Playboy Interview: Oliver Stone

Two Olivers made news last year: One, a gap-toothed lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines, became a temporary TV folk hero as he explained how he had tried to vindicate the "noble cause," by implication, of American intervention in Vietnam by promoting a winnable war against the Communists of Nicaragua. The other Oliver, a gap-toothed screenwriter and movie director, walked away with the year's best-picture Oscar for a landmark movie that preached the opposite point of view: that Vietnam was a tragic folly and that Central America could become the next generation's debacle.

It's a good bet that the second Oliver, the showbiz Oliver, will end up winning more hearts and minds than the military Oliver. For Oliver Stone, 41-year-old Yale dropout, former GI, doper, angry rebel and scourge of Hollywood, is now one of the true powers that be, with a body of work that has reflected--and perhaps affected--his generation's obsessions: war, politics, drugs, money.

Indeed, the fact that Stone went directly from his cathartic vision of the Vietnam war in "Platoon" to an up-to-the-minute drama on greed in America, "Wall Street," says something about his sense of symbolism and timing. Or about his luck.

It was only after ten years of excuses, postponements, delays and rejections from every major studio in Hollywood that Stone, a journeyman screenwriter, finally got his independently produced, low-budget, no-stars Vietnam movie on the screen. The result was a film that has grossed $138,000,000 and garnered four Oscars--including best picture and best director. For a time, "Platoon" became a kind of movable Vietnam memorial as men wearing fatigues wept in movie theaters over the film's closing credits. Not a small part of its appeal was the fact that it was embraced both by veterans who felt that their agony had gone unappreciated and by war resisters who felt that the film captured, definitively, the waste that was Vietnam.

The portrayal of U.S. soldiers in Stone's script as emotionally volatile youngsters who drank, smoked dope and occasionally fragged their officers so unnerved the Pentagon that it refused to offer any technical assistance in the shooting of "Platoon." From his right flank, Stone was barraged by columnists such as John Podhoretz, who damned the film for being "one of the most repellent movies ever made in this country. "But after a decade of pious, ineffective lip service from both left and right about the need to heal the wounds of Vietnam, "Platoon," emerged as a hardy curative. "Platoon," the picture, became, in the words of Time, "Platoon' the Phenomenon."

Back in Hollywood, the topic of Vietnam--a long-standing taboo in studio corridors--suddenly became chic. "Platoon" was followed by a parade of Vietnam-genre movies: "Full Metal Jacket," "Gardens of Stone," "The Hanoi Hilton" and "Hamburger Hill." Studio executives and producers who for the past five years had wanted to talk only about teen comedies and middle-of-the-road spoofs now wanted projects with "social significance."

However belated his world-wide fame, Stone has been known to Hollywood insiders for a long time. The movies he has written or on which he has collaborated have nearly all been visceral, noisy, controversial. In 1978, his screenplay "Midnight Express," about an American in the hellish world of a Turkish prison, won a screenwriting Oscar and launched his career--which nose-dived three years later with the flop of his second directorial effort, a gimmicky movie about a monster hand called, well, "The Hand. "Stone rehabilitated his career slowly, painfully, by writing and collaborating with a group of Hollywood's quirkier, more demanding directors: John Milius, of 'Conan the Barbarian"; Brian De Palma, of "Scarface" (a cult film today); Michael Cimino, of "Year of the Dragon"; and Hal Ashby, of "Eight Million Ways to Die."

Although it kept him busy, Stone's screenplay work drew mixed reviews, and he built up a reputation as a violence-obsessed xenophobe. Stories about his days as a druggie and carouser circulated freely. Although respected, he was considered a wild card, and it wasn't until he managed to turn "Salvador," his stinging film indictment of U.S. policy in Central America, into a small hit that Stone finally got financing for "Platoon" from a small independent company, Hemdale Film Corporation.

Stone went off to the Philippines with a relatively modest $5,000,000, shot the film with the Aquino revolution raging around his location, then came home with a classic. It was also on time and within budget.

His early personal history does not hint at the discipline or the toughness that were to become Stone's trademarks: The privileged son of a New York Jewish stockbroker and a French Catholic mother, Oliver had a comfortable, conservative childhood. He attended prep schools and entered Yale with the class of 1969; there, he was suddenly afflicted with the fear that he was on a "conveyer belt to business." Influenced by his reading--mainly Joseph Conrad--and the changing times, he quit Yale, bummed around the world and wound up teaching Catholic school in Saigon in 1965. More exotic travels followed, then more romantic reading, and in a desperate, suicidal state, he returned to Vietnam in 1967 and enlisted in the U.S. Infantry.

Stone began his combat tour a gung-ho patriot. "I believed in the John Wayne image of America," he says. He earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster. But he returned from Vietnam an embittered anarchist, landing in a San Diego jail on dope charges just ten days after his discharge. A failed marriage, stints as a cabdriver and training at the NYU film school matured him personally; the collapse of the Vietnam war and Watergate matured him politically. Ending his carousing, drug-taking, "sexually wild" days, Stone has settled into a posh Santa Monica home, a new marriage and domestic concerns with a three-year-old son, Sean.

To find out about the twists and turns in Stone's life, Playboy sent free-lance writer Mart Cooper (who co-conducted the "Playboy Interview" with Salvadoran president Josè Napoleon Duarte in November 1984) to talk with him during the filming of "Wall Street." Cooper's report:

"My first meeting with Stone was at his Santa Monica home--just hours before last spring's Academy Awards ceremony. 'I better win,' he said, grinning, 'or you guys won't publish this interview.' I assured him we were interested, win or lose. He immediately asked how I felt he had done on ABC's '20/20,' on which he had described the Pentagon's refusal to help in the filming of 'Platoon.'

"'I mean, the Army did come off as assholes, didn't they?' he asked.

"I didn't think he cared in the personal sense; it was a political question. Throughout our interview sessions, he would speak intensely, but he was monitoring each word, each turn of phrase as he spoke, always watching my face for hints of reaction. There was nothing personal or insecure about it--he had points to make and was looking for the best openings. His manner--broad, outward, forceful--is as potent as his films. But it seemed to me the way of a writer rather than a director. A writer with a mission. A writer with battles yet to win.

"We spoke through some of the location shooting of 'Wall Street,' in the summer, between setups that included actor Michael Douglas and Stone's own toddler, Sean. The atmosphere was frantic, but Stone seemed totally focused and inexhaustible. Snatching time in Southampton as the production hurtled on, he pushed the two of us as hard as he pushed his crew, making sure we covered all the ground we had agreed upon. There was no room for distraction, for ambiguity, for drift. He was directed.

"Finally, as the interview concluded, Stone's inborn skepticism surfaced. Perhaps it was the cynicism he had acquired after ten years of betrayal and rejection in Hollywood.

He pulled off the lapel mike and said gruffly, 'Hell, you guys'll probably concentrate on all the stuff that's not important. Then you'll cut out the politics.'"

[Q] Playboy:Not a bad year for Oliver Stone--from your four Oscars for Platoon to the release of Wall Street. For a guy who couldn't get a directing job for ten years, life has certainly changed.

[A] Stone:I feel like the beggar who gets invited to the party but who always keeps a wary eye on the back door. [Laughs] I'm a bit like the Nick Nolte character in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Kind of like I'm not quite sure I'm supposed to be at this party. From ugly duckling to Cinderella.

