PRIMAL STONE

It's a jungle out there. Meat stew. And Oliver Stone is very, very angry. The writer-director of Platoon, Wall Street, and now Talk Radio lets loose to RON ROSENBAUM about his epic Hollywood battles

RON ROSENBAUM

They're thieves! They're thugs! A fucking Mafia! Oliver Stone is railing against the Hollywood powers-that-be. Or, as he prefers to call them, "the cocksucker vampires." As in: "I'm being robbed blind by these cocksucker vampires."

Which cocksucker vampires in particular? I ask him.

"The majors!" he says in exasperation.

The majors—Warner Bros., Paramount, Disney, Fox, Columbia, MGM/UA, Universal, and Tri-Star—are not merely robbing him personally, but conspiring and colluding to strangle creativity in Hollywood.

"You talk about corruption in this country. It's a fucking Mafia! Blind stealing! Break them up! Destroy them! They're vampires!"

What exactly are the crimes of the majors he's raging over? This is, after all, the same Hollywood establishment that awarded four Oscars to Platoon, one to Wall Street, one to Stone's screenplay for Midnight Express, in addition to giving Salvador two nominations. Can he really be that mad at them? Or is he just mad at everything?

The answer is yes—to both questions.

We were in Stone's production-company office, a small, no-frills suite in a building on the fringe of Beverly Hills, when he first lashed out at the majors.

I pressed him to explain the specifics of his grievance, and initially he refused.

"I might get too passionate," he said, pleading weakness from fever and antibiotics. He did look pale and wiped out from the effort of simultaneously editing Talk Radio and casting Born on the Fourth of July. The walls of his office were covered with eight-by-ten glossies of potential choices to fill the roles of buddies of the paraplegic vet Tom Cruise will play in the film.

He lacked the strength to do justice to his rage against the majors, he said, but he's not letting the cocksucker vampires off the hook. When 1 shifted to another topic of conversation, he reminded me, ''You should come back to it later."

The following day in the living room of Stone's Santa Monica home the subject of the C.V.'s came up again, and this time he felt up to it.

The living room is done in the recently chic Melrose Avenue-Santa Fe manner, all well coordinated, bespeaking the peace of the pueblos—with one discordant note. Some kind of angry voodoo death's-head by Basquiat presides over the room with a vicious skeletal grin.

And it soon became apparent that some similarly wrathful spirit is the presiding deity of Oliver Stone's cosmos.

It's anger that gives the body of Stone's work its visceral power—and its distinctiveness as a chronicle of the unreconciled underside of the Ann BeattidBig Chill version of the post-Vietnam odyssey. Stone's characters don't end up in Vermont eating Cherry Garcia ice cream and being rueful about their briefly wayward youth. Stone's people go too far, they get in too deep to chill out. They go too far in Vietnam; they go too far when they get back. They end up in Turkish prisons, in blood-spattered Miami coke mansions. They end up as whacked-out, thrill-junkie photojoumalists like the James Woods character in Salvador. And they haven't adjusted to it. They're not nice about it, they're not very civilized. Which is not to say they're barbaric in the Conan the Barbarian sense. (Stone co-wrote that unwatchable film with John Milius; he also wrote Scarface for Brian De Palma and the underrated Year of the Dragon with Michael Cimino.) But they're always blowing their gaskets, going primal with their rage. The classic instance is that scene in Midnight Express in which the middle-class Long Island kid is driven into such a fury by the snake-pit Turkish prison that he springs upon a stoolie betrayer and tears out his tongue with his teeth. Following which he raises his blood-smeared face to the heavens, brandishes the bloody trophy in his mouth, and snarls in primitive triumph. Indeed, what makes Wall Street work, what makes Michael Douglas's performance as the voracious raider so powerful, is the barely suppressed animal savagery beneath his Alan Flusser suits, the primal snarl when he rips the liver out of a corporate opponent.

Stone says that his views on dramatic structure were influenced most by Robert Bolt (with whom he collaborated on an unproduced screenplay that presented a conspiratorial view of the Patty Hearst kidnapping), and that Bolt believed in the centrality of debate to dramatic structure. But the classic ''debate" in a Stone film is two guys screaming "Fuck you!" at each other with homicidal rage.

