed, the leaders of Natural Born Killers consolidated their power by assassinating two members of rival gangs and one rival within their own ranks.

"You can never declare victory and walk away, but I think these three indictments of these three gangs has had a major impact on the drug activity in Manhattan Valley," Mr. Morgenthau said.

Mr. Morgenthau said homicides in the 24th Precinct, where the gangs operated, have been cut in half since his office began cracking down on street gangs in 1994. So far, 81 people in three gangs have been arrested. In 1993 there were 23 homicides, while in 1994 there were 12. So far this year, the neighborhood has seen only one homicide.

Officials said, however, that fed by a deep-rooted demand for drugs, the gangs continue to spring up like dandelions as soon as others are ripped out. "I don't think that while there is a demand, you can completely wipe these gangs out," said Chief Patrick Harnett, who heads the Narcotics Division. "It's a business."

The Natural Born Killers gang has roots in a previous drug organization known as the Red Top Crew, which began in 1990, prosecutors said. Selling crack cocaine in vials with red plastic tops, the gang turned the area around Public School 145 at 104th Street and Amsterdam Avenue into a drug market.

But three years later, the orginal founders of the Red Top Crew were killed, and the Young Talented Children usurped their territory, selling yellow-capped vials, prosecutors said. The third gang, the Young City Boys, coexisted with the yellow-top gang, controlling the market around 105th and Amsterdam. They used vials with purple tops.

In June 1994, when the police arrested the leaders of Young Talented Children, some remnants of the Red Top Crew revived their drug organization and took over the other gang's territory.

The indictment says the leaders of the gang were Guillermo Urena, 22; Jose Lora, 18, and Norberto Russell, 20. Mr. Urena and Mr. Lora are charged with murdering Aries Santana, a member of the Young City Boys, on July 11, 1994, in front of 672 St. Nicholas Avenue.

A week later, all three men are accused of taking part in the assassination of Luis Quinones on 107th Street. Prosecutors said the men thought that Mr. Quinones had murdered a friend of Mr. Lora's father. The third homicide came on Aug. 8, when Mr. Urena and Mr. Lora are thought to have taken a dissident member of their own gang, Wilson Sanchez, to East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. He was found shot several times in the head.

The three gang leaders face life in prison if convicted.

Soon afterward, the gang renamed itself Natural Born Killers, said Walter Arsenault, an assistant district attorney.

The police investigation began a year ago when a community patrol officer, A. J. Melino, began hearing talk on the street about the resurrected Red Top gang and alerted detectives. During the year, undercover officers and informers bought or recovered more than 2,100 vials of crack and 12 handguns.

Source: New York Times

Movie Violence Has Become Routine

In your June 4 news article on the general moviegoer's response to Senator Bob Dole's comments on the entertainment industry, I might submit that the 17-year-old high school junior who admits to seeing "Natural Born Killers" seven times graphically illustrates the magnitude of the cultural problem that Senator Dole and others decry.

For anyone at that impressionable age to repeatedly witness and "really like" such a wanton depiction of mindless, casual violence cannot but adversely affect the outlook of such a person, and, by extension, of society as a whole.

I am a surgeon of 30 years' experience, including a year's service in Vietnam in 1968-69 and, no, I have not seen this movie.

The reviews were enough to send me elsewhere.

This brings to mind the totally stunned silence with which the movie audience in Houston greeted the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" in the Majestic Theater, with every one of the 2,000 seats filled. Not one sound was heard as everyone sat there in stunned silence, because of the wanton violence in the shower scene.

Nowadays such violence is considered routine, and audiences are inured to violence 10 times as horrific. BOONE BRACKETT Oak Park, Ill., June 5, 1995

Source: New York Times

Police Seize Suspect Obsessed by a Movie

Police officers in Nebraska have captured a Utah teen-ager accused of murdering his stepmother and half-sister after becoming obsessed with the movie "Natural Born Killers."

The 17-year-old suspect, Nathan K. Martinez, was found on Wednesday at a motel in the town of O'Neill, in northeastern Nebraska.

Mr. Martinez is charged in Utah with two counts of aggravated murder in the slaying of his 42-year-old stepmother, Lauren Martinez, and his half-sister, Alexis Martinez, 10, both of whom were shot in their sleep early Sunday at the family's home in Bluffdale, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Mr. Martinez's father and a brother were away on a hunting trip at the time.