[Q] Playboy:And do you feel a sense of getting even, considering all those people who turned down Platoon?

[A] Stone:No, the turnaround was so enormous it forgives all the noes and the rejections. That's the way the game goes in Los Angeles. What are you going to do? An asshole who hated you and blackballed you at some studio two years ago comes up to you and says you're a genius all of a sudden--you've got to laugh.

But, sure, there are a number of phone calls I haven't been returning lately. There is a certain satisfaction there. As an old English proverb says, "Vengeance is a dish that should be eaten cold."

[Q] Playboy:We'll get back to Platoon and the hungry days of Midnight Express, Scarface and Salvador; but first, what about your newest film, Wall Street? The word is that it's another war movie--jungle warfare in Manhattan.

[A] Stone:It's not that black and white. It's a tough story, but it simply has business as a background. It's about greed and corruption amid these take-over wars we've all read about.

[Q] Playboy:Your timing is certainly interesting--the stock-market crash, the wild trading since then.

[A] Stone:Yeah, I'm not amazed or surprised. Our movie doesn't deal directly with the prospects of a crash, but it reflects the hyperinflation of the times--not just of the market but also of personal values and individual egos.

[Q] Playboy:And, as usual, the movie is controversial. Didn't The Wall Street Journal take off after it?

[A] Stone:The Wall Street Journal has had a strange attitude toward the movie. We asked to use the paper as a prop, but they turned us down. We also asked about shooting in their offices and they turned us down for that. But I'm not surprised. They are very conservative, and they're nervous. There's a scene in the movie where a journalist gets an inside tip and uses that information to get what he needs for his story.

[Q] Playboy:So, Platoon was denied technical assistance by the Pentagon; Salvador was denied assistance by the Salvadoran army; now The Wall Street Journal has turned you down--you're going to offend everyone, aren't you?

[A] Stone:Yeah. [Laughs] We even had Forbes complaining about our using Fortune in some scene--but that was over wanting to be included in the movie. We used both magazines as props.

[Q] Playboy:How much of Wall Street is a personal story? Weren't you originally groomed for a business career?

[A] Stone:Well, my father was a stockbroker, and there's a character in the movie, played by Hal Holbrook, who is the voice of an older Wall Street. The Wall Street that my father worked in, the one I grew up around, is wholly different from that of today. There were no computers; they didn't trade in such volume; there were fixed commissions.

My father did very well in the Fifties and the Sixties. Very well. Then he had a reversal of fortune and had very bad luck in the late Sixties, into the Seventies. He never recovered. It sort of belongs in a Theodore Dreiser novel. But he was a man who supported the ranks of the rich--until the end, when he began to question the whole economic fabric.

Anyway, I always wanted to do a business movie. Always. My father used to take me to movies and would often say, "Why do they make the businessman such a caricature?" Then he'd explain to me what business is. The business of America, as Calvin Coolidge said, is business. He made me aware of what serious business is.

My father believed that America's business brought peace to the world and built industry through science and research, and that capital is needed for that. But this idea seems to have been perverted to a large degree. I don't think my father would recognize America today.

Personally, I think most corporate raids are good. Not always, but most times.

[Q] Playboy:That may surprise people who think your politics are liberal to radical.

[A] Stone:Well, it's what I think about American business. Management's become so weak in this country, so flaccid. These guys are into their salaries, their golf trips, their fishing trips; there's so much fat and waste in these companies. A lot of these corporate raiders are guys who want to make the money, but in doing so, they clean up these companies. So corporate raiding is a reformation of the system. It's a natural correction.

[Q] Playboy:Do you take a similarly benign view of insider trading?

[A] Stone:I think insider trading goes on and has been going on for centuries, in all businesses. It goes on in movies; it goes on in taxicabs; everybody is always looking for an inside thing. It's the natural human impulse. How do you legislate against that? The Street has been doing a fairly strong job of policing itself. My father would say there was more inside tipping in the old days than there is now. Apparently, in this new paranoid environment in Wall Street, brokers don't even talk with one another about what they know, they're so scared.

[Q] Playboy:Then all the busts have been healthy?

[A] Stone:Probably, yes. I think the past two years have shaken it out a lot. My movie is based on 1985. It's important to note that. It could not have taken place in 1987.

[Q] Playboy:You know, it sounds a little as though rebel Stone is defending Wall Street interests.

[A] Stone:God. Here I go. This is a tough one. Look, you know something of what I've fought against in the U.S. establishment, but--McDonald's is good for the world, that's my opinion. Because I think war is the most dangerous thing. Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else--and can still do it with nuclear war. The prime objective we have in this era is to prevent war, to live in peace. The best way you can do that is to bring prosperity to as many people across the world as you can. And when you spread McDonald's all over the world, food becomes cheaper and more available to more people. Won't it be great when they can have McDonald's throughout Africa?

The Pax Americana, to me, is the dollar sign. It works. It may not be attractive. It's not pretty to see American businessmen running all around the world in plaid trousers, drinking whisky. But what they're doing makes sense. Now it's been picked up more intelligently by the Japanese, the British and the Germans. But it brings education, health and welfare to the rest of the world.

[Q] Playboy:That may be, as we've suggested, the last thing people expected to hear from the maker of Platoon. That movie was a landmark for the Vietnam generation, but don't most people assume that you were strongly against the American war eifort, against the establishment?

[A] Stone:No, I got as much mail from people who thought I was supportive of that war as from people who thought I was against it. That's part of the appeal of Platoon--and the controversy.

[Q] Playboy:But the criticism from the right was that you undermined the military, wasn't it?

[A] Stone:From right and left. Some right-wing vets--many officers, many Marines--said they never shot villagers in Vietnam, never took drugs, never killed other Servicemen, so the movie was unfair and unbalanced. But I don't agree. I think the movie portrays a wide range of behavior in Vietnam. I think it treats people as human beings. Some are weaker than others, some are stronger morally.

[Q] Playboy:What was the left's criticism?

[A] Stone:That Platoon doesn't show the causes of Vietnam, of "American imperialism." That it glorifies America's action in Vietnam instead of denouncing it.

[Q] Playboy:In fact, Platoon doesn't deal with the causes of Vietnam. Was it a conscious decision on your part to omit the war's political origins?

[A] Stone:I dealt with that in another screenplay that didn't get made--Born on the Fourth of July [Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic's memoir, excerpted in Playboy in July 1976]. That really broke me up, and at that point, in 1978, I felt that nothing serious would come out of Hollywood. I had written Platoon prior to that, in 1976, and it always dealt solely, relentlessly, with the jungle. I wrote it as a specific document of a time and a place.

In the real Vietnam, there was no political discussion, as far as I remember. And people had not really seen the true Vietnam combat grunt story. That bothered me. I hadn't seen it in history books. Certainly not in the Army official history books, which all glossed over Vietnam. It was going to be flushed down the toilet, and I was afraid I would end up being an old man like Sam Fuller, who did a World War Two movie, The Big Red One, that I don't think was effective because of the lapse in years.

[Q] Playboy:You've said Platoon was meant not to put down the U.S. military but to oppose a certain mythology. Which myths?