In fact, Stone told me that afternoon in Santa Monica, there was a time when he was so constantly enraged he was not far from homicide himself, even assassination.

What prompted this reflection was a phone call that interrupted our conversation. It was Ed Pressman, producer of Wall Street and Talk Radio, calling to ask Stone if he should send over a copy of Don DeLillo's Libra for film-rights consideration. I praised DeLillo's picture of Oswald's peculiarly malleable psyche. Which led Stone to recall his own primalrage, proto-Oswald period.

This was the early seventies, following his return from Vietnam, a period that began with his arrest and subsequent jailing at the Mexican border for carrying a small amount of marijuana, an event he still recalls with bitterness. ("They were pigs!" he says of the Feds who busted him and ran the lockup. "They were pigs!")

He moved back to New York City, not to the Upper East Side he grew up on, but to the junkie-infested lower depths of the Lower East Side, to Alphabet City before it got its deceptively innocuous name. He took a place in a tenement between Avenues C and D, painted it blood red from floor to ceiling, wore only black, took lots of acid, listened incessantly to Jim Morrison, and started writing the first draft of Platoon.

"I believed in Morrison's incantation. 'Break on through. Kill the pigs. Destroy. Loot. Fuck your mother.' All that shit. Anything goes. Anything. I tried anything in that state."

And it was in "that state," he says, that he could have become an Oswald.

"If the right people had said the right things to me I might have gone after Nixon."

"You could have assassinated Nixon?" I asked him again later.

"Yeah, if the right people had inspired me, had been there to say 'Go for it.' "

"You would have picked up a gun and gone to Washington?"

"Oh yeah, yeah. If I'd felt the flood was with me. There was a moment there. It could have happened."

That moment has passed, the homicidal component of the rage sublimated in the screenplays, and—now that he's a husband and father—"the suicidal impulses are gone," he'll casually tell you.

Still, there are times he gives the impression of itching to pick up a gun again. When he talks about how he favors the summary execution of the Salvadoran general staff, for instance.

He met some of them when he was down there, the military officers who sponsored and protected the death squads. In fact, he admits to being somewhat dismayed when, in the very heart of darkness, the headquarters of the right-wing, death-squad-linked Arena Party, he found some big fans of Scarf ace. They particularly liked the way A1 Pacino boasted about how he killed Communists "for fun.'' Apparently the screenplay's ironic stance toward its coke-gangster antihero didn't come across in the subtitles.

But—fans or no fans—Stone wants no mercy for them when the revolution comes.

"It's a military Mafia down there. They ought to shoot every one of those Salvadoran officers tomorrow! Put 'em up against the wall and shoot 'em!'' Perhaps it was because they'd added insult to injury for failing to understand Scarface, but I had the feeling that—offered the opportunity—he'd be willing to pull the trigger personally.

He doesn't come out and say that's what he wants to do with the heads of the major studios, but it sounds as if he looks upon them as the Hollywood equivalent of the death-squad generals.

What finally brought us around to the cocksucker vampires was Stone's embittered account of his Twelve Lost Years, which followed his Primal Rage period. He studied with Scorsese at N.Y.U. film school, emerged with the "guerrilla filmmaking ethic,'' took it to Hollywood, and suffered defeat after defeat.

"Twelve wasted years. I had a lot to say about the seventies and early eighties. Never got to say it. My scripts were to some degree all diluted or changed by other directors. I wrote some other scripts that never saw the light of day. Fascinating alternative views of society. I felt I had the energy, the desire and skills in my twenties and thirties and just never could exercise it. So I felt frustrated. Very frustrated. That's partly the reason why I've worked so hard and fast now that I've gotten a little daylight. You know, I'm like a little dog that finally sees some light."

Like a little dog? Maybe, but an angry, bitter little dog who hasn't forgotten a single blow from the master's hand.

"Would this bring us back to the cocksucker vampires?" I ask.

He laughs. "Oh God, that'll kill me. No, I'm not worried about your using it; I'm just saying it would kill me to get that passionate right now."

But when he finally gets down to his case against the majors, he is surprisingly cogent rather than choleric. At least at first.

