Oliver Stone Isn’t Rocking The Boat (For Once)
It’s a good thing for those of us who care about the legacy of 9/11 that Oliver Stone hasn’t had a hit in a while; he needs money, so he has accepted the studio’s muzzle regarding his new film ‘World Trade Center’:
There are many people of course who have been driven a little crazy for other reasons by some of Mr. Stone’s more controversial films, “JFK,” “Natural Born Killers” and “Nixon” chief among them. But in several interviews, sounding variously weary, wounded and either self-deprecating or defensive, Mr. Stone spoke as if his days of deliberate provocation were behind him.
“I stopped,” he says simply. “I stopped.”
His new film, he says, just might go over as well in Kansas as in Boston, or, for that matter, in Paris or Madrid. “This is not a political film,” he insists. “The mantra is ‘This is not a political film.’ Why can’t I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time?”
He said he just wants to depict the plain facts of what happened on Sept. 11. “It seems to me that the event was mythologized by both political sides, into something that they used for political gain,” he says. “And I think one of the benefits of this movie is that it reminds us of what actually happened that day, in a very realistic sense.”
“We show people being killed, and we show people who are not killed, and the fine line that divides them,” he continues. “How many men saved those two lives? Hundreds. These guys went into that twisted mass, and it very clearly could’ve fallen down on them, and struggled all night for hours to get them out.”
By contrast Paul Haggis is directing the adaptation of Richard Clarke’s book on the causes of 9/11, “Against All Enemies,” for the producer John Calley and Columbia Pictures.
Asked if that weren’t the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, Mr. Stone first scoffs: “I couldn’t do it. I’d be burned alive.” Then he adds: “This is not a political film. That’s the mantra they handed me.”
Mr. Stone says he particularly owes his producers, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, for taking a chance on him at a time when he had gone cold in Hollywood after a string of commercial and critical disappointments culminating in the epic “Alexander” in 2004. “They believed in me at a time when other people did not, frankly,” he says. ” ‘Alexander’ was cold-turkeyed in this town, I think unfairly, but it was, and I took a hit. Nobody’s your friend, nobody wants to talk to you.”
Mr. Stone came forward asking to direct “World Trade Center” just about a year ago. He decided it would require a different approach from, say, “JFK.” “The Kennedy assassination was 40 years ago, and look at the heat there, a tremendous amount of heat,” he says. “I was trying to do my best to give an alternative version of what I thought might have happened, but it wasn’t understood. It was taken very literally. ‘Platoon,’ I went back to a Vietnam that I saw quite literally, but it was a twisted time in our history.
“This — this is a fresh wound, and it had to be cauterized in a certain way. This is a very specific story. The details are the details are the details.”
How do you shut up a raving conspiracy theorist? Well, conspiracy theorists have to eat, too; and the public hasn’t been buying what Stone’s selling for some time. Because Stone will have to play it straight, this might even turn out to be a decent film (though it will have to be good indeed to be in the same league as ‘United 93′)…
Richard Clarke has been a major thorn in my side:
His testimony before the 9/11 introduced a new vein of discussion that was never pursued.
He testifies that he forsaw a hijacked plane in 96, being used to hit Atlanta/Olympics-indicating that the events were forseeable, contradicting C Rice’s staement that ‘no one could have forseen’.
The left was jumping up and down with their hero, who showed ‘what a liar Condi was’.
The problem? He was the head of counter-intelligence, who admitted forseeing a plane being used…5 years before a plane was used. The logical question that was never asked:
“If you forsaw this, what efforts did you make?” If you saw his testimony, you could see the realization in his face of the conundrum he was facing.
Oliver Stone? Every nut in the galaxy thinks that since Stone did the conspiracy for JFK, he’ll do it for 9/11. Somehow, Dylan Avery got to the niche first, and even Stone realized that it would never fly.
Comrades,
Actually, I rather liked “Platoon”. That was my time, but Stone misunderstands a great deal about GI humour. The comedy noir just goes right over his head.
We’d sing jodies about “napalm sticks to kids” because we were throwing those damned lyrics BACK at the anti-war protesters who coined them. WE were taking them for ourselves and basically mocking the other side. It’s like when my platoon got together and burned our draft cards. A couple of peaceniks got wind of it and made a big deal out of it, how we were “in with the cause” and all that crap. We were mocking them, and also saying, well, h@ll.. what’s the gummint gonna do to us anywho? We’re already IN the Army, you know? We thought it was a riot, and the hippies never got the joke… oh well…
That’s the big problem with many on the left, you know? They simply don’t have a sense of humour. They just don’t get it.
Respects,
Gwedd
Stone has never had a sense of humour about anything, ever. Except for the unintentional moments in his films – take “Agent X” for example in JFK, or Joe Pesci’s fright wig in the same film. Hilarious, but Ollie doesn’t get the joke.
Some time ago I recall Tim Robbins being offered up a big, fat softball… T-ball really on Bush and the war and uncharacteristically for him declined to mouth the usual MoveOn crapola. I guess it isn’t much but it was a surprise. Even Hollywood Lefties have to eat, as you say (and sumptuously of course) but they also have to live in the everyday world, at least to an extent so even in this crowd the Charlie Sheens are pretty rare.