Chasing The Light

There have been many bios written on Oliver Stone over the years. I have read just about all there is to read on his work and life including his scripts and interviews. I personally enjoyed A Childs Night Dream which he wrote before his tour in Vietnam at age 19 — the novel was completed after Stone taught in Vietnam before his military tour began in 1967.

I also have liked his co-authored books and documentaries. He is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time and a gifted writer first and foremost. Platoon is a masterpiece (I once debated this with the late film director, Ted Post, who was sure Go Tell the Spartans was).

The 80s in my opinion was one of the worst decades in filmmaking. Rom-Com BS, e.g. Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Footloose Bad hair, bad movies bad music. But not Oliver Stone. His films were one of the few saving graces of the 80s. Visceral and provocative. Scarface and Wall Street say no more. Stones dialogue was quoteworthy and parroted worldwide, I was working in a bookstore when I came out to Los Angeles and everybody was buying the Art of War by Sun Tzu because Stone referenced it in Wall Street. Guys were posturing Gordon Gekko — some still do to this day. Oliver Stone created iconic characters and his original voice was influential most of all.

It is a fact, filmmaking is a Sisyphean task rife with disappointment, struggle, and small windows of opportunities as Stone points out in his Introduction, that he has been chasing the light his whole life grabbing that last shot before darkness sets in.

Chasing the Light is illuminating for any writer, director, or fan of Stones work. From the trenches of Vietnam to the trenches of Hollywood, no one lives to tell better than Oliver Stone. His references and perspectives are refreshing and honest.

He remains an inspiration.

Thank you Oliver for the gifts you have given us as an audience. Your work is important and will stand the test of time.

A caveat: This book does not cover all of Stones work.

I confess to being a major Oliver Stone fan; a devotee of his DVD commentaries, interviews and the two excellent biographies which have been released (by James Riordan and Matt Zoller Seitz, respectively). Due to that, I went into this memoir unsure that I would learn anything new about the man. I’m pleased to say that I was wrong, and that this is a true literary work rather than the typical star-kissed Hollywood memoir. To paraphrase one critic, Oliver Stone is the rare director who lived actual adventures rather than just watching adventure movies. It’s telling that this book chronicles only his first forty years – if it covered his entire life it would probably run about a thousand pages.
In many ways, this account of the first half of Stone’s life is a roller coaster of trauma and recovery. The first earthquake was his parents’ abrupt and traumatic divorce, which caused the figurative and literal loss of his home. It also caused the loss of his mother at age 15: she didn’t die, but did abruptly abandon him and leave his life for several years. All of that contributed to Stone wandering a wilderness of depression as a teenager: so severe that, at one point, he became suicidal. Instead, he dropped out of college to become a high school teacher in Vietnam and a merchant marine, wandered Asia, the ocean and Mexico, then wrote a novel. After he dropped out of college for the second time and his novel was rejected, a despondent Oliver Stone felt he had no future and took refuge (as manykids have over the decades) inthe military.
Stone is the only major director who is also a combat veteran and the chapters on what he saw and experienced during the Vietnam War are haunting. He writes cinematically of the sights and sounds and smells of war – as a reader, one can tell that the vividness of the tragedy has never left him. His mental state after the war (what we now know as PTSD) is also harrowing. As a writer, Stoneis simultaneously able to recollect his emotional state at the time while also taking pity in what such a young person had to endure.(I didn’t even mention the stint in prison or the drug addiction!)
Reading his own words, I did learn new things. For example, while James Riordan’s 1995 biography shared that Elizabeth and Oliver Stone suffered several miscarriages and a devastating stillbirth in the years after Platoon, in thismemoir Stone reveals his long struggle with infertility actually goes back to his first marriage. Told in his early twenties that he would never have children, he lived for years with the completely valid suspicion that he was robbed of parenthood due to Agent Orange exposure. Later, he writes of the expensive treatments and heartbreaks which occurred while he and his second wife, Elizabeth, struggled to get pregnant. That makes Stone’s awe when his first child is born all the more precious. He writes about his son Sean with a tenderness and love reserved for no one else,and he’s clearly a more tactile and affectionate father than his own ever was.
As to the films, Stone spends considerable time not just on the production, but is also startlingly honest about before and after. Pre-production is a slog of location scouting, negotiating contracts and hiring crew. Post-production is a whirling tornado: he explains the intricacies of sound mixing, the headaches of various printquality (back in the pre-digital days), endless screenings with executives, the promotional campaign, waiting for and dissecting the critics’ reviews, etc. Above all, the cloud that hangs over everything is money. Every cent in the budgets for films like Salvador was stretched to its breaking point. And if you’ve ever wanted to know what the personal financials of a major filmmaker were like in the 1980’s, this book is for you. Stone not only flat out states his fees for various projects and his relationships with various agents, but even informs the reader at various points of his personal monthly budget and carrying costs. Perhaps the trades at the time covered Stone’s purchase of a million dollar mansion after the success of Platoon – now we know it came with a massive mortgageand he and his wife were living beyond their means. (That’s Hollywood, baby!)
The sheer volume of nitty-gritty detail about the movie-making process here is a contrast to, say, Woody Allen’s memoir, where mentions of his films are tossed aside and the worst thing that happens on a film set is that someone got the wrong lunch order. Woody, of course, made different types of movies, but it’s more exciting to read about productions plagued with screaming arguments, snake bites, and assassinations (Salvador advisor Ricardo Cienfuegos) than whatever happened on Shadows and Fog.
Overall, this is a resplendent memoir which will surprise anyone who still believes in the image of Oliver Stone as a hard-partying, macho conspiracy theorist. He reveals himself in this book to be ambitious and talented, of course, but also vulnerable, raw, traumatized and at times self-punishing and emotionally naked. The only negative is that I was left wanting more: why did his marriage to Elizabeth collapse, what was the birth of his second son and his daughter like, what about Talk Radio, JFK, Natural Born Killers, etc.? Now that he’s semi-retired from films, I hope he indulges himself as the naturally talented writer he is.

