Word: stones
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Unlike today's breed of safe-bet directors, Stone is the guy who tries things. He works fast and hard: U Turn, the dark, barking melodrama that opens this week, is his 11th feature in 11 years. He godfathers other films (The People vs. Larry Flint, The Joy Luck Club), dabbles in TV (Wild Palms), keeps stoking his legend. A Child's Night Dream should do that: it's a big, toxic dose of undiluted Oliver. But don't take his word for him. Check out Jane Hamsher's funny, true-sounding Killer Instinct (Broadway Books; 288 pages; $25), about...
...Stone calls U Turn a scorpions-in-a-bucket movie; deadly critters snap at one another until only the strongest (or the top billed) survives. It also honors the familiar tropes of hombre films, from the requisite convenience-store holdup and multiple murder to a strident Ennio Morricone score (with the banshee harmonica from his Sergio Leone westerns). There's also a waitress named Flo. Stone swathes all this menace in his patented white-hot style: slo-mo, echoing voices, flashbacks that flick like lightning, cartoon sound effects (when the Mustang is mentioned, you'll hear a horse whinny...
What's missing in U Turn is a window into Stone's '60s obsession, which begat his Vietnam trilogy, The Doors and JFK. But all that and more are in A Child's Night Dream, an autobiographical fantasy written in 1966-67. The book's Oliver follows the road of Stone's busy young life and often guns into the overdrive of desire (a meeting with Julie Christie) and horror (vivid images of a war he had not yet fought in). With punch-drunk punctuation and verbs-a-poppin' prose, Stone imitates Joyce, Kerouac, Mailer...
...guess what? The kid can write. Like Jackson Pollock with a paint tube, Stone squeezes the pus and purple out of his gaudy youth. The book is like a huge scenario from some gifted, twisted lad--Oliver Stone, age 20--that the older Stone chopped down and published. But the two are eerie twins. They share the need to go too far, to push the vocabulary of words and pictures. The young Stone even envisions himself in the '90s, a zillionaire aswirl in controversy. "Of course many rumors abounded about me, mostly sinister...
That's our Oliver. He often works out on the Paranoio-Flex, sculpting suspicions, buffing his grudges, until he thinks the whole world is out to get him. That's just one reason Stone, again alone among modern filmmakers, is a figure waiting to be captured in a terrific novel. The funny thing is that maybe he did it himself, 30 years ago today...