The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (400 page)

Then, after another absence, he did
Born to Be Sold
(81, Burt Brinckerhoff) for TV;
Wrong Is Right
(82, Richard Brooks); he codirected
Human Highway
(82) with Neil Young; and he went to Nicaragua to make
Alsino y El Condor
(83, Miguel Littin). Then in 1984, he had a real part in the forlorn
Dune
(David Lynch) and unexpected attention as the decent, steady brother in
Paris, Texas
(84, Wim Wenders). That picture did well enough in America to begin to ease away his freaky reputation. He was back to the mainstream.

He was in
The Legend of Billie Jean
(85, Matthew Robbins);
To Live and Die in L.A
. (85, William Friedkin); uncanny, terrifying, and wonderful in the best scenes from
Blue Velvet
(86, David Lynch);
Gardens of Stone
(87, Francis Ford Coppola);
Beverly Hills Cop 2
(87, Tony Scott);
Buying Time
(88, Mitchell Gabourie); delicious as Howard Hughes in
Tucker
(88, Coppola); broad and funny as a camp don in
Married to the Mob
(88, Jonathan Demme)—he was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar;
The Blue Iguana
(88, John Lafia);
Limit Up
(89, Richard Martini);
Backtrack
(90, Hopper);
Sandino
(90, Littin);
Son of the Morning Star
(91, Mike Robe); and making the most of morsels in
The Player
(92, Robert Altman).

In recent years, he has done a lot of TV as well as
Friends and Enemies
(92, Andrew Frank);
Chasers
(94, Hopper); the father in
Madonna: Innocence Lost
(94, Bradford May);
Naked Souls
(95, Lyndon Chubbuck);
Mr. Wrong
(96, Nick Castle);
Unabomber: The True Story
(96, Jon Purdy);
Midnight Blue
(96, Skott Snider);
The Last Resort
(97, Lyman Dayton);
Air Force One
(97, Wolfgang Petersen);
The Rainmaker
(97, Coppola);
The Shadow Men
(97, Timothy Bond);
Restraining Order
(99, Lee H. Katzin);
The Venice Project
(99, Robert Dornhelm);
Water Damage
(99, Murray Battle);
Rites of Passage
(99, Victor Salva);
In Pursuit
(00, Peter Pistor);
The Quickie
(01, Sergei Bodrov);
Buffalo Soldiers
(01, Gregor Jordan);
Inferno
(01, Dusty Nelson);
The Manchurian Candidate
(04, Demme);
The Deal
(06, Bryan Goeres).

Andrew L. Stone
(1902–99), b. Oakland, California
1927:
The Elegy
. 1928:
Dreary House; Liebenstraum
. 1930:
Sombras de Gloria
. 1932:
Hell’s Headquarters
. 1937:
The Girl Said No
. 1938:
Stolen Heaven; Say It in French; There’s Magic in Music
. 1939:
The Great Victor Herbert
. 1941:
The HardBoiled Canary
. 1943:
Stormy Weather; Hi, Diddle Diddle
. 1944:
Sensations of 1945
. 1945:
Bedside Manner
. 1946:
The Bachelor’s Daughter
. 1947:
Fun on a Weekend
. 1950:
Highway 301
. 1952:
Confidence Girl; The Steel Trap
. 1953:
A Blueprint for Murder
. 1955:
The Night Holds Terror
. 1956:
Julie
. 1958:
Cry Terror; The Decks Ran Red
. 1960:
The Last Voyage
. 1961:
Ring of Fire
. 1962:
The Password Is Courage
. 1963:
Never Put It in Writing
. 1965:
The Secret of My Success
. 1970:
Song of Norway
. 1972:
The Great Waltz
. One wet Saturday afternoon in the early seventies, when rain had disappointed the author and his three children of the Wimbledon finals, TV offered as a substitute
The Last Voyage
. Initial enthusiasm could not have been lower. And yet within fifteen minutes the assembly were chewing furniture in anxiety, quite as concentrated as we were to be next day by Stan Smith and Nastase.