Stone's indictment of the majors focuses on two types of crimes, which, to use his terms, might be divided into Thievery and Thuggery, although there seems to be some overlap. In the Thievery category is the formula the studios use to apportion the vast new millions that come from the videocassette market. The dastardly formula which perpetrates the thievery, Stone says, is called the "videocassette override."

"Major, major thievery," he says. "It's $12 million on Wall Street."

Twelve million dollars is a large sum to have been lost to "theft," even by Hollywood standards. I ask him how he calculated that.

Stone's indictment of the major studios focuses on two types of crimes, which, to use his terms, might be divided into Thievery and Thuggery.

"The majors declare that only 20 percent of a film's videocassette revenues are allocated back to the film's gross."

"I thought gross was gross," I say, relieved to have seen Speed-the-Plow.

Gross isn't gross when it comes to tape revenues because of the override formula, he says. "They keep 80 percent," which means that profit participants on the creative end—like the director and screenwriter, who start collecting only if the gross is massive—can end up shut out of the tape-reve-

nue windfall. "They say they're treating videocassettes as a separate entity. It's been going on for years, but it's a complete misunderstanding of the way that videocassettes were originally supposed to be distributed. Wall Street's video revenues were more than $16 million in sales. They will allocate around $4 million. Ripping off $12 million." (Nick Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, calls this account "confused." He says that "the formula is an industrywide negotiated figure which is the minimum and can be negotiated higher. The economics of the marketplace—marketing costs and the like— have justified the formula.")

Stone calls the other category of crime committed by the cocksucker vampires at the major studios Thuggery: using monopolistic muscle to strangle the once promising growth of nonmajor independents and boutique studios such as Hemdale (which brought out Salvador and Platoon when no one else would). "It's an incredible struggle that's going on," he says. "It's very subtle. Critics don't pick up on it. In 198586, the independent films started to break through. The Salvadors, the Room with a Views, the Platoons."

He contends the majors reacted to this by increasing the quantity of the films they release, which resulted in the independents' being squeezed out, because they're locked out of distribution to movie theaters. "Hemdale, Cannon, Dino [De Laurentiis], all of them have been hurting. They're hurting because they can't get the theater time." (In fact, a recent Variety story confirmed a "screen crunch'' for indies, although collusion is another question.)

Having made the case against these crimes in a fairly sober, forthright manner, Stone suddenly gets revved up with fresh outrage.

"There ought to be an antitrust suit! I call them vampires because that's what they are! There's a legitimate case for an antitrust suit. Not only that, but there should be a separate antitrust suit on the videocassette override. Because they've all banded together and they've agreed to take the override on video. I mean, I'd just love to do it if I had the money."

We'll get into his troubled money situation shortly, but, for the moment, it's impossible to deflect the surge of outrage. It's not for his own selfish interests he's outraged. The future of creativity in American film is at stake! And it's time to go to war: "We're being blocked and destroyed! They put one filmmaker against the other and make you fight for the little fish they throw your way."

And so the call to arms: "We gotta end the majors' blockage! It's a Mafia—that's what it is. You talk about teamsters. You talk about corruption in this country. The film business is as corrupt as anything there is. It's a fucking Mafia! Blind stealing! Break them up! Destroy them! They're vampires. If some president had the guts, he would."

Such then is the State of the Industry according to Hollywood's Last Angry Man. Or might it turn out that what is last shall be first—that Stone is actually one of the first prophets of a dawning new age of rage whose fellow avatars are Morton Downey Jr., freeway shooters, and the other Oliver, the choleric Colonel North, with whom he has ^Hmore in common than he acknowledges ("Ollie North is a pig!" Stone explained to me). An age of rage whose first martyr was assassinated talkshow provocateur Alan Berg, murdered for his anger, memorialized already in Betrayed and now, more obliquely, in Stone's new Talk Radio.

Talk Radio (which began as a theater piece co-written and acted by Eric Bogosian, but which was enlarged by Stone) is one of those films that seem to capture the sneering curl of the lip of the Zeitgeist. It's full of great foulmouthed, blackhumored Oliver Stone material. In fact, although he repeatedly, vociferously denies the resemblance, it's tempting to think of Talk Radio's antihero as a Stone self-portrait. Bogosian plays an angry, abrasive, blown-gasket public provocateur who takes pleasure in rubbing people's noses in painful truths, in ugly realities, disabusing them of their illusions abusively, who argues in favor of legalizing drugs by yelling at the top of his lungs, REPRESSION NEVER WORKS!