[A] Stone:It's a huge question. You have to start with the way we fought the war. There was no moral purpose for the war. There was no geographic objective. There was no defined goal. There was not even a declaration of war. There was no moral integrity in the way it was fought. It started with President Johnson's defrauding the Congress with the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. Then it deteriorated noticeably when Johnson refused to send anyone except the poor and the uneducated off to fight the war. Anybody in the middle or upper class was able to avoid the war by going to college or getting a psychiatric, discharge or numerous other things. This split the country from the git-go, because there's no question that had the middle class and the upper class gone to that war, their parents--the politicians and the businessmen--would have stopped it by 1966 or 1967, as soon as their little kids were getting killed.

[Q] Playboy:You weren't poor or uneducated when you went to Vietnam.

[A] Stone:I was the exception. They sent in these poor draftees, not in units but as single replacement troops, where there's no geographic objective and an attitude--which I found in '67--that everybody wanted only to survive. Everybody was counting days. I remember arriving--and I had exactly 360 days to go. I was the last guy on the totem pole. Survival, period. Forget about military heroism and all of that stuff you saw in the movies.

[Q] Playboy:Surely, the military establishment was aware of the attitude it had created among the draftees.

[A] Stone:I'm not so sure. The U.S. military had one of the sickest infrastructures I've ever seen in my lifetime, outside of Miami Beach and Las Vegas. What the United States did, in fact, was bring Miami Beach and Las Vegas to Vietnam! There were seven to eight noncombatants per combatant. They fought a different war from the rest of us. They ate steaks and lobsters every night and watched the bombs and mortars falling from a safe distance.

And it went beyond that. It went to a huge rip-off of American supplies and money. Many of the South Vietnamese we worked with were corrupt and saw in this a possibility to make a lot of money. And when we brought in our PXs, we brought our refrigerators, our cars, our TVs.

[Q] Playboy:And the black market.

[A] Stone:This was the basis of the black market. And people made a fortune. There was a huge scandal during the war in which the Sergeant Major of the Army was busted, along with about four other sergeants, for illegal kickbacks. And if you worked in the rear, it became Las Vegas. You went back to China Beach; you had the hookers; you had the bars; you had the slot machines. You had the good food. It wasn't a war, it was a scam.

[Q] Playboy:As a Yale dropout with well-off parents, you were the exception among the grunts. But campuses were hotbeds of protest and dissent. How could you not have known what you were getting into when you enlisted for combat?

[A] Stone:The fact was that in '65 at Yale, there was no political discussion about the war. That didn't come till a couple of years later. When I was there, I was faced with an overriding conformity of outlook in the Yale ambience. I felt as if I were on an assembly line turning out a mass product: highly educated technocrats who could make money in Wall Street or banking, or run corporate America.

[Q] Playboy:What were your politics when you were young?

[A] Stone:I was born a Cold War baby. When Sputnik was launched, I was shocked. It was like the end of the American dream for me. I supported Goldwater in 1964 while at the Hill School. I think I might have even joined the Young Republicans [laughs.] I hated liberals.

[Q] Playboy:And your father was a rich Republican.

[A] Stone:One out of two. Staunch Republican, yes. But after a lifetime of devotion to his Republican masters, you'd think he'd have walked away a rich man. He walked away poor at the end, and when he died, he was still working.

[Q] Playboy:So after dropping out of Yale, you went straight to Vietnam--but not in the military, right?

[A] Stone:Yes. I felt a yearning for something exotic. To break the gray wall of the Hill School, of Yale, of my family. It was an urge that came from novels and movies. From Zorba the Greek. Wow! From George Harrison's Indian sitar music. Conrad's book Lord Jim really shook me up. I saw the world of Conrad out there: jungle steamers, Malaysia, dealing with the Asiatics. And Lord Jim's redemption. I knew there was another reality out there that I was not experiencing, and if I didn't do something about it, it would be too late.

[Q] Playboy:How far out did that romantic pull take you?

[A] Stone:Far enough that I investigated the possibility of going to the Belgian Congo as a mercenary. Check that out! I was so far into it, I was sky-diving. In those days, I really needed to find something. I think it was really the equivalent of a nervous breakdown--an intellectual breakdown.

[Q] Playboy:How close did you come to becoming a mercenary?

[A] Stone:Very close. I made the contacts. It was adventure. It was Hemingway. It was Conrad. It was Audie Murphy and John Wayne. It was going to be my war, as World War Two had been my father's war.

[Q] Playboy:But, instead, you ended up in 1965 in Saigon for about a year and a half as a teacher. What were your first impressions of Vietnam?

[A] Stone:At that point, it was still a great adventure. I remember seeing Teddy Kennedy on the streets of Thu-dau-mo. Hey, we were going to win. We were the good guys. To see the First Infantry in all its full flash arriving in Saigon was a tremendous thrill. The Marines were already there. Guys were walking around with guns. There were shoot-outs in the street. It was like Dodge City. There was no curfew in those days. Hookers were everywhere. Bars were everywhere. I was 19 years old.

[Q] Playboy:The romantic paradise you dreamed about at Yale?

[A] Stone:Oh, yeah! It seemed as if I had finally found the war of my generation. In fact, I was terribly concerned that year, as a teacher, that the war was going to be over too quickly, that I would miss it.

[Q] Playboy:You went back to Yale, though, tried to write a novel and dropped out again. But then you went back to Vietnam, after you enlisted.

[A] Stone:Right. I was disgusted with myself. I believed my father's warnings that I was turning my back on humanity by leaving Yale. I was convinced I couldn't write. I gave up and just basically said, "I'm going back to Vietnam, and either I'm going to kill myself or I'm gonna experience life at the lowest possible level. If I survive, I'm going to be another person." So I joined the Army.

[Q] Playboy:In a suicidal frame of mind?

[A] Stone: Partly, yes. The failure of the book was really eating at me. I wanted anonymity. And the Army offered that.

[Q] Playboy:Did the Army live up to your expectations?

[A] Stone:I made sure it did. I was offered Officer Candidate School. I turned it down.

[Q] Playboy:Not many people do that.

[A] Stone:I did. I was really in a rush; I was afraid I would miss the war. All these generals were saying, "It's almost over" and all that shit. So I went the fastest way. I insisted on Infantry and I insisted they send me to Vietnam. Not Korea or Germany, but Vietnam. April '67, I got inducted at Fort Jackson; and, oddly enough, on September 14, 1967, the night before my 21st birthday, I got on the plane to Vietnam. I started smoking cigarettes on that fucking plane. [Laughs] To celebrate my manhood.

[Q] Playboy:Given your father's politics, was he happy you went into the military?

[A] Stone:My dad was an intelligent right-winger. His feeling at that time was that it was a ridiculous waste.

[Q] Playboy:It was a waste for you or the entire war was a waste?

[A] Stone:He believed in the domino theory. And he felt that the war was fine as long as other boys less economically sufficient would fight it.

[Q] Playboy: How long did it take you after you got off the plane to change your mind about the romance of your decision?

[A] Stone:I'd say one day in the bush. It was like the scene in Platoon, the kid on the point. I was put on point my first fucking day in the field. It was just so hard, so grimy, so tough. I thought I couldn't take it. I was about to pass out with 50 pounds of equipment. Then, about seven or eight days in, we had that night-ambush scene--

[Q] Playboy:Real life or movie?