Stone’s best movies are devoid of thematic interest; they are unashamed manipulations of tension. And on that basis, everything from
The Steel Trap
to
The Last Voyage
is totally compelling. Stone underlined the authenticity of his films by shooting on location whenever possible, by exposing actors and crew to real dangers, and by buying old trains, boats, and planes to blow up or sink for finales. In fact, this effort is peripheral to the ruthless exclusion of all but plot from his films: the lip-smacking, traditional crosscutting of his wife-editor, Virginia; a vivid eye for cliffhanging imagery—e.g., an attempted rescue (in
The Last Voyage
) by Robert Stack of his daughter from a shattered cabin.

Invariably, he liked to present “ordinary” people with a sudden, shattering emergency that involves a race against time. Thus
Julie
has Doris Day piloting a plane for the first time in her life, and in
Cry Terror
James Mason is forced to serve the interests of a gang comprising Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, and Angie Dickinson. The comparison with Hitchcock is instructive. For, despite Hitchcock’s reputation for suspense, the Stone films are often technically purer. However, they are infinitely inferior because they are interested in that technique alone. The lesson by implication is that, whatever his claims, Hitch is concerned with much more than the mechanics of excitement.

Stone joined Universal in 1918 and he learned his craft, not surprisingly, on serials at Paramount. He formed Andrew Stone Productions in 1943, and it is to be emphasized that his early films were musicals,
Stormy Weather
being one of the first “Negro” films and offering Lena Horne with the title song. That earlier taste revived in
Song of Norway
and
The Great Waltz
. The explanation of such a contrast in material is simply that Stone is not an artist and possibly that Virginia was the brains behind the cliffhangers (they separated, it seems, between
Song of Norway
and
The Great Waltz
). But that still leaves the engaging comedy of
The Password Is Courage
as an aside from so much urgency, and a film that blithely uses English villages as occupied Germany and encourages flagrant German stereotypes.

Stone invented “disaster” pictures before the world was complacent. Andrew Sarris has the last word: “One sobering deduction: If the Stones had made
On the Beach
, none of us would be around now to review it.”

Oliver Stone
, b. New York, 1946
1974:
Seizure
. 1981:
The Hand
. 1986:
Salvador; Platoon
. 1987:
Wall Street
. 1988:
Talk Radio
. 1989:
Born on the Fourth of July
. 1991:
The Doors; JFK
. 1993:
Heaven and Earth
. 1994:
Natural Born Killers
. 1995:
Nixon
. 1997:
U Turn
. 1999:
Any Given Sunday
. 2003:
Comandante
(d);
Persona Non Grata
(d). 2004:
Alexander
. 2006:
World Trade Center
. 2008:
W
. 2009:
South of the Border
(d). 2010:
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
.

The child of a Jewish stockbroker and a French Catholic woman, Stone carries himself in the rather breathless, tireless way of someone who believes he contains multitudes. It is easy to scorn him, for he can be very bad and very foolish. Still, he is an example of the confidence that believes it can turn complex ideas and problems into crowd-pleasing movies. There is little point in having a popular American film business without that attempt. Of course, Otto Preminger did it all thirty years ago with more taste and intelligence. But Stone’s faults are part of his energy, and in
Salvador
and
Platoon
that force achieves searing popular drama.

Even then, Stone has severe limits. He has no sense of humor and startlingly little use for women: just think of Daryl Hannah in
Wall Street
, Meg Foster in
Born on the Fourth of July
, and Sissy Spacek in
JFK
. Indeed, he follows the dangerous fallacy that the important, controversial issues of the day are made for serious men alone. It is some consolation that he has drawn, or punched, such very good work from James Woods, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, and Tom Cruise. One cannot add Kevin Costner to that list, though one of the few interesting parts of
JFK
was its glimpse of a lurid gay underworld, fleshed out by Joe Pesci, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kevin Bacon.

Stone went to good boarding schools and then dropped out of Yale. He taught school in Saigon, worked as a merchant seaman, and then volunteered for the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, where he got a bronze star and a purple heart. He then entered New York University and took film classes—with Scorsese as one of his teachers. (He became a taxi driver who was writing screenplays.) His script for
Midnight Express
(78, Alan Parker) won an Oscar, and he went on to write, or cowrite,
Conan the Barbarian
(82, John Milius);
Scarface
(83, Brian De Palma);
Year of the Dragon
(85, Michael Cimino);
Eight Million Ways to Die
(86, Hal Ashby); and
Evita
(96, Alan Parker)—if you can find a script.