While the impulse to self-portraiture may have been the Aristotelian Formal Cause of the Talk Radio project, the Efficient Cause owes more to low comedy, or self-parody: Stone—the same guy who rails against Hollywood corruption and makes a film about corrupt Wall Street insider trading—got involved in Talk Radio because he was desperate for money after blowing $50,000 on a tip on a takeover stock.

"How I lost that $50,000 is really aggravating too," he tells me. " 'Cause it was a character in Wall Street who was a stockbroker who gave me the tip—a takeover deal was going to happen. I was a total sucker!"

"Was this right before the crash?"

"No, no, no," he says, moaning with pain at the memory. "It was a stock—once I got into it, I couldn't sell anything. I mean, you couldn't even sell one share. It was the dog stock of all times!"

Talk Radio was bom of this great moment in the history of capitalism—the maker of a scathing critique of the morality of takeover artists blows his financial security on a takeover tip.

"I was bitching to Ed [Pressman]. I said, 'I lost all this money—is there any way you can get me a quick $50,000? You'll be my friend. Can I do anything? Can I produce something with you?' And he said, 'Ah,' and he brought it [Talk Radio] out of his other hat."

This cheerful candor about what might be seen—in the strictest light—as the very hypocrisy and greed he condemned in Wall Street may actually be Stone's saving grace. It saves him from the Savonarola-like strain in his temperament, relentlessly exposing evil—saves him from lapsing into self-righteousness—because he's a walking expose of himself. There's a kind of off-the-wall charm in this, the kind of thing James Woods pulled off in Salvador by being cheerfully compulsive about both his sins and his confessions.

Stone's mother was French Catholic, his father Jewish; he was raised, in what he calls "a compromise," as a Protestant. He says he now looks more to the Homeric gods for theology, says he drew on the Iliad for inspiration for Platoon. But it may be one of Homer's commoners he most resembles; I'm thinking of Thersites, the bad-tempered, foulmouthed anti-war grunt who mocks the Greek generals with scabrous eloquence.

A Thersitean spew-it-all-out, blow-the-gaskets credo is at the heart of Stone's screenplays. You can see it in the way that even the murderous, disfigured Sergeant Barnes in Platoon—the cold-blooded killing machine—is endowed with a kind of respect, if not nobility, because of his blown-out, beyond-evil honesty. You can see it in Scarf ace in the notorious restaurant scene, the one in which Pacino's Tony Montana exposes his hideous coke-crazed ugliness in the midst of the damask and silver and then challenges the offended onlookers to acknowledge their complicity in the ugliness they try to distance themselves from. You see it in Bogosian screaming, REPRESSION DOESN'T WORK!, in Talk Radio and yelling into the static that he's doing a "public service" by bringing his listeners face-to-face with the fear and anger they've repressed.

Some of this may be attributable to the continuing influence on Stone of Jim Morrison's kill/loot/fuck Categorical Imperative. But it might also be traceable to an earlier, more primal experience. To something Stone experienced as a youth while working as a "wiper" on a tramp steamer: Blowing the Tubes. This was back in 1965, when he dropped out of Yale in the middle of his freshman year and shipped out on merchant-marine vessels, looking for Lord Jim-type adventures. (A search that eventually led him to sign up for Vietnam combat duty.)

The wiper, he says, had the lowliest shipboard job, consisting mainly of cleaning latrines and greasing hot engine parts. "But the worst job the wiper does— really truly scary—is what they call blowing the tubes.

You have to pull these chains off the main boiler, you have to blow these steampipes out. So you open these [gaskets] with like 1,200 pounds of pressure kind of whistling out next to your ear. It was pretty spooky."

You can understand how exposure to the explosive dynamics of this power would give rise to a kind of Steam Gasket model of intrapsychic dynamics: the vision of rage as a mounting head of steam that will explode if not somehow expelled or expressed. Better to blow a gasket than to risk blowing apart the whole psychic apparatus.