[A] Stone:It happened to me, and the scene was pretty closely depicted in the movie: I saw these three N.V.A. [North Vietnamese army] soldiers. They were huge. Tough! And they walked right up on me. I just fucking forgot everything I had learned. I knew the rules. I knew what you were supposed to do in an ambush. You blow your Claymore. You throw your grenades. Then you use your' '16, because you don't want them to spot your fire pattern.

[Q] Playboy:And what did Private Stone do?

[A] Stone:None of the above! [Laughs] I just stood there. Wow!

[Q] Playboy:You laugh now; were you scared?

[A] Stone:I was. I remember my logical, worldly brain, of course, trying to rationalize this whole thing. I said about the North Vietnamese, "These must be lost GIs." Because they had helmets on, I thought they were coming back into the perimeter.

[Q] Playboy:But it wasn't just fear that changed you so quickly. Or talk--you said there was no discussion of ideology there.

[A] Stone:No, never. But all of a sudden, I was with black guys, poor white guys for the first time. And these poor people see through that upper-class bullshit. They don't buy into the rich guy's game. They don't buy into the Pentagon bullshit. They know the score. That score is, "We've been fucked [Laughs,] and we are over here in Vietnam." [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy:Did knowing the score mean you dropped your Cold War view of the world?

[A] Stone:Well, let's say it went into abeyance during the war. I mean, over there, we were still feeling a certain hostility toward the antiwar protesters. Like, you know, "Well, fuck them. Let them come over here and fight. Let them experience it."

[Q] Playboy:Was that a generalized sentiment among the grunts?

[A] Stone:Not among everybody, but among a lot of people. No, I'd say a lot of black guys--especially black guys--and people like the Elias character in Platoon were more hippie-ish in their attitude. Like Muhammad Ali said, I had no beef with the V.C. You know? Or like, just, "I'm here, man; I'm gonna smoke dope and I'm gonna make it and I'm gonna survive and I'm gonna make a lot of money." And the dope was great!

[Q] Playboy:We take it from Platoon that you hung out with the dope smokers.

[A] Stone:Yes. It was the first time in my life. With black guys. I had never had any black friends before. They also introduced me to black music. I had never known about Motown. I had never heard Smokey Robinson and Sam Cooke. I remember the first time we heard Light My Fire. It was a fucking revolution! Grace Slick's White Rabbit. I loved her. Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin was very important.

[Q] Playboy:How long had you been in Vietnam when you started smoking dope?

[A] Stone:I actually did not smoke any dope until I'd been wounded twice.

[Q] Playboy:Did you begin as a model soldier?

[A] Stone:Not exactly. I was in the 25th Infantry First, which was where I saw most of my combat. Then, when I got wounded the second time, they shipped me to another unit, because if you had two wounds, you could get out. I went to a rear-echelon unit in Saigon. Auxiliary military police. But I was gonna get an Article 15, insubordination, because I had a fight with a sergeant. So I made a deal, essentially. I said, "Send me back to the field and drop the charges." I couldn't stand this rear-echelon bullshit. They put me in this longrange recon patrol, and that's where I met the basis for the Elias character in Platoon.

[Q] Playboy:What was Elias' real name?

[A] Stone:Elias. I don't know if it was his last name or his first name, but it was always Elias. A sergeant. Apache. A black-haired kid, very handsome. He looked like Jimmy Morrison; he truly was a Jimmy Morrison of the soldiers. Very charismatic. The leader of the group. He was killed.

[Q] Playboy:What happened to you there?

[A] Stone:I got this horrible grease-bag lifer sergeant, one of these guys who were raking off the beer concession. He had a waxed mustache; I'll never forget that. He didn't like my attitude, and I told him to go fuck himself. [Laughs]

So they sent me across the road to a regular combat unit, which was the First or the Ninth Armored Cav, or whatever the fuck they called it. Basically, it was infantry. And there was the Sergeant Barnes character. My squad sergeant.

There, among the First Cav with the black guys, is where I started smoking dope. There were a lot of guys over the edge in that unit. We had a bunker where we used to smoke a lot of dope. I was wearing beads, started to talk black dialect. "Hey, what you doin', man?" All that shit. "What's happenin'?" I'd do all the raps, and when I came home from the war, my father was freaked out. He hated me. He said, "You turned into a black man!"

[Q] Playboy:Did you smoke dope in combat?

[A] Stone: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy:Even on the day you earned your Bronze Star?

[A] Stone:Yeah. I had been stoned that morning and the fire fight was that afternoon. But it wasn't really a big deal. There were so many other acts of valor from other guys; it was just that in my case, somebody saw me doing it.

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel about the Vietnamese enemy?

[A] Stone: I never thought about them. My tour included the Tet offensive of January '68. So from September '67 to January we were running into crack troops that were coming from Cambodia down to Saigon, moving equipment. We thought they were pretty tough and skilled and mean. We didn't like 'em. We wanted to kill 'em, because they wanted to kill us. There was no thinking about it.

[Q] Playboy:That's true in all wars. But in Vietnam, there was the added factor of the civilians you couldn't trust, wasn't there?

[A] Stone: Civilians were another matter. A lot of the guys, as I showed in the movie, had racist feelings about the Vietnamese. Their attitude was, "All gooks are the same. The only good gook is a dead gook," and that meant women and kids. "They're all the same rotten bunch." A lot of that--I'd say that was a very strong feeling in many of the platoons.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that the mentality that leads to massacres?

[A] Stone:There were random killings. Nothing ever preordained, nothing ordered. It would be like we'd go to a village; Bunny, for example--the Kevin Dillon character--he really killed that woman. He battered her. He smashed her head with the stock of a '16, burned her hooch down, but it was in an isolated part of the village. Nobody saw it. It was just like a really quiet thing.

[Q] Playboy:How did that happen?

[A] Stone:We'd be pissed off on certain days. We'd walk up to a village, you'd see an old lady, an old gook lady going down the trail, right? The guy would be pissed off. He'd say, "Hey, gook, come here." She wouldn't hear or she wouldn't want to turn around; she'd be scared. She'd just keep walking a few more steps. The guy wouldn't ask her a second time. He'd raise the fuckin' '16--boom, boom, boom--dead. No questions asked. She hadn't come when he told her to.

[Q] Playboy:In Platoon, your character--played by Charlie Sheen--has a scene in which he comes very close to shooting an old man. Did that happen to you?

[A] Stone:Yes. The time I almost blew the gook away, when I made him dance.... I mean, I could have gotten away with it. I could have fuckin' killed him, and nobody would have busted me.

[Q] Playboy:In the movie, Sheen seems as terrified as his victim.

[A] Stone:The holes, the pits, used to make us all nervous, because you never knew what the fuck was down there. You'd yell, "Get the fuck outl Get out!" And you'd find weapons and arms and rice stores in these villages, so you hated the civilians. A lot of guys hated them.

I felt sorry for them, because I could see that they were getting pressure from the other side. I mean, I don't know where their actual political sympathies lay. I have no idea to this day. They probably were into survival, like we were.

[Q] Playboy: Did you take part in any of those random killings?

[A] Stone:No, I saved a girl from getting killed. I put that in the movie, too, the rape. They would have killed that girl.

[Q] Playboy:The murder of Sergeant Barnes in Platoon seems to suggest that fragging of officers and noncoms was fairly common.