Novel. Fresh. Bold. Reading about Oliver’s parents is an unexpected treat, especially his warm sensuous European mother. His parents’ real WWII romance in occupied Paris is a tale that will increasingly fall out of memory and could be a movie in itself. Oliver, maybe you will make it as a richly characterized independent movie?

I grew up watching Oliver’s exciting movies with my family, and I have seen many distracted teenagers and college students sitting glued and riveted to every moment of Midnight Express. Midnight Express hit the world like a shaft of lightning in 1978 and transcends its genre by considerable miles. I would rank Midnight Express among the best ten or twenty movies ever made for sheer storytelling and excitement. He never looked back. Between 1983 and 1993 he had Platoon, Scarface, Year of the Dragon, Wall Street, Born on the 4th of July, JFK. Even lesser movies like the Doors and Natural Born Killers had the landmark adrenaline and headlong operatic storytelling. They also had perfectly placed music. Who could forget the Talking Heads’s “This Must be the Place” when Bud Fox is rocking it in “Wall Street”? Stone also has one other novel, “A Child’s Night Dream,” a youthful, searing expression of intense feeling that is basically a first draft of “Chasing the Light.”

I would also point out my personal favorite movie, “Alexander” (2004) a potent portrait of Alexander the Great. It is much better than anything you have seen by David Lean. Oliver digs in; never lets go. His great insight and understanding of Alexander’s personality are clear. The critics flat out didn’t get it. I think they were jealous because the movie is so good. If the critics don’t get it that could mean the movie is a masterpiece. It is Stone’s masterpiece. My favorite screenwriter and director of all time.

Ill have to admit, I was slightly disappointed when I learned that Oliver Stones autobiographical Chasing the Light only covered his life up to his breakthrough success with Platoon. He made several great films after that, including some of the most fascinating and controversial of that generation: Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. What hes given us here, though, feels neither truncated nor incomplete. Stone is interested in the forces that shaped him as a person and an artist, as well as the seeds of his mad ambition, which partly manifested themselves in his tempestuous filmmaking experiences. Its a self-portrait: raw, emotional, brutally honest. Here we have the antithesis of the cliched shallow, ego-stroking Hollywood autobiography, as the writer-director lays bare his flaws and failures alongside his hard-fought victories.