The first major feature Stone directed, in fact, a much-neglected psycho-horror film called The Hand, is a pure expression of this model. In The Hand (which is much more interesting and skillfully done than you might think), Michael Caine plays a cartoonist whose drawing hand is sheared off in a car accident. He's a creepily repressed guy seething with pent-up rage which, when denied release, suddenly materializes: his tom-off hand appears to execute Caine's vengeful fantasies by strangling the object of his impulses. The return of the repressed with a vengeance—only Stone is a Freud of anger, not Eros.

But what I like most about that blowing-the-tubes story— and it's one more thing that distinguishes Stone from the "stylish" Spielberg-Demme clones among his generation of filmmakers—is that he actually has shipped out, seen combat, seen adventures rather than merely adventure movies.

This is an old-fashioned-sounding attribute, prerather than postmodern. And perhaps that's the way to describe Stone's work: he's a pre-modemist. He's probably suffered with the critics because of it, because he's not their idea of a stylist. There are few quotations from cinema history in his work. Instead, his films derive a kind of visceral, tabloid energy from the turmoil of the times, combining headline and narrative the way Dos Passos (another old-fashioned pre-modern) did. In fact, Stone told me he did term-paper appreciations of Dos Passes's "U.S.A." trilogy in high school.

In El Salvador; in the very heart of darkness, the headquarters of the death-squad-linked Arena Party, he found some big fans ofScarf ace.

Some of his best stories are about his "research," the lengths to which he's gone to get to the heart of the matter. There's one he tells, which I'm not sure I completely believe, about how he and Richard Boyle, the model for the James Woods character in Salvador, went down there and tried to trick the Salvadoran generals into putting their army at the service of the film by showing them a phony screenplay in which the death squads are the good guys.

Then there's the one he told me about his ''research" into the coke-dealing world to prepare for writing Scarf ace.

In addition to spending time with cops and prosecutors down in Miami, he also devoted some effort to spending time with "the other side." He was told there was an interesting "middle-management situation" in the international coke trade on the island of Bimini at the time.

"And so I went over to Bimini and almost got killed there," he said.

How's that?

"I'd checked into this beautiful old hotel on the ocean, like an old Hemingway resort out of an Edward G. Robinson movie or something. You sense the seediness immediately. It's all these Colombian guys waiting around, waiting for the night hours. So I started drinking with these guys and I.. .1 was doing a lot of coke at this point.. .for my research, right?" "Right, right."

"So I started tooting with some Colombians and got invited back to their digs, to, you know, to party hard. And I, uh, told them I was a writer from Hollywood making a movie, but then around four in the morning, I guess too much tooting had gone down, these three guys were very paranoid, and... Basically, I dropped the name of a guy, a lawyer who I'd talked to who was a defense lawyer now but who had been a prosecutor years before and had nailed them—and one of the guys went white. He thought that I was involved with this guy and I was setting him up again. That I had been sent to Bimini to get him.

Continued on page 127

Continued from page 93

"So the whole fucking conversation shifted gears and he and another menacing-looking guy went into the john to talk this over, and I was getting nervous. I felt, This is it, they'll come out and they'll blow me away.

"So they came out and they didn't shoot, but they wanted to put an end to the conversation, and I figured they're gonna get me later in my room because they knew where I was. So I really made my utmost effort to convince these bozos that I was a Hollywood screenwriter. ' '

"How did you do that?"

"I didn't. They started talking in Spanish. I ran to the door, I crashed through the window—"

"You crashed through the window?"

"Right through the window, glass and everything, and ran to my room. Locked the door, hid in the toilet. ' '

I started laughing, from a combination of wonder and incredulity. Which caused him to confess: "No, it's not true. It's not true. The last part is not true."

"Which part, from crashing through the window?"

"Yeah, up to then, it was very scary. But I talked my way back to the room."

It's actually a better story without the self-dramatizing window-crashing cliche (although who besides Stone knows where the self-dramatizing in this account really begins). It's a story he put to use in Scarface.

"It gave me a feeling of fear again, reminded me of what fear is, which I put into that chain-saw scene in the motel, remember?"

Who could forget the notorious chainsaw scene—still unsurpassed for concentrated whacked-out, paranoid savagery? Not everybody's cup of tea, of course, and the subject of Scarface triggered in Stone a tirade against the critics, who he feels have rejected and scorned all his films except Platoon. But he's particularly incensed by the reception of Scarface.