[A] Stone:It happened a lot. We knew that there was no moral objective from day to day--that there was no victory in sight. And you're out on the front lines. What are you going to do? Risk your life and get killed for this? So that was the source of the tension leading to the murders and the fraggings. The officer corps--not just the officers but especially the top sergeants--were pretty much hated, most of them.

[Q] Playboy:Did you hate them?

[A] Stone:I came to hate them, yes. Because they were guys who for the most part were fat cats, sitting there getting rich off the PX deals or making assignments but very rarely risking their lives.

[Q] Playboy:How widespread was fragging?

[A] Stone:It's hard to say.

[Q] Playboy: You saw some, though?

[A] Stone:I heard about it. But some people have suggested that if I really participated in some of the scenes in Platoon, I should be tried for war crimes--a pamphlet was sent around UCLA saying that I'm a war criminal. So I'm not going to be any more specific. You kill somebody during a battle, you put your M-16 on somebody and you just do him. Nobody's going to see it. Types like General Westmoreland don't want to admit how widespread it was. Maybe six, ten times more than the official count.

I think one of the other figures that are very interesting that I came across is that about 20 percent of our total casualties in Vietnam were accidents or people killed by our own side. I showed it in Platoon, in the scenes of artillery landing on our own troops. I think my first wound in my neck was caused by an American sergeant who threw a grenade. It's just--so confusing.

[Q] Playboy:The U.S. lost more than 50,000 men in Vietnam. The Vietnamese lost perhaps 2,000,000 of their people, but they are barely mentioned in Platoon. Do you think this sort of self-absorption may be what gets us into places like Vietnam?

[A] Stone:I know what you're saying. But it's not just self-absorption that leads us into Vietnams. Ideology is what leads us into Vietnams. Fear of communism is what leads us into Vietnams. What you're asking for would be a different kind of movie. I did Platoon the way I lived it. I did a white Infantry boy's view of the war.

Platoon is not a definitive film. It's simply a look at the war, a slice of the war. A great film would be the story of a North Vietnamese army guy who lives in a tunnel for six years, and you only see the American soldiers like blurs occasionally. And he blows them away. Because they were as scared of us as we were of them.

[Q] Playboy:Would Hollywood ever make that film, with the Vietnamese as heroes?

[A] Stone:No, I don't think so. But I agree totally with what you're suggesting. I think that the biggest, most recent example of that--what do you call it?--blindness to foreign concern is the situation in El Salvador. Because very few Americans have been killed--maybe fewer than a dozen in Salvador--America is not interested in the fact that it aided and abetted a death-squad regime that killed more than 50,000 Salvadorans between 1980 and 1986: as many citizens as the U.S. lost in ten years in Vietnam. We don't seem to care because no Americans were killed. We cared only briefly when four nuns got killed, because they were American nuns. But nobody said anything when the archbishop of the country got greased.

[Q] Playboy:Staying with Platoon a bit longer, what did the studios tell you during those years they refused to make the movie?

[A] Stone:Basically, that it was too grim. It was too depressing. It wouldn't make a buck. Too real. Who cares?

[Q] Playboy:Do you think that Platoon would not have been as well received eight years ago as it has been now?

[A] Stone:I think it would have done OK. But in a way, it's better that it came out now. It became an antidote to Top Gun and Rambo. It's an antidote to Reagan's wars against Libya, Grenada and Nicaragua. It makes people remember what war is really like. It makes them think twice before they go marching off to another one. Maybe now is a better time for it than '76, because in '76 we didn't have this rebirth of American militarism that we're seeing now. I think Platoon makes kids think twice. Because fuckin' Top Gun, man--it was essentially a fascist movie. It sold the idea that war is clean, war can be won, war is a function of hand-eye coordination. You push your computer button; you blow up a Mig on a screen. A Pac-Man game. Get the girl at the end if you blow up the Mig. The music comes up. And nobody in the fuckin' movie ever mentions that he just started World War Three!

[Q] Playboy:Until Platoon came along, Top Gun was the biggest military-theme movie of the decade.

[A] Stone:Yeah, it certainly sobered me and made me realize that the American audience is very divided. I think there are a lot of people who learned nothing from Vietnam. Nothing! Because of them, all the men who died in Vietnam have died for nothing--that is, if we haven't learned anything from that war. If we commit troops to Nicaragua, then all those men died in Vietnam for nothing.

I'm sick of these revisionists who want to refight that war. Why don't they just understand that we never could have won it? Never! The only way we could have won it was to nuke Hanoi, and even then I'm not sure we could have won. These people are bad losers. That's what it comes down to.

[Q] Playboy:What about Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which was released a few months after Platoon?

[A] Stone:Oh, God. I don't want to get into that.... Look, I don't think Stanley--I don't think Kubrick was as concerned in Full Metal Jacket with Vietnam as with making a generic war picture. It wasn't specific to Vietnam. It was more like his Paths of Glory. It could easily have been about World War Two or Korea. It felt a lot like it, what with the rubble and the metallic look it had. There were some very powerful scenes in it: That last sniper scene was very strongly done. He's a master film maker. [Pauses] Master angle shots. That's about all I can say.

[Q] Playboy:Full Metal Jacket was made before Platoon but was released later, right?

[A] Stone:Right.

[Q] Playboy: Since you were aware that Full Metal Jacket was already in production, were you concerned "that Platoon might come in second best?

[A] Stone:Oh, yes. But back in '84, when I had just about given up on the idea of making Platoon, Michael Cimino, with whom I had written the script for Year of the Dragon, convinced me that we could take the project off the shelf. He said that Vietnam was coming around and that Kubrick would bring a lot of attention to the issue. But our big concern was that, because he is the master film maker that he is, our film would be unfavorably compared with Full Metal Jacket if it came out afterward. You don't want your movie to be compared, if you can possibly help it, with a Kubrick movie!

[Q] Playboy:When you were shooting Platoon, were you aware of the plot line of Full Metal Jacket?

[A] Stone:I had read Gustav Hasford's book [The Short-Timers], which the film was based on, after Platoon was written.

[Q] Playboy:Well, since you're being diplomatic about Kubrick's movie, what did you think of Hasford's book?

[A] Stone:I didn't much care for it. I thought it was pumped-up, macho-man, sort of true-life man's-adventure-story stuff. It could easily have been in the old Argosy magazine. I didn't think it was real.

[Q] Playboy:Summing up your Vietnam experience, you ended up agreeing with the antiwar protesters you so distrusted when you were in Vietnam, didn't you?

[A] Stone:There's just no question that, ultimately, they were right. The protesters were a force for social change. They brought about the end of the war. They forced Johnson to resign and they boxed Nixon in. They were a movement that hadn't been seen in America since the Thirties, when people had gotten together in groups and united. But it all bypassed me. I didn't realize its import until later.

[Q] Playboy:Do you think the Vietnam vets are still not understood by the rest of us?

[A] Stone: Oh, no, I think there's been a tremendous reintegration. I think many vets are doing very well. There's obviously a very large minority of vets who have had severe problems. But you have to keep a balanced view about this. The Korean vets have had enormous problems, too. Nobody has really examined the Korean War as a fraud or a deceit, and it, too, has become a sacred cow.