Source: New York Times

'Natural Born Killers' Is Banned in Ireland

Ireland has banned the Oliver Stone film "Natural Born Killers" and the British authorities have delayed release of the movie, which is about a couple on a murderous rampage.

Mr. Stone has defended the film, which stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, as a satire on how the news media can turn serial killers into celebrities.

The film censor in Ireland, Sheamus Smith, announced the ban on Wednesday without giving a reason. The film was to be released in Ireland on Nov. 18.

The British Board of Film Classification is debating whether to give it a certificate, and its release has now been delayed until next year.

"At the moment, it has not got a classification and the board will not make a comment on a film that has not been classified," a spokesman for the board said today.

Source: New York Times

FILM VIEW; What We Don't Know About TV Could Kill Us

LATE IN THE MEDIA-CRAZED murder spree that is "Natural Born Killers," Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) point their guns at Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), the unctuous Australian star of a tabloid television show. That series, "American Maniacs," has helped make Mickey and Mallory pop-star murderers. Now Mickey turns on the reporter and speaks the truest lines in Oliver Stone's film. He says: "Killing you and what you represent is a statement. I'm not exactly 100 percent sure of what it's saying." But it's a statement, all right.

It wouldn't be fair to reveal whether Mickey pulls the trigger on Wayne, but his confusion about what the trash-TV reporter represents is a perfect reflection of the film's own problems. "Natural Born Killers" seems to say something about the insidious influence of the media -- tabloids and celebrity journalism in print as well as on television. Yet under its entertaining flash-and-dazzle surface, the film's statement is "TV can be a bad influence." No kidding.

"Natural Born Killers" is the first and the least thought-provoking of several films this season that grapple with the love/hate relationship of audiences to the media. Mr. Stone's sensory assault of a movie was followed by Robert Redford's elegant, profound "Quiz Show," which opened on Wednesday. And coming to the New York Film Festival on Oct. 6 is "The Troubles We've Seen," Marcel Ophuls's playfully serious documentary about reporting from Bosnia. When works as different and ambitious as these share a common subject -- that television can turn mass murder, the American dream or even war into entertainment -- the attention to television comes to resemble an obsession.

It's too easy to suggest, though, as "Natural Born Killers" does, that television is the Devil. (A kindhearted American Indian, about to be murdered, sees the words "demon" and "too much TV" superimposed on Mickey.) A sophisticated depiction of television must portray the attraction as well as the repulsion it evokes. Television wouldn't be an overwhelming influence, after all, if people didn't love to watch it.

"Quiz Show" understands television's allure and more; the film's grip on the audience echoes the intense connection between Americans and their favorite shows. The story of how the patrician Charles Van Doren disillusioned the nation when it learned that his game-show victories were rigged goes beyond a simple attack on television. In "Quiz Show" the telegenic Charles Van Doren takes the even grander shape of the movie-star-handsome Ralph Fiennes. This subtle actor's golden-boy manner suggests much about the heroic images -- deeply rooted in American history and dreams of upward mobility -- that television captured and enhanced in the 1950's.

When Herb Stempel (John Turturro), the belligerent loser from Queens, tries to blow the whistle on the deception he has also taken part in, no one -- especially the Harvard-educated Government investigator Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) -- wants to believe that this pathetic creature could be morally superior to the glittering, born-for-stardom Van Doren. The film chooses not to believe it, either. Think of how much less palatable, less mainstream the picture would have been if the central character were Stempel, that hard-to-love, charmless man.

"I have deceived my friends, and I have millions of them," Van Doren tells a Congressional committee in the film. No one stops to question the dizzying truth of that remark. In a way that is both real and absurd, television created bonds of friendship and loyalty between the star and his viewers. Struggling with his conscience, Van Doren goes from hero to fallen hero and remains the All-American no one wants to think badly of.

The strength of Paul Attanasio's script is that it depicts the way immense social issues were played out on the television screen in the days when television was still young. "Quiz Show" is the story of social problems that hadn't yet shattered the calm surface of the Eisenhower years: Protestants vs. Jews, money vs. intelligence, entertainment vs. learning, upper class vs. working class. The brilliance of Mr. Redford's direction is that he captures all this just the way television itself did -- smoothly, the calm surface belying epic battles beneath.

