The movie that almost killed Oliver Stone’s career: “I was dead in the water”
I try not to make a habit of comparing my life to that of legends in the entertainment business. After all, music and film are the custodians of opulent success, and so thinking too hard about how my Friday nights are spent in the same cheap pub, as opposed to a house party in the depths of Hollywood, helps maintain my sanity.
But then, someone like Oliver Stone is brought up to me, and I am truly faced with the reality of how little I have in fact done with my life. Here is a man who not only fought in the Vietnam War but also wrote the screenplay for one of the greatest films of all time in Scarface, and is an iconic movie director in his own right. With just one of those, he is already one of the most interesting men on the planet.
It was a sort of personal background that made him well placed to be the director of the sort of politically charged epics he created. JFK, Wall Street and Platoon all tap into his unique outlook on the socio-political state of America, while bleeding in the sort of cutting edge artistry he would have learned working on the production of Scarface.
But by the time Stone had got to that level, he had to cut his teeth the hard way. Especially when setting foot on such a monumental set, surrounded by Hollywood legends who were somewhat aware of his previous projects, for better or worse.
Stone cut his teeth in the horror sphere, creating films whose very genre allowed for the sense of shock and awe he prided himself on. But during the production of his second movie, The Hand, he experienced what all budding filmmakers do in their career infancy: commercial and critical failure.
The film follows a plagued cartoonist, played by Michael Caine, who, after losing a hand in a fateful car accident, goes on a killing spree in some pursuit of revenge, and while he believed in the drama of the plot, it was a story he failed to make stick.
So by the time the Scarface production rolled around and his screenplay for the film was developed, his on set kudos was somewhat questioned, “Well, Brian had been a very successful horror director. I had not. And that was screwed into my psyche by Bregman, and you can believe that,” he said in reference of the film’s director Brian De Palma and Martin Bregman who worked as a producer.
Stone added, “The Hand, according to him, was ‘a disaster,’ blah, blah, blah. But you can look at The Hand, it’s certainly a psychologically interesting film. But it had not done business. And I was dead in the water as a director. And Bregman used that, of course. I wanted to direct badly. I had written and directed, and I wanted to continue doing that. But I knew that this was not going to be my film, because I didn’t have the experience to do something this size.”
For film fans and Stone, it was only right that Stone didn’t get the project, for De Palma’s direction of the movie remains one of the most important contributions in cinema history. As for Stone, it’s safe to say he got his acclaim eventually.