Yes, Korean vets were as much victims of the Cold War ideology as Vietnam vets. So I don't want to make a special thing about being a Vietnam vet. We are all victims of this ridiculous Cold War ideology.

[Q] Playboy:Now to Central America. Some consider Salvador a better movie than Platoon. But you had plenty of trouble getting anyone to make that, didn't you?

[A] Stone:I sent the script around and got extremely negative reactions. Anti-American, they said.

[Q] Playboy:Well, isn't your portrayal of the U.S. as the mastermind behind the terror in Salvador fairly anti-American?

[A] Stone:No. It's anti--American foreign policy. It's anti--American Government--which is truly one of the worst governments in the world. Because we're always on the side of repression. We're always on the side of the dictators.

[Q] Playboy:Didn't you try to hoodwink the Salvadoran government into providing you assistance with the film?

[A] Stone:Yeah. We went down there and we met with the military bigwigs, and [co-writer] Richard Boyle had concocted this scheme, because they have tons of American equipment. He said if we could only get them on our side, we could ride anywhere in the country and film anything. We could follow the army. We could do the helicopter assaults in the north. He said we could do Apocalypse Now--for about $5000 or $10,000. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy:How did you try to persuade the Salvadoran army to help?

[A] Stone:We showed them a different script, which reversed everything and made them look good!

[Q] Playboy:And did they go for it?

[A] Stone:Oh, yes! They bought it. They liked the script. It was all set to go. What scotched it was a combination of events that culminated in our Salvadoran military advisor, who was our liaison with them, being shot and killed on a tennis court by the guerrillas. So we basically dropped the plans to shoot there, and we moved the production to Mexico.

[Q] Playboy:As brutally explicit as Salvador is, you cut out a lot of scenes before releasing it, didn't you?

[A] Stone:Oh, yes. The film was about two hours, 40 minutes, and we had many discussions with the producers. The film was difficult enough to distribute at two hours. We took out a lot. The original concept was that it would go from light to dark a lot. We wanted to use that Latin sort of blending that you find in a García Márquez novel--jumping from high seriousness to absurdity.

[Q] Playboy:Weren't there also some explicit sex scenes that you cut?

[A] Stone: Sure. We had this party scene where James Belushi gets a blow job under a table and Jimmy Woods is trying to get information from the colonel while he's screwing this hooker and the colonel is drunk and throwing ears--human ears--into a champagne glass. His line was, "Left-wing ears, right-wing ears; who gives a fuck? Here's to Salvador," and he makes a toast. Belushi throws up.

We showed a version of the film with that scene in it to preview audiences here in the U.S., and the comment cards that came back didn't like it. The feeling was that people in America didn't know how they were supposed to react to the movie, which I found kind of sad. Dr. Strangelove was a perfect amalgam of humor and seriousness about a subject that is extremely dark. There's no reason the subject of Salvadoran death squads has to be solemn. You can have fun with these guys, 'cause they're assholes. It's too bad. I think Latin-American audiences would have gotten the blend much easier; but apparently, when the North American audience wants to see a political film, it wants to see a political film, period.

[Q] Playboy:Did El Salvador remind you of Vietnam in the early days?

[A] Stone:It was Honduras that reminded me of Vietnam, because of the volume and presence of the American military there. You see a lot of young American guys in Honduras, technicians, too, that sense of Saigon in '65, that same sense of "We're doin' the right thing. We're beatin' the Commies in Nicaragua." I talked with these kids. I said, "Do you remember Vietnam?" And they kind of looked at me with a disturbed look. They don't remember. They don't fuckin' remember!

[Q] Playboy:Did that attitude affect you?

[A] Stone:Yeah, it's why I made Platoon. To yell out, "This happened, kids! People got killed here. This is what war is really like. This is it! This is what your kid is going to go through if it happens again. This is what it means. Think twice before you buy another used war from these fuckin' politicians with their 'Communism is everywhere' routine."

[Q] Playboy:Let's move on to your personal life. Drugs seem to be a theme in every one of your movies. Were they a central part of your life?

[A] Stone:I think drugs are very much a part of my generation's experience. We were not only the Cold War generation, we were the drug generation. And marijuana, with its origins in the Sixties, was good. It was a force for good. As was acid. It transformed consciousness. And in Vietnam, it certainly kept us sane.

[Q] Playboy:What was your drug use like?

[A] Stone:After the war, I took it to excess. I was using as much LSD as anybody. Even slipped it into my dad's drink once. What I did turned bad in the sense that it got heavier. My usage became heavier, but not for a purpose. It became an indulgence.

[Q] Playboy:How much and what were you using?

[A] Stone:Well, I started more acid, and grass, I suppose, in the beginning. And then I touched on some other things here and there.

[Q] Playboy:Heroin? Cocaine?

[A] Stone:Cocaine, certainly. But that was in the late Seventies. Cocaine is what took me to the edge. I finally realized that coke had beaten me and I hadn't beaten it. So in 1981, I went cold turkey on everything. Except an occasional drink here or there, or an occasional, you know, thing, but basically cold turkey. I moved to Paris that year and wrote Scarface, which was a farewell to cocaine.

[Q] Playboy:Scarface became a cult hit. Had you quit using cocaine before or after you wrote it?

[A] Stone:I wrote it totally straight. But I researched it stoned, because I had to research it in South America, in various spots where I had to do it in order to talk with these people.

[Q] Playboy:Before you quit, how deeply were you into it?

[A] Stone:I would say it was an everyday thing. Hollywood in the late Seventies was--there was a kind of cocaine craze. And it lasted until later in the Eighties.

[Q] Playboy:And are you now supporting Nancy Reagan's call to "just say no"?

[A] Stone:No. I don't agree with her phony policies. I think she's a hypocrite--no, her policies are hypocritical. The Government, with its left hand, is basically importing drugs, and with its right hand, it's trying to stop it. It's wasting a lot of money.

[Q] Playboy:What do you mean, the Government is importing drugs?

[A] Stone:I think we barely scratched the surface in the Iran/Contra affair of what this Government has been up to. It's a filthy story, and I know that the Cuban right wing is heavily involved with drugs. Our Government is really very bad, acting basically like gangsters. I mean, all the tie-ups through the years with the Mafia, the tie-ups with the dictators, the repressions are totally against the spirit of what Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln wanted for this country.

[Q] Playboy:Back to your own experience: Don't you think the Hollywood community is now more inclined to go with Mrs. Reagan's view of things than with yours?

[A] Stone:Oh, sure! Yes. Throw another two billion dollars at the problem and fight drugs! Any jerk-off Congressman is going to vote so the apple-pie moms will say, "Hey, we're fighting drugs." It's all horseshit! That money just goes down the tubes. The DEA does nothing. In fact, there are quite a few DEA agents who are suspects themselves. [Laughs]

This whole thing is sick. I mean, the way to beat it is to legalize drugs, out and out. Legalize heroin, cocaine, marijuana. Yeah. Let kids try it. Let them get it out of their system. Take out the allure. Take out the glamor. Make it cheap. Make it available. People kill to get it. The gangsters will scurry like rats to find another enterprising activity. It'll take the fuckin' mystique off it and the price tag off it. But no! We won't cut the price of drugs, because organized crime makes too much money. And the bankers make too much money. And the attorneys make too much money. It's a 100-billion-dollar-a-year business! Too many people are making too much money, including establishment people in south Florida and Houston and all over the country.