The opening and closing scenes suggest a perilous mass-media journey through history. At the start, crowds rush home to watch the quiz show "Twenty-One," and the NBC network proudly announces that the show is carried "coast to coast." Mr. Redford doesn't lean on the fact that we're witnessing the birth of the global village. He simply places us there.

As the final credits appear, faces of audience members laugh in eerie slow motion, magnified and horrendous. We are looking at ourselves as a hapless audience, appalled at our former naivete. "Quiz Show" stays with you, resonating long after you've left the theater, while the kinetic dazzle of "Natural Born Killers" is gone in a flash.

Yet Mr. Stone, too, has made the movie his subject demanded. "Quiz Show" depicts Van Doren on the cover of Time; "Natural Born Killers" depicts Mickey and Mallory on Newsweek. Not much else has stayed the same. Historically, Mr. Stone's story picks up long after "Quiz Show" ends. Television has turned into a forum for instant, disgusting celebrity, in which Charles Manson is a ratings king.

What the film misses is a sense of why television is alluring, of how a mass-murderer can become a star. The more Mr. Stone strains to say something important, the more the intended satire and substance elude him. He seems to have confused a big idea with a broad, simplistic one.

Critics who have been wringing their hands about the film's violence and shallowness dismiss it too easily, though. "Natural Born Killers" is a hit, its box-office appeal creepily echoing the popularity of shows like "American Maniacs." Surely Mr. Stone intended this mirroring effect, but reflecting the appeal doesn't come close to explaining it.

The perverse appeal of "Natural Born Killers" seems to be that it creates the illusion of making a provocative statement. Yet it never challenges the audience's conventional assumptions about television. The film plays into viewers' fascination with tabloid TV as well as their sneaking suspicion that it's bad for them; "Natural Born Killers" presents itself as a guilty pleasure that audiences don't have to feel guilty about.

And the seductive style provides an edge the film doesn't earn. Mr. Downey is so smarmy, funny and convincing that he makes us forget what a cheap, easy target his character is. The ultra-quick cuts, the cartoonlike inserts, the backdrops of newsreels that connect Mickey and Mallory to World War II are portentous, yet anyone who analyzes the film's lame satire won't be surprised by any of it.

THE BANALITY OF THE film's influence is creepier than anything in the movie. Five days after the film opened and became the No. 1 movie in the country, The New York Daily News ran a front-page story about an accused murderer, under the headline "Natural Born Killer." Two days later, after a man who was convinced that television was poisoning his mind killed an NBC stagehand, the New York Post's page 1 headline read "TV Networks Zapped My Brain" and New York Newsday's front-page headline was "TV Drove Me Crazy." No one can blame Oliver Stone for the way his film is used, but the movie's shallowness encourages a simple-minded view that TV is bad.

The subject of television's influence demands a more complex treatment. Marcel Ophuls, whose previous films have been authoritative historical documents about World War II ("The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Hotel Terminus"), has thrown himself into the subject, too.

"The Troubles We've Seen" is more than a series of interviews with television and newspaper reporters covering Bosnia. Mr. Ophuls interweaves these scenes with newsreels and clips of mainstream movies: Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas" in "Holiday Inn," and the Marx Brothers romp through "Duck Soup." "The Troubles We've Seen" creates the sense of trying to grab history as it swirls around us. Demonstrating that history is created through a mix of movies and reportage, Mr. Ophuls uses the documentary form to consider the difficulty of establishing anything like documentary truth.

If the sense that history is fluid seems obvious, consider the remark of a star anchor on French television. He justifies reality-based programs by telling Mr. Ophuls, "Show me a reality show that reconstructs a reality that didn't exist." The producers of "Twenty-One" and Wayne Gale himself couldn't have said it better.

Source: New York Times

2 Ohioans Arrested in Series of Slayings

It was a cross-country crime rampage that began in rural Ohio one week ago with a stolen car, a missing woman and two male suspects. One was an ex-convict fresh out of prison, a man found guilty both of theft and of once biting his own baby so hard that he drew blood. The other was a gangly, troubled 16-year-old described as "a follower," not a violent criminal, by his hometown police chief.

