“It’s kind of been forgotten”: the Oliver Stone movie released at the wrong time
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Oliver Stone enjoyed an incredible run of form that reaped plenty of critical and commercial rewards. The downside of being so prolific and successful in equal measure is that some things tend to fall through the cracks, leaving the filmmaker crushed that a movie he held dearly didn’t get its flowers.
It’s not an understatement to say there were few who could match Stone at the peak of his powers during that remarkable period, where he was racking up trophies, hauling in big box office, and winning massive amounts of acclaim on a basis so regular it made him the envy of his peers.
After winning his first Academy Award for penning Midnight Express, Stone would swiftly add two more to his collection by directing Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, while he also scripted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s breakout film Conan the Barbarian and Brian De Palma’s iconic Scarface.
He also directed James Woods to an Oscar nomination for Salvador, steered Michael Douglas one better when he took home the ‘Best Actor’ prize for Wall Street and crafted one of the most beloved musical biopics of its era when Val Kilmer delivered career-best work in The Doors.
Unfortunately, being such a hot commodity had a detrimental effect on Talk Radio, Stone’s 1988 dramatic thriller that flopped at the box office despite a warm reception. Eric Bogosian’s on-air host Barry Champlain makes it his mission to create controversy, but struggles to keep his personal life together, only for those two worlds to come crashing together when a caller with ulterior motives and sinister intentions puts him on the spot.
Producer Garth Drabinsky thought it would be the ideal counterprogramming during the festive season despite Stone’s protestations, only for the director to be proven right when Talk Radio sank without a trace and instantly vanished from memory after debuting in cinemas on December 21.
“It came out at the wrong time,” he admitted to Filmmaker Magazine. “Garth had huge ambitions for it and released it as Christmas, but it was definitely not a Christmas movie. It was far too dark for December, but Garth put it out then, and it bombed. It was my first real bomb.”
Stone remained immensely proud of the film, bristling when he was forced to confess, “It’s been kind of forgotten.” Still, it wasn’t lost on the auteur how “technically and artistically it was a big step for me,” with Talk Radio giving the filmmaker the confidence in his abilities to move on to his next project, which ended up winning him an Oscar when he tasked Tom Cruise to embody Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July.