[Q] Playboy:What were the circumstances of your drug arrest in 1969?

[A] Stone:I had been out of the Army ten days. I had gone to Mexico. I got busted at the border carrying two ounces of my own weed. They threw me in county jail, facing Federal smuggling charges--five to 20 years.

[Q] Playboy:Were you formally charged?

[A] Stone:Oh, yes. Everything. The papers were there.

[Q] Playboy:How long were you held?

[A] Stone:A couple of weeks. There were about 15,000 of us kids jammed into a place built to hold 3000. No lawyer showed up, and these kids were telling me they had been in there for six months and they hadn't seen a lawyer, either.

[Q] Playboy:Did you panic?

[A] Stone:Almost. The kids said to me, "Hey! Wake up! This is what America's really like, man!" There were two fucking judges. One judge was a little lenient guy. He sat on Tuesday and Thursday. If you came up on Monday or Wednesday or Friday, you hit the hard-balls guy. He would have hit me for five years; I might have gotten out after three.

[Q] Playboy:You got the lenient judge?

[A] Stone:What happened is interesting. I finally called my father. I had a hard time doing that, because he thought I was still in Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy:He didn't know you'd gotten out of the Army?

[A] Stone:Well, he knew that I was due out but not exactly when. So I called him and I said, "Dad, the good news is I'm out of Vietnam. Do you want to hear the bad news?" [Laughs] He said, "Oh, shit. What is it?" I said, "I'm in jail in San Diego." He said, "Oh, shit." He knew the score and he knew what it was about. So I could have sat in that prison for six months. My court-appointed lawyer might never have showed up. My father called him. The moment the guy knew he was going to get paid, he showed up beaming.

[Q] Playboy:Exactly like the lawyer in your script for Midnight Express.

[A] Stone:Same idea. I think we paid him $2500. He got my case dismissed "in the interest of justice." I guess they had 20,000 other kids to prosecute [Laughs,] so they let it go. What happened beyond his receiving the money, I don't know.

[Q] Playboy:Getting busted ten days after your tour of Vietnam must have made you quite an angry young man.

[A] Stone:Yes. I suppose if I went over to Vietnam right wing, I came back an anarchist. Radical. Very much like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Alienated. A walking time bomb. Hateful and suspicious.

[Q] Playboy:What did you believe in?

[A] Stone:Direct action. When Nixon invaded Cambodia, I was at the NYU film school, and everyone went nuts. I thought they were a bunch of jerks just running around shooting film. I thought, Why don't we get a gun and just do Nixon, you know? I'll do him. [Laughs] You know, "Let's go kill, man." I thought, If you want to shake up the system, if you want a revolution, let's fuckin' have one. Let's kill cops. Back then, I was feeling pure anger. Hatred. Well, actually, I'm right. [Laughs] That's the only way revolution is ever going to occur.

[Q] Playboy:Do you still consider yourself outside the system? A revolutionary?

[A] Stone:No. That anarchy gave way finally to some kind of reintegration into American society, I suppose. [Laughs] The Pentagon papers, Watergate, a lot of reading gave seed to what has become a sort of mature liberalism. I think I've been on that track since around 1975. And although some critics have said otherwise, I think my films have all been on that track.

[Q] Playboy:With a little help from a healthy bank account.

[A] Stone:I understand money. I know what it's like to move overnight from golden boy to ugly duckling. Success and disaster seem to be two sides of the same coin. I've seen disaster, because I saw it after my first Academy Award, in 1978, for writing Midnight Express. And before that, for ten years, when I was a starving writer.

[Q] Playboy:How did you manage to turn that initial success into prolonged failure?

[A] Stone:I buried myself with my own hand, so to speak. Whatever possessed me to spend half my time on the set of the second movie I directed--The Hand, in 1981--fighting Michael Caine, I'll never know.

[Q] Playboy:After that movie was panned, you suffered another setback when you couldn't get Born on the Fourth of July produced, right?

[A] Stone:Actually, I wrote it before The Hand. I spent a year on it. It was a very defeating experience. I worked with a series of directors on it, and Al Pacino was committed. I came up with a really good script. We rehearsed it; Al played it. I saw all the roles played. It was really happening. And then the money fell out at the last possible second and the film collapsed and Pacino went on to work on another film. It sort of soured me on the possibility of doing something serious in Hollywood.

[Q] Playboy:So you gave up for a while?

[A] Stone:In a way, yes. Part of the reason I did The Hand was that it was obvious that studios weren't going to do the more dramatic material. So I thought, At least they'll do a horror movie for money. That's why I compromised, and I made a serious mistake. I wanted to work as a director. So I really should have been directing Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July. But there was no way they were even going to make those movies, let alone let me direct them. So I went into a phase of cynicism from around 1980 to 1985, which was a period in which nobody was making any serious movies.

[Q] Playboy:Why?

[A] Stone:The execs were very much into high-concept, kid-gloss movies--War-Games rip-offs, Star Wars rip-offs. It was a depressing time. I worked on Scarface during that period only because Al Pacino wanted me. And I worked on Dragon because Cimino wanted me. I didn't work for a studio; I never had an office in a studio. I had a miserable four or five years writing other people's movies, but I did learn from them.

[Q] Playboy:What got your enthusiasm for Platoon going again?

[A] Stone:Seeing Warren Beatty's Reds in 1981. I loved it. The fact that Beatty had spent so much time doing a film that was so unconventional really reminded me that, hey, you can make good movies if you stick it out. So at that point in time, I said, "I'm going to do it." And I wrote my Russian thing--

[Q] Playboy:What Russian thing? Is this another unproduced script?

[A] Stone:Yeah. I wrote a great script about dissidents in Russia. Universal Studios sent me to Russia to research it, but nobody wanted to make it. Frank Price was in charge of the studio. He's a right-winger and was too busy doing movies like Fletch and Breakfast Club.

[Q] Playboy:A movie about Soviet dissidents wouldn't offend the right wing.

[A] Stone:That's true. But Price was probably offended just because it was a serious film. He was not doing dramas. Go check the books. Universal did one drama in that year [1985], probably, and it was Out of Africa. You know why they did it? Because it had Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack. An unknown film maker comes in and wants to do something serious, they're not going to make that.

[Q] Playboy:Hasn't it always been hard to make political films in Hollywood?

[A] Stone:No, in the Thirties and the Forties, studios did them. Darryl F. Zanuck [former head of 20th Century Fox] did them; they did a lot of stuff like that. Now they're just afraid of anything that's controversial, that stirs up emotions. Most of them want a very bland Chevy Chase comedy that gets a lot of people in to buy popcorn. The ater owners don't even like intense films. I'll bet you half of them would prefer uneven, mediocre movies that the audience can slip in and out of for 15 or 20 minutes to and from the snack bar and not miss a thing. I'm convinced that there's a conspiracy to make blander films.

[Q] Playboy:Does this mean that the distributors are dictating taste?

[A] Stone:No. Taste is dictated by a mass consensus of distributors, exhibitors--a floating circle of players. A guy in Cleveland says, "You gave me six dogs last year," puts pressure on the distributors. It all gets passed along. A consensus emerges.