The rampage turned murderous three times over in Missouri and Oklahoma, where the victims' cars were stolen after automobiles taken in previous crimes were abandoned. And it ended this morning, after a nationwide manhunt, with arrests in a dusty culvert at the edge of the mountains around Santa Fe.

But even after serving Federal warrants to 22-year-old Lewis E. Gilbert 2d and Eric A. Elliott, 16, the authorities in Ohio and F.B.I. officials remained puzzled over one peculiar psychological element, uncertain whether the teen-ager had been a willing accomplice, a terrified hostage or something in between.

These authorities said their first priority today was to try to find the missing Ohio woman, 79-year-old Ruth Lucille Loader, who, if still alive, might be able to shed some light on Eric Elliott's motivations. Asleep in a Ditch

The two men were apprehended as they lay in a ditch outside Santa Fe about 9:40 A.M., said Chief John Denko of the New Mexico state police.

Although they had two rifles, a shotgun and a handgun with them, "nothing bad happened" at the arrest scene, said Chief Denko, apparently because the two were taken by surprise as they slept. The police had received two telephone tips about suspicious people in the area.

The suspects were taken to Albuquerque and late this afternoon were charged before a United States magistrate, Lorenzo Garcia, with flight from prosecution. The authorities indicated that the two suspects would soon be extradited to Ohio.

Mr. Gilbert was released from state prison in Ohio on Aug. 15 after serving 11 months of an 18-month sentence for stealing a boat and breaking and entering. Although he had also been convicted of child endangering for a November 1992 incident in which he shook and bit his 3 1/2-month-old son, he was not assigned additional time and received "good time" credit for his behavior in prison, reducing his sentence for the other crimes, said Joe Andrews, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

When he left prison, the 6-foot-4-inch Mr. Gilbert returned almost immediately to Newcomerstown, Ohio, the home of his estranged wife and a place where he was well known to the local authorities.

"With the dealings we've had with him in the past, I consider him a violent person," said the Newcomerstown Police Chief, James Friel. But that was not true of Mr. Elliott, the teen-ager with whom Mr. Gilbert apparently crossed paths shortly after his release.

"Eric seemed like a clean-cut kid," recalled Chief Friel, who said the teen-ager had been working recently as a clerk in the local grocery. "But Eric is the type of individual I would classify as a follower." 'A Typical Teen'

That tendency apparently led Mr. Elliott to be involved in a break-in at the Cy Young Lanes, a local bowling alley, in late July. That brush with the law was his first. About $30 in change from vending machines and some liquor were taken, the owner, Leman Clark, said today in a telephone interview.

"I thought he was a typical teen," Mr. Clark said, recalling his impressions of Mr. Elliott before the break-in. "I didn't think he was a bad kid."

Chief Friel said Eric had been frightened almost to tears by his arrest and pending trial. "He was worried about it constantly, calling the officer to find out what was going on," Chief Friel said. "I don't know if meeting Gilbert pushed him over the edge or what."

Last week Mr. Elliott was spotted with Mr. Gilbert in a 1989 Buick Skylark belonging to the 79-year-old Mrs. Loader, who had been at her farmhouse in Port Washington, Ohio, a few miles from Newcomerstown, recovering from cancer surgery. She is still missing, and the authorities say they fear she was killed for her car.

The Skylark automobile turned up last Thursday more than 600 miles away in Fulton, Mo., stuck in the mud. A few miles from where it was abandoned, the authorities found the bodies of 86-year-old William Brewer and his wife, Flossie, 76, in their home. They had been robbed, and each had been shot three times in the head. Searching for Motive

And their car, a 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass, was missing. On Sunday, it turned up, also abandoned, on the shore of Lake Stanley Draper, near Oklahoma City. A few hundred feet away, the police found the body of Roxie Ruddel, 37, a security guard at the lake marina. She had been shot to death, and her 1991 Dodge pickup truck was missing. In New Mexico this morning, the state police said, they found an abandoned Dodge truck with Oklahoma license plates a few miles from the culvert where Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Elliott were apprehended, although the authorities have not positively identified it as the one belonging to Ms. Ruddel.

Now the authorities are trying to piece together the crimes, search for a motive. In no case, the authorities said, did the assailants make off with more than $40 in cash.