In that work, he displayed a rare facility for unbridled male arrogance and situations of intense fear. Even before
Platoon
, he was fascinated by male loyalty, honor, and betrayal, and he is a victim of the attractive fallacy that authoritarian villains can be glamorous.

As a director, he is a ringmaster of spectacle, editing, performance, and pungent dialogue—even in the travesty of
JFK
, the screen was often alive with his craft.
Salvador
seemed very novel when it came out, and
Platoon
fully deserved its reputation as the proper American admission of pain over Vietnam. Moreover, it had a command that reminded one of the Norman Mailer of
The Naked and the Dead
.

Nothing since has been as good.
Wall Street
is a showcase for Michael Douglas, but it never makes financial dealing clear and so it turns into comic book.
Talk Radio
was utterly misanthropic, and it seemed as if Stone had lost interest and drive before the end.
Born on the Fourth of July
was vivid and moving, but Stone now seemed not just immersed but lost in the trauma of the 1960s.

The Doors
was wretched, despite a brave performance from Val Kilmer.
JFK
, in this writer’s view, is loony irresponsibility of a kind that illequips its maker to defend the claims of history. I do not approve the Warren Commission or have a settled mind about what happened in Dallas that day in November 1963. But I fear the kind of movie power in the service of a reckless paranoia that can never be eased or satisfied. Yes, the film surely “affected public opinion” and helped liberate all the files. But Congress, please—insist that Oliver Stone be the one to read them all and make a decent report. Better that task than more abominations like
Heaven and Earth
.

By the midnineties, there were signs that Stone’s energy was turning sour and dark. Was he ill, depressed, or under some influence? Had paranoia taken him over?
Nixon
was a haunting picture, hideously exaggerated (who needs to exaggerate Nixon?), but full of a compassion for madness, and severely impeded by Anthony Hopkins’s helpless competition with all the miles of Nixon on film.
U Turn
was like a fever dream. But then
Any Given Sunday
was silly, macho, yet suffused with a love of what movies can do. Stone is down now, and he may have dug his own hole.

All of that said, there was no rationale to
Alexander
, while
W
was a travesty of the old Stone. But
Platoon
is still a beautiful agony.

Sharon Stone
,
see
Frances Farmer

Tom Stoppard
(Tomas Straussler), b. Zlín, Czechoslovakia, 1937
It happens that I wrote this piece immediately after doing the entry on Clifford Odets. Never mind any comparison between the two as dramatists. Odets seems to me a man and writer who was obsessed with movies and acting out the part of himself; Stoppard, no matter his Oscar for screenwriting—for
Shakespeare in Love
(98, John Madden)—his having directed one film,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
(90), and his several screenplays, seems to me essentially distant from the film business. He is deeply concerned with language, levels of reality, and theatrical enactment. He is far from charmless himself, yet he seems to have no vested interest in being “Tom Stoppard.”

Of course, things could change. His work on
Shakespeare in Love
was likely vital to that film’s success, and it did seem as if the wordsmith had at last become intrigued with the medium. On the other hand, Stoppard is now older than Odets was when he died. And whereas much of Odets’s later voice was given over to lamentations over what he had missed, Stoppard is the steady author of his own plays.

As a screenwriter, he has also worked on
The Romantic Englishwoman
(75, Joseph Losey); from Nabokov,
Despair
(78, Rainer Werner Fassbinder); from Graham Greene,
The Human Factor
(79, Otto Preminger);
Brazil
(85, Terry Gilliam); from J. G. Ballard,
Empire of the Sun
(87, Steven Spielberg), his most interesting film;
The Russia House
(90, Fred Schepisi);
Billy Bathgate
(91, Robert Benton); for TV,
Poodle Springs
(98, Bob Rafelson);
Vatel
(00, Roland Joffé);
Enigma
(01, Michael Apted). He did a screenplay for
The Golden Compass
, but it was rejected.