From a happy, sheltered upbringing in New Yorks Upper East Side his stoic Jewish father worked on Wall Street, his vivacious French mother courted the Bohemian society to his parents crushing divorce, on to his nomadic wanderings around South-East Asia, which led to him volunteering to fight in Vietnam, Stones early journey is joyful, sad, and a whirlwind of broken dreams and stirring passions. The way he describes himself, his spiral into aimlessness, we can see the adversities accumulate, forces that could either break a young man or forge him into something vital. It took time, heartbreaks, perseverance, and help along the way for him to find his personal spark in the creative process and fan it into screenplays that would blaze with his particular vision.

Even after hed gained his foothold in Hollywood, he had to fight an uphill, Sisyphean battle every time, often to no avail. And the successes along the way, like Midnight Express and Scarface, inflicted wounds, both professionally and personally, that he carried into future projects. Lessons learned the hard way. At times Stone was his own worst enemy, by his own admission. Hubris, cocaine, naivety, arrogance, bad choices: his honesty is welcome, his self-analysis illuminating. I knew, by reputation, that he could be abrasive, but I didnt realise how fragile his confidence could be. Hes a complicated guy, no question, and to his credit he digs deep to try to grapple with those contradictory forces.

Greek mythology has clearly had a profound influence on him. The way he approaches this literary self-portrait reminds me of his treatment of Alexander the Great firstly, identify the forces that shaped what he would become, and then weave them throughout his life story, sometimes in non-linear fashion, with flashbacks, asides, and stream-of-consciousness passages. He never loses sight of those formative influences his parents, their divorce, mythology, movies, combat, politics, etc. and its a pleasure to see him address them at the various stages of his arduous climb to the top. Salvador and Platoon were the double-whammy that thrust him to the front ranks of American filmmakers in the mid-eighties. Whats clear from his behind-the-scenes accounts of those productions (and indeed the crazy journeys of the projects to production) is that he earned every bit of his success.

Chasing the Light is a riveting read. Theres rarely a dull page in this frank, fiercely self-aware autobiography. Ive been a fan of Oliver Stones work for years, both as a writer and director, and this book has only bolstered my appreciation. Its a scintillating chronicle of an artists almost Homeric struggle to discover, and eventually to blaze onto the screen, his own maverick, personal vision.

Highly recommended.

One thing is certain. I dont think there is a single American filmmaker working today who could write a book half as good as this. Stone has an erudition, a cultural bandwidth and a self-awareness that comes across on every page. The son of a successful Jewish businessman and a French mother, he was brought up bilingual, bi-national and privileged. Not many directors could devote several pages to Homer these days or discuss a montage in Pierrot le Fou. Maybe only Paul Schrader could do that.

Chasing the Light (great title) covers his childhood, his parents divorce, his tours of duty in Vietnam, his alienation from almost everything, his anarchism, his drug addiction, his paranoia, his marriages, his failures and successes. After Vietnam, where he got wounded and saw the man he killed, he lived frugally and wrote feverishly like some beat poet, somehow ending up with Robert Bolt as his mentor. Bolt taught him the practicalities of screenwriting and he also got Stone a serious agent. Consequently, his script for Platoon made the rounds and while no one wanted to make it, everyone recognised Stones talent as a writer – his script for Midnight Express earned him his first Oscar. He was suddenly an A-lister. There were scripts for Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, De Palma’s Scarface and Cimino’s Year of the Dragon.

Stone -who seemed to be stoned a lot of the time – covers all this with unflinching honesty. Until the raw and thrilling Salvador, the combative, opinionated and iconoclastic director was always just an inch away from rejection by the Hollywood establishment. But the book has an inevitable trajectory, running at a canter towards his Oscar-winning triumph with Platoon.

One hopes for a second volume.

Galaxyaudiobook Member Benefit

- Able to comment

- List watched audiobooks

- List favorite audiobooks

- Bookmark will only available for Galaxyaudiobook member