Officials are also trying to figure out just how willing and active a role Mr. Elliott may have played. His father, Robert, of Cleveland, insisted in recent days that Mr. Elliott was not prone to violence and must have been coerced somehow by Mr. Gilbert.

"Maybe he is in fear to where he thinks he has to go along with what is happening," the father told The Daily Oklahoman over the weekend. "The more I hear reports on this fellow he's supposed to be with, the more concerned I get."

An F.B.I. special agent in Cleveland, Robert Hawk, said, "I'm unaware of any hostage situation, but that's something that will be looked at by us and local authorities."

The intrigue over the case was also compounded by the fact that it appeared to offer eerie overtones of life imitating the movies. As the pair and made their way west, they became the object of widespread news reports, and their violent, seemingly pointless mission was compared to the one depicted in "Natural Born Killers," the recently released Oliver Stone film about the murderous escapades of two deranged lovers.

Still, despite the similarities, the police cautioned today that no evidence had turned up that either suspect had been motivated by the movie or had even seen it.

In Newcomerstown, a rural community of about 12,000 people in south central Ohio, homicide has simply not been a fact of life. "I can't remember when they had a murder down there," said the Tuscarawas County Sheriff, Harold McKimmie. "I've been in office 12 years, and we've never had a murder there in that section of the county."

Source: New York Times

FILM REVIEW: NATURAL BORN KILLERS; Young Lovers With a Flaw That Proves Fatal

MEET Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), two renegades living out the oldest story in the teen-age wasteland. They're young, they're in love and they kill people, in thrill-crazy, rock-video style. "If I don't kill you," Mickey says to one soon-to-be victim, "what is there to talk about?" For Mickey, it's more than just a rhetorical question.

With more sophistry than poetry, Oliver Stone apotheosizes these trash archetypes in "Natural Born Killers," his supposed satire about an America despoiled by violence and exploitation. Satire? In his skill as a manipulator of thoughts and images, in his short-circuiting ordinary narrative, and in his intuitive visual brilliance, Mr. Stone could well turn out to be the most influential American film maker of his generation. But as a satirist, he's an elephant ballerina.

Scratch the frenzied, hyperkinetic surface of "Natural Born Killers" and you find remarkably banal notions about Mickey, Mallory and the demon media. ("Media's like weather, only it's man-made weather," says Mickey, delivering one of the rare memorable lines in the screenplay.) To wit: Born bad. Blame society. The sins of the fathers. Lost innocence. True love. Wild horses, deadly rattlers, fireworks, freight trains. Elements like these would appear more honestly threadbare if Mr. Stone were not a match for Mickey and Mallory in the area of overkill.

But he has exploded the slender premise of "Natural Born Killers" (from a story by Quentin Tarantino, whose distinctive voice is not heard here) into a firestorm of quick cuts, hot colors, gyroscopic camera movements and emblematic visions. Such techniques, intensified so furiously (thanks to superb editing by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan) that they become pharmacologically seductive, have a way of obscuring this film's more mundane troubles. Not least of them is the fact that "Natural Born Killers" is dense and unmodulated enough to be exhausting. Despite isolated moments of bleak, disturbing beauty, it is finally less an epiphany than an ordeal. Not for the first time, Mr. Stone assembles an arsenal of visual ideas and then fires away point-blank in his audience's direction. If viewers flinch during this tireless two-hour barrage, are they simply no match for the film maker's tough, unrelenting style? Or has he by now perfected his own form of exploitative fallacy? While "Natural Born Killers" affects occasional disgust at the lurid world of Mickey and Mallory, it more often seems enamored of their exhilarating freedom. If there is a juncture at which these caricatures start looking like nihilist heroes, then the film passes that point many times.

Meanwhile, how can anything Mr. Stone says about his characters be dismissed as tasteless or unfunny, since they themselves are meant to be embodiments of a tasteless world? "I Love Mallory," a grotesque sitcom version of Mallory's childhood, with Rodney Dangerfield in stained underwear as her lecherous father, is fairly typical of the film's light touch. Arriving on the scene as the Prince Charming who will rescue Mallory by helping to murder her parents, Mickey shows up carrying a dripping 50-pound bag of raw meat.

