The Big Picture - The F**k, Marry, Kill Game: Oliver Stone Movies

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

With the release of his new memoir 'Chasing the Light,' the provocative, award-winning writer-director Oliver Stone is back in the news. Amanda and Sean take a deep dive into the book and Stone's career, examining his origin story, his reputation as a Baby Boomer artist, and his incredible body of work. Then, to verify their feelings on his movies, they play a personally revealing round of Fuck, Marry, Kill with all 20 of his feature films. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by an American pickle. An American pickle stars Seth Rogen as a 1920s factory worker named Herschel Greenbaum and his great grandson, Ben. When Herschel falls into a vat of pickles, he is perfectly preserved for 100 years and emerges in present-day Brooklyn. An American pickle tells the uniquely heartwarming story of Herschel and Ben as they learn the meaning of family. Stream the new Max original in American Pickle August 6th, only on HBO Max, rated PG-13. Come on. One more. I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins.

And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Oliver Stone. Amanda, I in my mind have been circling a podcast episode about Oliver Stone, probably since about 1991, which is when I first had some consciousness about the work of one of the most fascinating figures of the last 40 years in American cinema. There's a reason we're going to be having an episode conversation about Stone today, which is that he has a new memoir. That memoir is called Chasing the Light, writing, directing, and surviving Platoon,

Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and The Movie Game. It's a very interesting book. You and I have both read it. I think we were both riveted in some ways and perhaps frustrated, confused, devastated in other ways. Before we get into the book, though, and before we get into how we're going to talk about the scope, the massive scope, the unbelievable scope of Oliver Stone's career, when I say Oliver Stone, what do you think? Conspiracy theorist, just to

be totally honest, and filmmaker, and really a boomer. And I think that that is going to inflect a lot of the way that I talk about Oliver Stone and his filmography because I am a generation younger. I am the child of boomers. And I came to Oliver Stone's work and to Oliver Stone's understanding of the world a generation after he lived it and made it. And it was very funny in rewatching everything from Platoon to Wall Street to JFK to realize the way in which those movies shaped my understanding visual and political about Vietnam and about JFK and about how we examine America and the government. And I am both like a child of Oliver Stone's world. And maybe because of time and the way the world has changed a skeptic of Oliver Stone's world at this point, which is just to say I'm the next generation.

I think a lot of this will be boomer versus millennial. And that's good. That's how the world should work. I think even Oliver Stone would agree with that, though maybe not. We can talk about it. But I don't know. What do you think of? Well, you've made already so many good points. I think he's an artist who strains credulity while also, I think, enlivening imaginations.

He's somebody who is obviously immensely thoughtful and intellectual and spiritual and simultaneously feels like he is completely out of control and trying to break the boundaries and stretch the concept of the truth all the time. And so he's just a generational paradoxical figure. He's a person who I think makes immensely entertaining movies that don't always stand up to deep examination. And so I think he is an archetypal baby boomer figure in that way, in that there's a certitude about his mission, and there's an earnestness and a sincerity to the message that he's trying to send.

But also underlying that is perhaps a kind of a cynicism and a skepticism about what he should be doing with his time versus what he's actually doing with his time. And so I've always found him to be fascinating, maybe not as a human being per se, but at least the stories that he tries to tell. I was going to say, I do think he's interesting as a filmmaker and, and, but also as a person. And we're going to talk about all the different ways in which Oliver Stone like quote breaks the rules. But I have been thinking a lot as I have been reading his book, which is a fantastic read. I will just say that the guy can write. And I have also been revisiting his work that you and I are trained to, as much as we can, or at least I wasn't college trained to separate the artist and the art. The art has to stand on its own. You can't conflate the filmmaker

and the work. And you also need to understand that the work and the intention are possibly separate as well. And Oliver Stone just makes a mess of all of that. And he makes a mess of that in his actual art. And he makes a mess of that in the life that he lives and in the interviews that he gives and the work that he pursues. And to me, that's exciting because it opens up a conversation to talk about what can you take seriously and what is cynical and what is sincere and what is true and

what is not true and how are we like, and who is responsible, which is at least a different way to talk about art. So, you know, I give him that even though I don't always agree with where I think Oliver Stone comes down on the answers to those questions. But even there, I'm just guessing. Well, I think if you look at the book, you certainly are looking at the man or at least the self-perception of the man. And so we'll talk a lot about him and his story and his life and the way he is capturing his own life on the page, which I agree. I mean, he's just, in case you didn't know, this is an Oscar winning screenwriter. This is one of the great movie writers of the last 40 years. This is also, you know, as a person who didn't just write his own films, but wrote Scarface and Conan the Barbarian and a number of other films

over the years. So he knows what he's doing on the page, but he is also somebody who, if you look at the political thought, not like a straight line where there is a left and a right, but if you look at it like a wheel, like a circle, and if you go too far from one side of the circle to the other, you can land, you may think you are a liberal person and find yourself with right-wing ideology or libertarian ideology, and the reverse can also be true. And I think one of the reasons it's really hard to unpack, not just what Oliver Stone says in interviews or what he even portrays in his documentaries, but even what he puts in his films is it feels like he's constantly running around that track, that circle of political thought. And so he's actually a perfect figure for this moment where there is this desperation to find art that

coincides with our political ideology or our sense of what the world should look like. And as you said, Oliver makes a mess of that. He really is trying to, he's contradicting himself in real time. He's contradicting the sensibilities of that kind of baby boomer anti-war mentality. But on the other hand, he's like an avatar, like a spirit animal of truth for a certain kind of humanism. And that sounds really kind of haughty, but I think he really wants to representationally be a person who is thinking about putting people before government, business, political structures. And it's complicated, right? Because he's essentially a wealthy, well-to-do white man who was born in the immediate aftermath of World War II. And so he had so much opportunity to do

the things that he wanted to do in a way that other people don't. So he's just not a tidy figure for that pursuit of humanism. It's interesting that you said he's putting people in front of institutions and ideas and governments, because I think that's true, but it's usually one person. And if you look at his entire filmography, and really, I think even if you look at how he parses a lot of political issues, but it's not the greater good. It's usually focused on one character who is often a man and quite often a white man. And it is understanding history through a single person's experience. So it's like, it's almost, I mean, he certainly subscribes to a great man theory of history, but at the same time is also reversing it, which is like the one person's experience

of history, which can be really exhilarating in certain films that we'll talk about and really, really misguided, I find, or not even misguided, but just doesn't work and isn't illuminating in the way that he thinks it is in certain aspects. And then also in certain cases, it can just be about himself. And the thing that makes his memoir so electric is that it really is self-mythologizing. And he is really trying to understand himself and trying to pin down that constantly moving wheel, as you said, simultaneously. And I really admire

having access to that. I obviously read a lot of celebrity junk and memoirs and am interested in trying to have access to people's ideas and inner thoughts and understand their characters. And most people won't give it up in that way and won't share and won't be as open and messy as Oliver Stone is. And that's true of the book and that's true of his politics for sure. And it's true of his filmmaking. The great man theory is really relevant to this conversation, not just because of the book and not just because of the films, but because it's a little bit unclear. It's a sort of a chicken and the egg or the egg proposition with him. Does he subscribe to those theories? Because as we read about in this book, he is interested in the dramatic pursuit. He has a pretty clear understanding,

literarily, of how to tell a strong story. And that story is usually through a Homer-like figure or a Ahab-like figure, somebody know, on an indomitable quest to achieve something that seems impossible. He's really passionate about this. And, you know, again, there is something kind of haughty about this, but also he just, he seems to come to it very sincerely. And so he uses Jim Garrison in JFK, or he uses Jim Morrison in The Doors, or he uses Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July as these avatars, as these great men who are seeking to achieve something that no one else could even perceive as possible. And I think Oliver Stone sees himself in a very similar fashion.

He sees himself as this well-to-do white guy who volunteers for the Vietnam War to explode his privilege and to understand the world in a hopefully deeper way. And then after he does that, he goes through this tremendously traumatic experience in the war. And then that becomes a centerpiece of the stories that he tells for the next 25 years. And it's fascinating to know kind of which came first. Was it the urge to tell dramatic stories or was it that he experienced life and he came to understand life as a series of stories, especially American stories about great men, and then chose to pursue those stories as his life's work? It's kind of a fascinating what if in terms of how he pursued all of his work. I would add that there is also possibly

a middle ground where he is trying to understand what happened to him and his own experience through the narrative structures that are familiar to him and can help further that experience. And again, that's a lot of artist versus art and marrying the two things, which we're, quote, not supposed to do, but we're going to break all of the rules in this podcast. So let's talk about what this podcast is going to be. Before we get into a conversation about the book where we talk about the artist, later in the show, we're going to play a new game. It's an old game for those of us who were alive in 2006 when I first heard about this game, but it's new to this podcast. It's Fuck, Marry, Kill. So Amanda and I have chosen a handful of

films, a number of films that we would like to copulate with that Oliver Stone made, that we would like to spend eternity with, and that we would like to destroy immediately. So that is one way for us to travel through this 20 film filmography, all of these documentaries that he's made, all of this work that he's put on the page and on screen over time. And I'm interested because I know that you're a skeptical Oliver Stone consumer. Yeah, I'm a skeptical consumer of everything. And I also hope that Oliver Stone himself would understand the skeptical approach that I bring to his films because he is also a skeptic. Don't trust anything. Or if you did trust anything, then you're going to pay the price for it. So yes, we will talk about Oliver Stone's filmography. I think it is very interesting

to watch it as a millennial. It's interesting to watch it as a woman, though we won't dwell on that. But, you know, because like, it's kind of boring at the end of the day, we're engaging with Oliver Stone's work, but I have certainly learned some things about a certain generation of masculinity that, um, definitely are different than my day-to-day life. And, you know, that's, that's the point to an extent. Um, I think it's also just really interesting to examine how Oliver Stone has influenced the way that you and I watch movies and what lessons other people and he himself have taken from it and what works and what we would rather get rid of.

Yeah, I'm excited. Honestly, it'll come as no surprise to you or anybody who has heard me talk on the show just to talk about the very formal aspects of what he does as a filmmaker, because he's such an outspoken and generational political figure that I think that that has kind of subsumed a lot of the work that he has done. last week, David Marchese directly asked him that question. And, you know, I don't think Stone necessarily gave the kind of answer that we wanted. You know, it was a sort of like, no regrets, man. That was his answer. And yeah, he gave a lot of answers in that particular interview that we'll be discussing. I recommend it. It's a great piece. I mean, there have been some very interesting interviews with Stone in the last few weeks. He knows how to talk. That's part of the reason why he has stayed in the consciousness for as long as he has, is he has impressively stoked the flames

with his work and with his words. So let's talk about the words a little bit. This is a fascinating book. And I think we should just start from the beginning because the first chapter of Chasing the Light is called Child of Divorce. And Amanda, for the listeners out there who heard our marriage story episode, for example,

or have heard us talk about marriage in any way, shape, or form in the last couple of years, we too are children of divorce. And I will say that there are parts of his story about his parents and about the way that he was raised that were resonant for me and that I identified with. And then there were other parts that I found confounding and almost grotesque.

