His exploits as a grunt, discovering drugs and psychedelic rock with his brothers in arms, and landing in a prison cell in San Diego for marijuana possession would be the template experiences for Platoon, The Doors, and his first Oscar-winning screenplay, Midnight Express. Stone’s book is an exhilarating primer for anyone who wants to understand his reputation as a writer and director. However, it was his experiences as a soldier that would shape his destiny, inspiring him to write and direct Platoon, which he would seek to make for the next 20 years. When Stone addresses why he went to Vietnam, he cites that depression was the impetus behind his decision to fight. Stone returns to Vietnam in 1967 as an infantryman and serves two tours of duty. He drops out of Yale a second time he is lugging around a manuscript, fantasizing he will be the next Norman Mailer. Stone goes to Vietnam as an English teacher in 1965. His anger and confusion lead him to rebel against his father’s wishes that he graduate from Yale.
He revisits a pivotal moment at his private school, where his father tells him that the couple will be divorcing. It was almost as if he were anxious to get beyond the headlines in the Washington Post - he was searching for something deeper.īorn and raised by an Eisenhower-conservative stockbroker of a father and a French mother who savored the nightlife more than being a Stepford Wife, Stone views the fractured relationship between his parents through his solemn, yet traumatized eyes. I remember seeing Stone in 2013 in Washington DC talking to a packed audience of fellow academics about his then-newly released Showtime series with Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States. I couldn’t help notice Stone’s pensiveness and agitation when being asked about current events, the NSA, or the political climate before Trump. (Jane Hamsher published the infamous Killer Instinct in 1997.) In Chasing the Light, Stone examines one of the most perplexing and conflicting people he knows - himself. For the 73-year-old’s newly published memoir, Chasing the Light, Stone goes back to his original calling as a writer: and a damn brilliant one at that! If you are expecting a jaw-dropping look at the making of JFK or Natural Born Killers, this is not that book. When the name Oliver Stone comes up in conversation, a myriad of descriptions come to mind: provocateur, conspiracy theorist, or “The most dangerous man in America” as The Los Angeles Times dubbed him. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pages, $28. Filmmaker Oliver Stone’s memoir is an exhilarating primer for anyone who wants to understand his reputation as a writer and director.Ĭhasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game, by Oliver Stone.
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