Comedies, the least offensive category, are still "in." Comedies are the least offensive medium. They shouldn't be, but they are--though Eddie Murphy is getting to be offensive. But Chevy Chase--a very safe man. And he's one of the hottest movie stars today, as the American, middle-class boob, you know, in plaid trousers, walking around with a happy face and a pretty wife, and I guess America wants to see itself that way. Put Chevy Chase up against the Libyans, I don't think he'd last two seconds.

[Q] Playboy:What was it like to go in and pitch ideas after having written two bigtime scripts?

[A] Stone:From '80 to '85, miserable. Often I'd go in and have a meeting with some real smartass baby exec, maybe 24, who'd just gotten out of film school. He or she was supposed to have his or her finger on the pulse of what the new kids wanted, and I'd sit there, discussing a serious story and being patronized. You know the crap: "Well, we know from Midnight Express that you like those dark films, but you're not really getting the point of where America is at. America wants Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd."

After '85, I vowed never to go to a development meeting again, and I never did. Since Salvador, I've never had a script conference. On Wall Street, I never even saw a development person. The so-called development process is just a series of 25 (concluded on page 112)Oliver Stone(continued from page 63) meetings to make the script as obsolete and harmless and banal and inoffensive as possible. When 25 people agree that it's all of the above, then they make the movie. If the star agrees to come along! [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy:And yet some very good movies do get made.

[A] Stone:I think it's a random thing. It depends on the persistent vision of two or three people, and they push it through a system that's geared to compromise and obstacles. Nobody deliberately sets out to do a bad movie, but people have different tastes. There are just so many collaborative elements. You have so many actors; you have to depend on locations; you have to depend on money; you depend on whether you woke up that day with a headache. It all comes down to thousands of little choices. And if you miss one of them, the movie is not going to be good.

Sometimes a political movie gets made that people don't know is political--George Lucas' Star Wars, for instance, which teaches us that the forces of authoritarianism and fascism can be defeated by a good conscience. By listening to your inner voice--which is, I think, a great liberal message. Steven Spielberg has never professed political interest in his films, yet he seems to be moving to ward a greater awareness of it, which I think is good. The Color Purple, I think, is an excellent movie, and it was an attempt to deal with an issue that had been overlooked, and it wouldn't have been done if it hadn't been Spielberg. And it's not like everyone says, that he ruined the book. That's horseshit. Nobody was going to do the book. He made the book live again.

[Q] Playboy:Let's talk about some of the criticism of your films. You say they are in the liberal tradition, but critics slammed you for racism in your characterization of the Turks in Midnight Express.

[A] Stone:I think that there was a lack of proportion in the picture regarding the Turks. I was younger. I was more rabid. But I think we shouldn't lose sight of what the movie was about. It was about the miscarriage of justice, and I think it still comes through. In the original script, there was more humor. There were some very funny things that the Turks did, where they were portrayed as rather human, too. But [director] Alan Parker does not really have a great sense of humor, and I think he moved it in a direction where the humorous scenes were cut out so that the Turks came out looking tougher, meaner.

[Q] Playboy:Next case, Scarface. The charge: racist portrayal of the Cubans.

[A] Stone:In Scarface, I don't back down for one second. I think it's clear that not all Cubans are drug dealers. The guy is, and his mother even says he is, no good. It's classic gangster stuff. But people get oversensitive, like when the Italians objected to Francis Coppola's doing The Godfather. It's like "We're not gangsters." I mean, every nationality wants to believe there are no gangsters. And Scarface is a political movie, but the Cuban right wing is a very scary group. Honestly, even to talk about them is dangerous; they may be the single most dangerous group of guys I've ever met.

[Q] Playboy:Aren't you exaggerating the politics of the movie?

[A] Stone:The politics in it are buried by a lot of superficial trivia. To some, it's a movie about cars, palaces, money and coke. It's not just about that. It's about what those things do to you and how they corrupt you. That theme got lost. I think Tony Montana--Al Pacino--has a Frank Sinatra dream of the United States, OK? So he becomes a rightwinger in this sense: "I hate Communists, and this is the good life with the big steaks and the cigars in fancy restaurants and the blonde and the limousines and the whole bit."

It's the whole group from the Bay of Pigs. A few of them are drug dealers and use drug moneys to keep their political work going. A lot of these guys have disguised drug dealing as legitimate anti-Castro political activities, and that is mentioned in the movie. Tony's mother tells him, Don't give me this bullshit that you're working against Castro, you know. I know you. You've always been a gangster and you're going to die one.

[Q] Playboy:What about the Chinese, who organized protests and boycotts against another movie you co-wrote, Year of the Dragon?

[A] Stone:The Chinese want to believe that there are no gangsters among them. That's all horseshit! The Chinese are the greatest importers of heroin in this country. We knew this five years ago! As for the lead character, played by Mickey Rourke, he is a racist and we wrote him that way.

[Q] Playboy:But didn't you write the character to make people cheer him on?

[A] Stone:Yes. But I think people cheered him for other reasons, not for his racism. At least I hope not. But there might be an element of it. The guy, no matter how prejudiced, is still trying to get something done--as an underdog. That's why I'm rooting for him. But I should say that I think it was the least successful of my scripts.

[Q] Playboy:Next charge: All your movies have a locker-room feeling to them. No Strong women.

[A] Stone:OK. I think this is true. I have not done movies about women. I have always picked areas that involve extremist ideas that to date have involved men, mostly. The Vietnam war, the drug trade at the highest levels, the heroin trade in Chinatown, men's prisons in Turkey, Wall Street; all--at the top, anyway--were and are run by men. Though I do have women in my films and I happen to like the portrayals--Cindy Gibb as the nun in Salvador; Michelle Pfeiffer as the basic bimbo hanging around this Cuban gangster in Scarface. I know they're smaller roles, but I don't think any of them are inauthentic.

[Q] Playboy:Is there going to be a sequel to Platoon?

[A] Stone:I had contracted before Platoon was ever released to write a film called Second Life, to be based on my own experiences in coming back to the States. I wanted to do that whole period of the late Sixties and early Seventies in America, a period of extreme ideological conflict between the left and the right. The age of Easy Rider--the landmark film of that era. I'd like to go back to that. But it wasn't meant as a sequel. Now, with Platoon, if Charlie Sheen does it, it will be deemed a sequel. After Wall Street comes out.

[Q] Playboy:Can we assume that the studios had a friendlier attitude toward Wall Street after the runaway success of Platoon?

[A] Stone:Wall Street was like a Porsche to Salvador's broken-down jeep--a smooth, cushioned ride. And I must tell you that I enjoy working this way, because there's so much tension in making any movie. When you have money worries, it makes things impossible. I'm now a believer in Flaubert's advice to live a bourgeois life but to have an exciting mind.

[Q] Playboy:After the boom of Platoon, do you expect critics to be gunning for you?

[A] Stone:It would be nearly impossible ever to follow Platoon with something that could be as big box office, or as critically well received. That I know. There is the king-must-die-theory. I think that you have to keep your head down. You some-how have to ignore the critical storms that come and go. And you've got to continue to do good work for your life, like Ford did, like Stevens, like Hawks and Huston and Renoir. That's the only way to get through this madness: Wear blinders and keep to the work.

"I feel like the beggar who gets invited to the party but who always keeps a wary eye on the back door."

"The Cuban right wing is a very scary group. Honestly, even to talk about them is dangerous."