What did you think of young Oliver in his own eye? I think I really excitedly looked up from the book and announced to my husband and then also texted you like, oh my God, it's the child of divorce chapter. Because I do always kind of see that as a source key for understanding really anybody. He approaches it with more distance than you or I do, I think, which in one sense makes a lot of sense because he's older than us. So he has quite literally more time and distance from it. And I think also expectations of marriage and things were different 30 or 40 years ago. The Child of Divorce chapter for me is actually less about divorce

and more about his particular relationship to both of his parents, which are extremely important to him, as anyone who has seen any of his films would know, because we're going to talk about daddy issues. But yeah, to me, it was just a way of working through those relationships, which he carries definitely through the book. I wanted to read a passage from the book about this specific phase of his life,

because as you said, there is some critical distance, but he is also trying to tangle with his feelings. And this is a guy who is born in 1946. His father was a GI. His mother was a woman living in Paris who his father met and brought her back to the States. And, you know, they have that very kind of traditional American romance. You know, you could imagine them being in that photo of the naval officer and the woman in the middle of the street on 42nd Street during a

parade kissing. And then, of course, like things apart, like so many things did in the 1950s. But he wrote something interesting here that I wanted to share. This is a consciousness that is shared by most children of divorce, that our lives, our being itself is the creation of many lies. If my parents had known each other truly before they were married, they would have never united and I would have never existed. Children like me are born out of that original lie and living a false front. We suffer for it when we feel that nothing and nobody can ever be trusted again. Adults become dangerous. Reality becomes loneliness. Love either does not exist or cannot survive. And my past 15 years on earth was a quote, fake past, a delusion. So in case you're wondering why Oliver Stone's films are paranoid and riddled with doubt

he it's all that it's all there in the opening stages of this book in a very very Freudian way and throughout the early stages of it you also come to learn that Oliver Stone was is outright in love with his mother and has strong physical urging for his mother which is a lot to take in although radically honest in the way that he sometimes is. But also maybe he is trying to kind of shock and provoke us in the way that it seems like Stone likes to shock and provoke. And so it's this really complicated portrait of a young guy who has, you know, these wild mommy and daddy issues that may or may not be informing this life's work. Yeah. But, Yeah, but even the mom stuff is him leaning on the Oedipal myth

and using older narrative frameworks in order to help understand himself. I listened to the passage that you just read, and I think I'm really glad that my parents put me in therapy short and really after the divorce. Me too, yes. I just like, you know, and I feel sad that Oliver Stone didn't get access to that therapy because- I had the same thought.

You know, because like at the end of the day, it's like really not about you that much, man. It's just not. And in a lot of ways, after every single Oliver Stone movie, you could just say it's really not that much about you, man. So that is hilarious, too. But yeah, I think there's a combination of not having worked through some of the emotions that maybe we, a generation later, did get to work through. And that doesn't just go through divorce.

That goes through a lot of political issues as well. And then also him having a flair for the dramatic in the very little dramatic sense, that's how he understands the world and tell stories about himself and everything else. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It seems like he was not given the opportunity or did not know how to express himself at this phase. This is the early 1960s when a lot of this stuff is happening. We're not the consciousness that we had about the idea of, you know, therapy and communicating with your children about divorce that didn't exist 45, 50, 60 years ago. Yeah.

And again, it's just peak boomer stuff. And I can just, I don't know if you are a boomer and listening to two millennials talking about Oliver Stone right now, like, I'm sorry. I apologize. It must be really annoying. But some of it is just such a product of the time and generation and not even just, I mean, that is true, but also like archetypically, like that is what we're talking about when we say, okay, boomer on TikTok or whatever, I guess, Instagram Instagram because millennials don't know how to use TikTok. But it is it. And in a way, it's a credit to him that even in his his politics and his emotions, he is telling a story at that broad generational level.

Yeah, I think he comes by it. Honestly, I just don, again, I don't know if it's chicken or egg. I don't know if he is a drama queen, for lack of a better phrase, or if he is naturally born this way. You know, like it's just impossible to say. It is nature or nurture. And like the nurture clearly seems to have been a challenging aspect of his early life. And that leads to these fascinating decisions that frankly, most of his other kind of boomer generation cohort don't pursue. Now, we know that a lot of boomers, especially politically active boomers, participated in the protest movement, participated in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, women's liberation. These are obviously key talking points.

They're generational points. They're generational life points for my mother, for example. She was a very active person in the world in that way. But for Stone, he does something a little bit different. He's a very bright guy, obviously, but he's also a child of privilege. His father went to Yale, and so he went to Yale. And he goes to Yale after spending some time in boarding school. And he kind of washes out after a year.

He seems kind of bored. He seems kind of disinterested. He's unclear if he's kind of washes out after a year. He seems kind of bored. He seems kind of disinterested. He's unclear if he's kind of a stoner at this point. And he decides to leave Yale to go teach in Saigon, teach English for a year, which is, you know, it's certainly like programs like Teach for America exist. And this is a not uncommon thing that, that frankly, a lot of children of privilege do it to sort of get a gap year or to get some new life experience. But so he sees Vietnam really at the earliest stages of the conflict in that country. And this is right in the heart of Johnson's second term, I suppose. And rather than flee and find a way to dodge the draft or, you know, put as much distance between himself and Vietnam as possible, instead he comes back to the States and he enlists in the army as an infantryman.

And, you know, it is clearly the signature choice of his life. And it is the thing that has completely shaped him. It is the thing that has shaped his art and formed all of his art. How much of this stuff, these choices, were you aware of when you were watching his movies? And how much of this did it kind of inform the films that knew for you? I think none at the time, though a lot of this is in the films. I mean, in Platoon, he gives that exact choice to the Charlie Sheen character. And there is a conversation between Charlie Sheen and another soldier where Charlie Sheen's character explains his rationale

and is told like that's something only rich people would say, I think. I'm like paraphrasing it. Which, you know, you have to, it's in the movie. It's in the script. So Oliver Stone is aware of that and is reckoning with that. So I think I was maybe not aware of it in a literal sense, certainly not the first time I saw Platoon. Though again, that's another thing where when you come to these films as a person

seeing the art versus being aware of the artist, and probably I had some awareness of Oliver Stone and a later phase of Oliver Stone. So I think you can feel it in the work, but it does make you go back having read all of this and want to ask a lot of questions. Well, he does a fascinating thing in the structure of the book. So the section that is functionally, after his childhood, is functionally about Vietnam. It's very short. He doesn't spend a lot of time in the book on the war in real time, because the book is told mostly chronologically, but we get more time about Vietnam and the people that he experienced and what he went through and the characters who would eventually become the figures that we see in Platoon that they're largely based on real life

figures. That all comes later when he's writing, when he's writing the screenplay for a film called Break, which never gets made. And then when he starts writing Platoon, which I think is not until about 1976 or so, which is really the film that kind of gets him on the map in Hollywood, even though it isn't made for another 10 years after that. So again, this concept of artifice and shaping your own narrative is such a big part of this stuff. So we don't even necessarily see the more documentary aspect of his Vietnam experience, even in his own memoir, which I thought was kind of a fascinating choice. Yeah. I went straight child of therapy on that and was like, this is not avoidance because that's unfair, but it's like very clear that the only way that he's able to

understand and talk through it is, is through the filmmaking. And I mean that, and that's very clear in the work as well, but it was clarifying for me of just like, oh yeah. I mean, your life's work has been to understand what happened to you and what you went through. Yes. I mean, and that is something that like, that just creates a lot of empathy from me. Honestly, I think we can, it's, he's a very easy filmmaker to joke about and just to be like, oh God, Oliver Stone at it again. But I think when you see, when you try to understand him in that exact way, and I completely agree with what you just said, I think that there is clearly an attempt to put his feelings and his understanding into the work and not on the page, even though he's putting things on the page in the first chapter about his parents that are kind of like mind

blowingly personal and specific and have clearly not left him. And there must've been so much that happened in Vietnam over the course of the 15 months he served that he's not putting on the page because either it's too difficult or he just needs another way to channel that information, which is just, it's like, it's a reason to read these books is to better understand these people. So he serves in Vietnam. He does 15 months and he's awarded a Purple Heart and he's wounded, I think, three times and he has a tough go. I think it's 67 to 68 are the years that he serves, which is obviously right on the precipice of when America sort of explodes in 68 with the anti-war movement. And so he essentially leaves the armed services and goes to Mexico and I guess attempts to

smuggle some drugs and is arrested, trying to move into the United States, and is basically bailed out of prison by his rich dad, who knows the right people to get out. And again- Not basically. I mean, that's what happens. And then he has one line. It's something to the effect of money, it fixes everything or something like that. And it's told in a self, maybe not self-lacerating, but in a self-conscious and knowing way. There's the reason that that one line is there, but it's one line.

Yeah. And he says over and over again in the book, if I were Black, or if I were Latino, or if I were this, or if I were that, I just would not be where I am. He does have a self-awareness about that, but it doesn't change the fact that all of these experiences are so deeply informing all the things that he's going to do. This guy got arrested for trying to smuggle drugs across the border and got out of prison serving virtually no time. And if you were any other person, you probably would have spent three years in a Mexican prison. That's just, that's just ludicrous. And so I like, I think you kind of have to bring all of this information now when you revisit these movies. And I hope if people are listening, they will revisit the movies because they're so interesting in the context of the book.

They clearly inform so much. This is a guy who went on to write the movie Midnight Express, for which he won an Oscar, which is about somebody who tried to smuggle drugs out of a foreign country. It's all there in the text, which is so fascinating. So somehow he manages to get himself out or his father gets him out. And within a couple of years, he's at NYU film school and he's decided that he wants to be a filmmaker. He had wanted to be a novelist as a kid. He wrote a novel. He thought it was very bad. It didn't pan out. And then he starts working on screenplays and thinking about what kind of stories he wants to tell and what he wants his life to be. And he shows up at NYU in the 70s. And who's there but Martin Scorsese is his professor

of all people to be teaching him. And even though Oliver Stone is this green jacket wearing, sullen Vietnam vet who rarely speaks, Martin Scorsese identifies that this is a true talent. This is a guy who's not at all like any of his classmates or at least not in Oliver's perception, you know, that he's a true talent. This is a guy who's not at all like any of his classmates, or at least not in Oliver's perception, you know, that he's a loner. But after he makes his first short film

last year in Vietnam, Scorsese identifies the film and says, that is a filmmaker. That's a famous story. It's such a great moment. I mean, you can hear him saying it. Well, and you can hear the pause before Scorsese says like,

that's a filmmaker. It's, yeah. It's a great story. It's a story that I had heard before. It's one of the few things in the book that I had read before. Cause it's part of the stone mythology of how he came to be. And it's interesting too, because over the years, many people have speculated that perhaps taxi driver is based on Oliver Stone because taxi driver is about a Vietnam vet who drove a cab. Oliver Stone drove a cab in New York in the 70s to help pay for his lifestyle. You know, he was this kind of like dissolute, paranoid, you know, person with a history of

time in the war and violence and the complexity of thought that goes into that film. Stone says, this is not about me, understandably trying to distance himself from Travis Bickle. But, you know, this collision in this time in American movies, as you know, is like the most interesting time we're ever going to have this sort of mid to late seventies. And so stone being kind of at the feet of Scorsese and then later being at the feet of people like De Palma and Spielberg and all these people who went