"Why was that movie shit on so much? When that movie came out it was so hated. I was banned. I was blacklisted."

He knows it's become a cult favorite on videotape, but feels that nobody understood its anti-capitalist politics. That, like Wall Street, it was attacked for what it was about.

He also feels the movie he did with Cimino, Year of the Dragon, was years ahead of its time in exposing the Chinese organized-crime heroin connection. "Then last year The New York Times has a story on it—like it was a new thing. Give me a break!"

He swerves into an assault on critics for falling prostrate before fantasy gimmicks like Roger Rabbit—calls it "a mass delusion," compares it to the Circe episode of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus's men are all turned into swine.

One reason his films will never be beloved, if that's what he wants, is that almost all his heroes are villains. Certainly all the most charismatic figures in his films—the Tom Berenger character in Platoon, Wall Street's Lizard King, Gordon Gekko, Pacino in Scarface—are charismatic villains, or deeply obnoxious "variations on an asshole," as he describes the personal qualities of Barry Champlain, the hero of Talk Radio.

Which brings us to something remarkable about that film: despite all the surface darkness, the ranting bitterness of its protagonist, the film as a whole seems to signal a real shift in Stone's view of rage in general, and of his own rage in particular. It could be a sign that, for better or worse, Oliver Stone is Going Soft.

Going soft? You can see it in the way The changed Talk Radio from the time his stock-tip fiasco brought him into the project (first as producer, then as writer and director). I'm not referring to the acquisition of the rights to a nonfiction book on the assassination of Alan Berg by neoNazis—that turns out to be a red-herring subplot in the film.

No, it's the other piece of major surgery he did on the Bogosian theater piece: he wrote and grafted on a flashback subplot, a "humanizing" romantic-triangle subplot that provides a Psychological Explanation for his hero's anger—and in doing so radically diminishes him, undercuts the integrity of his anger.

In the original version of Talk Radio we only see Barry Champlain, Bogosian's loose-cannon, call-in-show guy, on the air or in the studio. And while it's clear he has problems, his on-air tirades against the ignorance, emptiness, and false piety of American culture as served up to him by his listeners have a kind of eloquent madprophet integrity—he's mad because the world is mad, and it's driving him mad.

But the subplot Stone has written into the piece subverts that by psychologizing Champlain. It's not that the world is screwed up so much as that he's screwed up, which makes him pathetic rather than tragic. It becomes less a film about finding the heart of darkness in the ether of the American night than the story of an immature, insecure guy whose real problem is that he suffers from an "inability to love," because he "doesn't know how to love himself."

It's hard to believe these greeting-card cliches of seventies encounter-group psychology could be at the heart of an Oliver Stone screenplay. After all, these are exactly the sentiments Stone satirized quite sharply in The Hand, which featured sappily earnest devotees of an Esalen-like "Origin Institute."

But, in fact, the psychological turning point, the dramatic Moment of Truth, in Talk Radio comes not from Barry Champlain's peaks of rage or the violence he ultimately provokes. The thing that really stops him dead in his tracks is a question from a young woman caller who asks him, "Why does an intelligent fellow like yourself spend so much energy hurting other people? Do you not love yourself?"

Now, the traditional Oliver Stone character might have something scathing to say about the pathetic selfishness of people who can look at the tragedy of human existence and announce that the highest value is self-love.

But instead, Barry Champlain, man of a million vicious wisecracks and comebacks, is suddenly struck dumb by this question.

"Barry stares at his microphone" is the way the screenplay stage-directs it. "He's trapped—can't or won't answer. . . " At which point the earnest selflove woman tells him, "I think you're very lonely Barry, I'm sorry for you because you don't know how to love."

And then, the screenplay tells us, everyone in the studio who really knows Barry—friends, lovers, co-workers—they all stare down at their laps in mute acknowledgment of this truth.

