Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Right now Stone is Hollywood's hot new guy. He is even entertaining the improbable idea of a Platoon TV series. But don't expect Stone to direct Indiana Jones III. Says Stanley Weiser: "Oliver's been around the block ten times and won't be seduced by money. He's not an easy lay." Stone and his second wife, Elizabeth, 37, look the family-album picture of swank domesticity in their Santa Monica home. They swore off drugs a few years ago, and now seem addicted only to each other and their little son Sean. "Success and Sean have...
Until Dec. 19, though, when Platoon opened, Hollywood had thought the picture a matter of indifference. It had taken Stone ten hungry years to get the project going. "For two years in the late '70s," says Producer Martin Bregman, "I banged on every door in California to get it done, but at that time Viet Nam was still a no-no." Tom Berenger, the film's showcase psychopath, imagines that "it must have made Stone feel like an old man, carrying the project around for so long. He said it broke his heart." Then something interesting happened: people went...
With its critical, popular and insider acclaim swelling, Platoon began to shoulder its way toward the front rank of Oscar favorites. By now it would have to be counted as the front runner, and Hollywood is furrowing its back with self-congratulatory pats for making this big bold message movie. To Stone, Hollywood's claim of paternity for Platoon must seem a rich joke. He and Hollywood both know that Platoon -- like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Boys in Company C, The Killing Fields and nearly all the serious movies about the war in Southeast Asia -- secured its major...
...there: David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times and, in The Best and the Brightest, documented two Administrations' slides into the Big Muddy. "Platoon is the first real Viet Nam film," Halberstam proclaims, "and one of the great war movies of all time. The other Hollywood Viet Nam films have been a rape of history. But Platoon is historically and politically accurate. It understands something that the architects of the war never did: how the foliage, the thickness of the jungle, negated U.S. technological superiority. You can see how the forest sucks in American soldiers; they...
...Hollywood (and not just Hollywood) refused to see that Viet Nam was different. All the old givens -- beau geste, military master plans, unswerving belief in the officer class -- were fatally irrelevant to a guerrilla war. Forget the World War II narrative line of tanks and tactics, which moved with the ponderous sweep of a Golden Age Hollywood plot. Viet Nam, set in jungles without beginning or end, was a flash of episodic, aleatory explosions; it was modernism brought to war. And a new kind of war demanded a new look at the war-movie genre. Platoon fills the bill...