on to make Hollywood for the next 30 years also is, I don't know if it's grand design or good luck or what, but he just, he finds himself in this perfect position. So he's in New York city. He meets a Lebanese woman named Najwa Sarkis, who I suppose, I guess works for the, the, the embassy, um, in, in Lebanon. And so she has, she's a bit older than him and she has a high power job. And he writes quite freely about how she was an elegant and beautiful woman who he didn't love. And they were, they were friends and they had a strong partnership, but he already like

he evinces, um, I don't, this like confusing emotional front. You know, there's something about the way that Oliver Stone tells the story of his life that is simultaneously very raw and self-effacing and also completely difficult to parse. What do you think about the New York period of Stone? I think he's comfortable in the world of ideas and ambitions and not comfortable in the world of emotions. And so anytime he has to talk about the people in his life, whether it's his parents or his first wife, and no spoilers, but there's a second wife and also, I believe, a third. You can see him trying to wrestle with the language and the emotions themselves. It seems a bit blocked off. And so then the language that he uses is very representative

of his time and place in the world, which means it's not always as progressive as we might wish it to be. No, certainly not. So while he's in New York, he makes the decision that he wants to be a filmmaker formally. He tells the story of having a nightmare one night about three figures that haunt him, who has an author character and eventually kill all of the people in his life. And this nightmare becomes his first movie. 1974 is a very little scene,

low budget movie called seizure. It's not very good. I did rewatch it. You know, it's one part horror, one part paranoid thriller. You can see the kind of the makings of where Stone's imagination is going in the movie, but it's an interesting choice because you can see that he's, he made a film before he was ready to make a film as is so often the case with so many filmmakers. And it's so unlike so many of those other guys that I was just referring to, unlike Scorsese,

unlike, you know, De Scorsese, unlike, you know, De Palma or Spielberg, those guys who made movies in their early 20s and were ready, you know, Steven Spielberg at 20 years old was ready to be Steven Spielberg. And Stone is a little bit more of a slow burn in some respects. And he kind of constantly refers to that throughout this book. There's this sense that even though he's got all the opportunity in the world, he's not quite getting the opportunity that he wants. And so there's something kind of confusing about this guy who really has done it all as far as filmmakers go. And yet still seems kind of steamed about the fact that he had to wait until he was in his mid-30s to be as great as he would become. Yeah, that's a theme for him in general of someone who really has been given every opportunity that America can afford someone and is just still like, I have been betrayed by America.

And he was betrayed by America in an actual in the sense of being in Vietnam. kind of parsing the ideological aspects of that and the expectations that come with being Oliver Stone is a very interesting exercise and certainly animates all of his work. Before he fully decides to throw his hat in the ring as a screenwriter for the next 10 years, he kind of dabbles. He makes seizure. He's thinking about what he's going to do. And as he's thinking about his writing career, he's writing something interesting in the book that I want to share. So he writes, rather than pursue a career as an actor, he writes, I wanted to be my looks,

have my own ideas, live in my body, not rent it. I had ego, but unlike a good actor, I couldn't locate it. I didn't know who the hell I was, and that mystery drew me inward, searching. Maybe by connecting my own dots, I could help not just myself, but others to see things they hadn't seen before. I could, as a playwright or director, bring actors to realizations they could not find on their own. The writer can become the handholder of the actor's dreams. The writer brainwashes an actor into feeling the script's words are his own feelings. Perhaps I was being arrogant, but toward those goals, I was driven to stumble with a blind and

zealous faith. The perhaps I was being arrogant clause could be at the beginning of virtually every page he writes in this book. But it's true. And it's an interesting, you know, I think there's some pretty strong self-analysis here, you know know because Oliver Stone is a kind of a handsome dashing six foot three war veteran you know he's kind of Audie Murphy for the baby boomer generation but he doesn't pursue that he pursues something that is like a little bit more metaphysical a little bit more romantic and spiritual and also like power driven you know there's like a power to being in charge of the writing and the directing of a film and so he goes on this quest to seek all that stuff out. Yeah, I thought when you were reading this that this was going to be the passage that's maybe later on where he just says that as a director, he's God on a set.

Which in a way, I suppose it's true or is certainly one person's and one school's definition of being a director. But I think everything that you said is true. I do also just see it as a little bit of not even revisionist history, because that's a phrase you have to be careful with with Oliver Stone. But it's a way of understanding pretty practical choices and pretty he is an extremely successful person and has navigated himself into a lot of situations and has made like 10 unbelievably successful movies a lot comes with privilege a lot comes with luck but also this is a guy who like maybe understood a little bit more of what he was doing than I think he wants to acknowledge in this book. Yeah. And it's hard

to know if it's because he was a great operator or it's because he was truly gifted or probably most likely a combination of both. And the book kind of transitions pretty hard about page 100 from the unknown details of this guy's life up until the age of about 25 to a lot of things that we're much more familiar with when he starts to enter his early 30s. So he moves out to Los Angeles. He gets a writing gig, learning at the feet of Robert Bolt, the screenwriting legend. People may remember him getting a shout out from Quentin Tarantino earlier this year at the Golden Globes when he dedicated his Golden Globe to Bolt. Bolt wrote Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons, The Mission. Bolt's movies, to me, are very instructive for the kinds of stories that Oliver Stone would go on to tell, these

action-oriented morality plays that are kind of tests of masculine metal. Those are the stories that Bolt told. And he clearly was a very rigorous teacher and taught Stone a lot. And not everybody gets to, you know, learn at the feet of the single most gifted screenwriter of a generation. And Stone did get that. And the film that they wrote ultimately never was made, but it clearly sets him on a course to figure out who he's going to become, which is at first this kind of wunderkind screenwriter. And his next project in 1978 is Midnight Express, as we mentioned, the Alan Parker film about Billy Hayes, a guy who tried to smuggle hash out of

Turkey. And that movie was a sensation. And at the age of 31, Stone becomes an Oscar winner. And then all of a sudden we enter phase two of the book, which is LA, his second marriage to a woman named Elizabeth, a blonde, idyllic American dream woman in his eyes. And suddenly they both get very interested in cocaine. They start getting a lot of money. And then he starts writing Scarface. And this is really like the stone myth, the life that we know about. And this will ultimately be a segue into starting to talk about his films and the things that we're more aware of about him. But,

you know, this section is where the book took on, I think a little bit more of that character that you're talking about, about the celebrity memoir, where you're just like, Oh, here's Diane Keaton. And here's John Frankenheimer.

And here's a party at Sue Menger's house. And, Oh, these are all these like kind of recognizable touch points. This is the gossipy, like when they tell you to skip the first hundred pages of the celebrity memoir because you don't care about their life in Oklahoma for the first 20 years. This is kind of what they're talking about in Act Two. Yeah, that's true.

And he names names and he was obviously in a lot of rooms and there is some subtle score settling going on. You can tell who he likes and who he doesn't like and who he'll tell flattering stories of and who he just honestly wants to throw under the bus. There's also a great moment, and I don't know whether it starts in this section. I think it does, where he starts quoting another book about him, which is an amazing, amazing structural choice. So he is, but I point that out to say that he is clearly aware of how he's telling the story and he's making structural choices and he is building Oliver Stone, the character you mentioned the interview and then New York Times Magazine with David Marchese, where the first question is about the book and Oliver Stone answers in the third person. He's talking about the character Oliver Stone in the book as a person other than himself, which again is maybe pretentious, but is also just maybe like

someone's thinking about storytelling, which is usually a word that is used to describe things that aren't storytelling. But in this case, my guy does know how to tell a story. Also, you know, if you're a listener of the rewatchables, you know, there's a category called half-assed internet research. And this is the kind of book that creates a lot of half-assed internet research. I learned a lot of things that I didn't know about, say about what the original incarnation of certain films could have been or would have been. For example, Platoon was a movie that Stone had written in 76. The famed producer Martin Bregman, former manager of Al Pacino, got his hands on the script. And that kind of jet streamed Stone into a lot of meetings and a lot

of rooms. And there could have been a version of Platoon in the mid-70s that starred Al Pacino. And that would have been a very different story for Oliver Stone. And would he have been the director? Probably not. Would it have been a Sidney Lumet movie or a Fred Zinneman movie? These are the kinds of things that pop up. And then later on, we learned that there was a version of Born on the Fourth of July,

which also might've starred Al Pacino, despite the fact that he was in his mid thirties. And that's another fascinating what if. Every movie could have starred Al Pacino at some point is my understanding of reading this book. Yes. And like you say, some people get stray shots. You know, William Friedkin does not come out of this looking great because William Friedkin passed on the opportunity to make Platoon and instead, I think, took on The Brink's Job, which was a movie that was not successful. And, you know, Stone has a dagger for Friedkin. So these are like all reasons

to read the book. Like if you care at all about Hollywood history, if you care at all, especially about Hollywood in the seventies, there's a lot of really fun and juicy stuff here. And then there is a lot of kind of depressing, paranoid stuff about his rise to fame. And it's a, it's kind of a tried and true tale where you get a lot of money, you get access to drugs, you get access to a certain class of person, perhaps a woman, if you're a man, and that refracts and distorts your perception of self. And it leads you into these crazy decisions. You know, one of the decisions he makes, which is so fascinating and so like unexplored, I think about the stone myth is just the fact that he made a second movie after seizure called the hand,

which, um, I also revisited last night and which is not very good. And this is well after he's already won an Oscar. This is well after he's already achieved a kind of incredible fame. It's a horror movie starring Michael Caine about a cartoonist who loses his hand and his hand then haunts people and kills them, acting as a kind of like disembodied id. And again, Oliver Stone, guy, even though he's got a lot of money, beautiful wife, Oscar on his mantle, he's coping with some demons, coping with the idea of physical violence. I'm sure he saw his fair share of severed

appendages during his time in Vietnam. And he's like literalizing some of that pain to create these horror movies. He's just clearly not yet ready to be a great filmmaker. And so the book then spends essentially the final third analyzing his two great triumphs in 1986. There's plenty of time spent on Scarface, which is entertaining and clearly a frustrating experience for him. There's some time spent on some other films that he made. You're the dragon for Michael Cimino and 8 million ways to die and some of his writing projects, but really the book turns on Salvador and platoon, which I think makes him,

I don't know. I I'm sure I'm going to get this wrong, but he's the only person I could think of who was nominated for best original screenplay twice in the same year. Can you, can you think of any other person who had that, that honor? There must be someone over the years. Yeah, presumably, but probably like decades ago, because it seems it happens a lot with actors, but that's just a little bit more because of when projects are released. And it, you know, happened in directors with Soderbergh, I think, in 2000. But it's the screenwriters are always just fighting to get anything made. So it's really

hard to have two at once. Exactly. I mean, that's that was exactly what I was thinking. And it's clearly, you know, it's a manifestation of two projects that he'd been working on for a very long time, finally both getting the green light in 86 or 85, I suppose, and then making them in 86. And they're they're kissing cousins. These two movies, you know, they set a template for the kinds of work that he's going to do. And we'll talk about them a little bit more when we get into the game. But like, let's just put Stone in context here as a filmmaker before we get into the

game, OK? OK. 12 Academy Award nominations in his career. game but like let's just put stone in context here as a filmmaker before we get into the game okay okay 12 academy award nominations in his career he has four oscars he also has two best director oscars there's a very short list of people who have two best director oscars he got them both within the span of four years that's just that's pretty crazy and and now i think is very overlooked when we talk about him because of some of that, you know, the political energy that exists around him. Well, I think it's essential to understanding everything that comes after because he is so quickly goes from all of the trials and tribulations and self-perceived failures that

he outlines in this part of the book to winning two Best Director Oscars in the span of four years. And he's entirely accepted by Hollywood and the establishment. And once you are completely validated, then your mind starts going in other directions. And that's how you get JFK. And that's how you get the Oliver Stone of the 90s. I think that's exactly right. There seems to be an act of defiance going on in the second third of his career where he's trying to take that, I don't know, that just the kind of like comfort and ease with which we talk about people who have achieved a great deal and try he's trying to blow up that respectability. So, you know, his films have garnered 42 nominations and 12 wins over the years. This is one of the most celebrated filmmakers of the last 50 years. As a writer, as we said, it's pretty clear what his influences are. You know, Greek mythology, Moby Dick, he literally quotes George Orwell in this book. He's very cynical, but very romantic. He's postmodernist, but he's also a

total classicist. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too throughout his whole career, which makes for, I think, fun art to disentangle. This is not Fast and Furious 5. You know what I mean? I like Fast 5 just fine. There's no undertext in Fast Five. Yeah, but sometimes there's not a ton of undertext in Oliver Stone movies. I don't think that Fast Five is the worst comparison in terms of bombast and, you know, cramming everything into a film that he's working on a very grand scale always in ideas and in execution. That's a good point. You're right.