Equally representative is an opening sequence at a roadside restaurant, where Mallory taunts the locals by writhing seductively to the jukebox, then savagely attacks a man who tries to flirt with her. At first, while this goes on, Mickey simply sits at the counter, reading a newspaper whose headline says he and Mallory have just killed six teen-agers at a slumber party.

Then he joins in, as Mr. Stone pumps up the music, switches film stock, lets the camera sway vertiginously, shows a bullet circling playfully toward the scared face of someone about to die, and so on. Grand flourish: when the spree is over, Mickey and Mallory dance together to "La Vie en Rose," with fireworks exploding romantically behind them. Mini-witticism: Mickey may have killed almost everyone in sight, but when he spoke to the waitress, he ordered nonfat milk.

Unfolding in only semi-linear fashion, "Natural Born Killers" devotes its first hour to Mickey and Mallory's rampage, interspersing lurid bloodshed with moments of eerie tenderness. (After the opening slaughter, these two find themselves in the moonlight, with a holy glow enveloping Mallory as she squats in the dirt and speaks about angels.) The couple's blood wedding, with an exchange of rattlesnake rings and Mallory's white veil drifting off into the abyss of a deep canyon, offers one of the film's most genuinely haunting visions, if only because it eludes easy understanding.

That's hardly the case with "American Maniacs," the tabloid television show starring Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), who appreciates Mickey and Mallory for their entertainment value. At one of its funnier moments, the film dwells on the show's re-enactment of their exploits, with a title that says "A Dramatization" as two actors, playing Mickey and Mallory, shoot a bicyclist identified as an American bronze medalist. Finally persuading Mickey to sit for an interview after 50 killings in three weeks, Wayne asks the inevitable question: "Any regrets?"

As played by Mr. Downey with a thick Australian accent and perfect lip-smacking unctuousness, Wayne is one of the film's more deft inventions. But he, like everything else about "Natural Born Killers," is allowed to go overboard. After their operatic arrest in a ghastly, green-lit drugstore (another of Mr. Stone's genuinely disturbing images), Mickey and Mallory go to prison and are manipulated by a leering detective (Tom Sizemore) and a publicity-happy warden (Tommy Lee Jones). Even before it culminates in an actual riot, this section of the film becomes hysterical, to the point where it even features the rare out-of-control performance from Mr. Jones.

Mr. Harrelson and Ms. Lewis deal as captivatingly as they can with the film's wavering attitudes toward their characters. Both hit the requisite raw nerves, and both also make sense of the material's occasional romantic reveries. Used in a labored effort to give this story a spiritual dimension is Russell Means, as the only character in the film whose life means anything to Mickey and Mallory. Balthazar Getty is seen briefly as a young man who gets killed at a gas station, which probably qualifies as some kind of black joke.

Mr. Harrelson looks wild-eyed and deadly during parts of "Natural Born Killers," but he is at his scariest when serenely telling Wayne that he feels possessed of a certain purity. "I don't think I'm any scarier than you are," he says. "That's your shadow on the wall. You can't get rid of your shadow, can you, Wayne?" The point is made even more chillingly over the closing credits, as Leonard Cohen, a true poet of doom, sings succinctly: "Get ready for the future, it is murder."

Just before those credits roll, Mr. Stone shoots himself in the foot with a quick montage of tabloid television's latest, greatest hits: the Bobbitt and Menendez trials, Tonya Harding, O. J. Simpson. For better or worse, those are spectacles that cast a long shadow. And for all its surface passions, "Natural Born Killers" never digs deep enough to touch the madness of such events, or even to send them up in any surprising way. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth.

"Natural Born Killers" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes strong language, sexual situations and extreme, frequent violence, of the sort that could well have warranted a tougher rating. NATURAL BORN KILLERS Directed by Oliver Stone; written by David Veloz, Richard Rutowski and Mr. Stone, based on a story by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan; production designer, Victor Kempster; produced by Jane Hamsher, Don Murphy and Clayton Townsend; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Woody Harrelson (Mickey), Juliette Lewis (Mallory), Robert Downey Jr. (Wayne Gale), Tommy Lee Jones (Dwight McClusky), Tom Sizemore (Jack Scagnetti), Rodney Dangerfield (Mallory's father), Edie McClurg (Mallory's mother) and Russell Means (Old Indian).

Source: new York Times

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