Oliver Stone names the director who “did the best orgies” in cinema history
For decades, Oliver Stone has been flirting perilously with ‘old man yells at cloud territory’, taking the world to task in his own inimitable way. Whether it’s movies, television, politics, or anything else that tickles his fancy, the filmmaker has never been regarded as a shrinking violent.
The conspiratorial auteur has espoused his beliefs in both fictional and non-fiction settings, ranging from his multiple politically-tinged movies to the documentaries he’d helmed covering such figures as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. Did the world really need him to comment on orgies, though? Probably not, but he did anyway.
With four Academy Awards to his name and a filmography boasting several established classics of the moving image, cinema is something Stone is well-qualified to comment on. And yet, the majority of his work could be described as sexless, which makes it curious that he’d rail against one film in particular for failing to do justice to the reality of writhing mounds of flesh bumping uglies like there’s no tomorrow.
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon was a significant box office flop that failed to live up to its early billing as a nailed-on awards season contender, and while it was clear from the outset there was a heavy element of embellishment and fantasy to his hedonistic period piece, Stone drew the line at the unrealistic orgies.
“It’s ridiculous because he lost touch with reality,” Stone ranted to Metrograph. “I’ve read a lot about the 1920s, they didn’t have orgies like that. I mean, orgies existed, orgies happened for a reason, Cecil B. DeMille did the best orgies we know, in The Ten Commandments, but Damien Chazelle; I liked the movie, it had many good things in it, but that opening was overdone.”
Babylon opens with a raunchy party populated by drugs, debauchery, and jazz, but Stone was bizarrely put off by the overwrought nature of Chazelle’s mass copulation. “Everybody’s fucking everybody, it doesn’t work like that,” he explained, speaking suspiciously – and harrowingly – like a man who would know.
“A reason has to be established,” he continued, breaking down the intricacies inherent to having a room full of people shagging each other’s brains out. “You shouldn’t lead with the chaos. The chaos should come later, is what I think.” If anybody wanted to know how Stone prefers his orgies, which hopefully they shouldn’t, then they have their answer; the man wants them to be chaotic… eventually.
DeMille certainly crafted enough orgies to justify Stone calling him the industry’s most vaunted proponent of multi-person pounding anyway, with The Ten Commandments joining Manslaughter and Madam Satan as just three examples of the influential director’s career-long habit of throwing caution to the wind and injecting his oeuvre with a penetrative pile-on.