In some ways, there's very little that is unsaid in his work. And so that's, you know. Captain know captain obvious yes sometimes that works really well i think in the case of jfk it's actually great that he just says everything that ever occurred to him about the jfk assassination in other cases not so much but we'll get to that um as i said the filmmaking style is pretty important he basically has two different phases of his work as a filmmaker. The first is those sort of Salvador and Platoon films, which are very grounded. They're almost documentary-like in the way that they're shot, but they're still dramatic, still kind of that spiritual moment where Willem Dafoe falls to his knees as his character is dying as the helicopter pulls away.

But for the most part, he's trying to capture something very earnest and straightforward and right in the character's face. And then there's that second phase, which sort of mutates as we get into the early 90s, that is this fast cutting, multiple film stock, hallucinatory, impressionistic, media saturated, over eager, hazy portrayal of the way that influences kind of poison our brains. And I still don't totally know if Oliver Stone invented that psychology and then made me think that that was all true, or if he was reflecting on something that was real. Do you know what I'm saying? Did he invent that commercial style style or was he trying to manifest something that he was seeing in the world?

I've always thought it was a little bit the latter, but that's because I think I came to that era of Oliver Stone at the same time that I came to pop culture itself. So it's very hard for me to separate, you know, what I saw on MTV versus what I saw in an Oliver Stone film. It just kind of all blends together

as stuff I got to catch up on. And how you receive it does affect how its effectiveness for you as well, which I'm sure we'll talk about. There's one movie in particular that I know we're going to talk about. So yeah, I think if you look at the subjects that he focuses on, that approach,

that explosive impressionistic approach makes a lot of sense. You know, Vietnam and Kennedy and rock and roll and drugs and identity and love. These are all things that are actually in some ways best understood, not in linear fashion, because too frequently, if they're understood in linear fashion, then it's, they're, they're explained too simply. And I think he can cloud the certitude of some of his ideas by throwing a lot of things at you all at once. Sometimes that works.

Sometimes it's what you're saying. It's sort of making things too obvious. And that's part of what makes him so interesting. The glue of this second stage approach is definitely Robert Richardson, who has shot most of his kind of masterpieces, most of his best liked or best loved films. 11 of his features were done with Richardson. And then Richardson went on to become one of the four or five most celebrated cinematographers of his era, teamed up with Scorsese, Tarantino, Errol Morris, all since working with Stone. Notably has not really worked with Oliver Stone in about 15, 25 years. And that can tell you a

little bit about where Stone's career has gone to. I think that they miss each other. Um, and Hank Corwin is the editor who was a commercial editor who helped develop that editing style with Stone and Richardson that I think, you know, when I think of Hank Corwin, I think of natural born killers and he's been in the news in the last few years because of the big short and vice. But he really built that style with Stone 25 years ago. And so those two guys, along with, you know, Bruno Rubio and a bunch of other people, you know, the casting directors who found a lot of the Stone players over the years, they built that mythology, that first 10 years of significant work for him from 86 to 96 that I suspect we'll spend most of our time on. And I guess the last thing just to talk about is what you opened with, which is that people think Oliver Stone is a conspiracy theorist. So do you think he actually is a conspiracy theorist or do you think he is trying to upbraid and unnerve conventional wisdom?

I think at some point he has turned into a bit of an actual conspiracy theorist. The reason I answered the way that I did is because he was good at branding. And this idea of Oliver Stone and what to expect from his movies and from his interviews and kind of the world of Oliver Stone

was like extremely well communicated to me. And it's how I understand. And I think as we've talked about when we talked previously about JFK, and I'm sure we'll talk about it some more. But how we all learned to look at like actual film and things like the Zapruder tape and what we ask questions of and how we communicate skepticism and conspiracy. Like, I guess our entire generation learned that from JFK. So I give him a lot of credit for that. I think it is possibly more knowing and intentional in JFK than it is in perhaps the documentary that he says that he is releasing a follow-up to JFK.

Again, I refer you to the New York Times Magazine interview with David Marchese, where he is asked about this project. And he explains all of the things that have since been revealed that will be in his documentary. And it's very hard not to take that as an actual conspiracy theorist. Yeah. I mean, I think the other significant complication around this is the documentary work he's done spotlighting the leftist leaders of the world. And he spent a significant amount of time on camera and off with Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez. He has put these people who many people believe are very evil and destructive figures in world

history, and he's put them in a very positive light. Stone is very sympathetic to their causes. And he is, has been accused of being a bit, um, soft on people, particularly Putin, who, you know, many people obviously believe is a strong man and a very dangerous figure. And I, I perhaps this is my kind of like simple minded wish, wish casting, but I would love to know what we would think of Oliver Stone if he just hadn't made any of these documentaries, if he just had not done any of this work over the years, because they're inextricable now. The fact that he made two documentaries about Fidel Castro, the fact that he made, I thought, a very not good documentary about Hugo Chavez and the revolution in Venezuela and how that affected South America.

Just like a very credulous portrayal of a person who is immensely complicated and who is not challenged in the movie. I think that would be, it would be fascinating to look at these 20 feature films he made and just look at those films as like the text of Oliver Stone's life. But I don't think, I think they're inextricable now, and it certainly complicates him. I do also think that the culture has just caught up to Oliver Stone. And technologically and politically and psychologically, we're a lot more familiar with the type of thought that he is presenting in those documentaries. And it seems like what we see on YouTube is in a lot of ways like an evolution of what started 20 years ago. Now, can you hold him responsible for that? I think no. We're going to talk a lot about the reactions to his films and other people's interpretations of his art. And I don't think that you can hold someone entirely responsible for

that. But at the same time, Oliver Stone is very aware of his own meta-narrative and he is very aware of the politics and is very aware of the media and schools of thought. And so I don't totally know how to untangle all of it because he is actively engaged in the work of his own influence. And some of those daddy issues that we mentioned, I think crop up so specifically in all of his work, documentary and otherwise, he's seeking this kind of political father figure. He obviously has this incredible adulation for John F. Kennedy. He's talked recently a lot about his, the literal hope he had in Barack Obama and how let down he felt by his administration. He's talked about what a meaningful figure Castro was to him.

And these are really complicated personal issues that he's bringing to deeply political and social issues that makes him such a difficult person to sort out. You know, like you can, you can feel the psychology in play in the way that he is saying, gosh, I idolize JFK in the same way that he represents something my father could not be, or the way that I was disappointed by this version of uncle Sam. And, you know, he's, he's so like, he's so bald faced in that stuff that it's, it's kind of fascinating. Yeah. And again, that's where the real boomerism of it all comes into me because at some point, and I'm only speaking for myself, but my reaction, I, I do find myself hitting a wall against the like America daddy issues, uh, just because like, I understand that it is the, like Vietnam is the defining moment of his life and he's working

through that and so I you know I don't mean to diminish it but it's just also I as a millennial who was born um when I was uh I just can't understand believing in America and feeling as betrayed by America in the way that he did he does still. And some of that is just because of his generation and his time. And he is still working through his experiences in the way that he was betrayed. But it does, I think we just all look at politics and the idea of America so differently. Okay, before we get into our game, let's hear a quick word from our sponsor. city. Seth Rogen also plays Herschel's only surviving relative, his great-grandson Ben, a mild-mannered computer coder living in Brooklyn. From the producers of The Disaster Artist and 5050, An American Pickle tells the uniquely heartwarming story of two men from different generations who must learn the true meaning of family. Stream the new Max original in American

Pickle, August 6th, only on HBO Max, rated PG-13. Let's try to look at him a little bit differently. Should we go through his movies? Okay, you're just going to read the whole list? Well, no, no, no. I think what we should do is we'll set some ground rules for this game. Okay. So we've just had this sincere and deep conversation about one of the more provocative artists of the 20th century. I thought we were pretty fair.

I thought so too. I mean, I come to this as a big time fan of Oliver Stone's movies. Not all of them, but a lot of them. And I'm proud of the way that we've talked about his work and his book thus far. But we're going to play a stupid game in order to organize our feelings about him a little bit more coherently. So, fuck, marry, kill. Here's the deal. We're only going to focus on the feature films. So we're not going to focus on the work that he did as a screenwriter. As I said, that includes Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, Year of the Dragon,

8 Million Ways to Die. And he does have a writing credit on Evita, which is a film that he desperately wanted to make and was not able to make. And it was eventually made in the mid 90s starring Madonna. Maybe one day we'll talk about Evita in depth on this podcast. Fun fact, I did see that film on a school trip and I'm not sure what my teachers thought I needed to know about Eva Peron, but they thought I needed to know something. And we're also not going to talk about the documentaries. I think I'm not really a fan of most of the documentaries. I do think that the 12 part, the untold history of the United States, which you can watch on Netflix is interesting. I think it's probably

the most interesting documentary work he's done. It's this really kind of breathtaking, comprehensive look at America through the nuclear age, starting in the forties, running all the way through George W. Bush. And, you know, there's that kind of picaresque Oliver Stone, like who could ever believe I'd be the one to tell this story feeling in that series. But everything else I find is pretty politically complicated and feels like agent provocateur stuff to me. You know, it feels like he's trying to draw people out and get them to embarrass themselves publicly by talking about some of this work, which is something that we have decided to do on this podcast like fools. But so we'll just talk about the 20 movies. So Amanda, you got three fucks, three Marys and three kills, and I got three, three and three of the same. So let's just go through each movie one at a time. And you can

tell us if you decided to fuck Mary or kill it or none of the above. Okay, this is interesting because I didn't know that the screenwriting was off the table. So I have one free spot that I'm just going to have to award during the run of play. So that'll just be interesting. Well, if you want a monologue about Evita

for 20 minutes, feel free. I do also have a very vivid memory of seeing Evita, though I don't know whether it was a school trip or just my parents' home education. Anyway. Well, should we use this as an opportunity to talk quickly about Scarface? I assume Scarface is the film you were going to pick. Yeah, I was going to be one of my fucks because what else are you going to do with Scarface? Yes, you got to fuck Scarface. It's just not his movie. And I think if it was his movie, it would have been a very different movie.