As a pronouncement of the California Commission on Self-Esteem, this "need to love yourself' thing would not seem a strange judgment. Coming as the thematic crux of an Oliver Stone screenplay, it does seem strange. Not that Stone's a total hard-boiled type; there's a strain of Whitmanesque nature mysticism in his thought that makes itself obliquely felt in Platoon (plentifully and explicitly in earlier drafts). But it seems so pat and simplistic, this guy-who-can't-love-himself business, it makes you wish it too were being subverted; perhaps it is unconscious self-parody. Talk Radio seems curiously divided against itself in the way it subverts its own anger and makes the lovey-dovey "solution" to the anger look ridiculous too—as if reflecting an ongoing debate within Stone's mind over the psychological legitimacy of his own anger.

And, in fact, Stone discloses that he has recently been subjecting at least one component of his anger to psychological scrutiny, and that he's re-evaluating what he calls his "previous animus to psychology."

"It's been very helpful to me in my marriage counseling," he says. (He's been married to his second wife for seven years.) "The attitude in The Hand was very anti-psychiatric. But now it's deepened and I value what they do. I even got an award [for Platoon] from an association of psychotherapists."

He says the marriage counseling has been a big factor in his recent thinking about himself. "You probe your feelings and your relationship to your mom, your relationship to women. Whether you're a misogynist or not."

Stone had a reputation as a womanizer in the past. Does he think he was a misogynist?

"Well, the issue came up: 'Why in your films do you treat. . . ?' And I think there's some truth to it. I think there's some anger and hostilities that I had toward my mother that are still being worked out. . .. There was an ugly divorce, and it came at age fourteen, a crucial age. I went into a very Holden Caulfield kind of reaction to the divorce where I became very cynical about everything. And I think there is a certain anger with my mom that has always been there, latent, and I think my second wife made me aware of it. And that's made me deal with it more honestly. And having a child has... brings things out. . .these repressed things. I'm moving in a direction. . .I'm bringing out the woman in me more and more in my work. I think I made big strides in Talk Radio."

Is the world ready for this kinder, gentler Oliver Stone? Is he ready? The evidence suggests there's still a debate going on. Consider his mixed reaction to the Platoon phenomenon—as distinct from Platoon the movie. The phenomenon transformed the movie into a symbol, an excuse for a rosy national ecumenism about the Vietnam War and the Vietnam veteran. There was a desire to "heal the wounds" even if they had to be papered over.

Somewhat swamped and obscured in the syrup of these sentiments was the fairly dark and bitter point of view of the film itself, which ends, as you recall, with the young American hero cold-bloodedly assassinating his superior officer, after he's murdered a rival because he fears exposure of a hideous rape-and-murder rampage by the platoon in question. (If the new, kinder, gentler Oliver Stone had made the movie, Charlie Sheen might have stopped the murderous Sergeant Barnes dead in his tracks by asking him if he knew how to love himself.)

The capstone of the transformation of Platoon into the Platoon phenomenon was the Lee Iacocca Chrysler commercial (for Jeeps!) that now precedes the videocassette version of the movie. It was a bigmoney deal, but the significance was not the sum so much as Chrysler's implicit endorsement of the wholesomeness of Platoon.

I asked Stone about the Iacocca spot, and he disclosed there was some heated debate over what he would permit Iacocca to say.

"The first copy was terrible," he said. "It was very patriotic, and I said, 'There's no way that I'm gonna say that.' So we went through several rounds of the copy. I don't think that anything he says is particularly pro-American in the sense of our boys. I said, 'It can't be our boys. It's gotta be all boys. It's gotta be Vietnamese and Americans.' So they reached some kind of compromise. I mean, it didn't sound too offensive. And Iacocca's a guy I kind of admire."

But he does condemn a lot of the Vietnam films that followed in the wake of the Platoon phenomenon.

"A lot of right-wing films were made with the idea being that our boys did a great job—aren't they wonderful? Letters Home—with no sense of the fact that the war was morally corrupt from the get-go. It's not enough to say that the boys fought well. That's not what it's about. The war stank! It was wrong because our foreign policy was wrong. Because we had no integrity in the way we fought. And we lost because we were morally corrupt. We [the guys who did the fighting] were just the frontline guinea pigs for this marionette show—that was rotten from the core. We deserved to lose!" he said. And then repeated, "We deserved to lose!"

There are other signs that Stone hasn't entirely shrink-wrapped his anger— that there's a debate going on over how, or whether, to come to terms with it.

