Word: viets
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Welcome to the old nightmare -- the one neither Stone nor the 2.7 million American soldiers who went to Viet Nam can shake. Welcome back to the war that, just 20 years ago, turned America schizophrenic. Suddenly we were a nation split between left and right, black and white, hip and square, mothers and fathers, parents and children. For a nation whose war history had read like a John Wayne war movie -- where good guys finish first by being tough and playing fair -- the polarization was soul-souring. Americans were fighting themselves, and both sides lost...
Platoon pushes the metaphor further, thousands of miles away from the "world," into the combat zones of Nam. Platoon says that American soldiers -- the young men we sent there to do our righteous dirty work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center...
...astronaut. Martin Scorsese was my first teacher. He was like a mad scientist, with hair down to here. He was someone on an equal wave of nuttiness. And he helped channel the rage in me." Stone made a short film for Scorsese's class called Last Year in Viet Nam, about a vet wandering the New York streets; in another, Michael and Marie, Oliver's father played the victim. "Oliver was alienated, sarcastic and brooding," says his film-school friend Stanley Weiser, who is collaborating with Stone on a script about Wall Street crime. "A real macho man who carried...
...tall ships clogged New York harbor, Stone sat down and wrote Platoon. "Essentially what I wanted to say was, Remember. Just remember what that war was. Remember what war is. This is it. I wanted to make a document of this forgotten pocket of time. I felt Viet Nam was omitted from history books. Like a battle I fought in during the war: a lot of people got hurt that day, and it wasn't even listed as a battle by the Army, as if they didn't want to admit the casualties we suffered. The script I wrote...
...spellbinding harangues. His mind and moral sense are too restless to relax in the glow of celebrity and the promise of statuettes. But for the moment, Oliver Stone has found for himself the one plot twist he would never have put in Platoon: a happy ending to his Viet Nam nightmare...