And he says as much, and that seemed like a fascinating experience for him. Oliver Stone talking about the people who really got Scarface, which is something that I've been reading for 40 years, where he's like, you know, black and Latino and inner city people understood this movie always kind of just gives me the chills a little bit. It always just feels like he's not the right person

to be telling that story, even though in many ways he's right. And in many ways that the film always kind of just gives me the chills a little bit. It always just feels like he's not the right person to be telling that story, even though in many ways he's right. And in many ways that the film was kind of saved and mythologized by, by hip hop and by a different kind of a culture than the sort of white safe Hollywood culture that it, it found its way into. But you know, it's an amazing movie.

Like I love Scarface. It's just a complete mess. It's all over the place. It's De Palma at his Ur-De-Palma-ness and Stone throwing every pipe bomb he has in his bag into a screenplay. Well, that's, I mean, and that's kind of why I think it is more of an Oliver Stone film than you're giving it credit for. It's just absolutely ridiculous and also so instantly memorable, especially like much of the dialogue.

But I was just watching some clips before we do this. I can't not laugh when Al Pacino is like speaking in this movie. It's, I can't believe this happened. I can't believe this happened, which is honestly the truest Oliver Stone experience. Are you surprised that this movie hasn't been canceled yet because Pacino is playing a Cuban man?

I had just assumed that, I mean, you could cancel all of Oliver Stone's movies, I think. Yes, that's a good point. Oliver Stone in the time of cancel culture is fascinating.

Fascinating. I think here we are. He's almost untouchable in a way because everything is contaminated. Yeah. Okay, so you're gonna have to make another pick.

You're gonna have to fuck another film. Is that Okay. So you're going to have to make another pick. You're going to have to fuck another film, which this might be, is that a challenge for you? This was the last spot. This was the one I couldn't fill. I told you very confidently yesterday that I had eight of nine slots figured out. And the ninth one is,

yeah, I don't totally know what to do, but I'll get there. I'll figure it out. Okay. So we're flying fast and free so i mentioned those the the first two films that he made 1974 seizure and 1981's the hand i think it's safe to say that neither one of us are going to fuck marry or kill either of these movies right correct um it definitely seems like oliver stone needed to get fucked after making these movies because they're just really kind of sad and weird and paranoid. And he just shouldn't be making horror movies. He should be making the kinds of films that he would go on to make shortly thereafter.

So the next films that we get are the 1986 duo of Salvador and Platoon. Do you have any laurels for either of those films? I do not. I wish them well and and i have like a lot of respect for platoon sort of uh no i mean i do but it's a pass for me on both let's talk about platoon quickly because i'm gonna fuck platoon which is a complicated emotion to have about a movie as searing as platoon um I understand platoon because of the way that it was. It's it's myth was communicated to me, which is that this was the most real Vietnam movie that had ever been made.

That was the way that it was delivered. And this movie comes after apocalypse. Now it comes after full metal jacket. It comes after a lot of these, you know, harrowing and, anding and serious, but also kind of mythological approaches to war films. And this was, like I said, much more of a boots on the ground approach. Dale Dye was the advisor on this film, and he goes on to be an actor who

appears in many of Stone's films. And he's the person who trained a lot of the actors to look like soldiers. And, you know, this book ends functionally with Platoon winning Best Picture. That is like the summation. That is the like, ta-da of Oliver Stone and his story. And it's funny that he then goes on to literally 35 more years of crazy shit. The book actually ends with him being like, it was so great

that I won Best Picture because it would steal me for the wars to come. Like, that's literally how it ends. To be continued, aka this podcast. So, I have a lot of admiration

for Platoon. I think it is, like so many war movies before it, it is not aging well necessarily because the way that we see war movies has evolved a lot, but it's also, it's set the archetype in so many ways for the kind of war movies that we would come to see. And so it's one of those things where it, it deserves multiple points for setting the table for, you know, the next batch of that. And, you know, casualties of war come shortly thereafter, Brian De Palma's

Vietnam movie, and they have a lot in common, but this devil and angel, devil and Jesus figures in the film too, is a total literal design from Stone, the Willem Dafoe character of Elias and the Tom Berringer character of Barnes. But they create just this straightforward, uncomplicated, but beautiful metaphor for his tormented soul as he spends time in the jungle. And the movie is, um, you know, I don't, I don't think it's a perfect film. I don't think it's his best film. I don't think it's even his most kind of like searing and, um, excitable movie. It's, it's quite a solemn movie in many ways, but it's undoubtedly the work of somebody who knows what they're doing and what they're talking about. Despite the fact that as he writes about in the book, it seems like they had

to beg, borrow and steal just to get the thing finished. And it seemed like it was a very difficult shoot and there was a lot of learning that he had to do on the fly while making it. But you know, it's, it's, it's one of his signature movies. It's a kind of traditional American four-star movie. So I'm having sex with it. Yeah. When I rewatched it, I was reminded just how much my, and I think our generation's, understanding of Vietnam is shaped by this movie. In a lot of ways, we've moved past it. And our understanding and that American-centered version of a war movie is just kind of not

where we are. And so I think I'm also just, maybe I'm thinking a little bit too much about the definitions of fucking versus marrying versus killing something, which we didn't like really talk about. And like possibly for the sake of, you know, everyone should not really define how we're thinking about those in any great terms. But I would say the platoon was kind of like a second tier Mary for me. And I just didn't get there. So I think that I have a case for flipping a Mary and a fuck. And this is the one that I may,

I could flip theoretically, but we'll get there when we get there. Okay. Uh, so 1987 after platoon, after best picture, after Salvador, which we didn't really talk about,

but you know, is this kind of crazy adventure movie about a journalist who travels to El Salvador to expose the lies of what the Americans are doing to support the right-wing parts of the party. And then the rebel soldiers and the confusion there has an amazing James Woods performance. He was nominated for Best Actor. What about Pol Pot and Castro? I don't know if they're better. All I know is that some campesino who can't read or write or feed his own family James Woods' performance, he was nominated for Best Actor. liberal assholes. What the hell do you think the KGB's doing, huh? Is that why you guys are here? Some kind of post-Vietnam experience, like you need a rerun or something. You pour 120 million bucks into this place.

You turn it into a military zone. So what? So you can have chopper parades in the sky. It's a bit of a like, it feels like it's still being made by somebody who doesn't totally know how to make a movie yet,

but he pulls off all these crazy set pieces on the shoestring budget that it's definitely worth a watch, but it doesn't register for me. 1987, Wall Street. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

Definitely one of the archetypal Oliver Stone movies. Upon revisiting, I did not like it. And in fact, I wanted to kill it. Are you killing Wall Street? Yeah, yeah. That's insane. Wow.

You don't know what a good fuck is then because i'm fucking wall street okay tell me more of course it's not that it's not good and of course it's just like it creates gordon gecko and then we all have to live in oliver stone's wall street world it like thinks that it's commentary and it's mythologizing the you know know, the Wall Street big spending greed is good character that it's trying to critique. And part of that is because Michael Douglas gives an all time performance. And part of that is because Oliver Stone is like working through his definition of what a great man is and what ambition is and what you should and what you should admire and what you should revile both in men and in capitalism. And also partly it's bad because you have the Charlie

Sheen character in there who has to go through his daddy issues and make good at the end, which is clearly a stand-in for someone who we've been talking about a lot on this podcast and adding on a moral lesson that you don't really need. But the Gordon Gekko of it all is all time in terms of creating a character and an image and penetrating the culture. I think you have to give him credit for that, even if it gets away with him. In a lot of ways, that's the Oliver Stone story. It got away from him. It's an interesting thing. I think you made my case very strongly when you said all the things before, but which is that it created a culture on perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not that I think was pretty toxic. Maybe

it didn't create it, but it cemented it. It cemented that Michael Milken, you know, power broker, you know, pinstripe suit, suspended Superman figure that is obviously really gross. And Michael Douglas is amazing. There's no doubt about it. But this movie was really not that well received, was not a hit. And Douglas is the only person who got an Oscar nomination. And so even though it has this big reputation and it's considered a very big movie, it really wasn't. I think many people considered it kind of a letdown in the aftermath of Platoon, even though it did have, there's an iconography to it that is still memorable, but God, Charlie Sheen is not good, not a good actor. And there is literally a scene in which he's standing on the sky roof of a skyscraper and screams into the night, who am I?

Like, could there be a more dumb shit representation of a person going through problems than literally asking themselves, who am I? As they make decisions in life, like there still seems to be like a little bit of a one-on-one thing in play and he hasn't totally tapped into his essential stoneness. And I think I was just surprised by how simple this movie was, how not deep it was. All totally fair.

And then how you respond to that fact says a lot about other aspects of your life you know we should also add it's one of the worst performances by a an actress in an Oliver Stone movie which is saying something I I don't Daryl Hannah I don't know what's happening but it's not good no it's not good but I just kind of think in terms of like seizing the zeitgeist and like image and energy making and putting your finger on something with Gordon Gekko, you got to give credit to it, but not enough to marry it. So I get it.

You love to sleep with stockbrokers. Noted 1988 talk radio. I've chosen to marry the film talk radio. Did you get a chance to look at this before doing the show? No, I did not rewatch it. I think I've seen part of it, though I will be honest. I don't think I've seen it in full. You're happiest when others are in pain. That's where I come in, isn't it? I'm here to lead you by the hands with a dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation i'm providing a public service you're so scared you're like a little child under the covers you're afraid of the boogeyman but you can't live without him

your fear your own lives become your entertainment interesting film um not exactly what I remembered seeing many years ago. I could probably make the case for flipping the fuck session with Platoon with a fuck session with talk radio and then marrying Platoon. It's debatable here. I was really taken with this movie, though, because something I wouldn't have picked up on when I saw it in the 90s was just how incredibly well-made it is.

And this, to me, this kind of signals like Stone going to another stratosphere in part because this is arguably an even harder movie to make cinematic than Wall Street Platoon and Salvador because the whole damn movie essentially takes place inside of a radio booth. It's just in a radio station and it's just Eric Boghossian yelling into a microphone for about 80% of the film. And somehow with Richardson, he manages to use all of these filmic tricks to make this movie completely riveting. So it's based on a Pulitzer Prize nominated play that Boghossian put on at the Public Theater and later on Broadway. And, you know, Boghossian is, of course, this incredible monologuist and playwright and is

best known now probably is the guy who was trapped in the vestibule and at the end of uncut gems. But, you know, and also has been a villain in a lot of films and plays a very unlikable shock jock in Dallas, Texas in this movie gives a searing performance. But,

and you know, I think the movie in many ways predicts the Ben Shapiros and Joe Rogans of the world, the kind of like intense, you know, deeply angry and sure that they understand the truths of the world, kind of talking head figures

that dominate so much of media now. And certainly the Bogosian character would fit in in a Twitter world very well, very comfortably. And so the script has a lot of foresight. But to me, it's much more a story about basically a director figuring out how to make movies, not how to make stories that are essential to him. And Platoon is essential to him. Wall Street, he writes a little bit about his father's struggles with money at the end of his life and how, you know, the way that kind of stockbroker culture overtook New York and how that damaged his family. Like Wall Street's a very personal film. Talk Radio, he didn't write it,

but Gojan wrote it. And he comes to it almost for hire because he had to wait a year for Tom Cruise to be available to make his next film. And so in this year, he takes the year and whatever in a 60-day shoot makes this really interesting movie. If you haven't seen Talk Radio, I would definitely recommend it. It is not a perfect film, but it is something that

I thought about a lot after seeing it, which is not always the case with all Oliver Stone films. So, marrying Talk Radio with maybe a, maybe a,

maybe a side fuck session as well. Okay. I should hope so. And a nice marriage, but whatever. Okay. I should hope so. And a nice marriage, but whatever. Yes. 1989, born on the 4th of July. Yes, you did! Yes, you did!