His screenplay for Born on the Fourth of July, for instance, is to my mind some of the most powerful writing he's*done. There are some of his most bitter and ugly moments, but surprisingly there are also some scenes of amazing tenderness and sadness (particularly one between the crippled vet and his mother that begins in violence and ends in reconciliation).

Born (based on the Ron Kovic autobiography) could turn out to be a major tearjerker, which would be a first for an Oliver Stone film. As it's written, it's a bitter love story about a Viet vet's coming to terms with his rage against his once beloved country. And about coming to terms with what's inside himself. In a sense, it's a conscious, articulate synthesis of the Old and the New Stone, which were at odds with each other in an incoherent way in Talk Radio.

But despite this evidence of a kind of reconciliation with his rage in his work, there seems little danger that Oliver Stone will ever become one of life's happy campers. If there'd been any doubt in my mind about this, it was resolved at the end of our last lunch together when Stone poured forth what I now think of as his Swarming Anaconda Vision of Planetary Existence.

We were at the Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica. The sun was sparkling off the Pacific just a Frisbee toss away; the breeze was gentle; the pleasant hum of laid-back industry types was broken only by the occasional roar of the blender making rum-and-kiwi frappes. Everything about the moment was pacific in the best sense of the word. Until I brought up the subject of The Healthy Mind.

What prompted this was something in the Talk Radio screenplay that he subsequently cut from the film itself. It's a throwaway laugh line: Bogosian's Barry Champlain is followed on the air by a radio phone-in shrink, Dr. Susan Fleming, who calls her show The Healthy Mind. In the screenplay, the somewhat prissy Dr. Fleming comes in for a bit of piggy ridicule from motor-mouth Barry ("Admit it, you really want an orgasm after all—once in your life!''). There seemed to be some satirical animus in the very name of her show, The Healthy Mind.

And so, after a healthy meal (I drank, he didn't) at the Ivy, just as we were about to leave, I asked Stone what his idea of "the healthy mind" might be.

He began with a rather pious recitation of qualities: "Well, it's obvious, I'll probably be very boring to you, but.. .considerate, generous, humble, merciful..."

He thought a little more. "And probably with a good sense of attention, and a balance between the darkness and the light..."

Something happened as soon as he introduced the word "darkness" into the flow. It was in the context of "a balance between the darkness and the light," but suddenly the balance was tipped, and he began to explicate what he meant by the darkness. He started talking about life being conflict, "continual conflict going on all the time. It's a raging sea, it's a raging.

He paused as if groping for what exactly the raging was like, and then declared: "It's a war! It's a battle every day. The most commonplace activity can be perceived as a war, if you think about it."

I paused to think about it: the most commonplace activity a war—is that how the healthy mind thinks? Are we still on the same page?

It was at this point he launched into his Swarming Anaconda vision of the planet.

"As we speak, you know what's going on in the whole world? If you were God looking down, what you would see would probably blow your mind out. I don't think you'd live. It's like one acid trip to the millionth degree. I mean, there's murders going on now, there's fish eating each other in the sea, there's pythons, there's anacondas swarming in the depths of some Brazilian river. There's a mugging, there's a rape, there's a guy dying, there's a woman dying. Tortures! Eyeballs being pulled out in Guatemala probably right now as we speak. Babies are dying, babies are being bom, people are fucking in motel rooms across the hall. This world is very rich. . .it's like a meat stew. It's all a war. It's raging. This woman putting lipstick on at the next table— where does that lipstick come from? I mean, what got mashed up to make that lipstick?. . .There's a war, a psychological war all around us... "

The swarming anacondas in the meat stew at the bottom of the Brazilian river: the healthy mind according to Oliver Stone.

In fact, to be fair, he's saying something more than that. He's talking about a balance between darkness and light. A recent critique of the currently fashionable "cultural materialist" school of literary criticism contended that its inner ideology could be reduced to: It's a jungle out there. While the inner ideology of the New Criticism it supplanted could be reduced to: Love makes the world go round. And that the two views must be in conflict. I think what Stone is saying is that the healthy mind can gaze at the jungle out there without flinching, but still root for love to make the world go round. Although he'd probably complain that it was going round in the wrong direction.