Stone’s raw, violent, and morally challenging script depicted US involvement in Vietnam as futile and savage rather than heroic. Like the script for Born on the 4th of July, which Stone co-wrote with Ron Kovic, the script for Platoon had knocked around Hollywood for several years, waiting for a confluence of timing, money, and a studio willing to take a risk on a film unlike most American war movies.

Over the next seven years he wrote the screenplay for Scarface, and wrote and directed two films that would make his reputation: Salvador and Platoon. Stone broke into the business as a screenwriter, winning an Academy Award in 1979 for Midnight Express at the age of thirty-three. It’s a risky, mercurial game, with what seems like hundreds of moving parts, outsized egos, and constant uncertainty, even during filming. It was in this state of mind that he enlisted in the Army as an infantryman and returned to Vietnam, this time to take part in the war of his generation.įor readers who don’t know much about how movies are made, and I count myself among them, Chasing the Light is a fascinating peek into the labyrinthe of scripts, producers, studio gatekeepers, directors, and the financiers who put up the money. When the manuscript was rejected, Stone felt like a failure, as if he was worthless and his life was over. He finished this autobiographical novel in New York City and through his father’s connections sent it off to several publishers. For the first time in his young life Stone felt that he existed as a unique individual, at least on paper. After a brief stint in the merchant marine, Stone traveled to Mexico where he holed up in a hotel room and wrote about his recent experiences, a glorious release of all the pent-up emotions he was feeling. The broad outlines came into focus when he spent a year in Vietnam teaching english to high school students. Along with his private school classmates, he watched black-and-white news coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy, only vaguely aware of how significantly the world, and America’s place in it, was about to change. Stone came of age in a time of great social upheaval, when the United States sat atop the world order militarily and economically. About this time Stone writes, “I’d have to become harder now, be on my own, not give in to grief or weakness or self-pity.” He was off at boarding school in Pennsylvania in 1962 when he learned that his parents were getting a divorce.

He loved his parents, but often found himself caught between them. Stone’s upbringing in New York City was privileged, and emotionally complicated. It was many years before Stone came to know his father, and more beyond that to feel that he had made his father proud. Oliver Stone was an only child, the product of a whirlwind romance between his father, a US Army officer who served under General Dwight Eisenhower, and a French woman of no family standing or wealth.

Chasing The Light by Oliver Stone