And it's all falling apart! King Kennedy can't state! We all lost fucking war! It's not my fault! Fucking communism won, it's all for nothing! It's not true, Ronnie! How do you know? What do you know?

Yes, I'm marrying porn on the 4th of July. I am too. I knew this is where we would meet. It's a lie. It's a fucking lie. Amazing film. I'm so glad I rewatched it. There's no God.

Probably his best film in my mind. There's no God. Yeah, I think it's just, it is in a lot of ways the most obvious because it is the closest marriage of what Oliver Stone is working through and the themes and how he relates to the ideas of America and politics and Vietnam with the actual text. honest because I don't mean that the others aren't honest, but it just, it feels unvarnished almost while also being just like a really big tent filmmaking and using all of the American iconography and, you know, the John Williams score and it's Tom Cruise. It's, it's Tom Cruise

playing on the idea of Tom Cruise as a movie star and, you know, the American matinee idol in 1989. So it's I do kind of think it's kind of his most well-rounded work, if that makes any sense. And that's what I'm looking for in a marriage. Oh, that's a nice way of thinking about things. I mean, I think of when I think about the married concept of this game, I think about what's the thing that I want to spend the most time with. And Ron Kovic's story is powerful to me for very obvious reasons, which is that Ron Kovic is a brown haired, idealistic kid from Long Island. And when I was growing up, I went to Wallman High School in Huntington. And Ron Kovic was friends with many of the people who taught me in high school. And so Ron Kovic was a name you would hear all the time. He's like a Long Island legend in many ways.

And he's known as this incredible anti-war activist, obviously, now in the latter stages of his life. But just to provide some context for that, I think the film does an amazing job of capturing what Long Island is like, which is to say it is not really the home of a lot of anti-war activists. And for him to be a figure who emerged from that and went through the trials that he went through, you know, losing the use of his legs and, um, encountering like his own incredible frustrations and PTSD and the problems inside of his family. Like it's Pat to say that it hit home, but it hit, this is like a movie that hits home so hard for me. And Kovic is just like American

hero in both of the ways that we like to use that phrase. He is the person who gave his life and his body for his country. And he is also the person who, um, you know, sacrificed his freedom to say the things that he felt were true and stone not being ron kovic i think makes him the best person to make the movie you know platoon is so personal and so specifically about stone and i think that that people glommed onto that and they romanticized that when they were celebrating him for the film but him having just a little bit of critical distance while also knowing how to tell a vietnam story and then a story about this guy who lived a slightly different life than he did. I think it just makes, it's the perfect marriage.

And as you said, Cruz, this is like, this is the best Cruz has ever been in my mind. I mean, at least in terms of the kind of, um, you know, the serious awards worthy work that he's done over the years. I it's, it's nuts to me that he didn't win. I mean, I get, he lost to Daniel Day-Lewis for my left foot, a similarly, you know, body-sacrificing kind of performance. And it's fascinating that they were up against each other at this time. But man, this is just one hell of a movie.

I really, really like it. I was so happy. After watching a lot of like mediocre Oliver Stone movies, this was the last one I rewatched, and I was really happy to be with it. So we're both marrying Born on the Fourth of July from 1989. I suspect we both have

strong feelings about the next film, which is 1991's The Doors. You're all a bunch of fucking slaves. How long do you think it's going to last? How long are you going to let them push you around?

I tell you this, I'm going to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. All right. So we're in the sweet spot. We're in prime time for Stone now. He's just won his second best director Oscar for Born on the 4th of July. He is one of the most celebrated filmmakers of his generation. Maybe in his mind 10 years too late, but it's all happening for him.

He is at the center of movie culture. And what he has to say about American life matters more than almost anybody. And he decides to make a movie about the doors. Do you like, do you like, do you like the band, the doors, Amanda? No, no. Like, come on. I was born in the eighties. I don't care about this shit. This is, this is peak boomer, which is why I'm obviously gonna kill it in addition to being not good i re-watched part of uh the doors yesterday afternoon and then had to have a meeting with our co-worker mallory rubin and she was like how are you and i was like i'm in a really bad mood because i just watched part of the doors but i know we with all respect to jim morrison and i know the lyrics to a couple of the songs but I why

why is this the myth that we're making such an interesting choice for him because I think it speaks to some of that earnestness that aided a movie like Born on the Fourth of July and really hurts a movie like The Doors because he takes so much of the Jim Morrison mythology

at face value and so much of that kind of that the poetry of the of the wounded man at such face value and it really hurts the movie because the Doors at their best and they were not frequently at their best but at their best I thought were like a pretty they were a pretty fun blues band I I, I, I, you know, I used to be a rock critic and when I was a rock critic, the doors were the number one punching bag of that generation. They were the band that no one respected because Morrison's lyrics were so dumb and his melodies were so thin and weak. And the band had this, you know, Ray Manzarek's like goofy organ was a part of all

of these songs that didn't really belong. But I always thought Robbie Krieger was a great blues guitarist and John Densmore was a jazz drummer. And so you took a blues guitarist and a jazz drummer and this guy with this deep, deep baritone voice, and he sang really good white blue songs. This movie is like not interested in that at all. This movie is interested in witchcraft and Morrison as like a fuck God and the broken dream of the 1960s, which is that boomer exceptionalism that you're talking about. And while I think Val Kilmer is like maybe the closest any person will ever come to becoming another person for a movie because he literally looks, sounds, and acts exactly as we imagined

Jim Morrison did, the movie is just so listless and pointless and self-serious and not good. And it's such a bummer. Like I, I did the same thing when I rewatched it this week, I rewatched it. I got to the end of it and I was like, God damn, this is bad.

Like I, I can't believe how bad it is. I do love the one sequence. I do love the, I don't know if you had got, you got to this point in the movie, but you know, when the meltdown happens, when Morrison kind of burns it all to the ground in Miami at this at this infamous concert that they gave.

Stone does do some kind of interesting, like presaging the natural born killers manic style of filmmaking. But for the most part, it's a, it's a really tough watch. The movie has probably aged the least well because I think we're totally out now generationally on romanticizing rock stars of the 1960s like this. Wouldn't you agree? I was never in on it, but yes. There is just a real, okay, dad, please stop talking to every aspect of deciding to do this and making this movie and then having to talk about it with with our respect to my father who's also a boomer and who i love very much uh i don't know if he likes the doors i i hope not um are you killing this i am killing it oh good okay great so right now let's just let's just do a quick tally because

we're going through the heart of his filmography. This is really the key era. So I'm fucking Platoon, killing Wall Street, marrying Talk Radio, marrying Born on the Fourth of July, and killing The Doors. Okay. And so far, I am fucking Wall Street,

marrying Born on the Fourth of July, and killing The Doors. Okay, so you've got quite a few left, which is exciting, which gives us a lot to talk about. Next film, 1991. I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment. You've heard about it before.

Is that why? Well, it's a real question, isn't it? It's a little movie called JFK. The how and the who is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the mafia. Keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game. Prevents them from asking the most important question, why? Why was Kennedy killed?

Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up? Goddamn brilliant, immensely watchable masterpiece from Oliver Stone. I am, of course, marrying it. What are you doing? I am also marrying it. Yes. Because we have to marry the best.

We have to marry the truest versions of the other person. Kids, if you're contemplating marriage, make sure you know who you're marrying and also marry the essence of that person, which for Oliver Stone is JFK. Couldn't have said it better. This is an immensely long film, just like Marriage. It's a immensely complex and oftentimes confounding film,

just like Marriage. It is a film that is quite sure it knows what it's doing, even when it does not, just like Marriage. And it's kind of beautiful in its own fucked up way, just like marriage. I really think that, you know, I think you and I probably talked about this every once every six months for the last two years

we've been doing this show. It's just a totemic movie for me. But it does signify, like you say, not just philosophically and creatively what Stone's about, but even though Born on the Fourth of July, I think is the most coherent filmmaking he's ever done and the clearest, straightest, truest line he's ever drawn. JFK is just so fucking fun. It's just so fun to watch. It's just so crazy. It's just it is is really where he cements that that style that I was talking about,

that crazy impressionistic style where he's capturing all of his archival footage and mixing in film stocks and just showing you things that he shouldn't be showing you. And frankly, like lying in places, making things up in an effort to tell this ostensibly true story. I mean, there are so many composite characters. There are so many twists of the truth to make a compelling case. But it's convincing. It's a really convincing piece of work.

And it also has not one, but two really iconic scenes that are not just iconic scenes in movie history, but I think formulate the way people understand schools of thought and politics and ideas. And that, of course, is the Donald Sutherland extended scene and then the bullet at the end, and it went this way and the other way. You know, it's memes before there were memes and also like 60-minute YouTube videos

parsing one second of video before YouTube existed. Yeah, I mean, for a guy who loves Greek mythology, this is like his Helen of Troy. This is the, this is the film that launched a thousand subreddits, you know, it's really, he is the, the mocker of, of this kind of thinking that is so prevalent in, in, in American internet culture, you know, like he really is like a granddaddy figure of this stuff. And while I think a lot of that stuff is toxic and fucking weird,

it's not surprising that it was inspirational for so many people living quietly alone in their basement because it is, it's just, it's enrapturing.

And we're both marrying JFK. 1993, Heaven and Earth. I got, I got nothing for this movie. I was, I was, yeah,

likewise. i found it dull um it's it's i mentioned this to you last night when we were talking but this actually just feels like oliver stone trying to tell a story a bit more conventionally and maybe maybe this is a chance to talk about his relationship to female characters which is not terribly strong throughout his career because this is a story that is, um, favors the female lead much more than most of his stories do. And, um, while it is,

you know, at times I think a very sympathetic portrait of a woman who went through incredible struggle during the war, it is really bland. And he just does not have a feel for how to write a character like this. And he just does not, it seems like he just does not have a strong feel for writing female characters in general. Yeah, I just sense a disinterest and you can sense that in the book and you can definitely sense it in the work where there are not very many female characters.

They're usually afterthoughts. They're almost always miscast, which just signals to me a fundamental misunderstanding either of what he's writing or, you know, what he thinks he thinks of women versus what he actually thinks of women when he's, when he's casting. I, I don't want to hold, I think it's boring to go through a director's list of works and be like, you didn't make enough movies about women. I don't think that that is ultimately productive, even though I would like to see more movies about women. And what I would really like is to see more movies by women. Because at the end of the day, if you're not interested in something, then I don't want you making an entire movie about it. But yeah, I agree with you. And some of it is also, I think, again, he is just working through what happened to him in Vietnam and his relationship to all those men in Vietnam in so much of his work and his life and when women were

not there. So for me, it's more, it's tunnel vision. Though I have to say, just a number of tremendously sexist asides in the book, which, you know, what are you going to do? Yeah. I underlined a few of the tougher hangs. There are some tough hangs. And if you're triggered by that, I would say avoid chasing the light. Heaven and Earth is the final film in his triptych of Vietnam stories after Platoon and Born on the 4th of July. And it's interesting. It's very staid and it was received a bit stiffly. I don't think people really cared for this much more measured approach, much more traditional approach to storytelling. So in 1994, he says, fuck it. And he makes one of the craziest movies of the last 30 years.

That movie, of course, is Natural Born Killers. So tell me, Mickey, how can you look at an ordinary person, an innocent guy with kids, and then shoot him to death? I mean, how can you bring yourself to do that? Innocent? Who's innocent, Wayne? You innocent? I'm innocent?

Yes, I am. I've murdered? Definitely. It's just murder, man. All God's creatures do it some form or another i mean you look in the forest you got species killing other species our species killing all species including the forest and we just call it industry not murder very interested to hear what you think about natural killers because i don't think you and i have ever discussed

it what do you think i'm gonna say about it I'm I think you're gonna fuck it oh no I'm definitely killing it but like but but but born from probably the same place as fucking it which again I think you and I are just like revealing too much about our sex lives that we should note that again we are millennials we learned about sex in the 90s they were teaching some very different things kids go have go have a positive, consensual sex life, okay? But for you and me, it's two sides of the same coin. But I'm not killing it for the reasons that you think I'm killing it. I'm killing it, and I say this with a lot of love for you.

I'm killing it because of what you're about to spend five minutes talking about. I'm killing it because of the shots. I don't five minutes talking about. I'm killing it because of the shots. Like, I don't care. I don't want to hear about it anymore. I understand that it invented a style of filmmaking that I kind of came to later and kind of thought was part of the world. I appreciate the technical aspects of it. I find it really irritating to watch.

Like, I just don't enjoy watching it. I rewatched, again, part of it yesterday afternoon. That's why I was such in a, in such a bad mood when I talked to Mallory and I, you know, I find the ideas outdated at best. It's maybe they were incisive in 1994 though. Like, I don't know. The media did it even then. I know, sir. Thank you. Um, so I just just I don't have interest in talking about it. And that's why I'm killing it. I think that makes total sense. I think this is good sex at the end of a bad date is the way I think about this. And sometimes you just have a carnal desire for

something that you know is bad for you. And Natural Born Killers is very bad for people. And I agree with you that philosophically, intellectually, the movie is a little too basic for my taste. And I have always wanted to see the Quentin Tarantino version of this script. And obviously, you know, the film was the script was bought and stoned and two other writers rewrote it in their own image. And the idea that I the idea that Quentin Tarantino would blame the media for violence and culture is obviously that is not what was in the original script.

There's just no way that that was in the original script. I don't know. I did not ask Quentin, but just based on his work in the subsequent years, you know, that's not the case. However, you're right.

Formally, this is an amazing movie. This is an unbelievable thing. And it's forget about like analyzing the shots and talking about the film stock as I have just for me, the movie came out when I was 12 and I saw it when I was 13. I did not know you could do any of this stuff in a movie. It really, it, it, it, it put a power saw around my skull and pulled my brain out and poked at all of the wrinkles and was like, did you know that you can put a, an evil sitcom as you're at the origin story for a character? Did you know that you can put an evil sitcom as the origin story for a character?

Did you know that you can put a laugh track in a movie? Did you know that you can have a completely digressive docu-series hosted by Robert Downey Jr. in the middle of your movie? These are all things that when you're a kid are mind-blowing. They're just formally mind-blowing and they make you think about whatever meta text is. Now at this stage of my life, you know, taking that hard left into 40, I'm not that impressed. You know, all of these, this media has been exploded over and over again. The internet has completely, has made this film seem completely outmoded. I think the concepts of who is responsible for the violence in the world, like it even seems really simplistic for somebody like Stone. But changed my way of

thinking about movies as a teenager. And it features like an all time Woody Harrelson performance, just an amazing performance as Mickey. I like Juliette Lewis in the movie. I think she's a little bit cartoonish, but I think what Woody Harrelson's doing is movie icon work. It's the sort of stuff that makes you a legend as a movie star. So I am having sex with this movie. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm just glad you're not marrying it. That would just be a long life to live. No. In fact, I've already married three of his films, so I'm fresh out of marriages. What I've got left is one fucking one kill. Married JFK, born on the 4th of July in talk radio. Three years, in and out. Oh, wow. Okay. That also says a lot. Okay, keep going. 1995, Nixon. I don't really have anything on this.

I have nothing on it either. I did not rewatch it. I've seen it a couple of times. It's a very, very long film and I think a bit overwrought. I think Stone attempted to shoot the moon again. And it's an important movie in the history of his career because it essentially sets him off course. It sets him off the political course. It sets him off the boomer course in many ways for a long stretch. This is really the last movie of its kind in that 10 year period where Oliver Stone was one of the two or three most important filmmakers in America. But while it does have a great Anthony Hopkins performance at the center of it, I find it to be not a very effective movie. And also a little bit like um you know a little bit like telling a man that he needs to procreate you know like that's instinctual like we we know in our american dna that nixon was paranoid and evil

you know we don't need a three and a half hour movie that explains it to us in 1995 you know what i mean i mean i agree with you, you know, maybe Oliver Stone needed that because this is just how he's, like, making sense of his life. But I don't need it. 1997, you turn. You know, I don't think you know who I am. The name's Toby N. Tucker.

People around here call me TNT. You know why? They're not very imaginative. Because I'm just like Dynamite Boy, and when I go off, somebody gets hurt. Fine. I was trying to make time with your girl, you're right. And now I'm terrified, and I've learned my lesson,

and you can go away. Do you have anything for this movie? I don't. I'm fucking this movie. Wow. You're just... I was going to say something really inappropriate that, again, is really outdated

in terms of just giving it up pretty quickly. And once again, kids, just go out and have safe sex with whoever you want. No judgment. But you are moving quickly, Sean. You're making some good points, which is that you and I are, we're border kids. We're on the border between Gen X and millennial. You're a little closer to millennial than I am. I'm not a Gen X. I'm not Gen X. And I'm not, that's not even about when I was born, but just ideologically. I

completely missed the boat on it. Do you think so? I'm not so sure. Don't you think though, that all of my reactions and just in terms of the culture, I consumed what was important to me and how I come to it. I feel like I'm always the millennial in the room and I deal with Gen Xers or Gen X influence people like you and my husband, and obviously Chris Ryan, who is my favorite old-timey Gen X person in my life. Well, I think that you have a lot of the cynicism of a Gen Xer and not a ton of the ceaseless ambition of a millennial. So I think of you in our cohort. But this is notable, I think, in having a conversation about these movies because U-Turn is the ultimate Gen X movie.

It is a movie about a guy, you know, after, you know, breaking his back for 20 years to make these profoundly important films about the American character. Just makes this really seedy neo-noir based on a John Ridley novel full of movie stars, just absolutely teeming with incredible actors. You know, star Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, you know, right before out of sight when she is just at her maximum powers. Nick Nolte, Billy Bob Thornton, Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix on a thousand, John Voight doing some just absolutely absurd shit as a Native American. Really just a wild movie as a native American. Um, really just a wild movie and a very fun movie and a real, like,

let me just take the safety off kind of a movie to kind of cleanse himself. And it's really dirty and it's really quick by Oliver stone standards. I think it's a sub two hour movie and it's got also, I think I might've mentioned it on the show before, but it's like my favorite trailer of all time is this movie. This is the trailer that like haunted my dreams when I was a teenager. I would, I would, when, when we got the internet, I like downloaded the dot move version of this trailer and we just watch it over and over again, like a fucking weirdo. Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sleeping with U-turn 1999, any given Sunday.

I will be marrying any given Sunday. Speak on it. I'm not doing anything with it, which was a twist for me. Yeah, that is interesting. For me, it's honestly the entertainment value. And that's a little bit why I was like, I don't really think I'm the Gen X person. I'm the play the hits, you know, give me something that I am having fun doing and something a bit more mainstream. Obviously, I, obviously it is extremely prescient in terms of all of the issues that the NFL has been working through for the last 20 years.

And I don't even really watch the NFL and I know about all of that. So, and, and I give Oliver Stone credit. That's when his skepticism and his kind of like, what is the truth? And are we being lied to actually, you know, pays real dividends. I think there are great performances with the exception of one Cameron Diaz, who once again, just, I don't understand that character. Like, and it's so funny because I believe it's in the oral history that we had on The Ringer last year for the 20th anniversary. He was, Oliver Stone was asked about the character and he's just like you know it seemed like in the air there could be a female owner coming sometime soon so it was almost like it was his version of feminism to be like now I will give the team a female owner and I'm just like sir I don't really know what you think's

going on with women in America in 1999 or now um but that's okay. I think that it's definitely too long. But also in terms of the way that it's filmed and the way it recreates football, I guess that's how I, a person who doesn't watch football, think and understand of football now because I saw Any Given Sunday. I'm like, oh, it's like super violent and you're in the mix and you can hear the crashing and it's really visceral. And in that same oral history, a lot of people, including Appiccino, talk about how watching Any Given Sunday changed the way that they watch football. And I think for me, it probably just informed how I watch football when I do now watch it when my husband is being a nut. So I enjoy this movie. At the end of the day, I just I find it rewatchable. So I will marry it

because I have to spend the rest of my life with it, theoretically, and also give it half my money. So. Wow, that's a complicated way of thinking about your relationship to any given Sunday. I'm with you. This was like a very borderline situation for me. If there weren't three movies that I loved more than it, it probably would have been A Marriage for Me for the same exact reason. I love to watch it too. I think it's immensely prescient.

I think it's probably not actually a very honest representation of the violence inflicted in football. In fact, someone's eye is pulled from their skull in this film, and I've never seen that on a football field per se, but it's like all Oliver Stone movies. It's the opera version of real life. It's the over the top physical sensation and intellectual sensation that you get from the

ideas of a thing. And he's, he's the best at that. And football is, was a big fat target for him. And it's kind of perfect for him. I think the movie is like 30% of the movie doesn't work for me. I agree about Cameron Diaz's character. They're, they're, you know, she's not only the owner, she's the GM of that team. And then the NFL still does not have a female GM in its league. And it may not for a long time. It's an immensely sexist sport full of sexist organizations. And so, and I think the idea of making her like the young scion slash ball buster is a bit complicated. Not ideal really. But on the other hand, go ahead. And then she has to have like her own version of daddy issues without Pacino because there have to be daddy issues in every single movie.

But it makes no sense. But it's just so funny to me because I got the impression that he thought that he was really developing like a really progressive female character. And it is just kind of a Frankenstein. It makes no sense. Well, it's that thing where older men think that the way to make a woman more complex is to give her traits that are typically defined as masculine. And that's not necessarily a sophisticated way of writing a female character. And he, you know, he falls prey to that sometimes.

On the other hand, the male characters in this movie, the actors are giving some of their best performances. I mean, in terms of late period Al Pacino yelling phase, like this is as watchable as he's ever been. The speech is obviously iconic. The, you know, the inches speech. I think Jamie Foxx obviously emerges here in a way that he had not before. This is when people really started taking him seriously as a performer.

His, his, his character is also just, it's a, it's so cliche to say, but it's just such a predictor of where the league was going. I mean, it's Willie Beeman is the NFL.

Now, if you look at what, you know, Lamar Jackson and, and Patrick Mahomes are as players, Dennis Quaid, basically just playing John Elway is wonderful in this movie as like a broken down steroidal,

you know, sun setting middle-aged man reunited with James Woods as an evil doctor. Love him just being a complete shit heel up and down the cast. It's really just a great collection of, of actors and Margaret getting a look. Love to see Ann Margaret in the movie. But I'm not doing anything with it. You're, you're, you're marrying any given Sunday. Are you, are you doing, are you doing anything with, um, with Alexander, the 2004 film? No, I'm not. You know what? I didn't even bother revisiting it,

but I do think I saw it in theaters. I saw it in theaters as well. I have also seen The Ultimate Cut. Are you familiar with the kind of the backstory, how this is sort of the Blade Runner of our generation, this movie? No. Okay, so obviously Alexander is, it comes five full years after Any Given Sunday.

In this time, Oliver Stone has started making some of these documentaries that we were talking about. He's gotten a little bit more politically active as a documentary filmmaker. He takes a long stretch off, the longest stretch by far he's taken since 1986 from feature films. He comes back with his grand epic,

Alexander starring Colin Farrell. The movie tested poorly. It was not a box office success. It was a very difficult shoot. And they shot a lot of film, a lot of film. I think when it was released, I think it was in the neighborhood

of two hours and 40 minutes. It was long at the time. I think that the ultimate cut is in the neighborhood of three and a half hours. It's one of the longest director's cuts ever. It's up there with Kingdom of Heaven

and some of the Blade Runner controversies. But, and I haven't seen it in a while, but the people who like it love it. They swear by it. They swear that it is the epic of the 21st century. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. I'm going to rewatch it, I think, just because I spent all this time rewatching all these other movies and reading this book and going through his entire career. But I just remember not really liking it at all the first time I saw it and kind of feeling a bit confused as to why Oliver Stone made this movie. But after reading the book, it does make sense that he clearly is, he's taken with these stories, with these great men that you're describing. The classical, yeah. Nothing for Alexander. 2006, World Trade Center. Got

anything for it? I do not. I don't either. I think this is probably like his least successful film to me. It's not offensive in any way. It's actually because it's played so down the middle and because it is not the, the well of conspiracy that we expect from him. I'm weirdly holding that against it.

And that's what, that's the paradox of being Oliver stone. If you don't bring the crazy to the movie, somehow we're not as interested in your movie, which is, that's gotta be tough for him. 2008 brings a movie called W. It's important that we meet that deadline. All right. The only way we can win, um, is to leave before the job is done. Yeah.

I'll now take questions. Mr. President. Mr. President. Mr. President. Yeah. I was going to say, it's a great setup that you just did about not bringing the crazy.

I will be killing W. I will as well. W should be killed. This is not a the crazy. I will be killing W. I will as well. W should be killed. This is not a good film. This is a bizarrely sympathetic portrait of a bad person who wrought havoc. Yeah, so here's the thing is that it's like, it's not a bad film.

It's really traditional. It's them, it's everyone doing SNL Bush administration with hints of The daily show and I believe Rob Corddry is like actually in W and it is a little bit funny and Josh Brolin is amazing in this movie I'm sorry or he you know what he's very good but what he does which is both a testament to his performance and like the problem of the movie, but, and also the problem of George W. Bush, if you share our politics is that, uh, he brings the charisma in a, in a really big way. And it's tricky because there are flashes in the movie of Oliver Stone understanding. I mean, he definitely understands that W is a buffoon and he understands that the larger

administration is doing nefarious things. There's that Dick Cheney speech in the control room that is quite chilling. So you have to understand that he's like kind of working with the charisma and is like maybe trying to expose it. And it's a little bit of like the media did it or whatever, but it's the tricky thing with making movies about these really charismatic people because we're conditioned to watch a movie and be like, Oh, what a charismatic person. Now I, now I am very charmed by them. And then you add on all the dad stuff. And I just, you know, it's, it's disrespectful to the entire world that we just all have to

live in this world because George W. Bush couldn't really work out his relationship with his dad. I don't think that that is fair to anyone. I don't want to live in that world, so I'm killing it. It's a confusing piece of art in so many ways. I just listened to an interview with, with stone recently in which he said that there is no doubt about it. The George W. Bush was a worse and more dangerous president than Donald Trump. And that that is what he believes hard to believe that by watching this film, that really is not my takeaway from the movie. I agree with you.

It is definitely a buffoonish portrayal of adultish guy who kind of, you know, uh, woke up on third base and thought he hit a triple, but it's not, it does not have the like searing anger or satire that you would expect from a movie like this. In fact, it's like, it's certainly a film about a guy seeking his father's approval. And it's a story about a guy who really loves his wife and whose wife saved his life. And that's just a weird choice for Oliver Stone. I'll never figure out why he made this movie. And a guy who also really likes baseball. I was

thinking a lot. I have a vivid memory of seeing this movie and I'll tell you why. I saw this movie on opening weekend, the Union Square Theater in New York, and I sat directly behind Anna Winter in a crowded, in like a packed theater. And number one, that's kind of all you need to know. But I was trying to reflect on the fact that in 2008, and I believe it was the fall of 2008 when this movie is released. So we're kind of in the Obama is coming throws and there's a lot of excitement. And Bush as a reviled character was at least among some circles, pretty established.

So I was like, did Oliver Stone think at the time in 2008, he was making like a slightly radical, different take on the established narrative around this person? And is that why he did it? I don't think there's a justification for it, but that was my best guess at to how it

happened is that we've kind of, we've gone back and forth or not we, but some people have gone back and forth on W a couple of times at this point. And this movie is just from a different phase. Well, I think it goes back to that sort of that wheel of political thought that I was describing where sometimes you can, you can think a little bit too hard about where you stand on something and somehow end up on the wrong side of what you think about it. And also, Stone, he's a zagger. When everybody else is zigging, he's zagging. And it feels like he zagged too hard.

I find this to be a really, really confusing movie from him, not because we needed a movie that told us that George W. Bush was a very bad president. People understood that at the time. For some people, his memory has softened over time because of this Donald Trump period that we've been living through. But let me assure anybody who was not paying close attention, in 2008, we were quite sure that george w bush did a very bad job across two terms and so the whole project is very odd and and you know this is kind of this is where things clearly start to wane for him um and he starts to he becomes a kind of unfavorable filmmaker after this movie because i think people i think the media in particular i think critics really wanted

they wanted a sharp blade on this movie and it didn't have it. And world trade center was very conventional and did not have a sharp blade. And then all of a sudden it was like, who is Oliver Stone anymore? And then he makes two years later, a sequel to wall street, a movie that I killed earlier in this conversation called money never sleeps, which is a great title. And I did choose this movie in the movie draft of 2010 but um it's okay it's not it's not it's not a it's a watchable movie it's just not um it doesn't tell us much more than we all than we didn't know already yeah here's my thing I have two fucks left and there are three movies left and there's one I'm not picking so I think I I'm just like, I guess I do fuck stockbrokers now.

And I'm also fucking Wall Street Money Never Sleeps. Here we go. Let me say a couple of things. You're fucking both Wall Street movies. I don't know. It just happened. What else am I supposed to fuck on this list? Wow. It just happened. Okay. At least it has Shia. It's got Carey Mulligan. It's got great bits about day trading that Chris Ryan will dine out on for the next five years. So I don't know. I don't know what else I was supposed to do here. I kind of forgot that I had that many fucks left, but here we are. You have no fucks to give because you've given them all to stockbrokers. Incredible showing by you.

I have one left that I'm about to give to another completely wild movie because I am giving it to Savages. Savages. 2012 Savages is the next film.

Pretty fun movie. I have nothing to give it because I've run out of categories but what's your memory of this? I remember wanting this to be a little bit more than it was. I just remember it being such a product of its time in such an electrifying

way because the main stars are Blake Lively, 2012 Blake Lively, Taylor Kitsch, and Aaron Johnson Taylor. And then also you've got Salma Hayek just throwing heat in this movie. She is amazing. And I remember it being fun, which is a really twisted thing to say about a very dark movie about drug cartels. So fun is a relative term, but just in the sense of Oliver Stone had some energy and was trying to make a really deranged, big top, well, we'll just try it movie. I mean, literally, this movie starts with Blake Lively, whose pretty, I don't know if it's that intense, but like she and Taylor Kitsch are definitely fucking. And it's just like close up on Taylor Kitsch's bare bottom. And then she's narrating and she says the line, I have orgasms. He has wargasms. So I, at some point, at some point, if you're gonna go for it, you gotta go for it. And,

and so here I am. I think that that is verbatim from the novel, which I have read by Don Winslow, that quote, um, which is, you know, this is a lurid maximalist crime story. It's very much in keeping with what he did, uh, 15 years earlier with U-Turn, where he pivoted away from the seriousness of Wall Street money never sleeps and W to make something that is just kind of down and dirty and also is surreptitiously about the drug war and cartels and the absurdity of the way that we wage violence across the border. And that's what a lot of Winslow's work is about. He's written great books about this power of the dog and the cartel. And they're an interesting match, you know,

to hyper masculine humanists, which is just a, just a fascinating mix and unusual mix, really a Chris Ryan special. If ever there was one, those two, those two working together. Savage is pretty cool.

I think I just wanted more out of it. This was also in the heyday of Taylor Kitsch probably shouldn't be the star of movies like this. Like he is great for 30 minutes, but is he great for 100 minutes?

And Blake Lively is alive, is a human. I don't know if she's a great actor. She's not, she has not starred in as many movies in recent years, I think, because of stuff like this. But I don't want to degrade your desire.

I'm just trying to have a little fun, you know? I'm not marrying it. Speaking of fun or perhaps not, Oliver Stone's final narrative feature was released four years ago, his 20th film. It's called Snowden. Don't remember this being a fun time at the movies. Did not revisit this movie.

Obviously, it's understandable why it's an important film to Stone, the story of Edward Snowden as portrayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the movie. But he's talked at length about why he hasn't made a film since this, which it seems as though it was one, very hard to raise money for it because of the subject matter and two, very difficult to make. But it's not a movie that I want to marry, fuck, or even kill. I'd rather just not watch it again. It's a no thanks for me. That's the 20 films. That's FMK for the Oliver Stone filmography. We walked through every phase. Do you have any regrets? Anything you'd like to take back? I don't think so. I probably could have thought a lot harder

about the fuck category, but that would also kind of contradict the category. So I just, I went with my instincts and that's the point, right? Those instincts took you straight to Wall Street, which is beautiful. Amanda, thanks so much for bearing your soul. Thank you to Oliver Stone for bearing his soul

in his book, Chasing the Light, in his many films over the years. I admire and appreciate, and I'm also a little bit concerned about everything that he's ever done. Any closing thoughts? No, you said it well. Okay, this has been The Big Picture.

Thank you to Bobby Wagner. Thanks for listening to the show. Please wear a mask, and we'll see you next week when we talk about something in the world of movies if we ever get more new movies. See you then. you