TWISTED OLIVER STONE

Where in Riordan’s new book, Stone: the controversies, excesses, and exploits of a radical filmmaker (Hyperion, $ 24.95, 573 pages), does the answer lie? Could it be when Stone landed in the clink for marijuana smuggling on his 1968 return from Vietnam? (“He was a vet just returned from combat . . . who’d been thrown in jail and America didn’t seem to care.”) Or perhaps paranoia dates from 1975 and Stone’s unproduced but attention-getting script $ IThe Cover-Up, the first of his fictional works “to involve a government agency in a conspiracy” (it connected the dots between Uncle Sam and the Patty Hearst kidnapping)? Or maybe the pivotal event was as recent as 1990, when $ IBorn on the Fourth of July failed to bag a slew of Academy Awards in the aftermath of the first collision of Stone-made falsehood with verifiable fact? (“They’ll find something to make you look bad if they want to,” says Stone.) Reaching deep into the past, one ought not dismiss the miserable stretch in summer camp that Oliver Stone endured at age 4. Or does the answer lie elsewhere?

Indeed it does. The dark epiphany, as Stone explained to his biographer, came with the first debunking of his movie JFK, a public service performed in 1991 by the Washington Post’s George Lardher while the film was still in production. Lardner got his hands on an early draft of the script and tried to correct Stone’s twisted account of events. Quoth self- described anarchist Stone: “I said, where the f — is our security? . . . I wanted our computers sealed. I wanted security guards. . . . We didn’t know where an attack might come from or what might be targeted as an obstruction. Now that the real guts of what the film was about was out, who knew what to expect? Especially if the CIA or the Mafia wanted it stopped.”

There’s more. Having brazenly fingered the CIA, the military, Lyndon Johnson, and Earl Warren, among others, in a plot to kill the 35th president of the United States, Stone adopted a pose of injured innocence: “I never sought controversy. I tried to make JFK as quietly as possible . . .”

What to make of a man who seems genuinely to believe he may be rubbed out, offed, or taken for a ride in cement shoes because of “the real guts” of his movie, all the while insisting he “never sought controversy”? Again and again, Stone demonstrates an inability to distinguish not only between right and wrong, but even between yes and no. This explains how he could, by his own telling, rediscover in himself an “essential decency” that allowed him to give up cocaine-and, simultaneously, write Scarface, a 1983 flick still notorious for its obscene violence and mind- blunting profanity.

Now, just as Nixon opens a new chapter in Oliver Stone’s cinematic history of the American-speaking peoples, James Riordan has offered up a curious work of warts-and-all hagiography, which felt-wraps the “excesses and exploits” of the subtitle in a cloak of acceptance and apology. Riordan does not shrink from such clich’s as “anger” and “alienation,” “pain” and “compassion,” to pad his subject’s sharp edges. Most of the time, though, Stone’s antisocial habits just blend into the Hollywood landscape.

Thus, when Stone slips a Quaalude into a date’s drink, writer-director John Milius and his wife can’t stop laughing. (Years earlier, Stone had spiked his father’s drink with LSD.) While the movie community buzzes about Stone’s auditions for the female parts in The Doors, casting director Risa Bramon Garcia puts them in perspective: “Look, I was in the room.

All that happened was the girl had to say, “My c — is yours,” and kind of be nd over. I mean, big deal.” From collabor ator Richard Rutowski (Natural Born Killers) we hear of a late-70s ” research” project that led him and Stone through several prisons, into all of which they smuggled cocaine, on one occasion getting high in an electric chair. In such company, even Oliver Stone verges on the unexceptional.

As for the “controversies” mentioned in Riordan’s subtitle — main- ly the struggles over historical memory that separate Stone from such run-of-the- movie-mill lefties as Robert Redford and Warren Beatty — the arguments only make it into the book garbled and incomplete. Riordan concludes, deadpan: Stone “may even slightly distort the factual truth sometimes for the good of this goal [spiritual truth]. Because of these attitudes, he has never understood why people get offended when he tells what he believes is the truth. To him there’s no such thing as an offensive truth. He doesn’t factor in that people may get angry because the truth hurts feelings.”

Needless to say, the willful, reckless distortion of fact is not a matter of feelings, hurt or otherwise. Expect no insightful, let alone literate, critique of Stone from Stone. As biography, the book is plodding and superficial; if it has high points, it does so because interviews with Oliver Stone — and, indeed, his life itself — contain crests of frenzy and disequilibrium that do not fail to astonish and unnerve.

Oliver “I never sought controversy” Stone was born in 1946, Year One of the Baby Boom, or, as he prefers, the dawn of the Cold War. His upbringing, for all its wealth, was emotionally grim. Son of a French Catholic mother and a Manhattan Jewish father, Stone grew up an Episcopalian. He followed a privileged track from prep school to boarding school to Yale, his father’s alma mater. (Upon matriculation in 1927, Lou Silverstein had changed the family name to Stone.) Oliver’s parents were preoccupied and promiscuous; Riordan recounts wifeswapping, prostitutes for Lou, and, later, sex-and-drug parties for Jacqueline. They divorced when Oliver was 15, leaving their only child to hear the news from his headmaster. Not long after, Lou Stone bought his son his first sexual experience with a call girl, and, soon after that, President Kennedy was assassinated. This series of events constitutes young Oliver’s coming of age. “It left me feeling that there was a mask on everything, a hidden negative truth. . . . I feel you have to keep digging into history to understand what happened to us and our generation,” he says. Perhaps here lies a clue as to why Oliver Stone movies are peopled by such cold and unlikeable characters, and why many of the films project a predivorce, pre-assassination world that glows with a near-surreal sheen.

The well-known 14-month hitch in Vietnam followed, and Stone, sometimes valorous and almost continuously drugged-out, lived to tell his tale. Seventeen years later, after 14 screenplays, a failed first marriage, one Academy Award (Midnight Express), and untold quantities of drugs, Oliver Stone brought Platoon to the screen, transforming himself into a hero of the intelligentsia and a formidable force in Hollywood.

The bulk of Riordan’s book consists of chapters named for Stone’s major movies, and the making of each is meticulously documented: Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, and Natural Born Killers. Considered as a whole, Stone’s work is not memorable for storytelling. It runs to linear plots and stock characters, loaded with emotional baggage calculated to elicit a predictable response. Like a TV movie-of-the-week writer who spins stories around terminal illness, Stone tends to revolve his pictures around a charged central element-the brutality of warfare or drug trafficking, the pathos of paralysis, the nihilistic destructiveness of serial killers — that is fused to go off, almost regardless of the story line.

Stone’s significance hangs instead on his handful of movie-histories. Without Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, to a minor extent The Doors$ N and Heaven and Earth, and, of course, JFK and now Nixon, Oliver Stone would be just another successful, reflexively leftist moviemaker living a high- consumption fairy tale in the West Coast sunshine. The creator of $ IConan the Barbarian, Wall Street, Talk Radio, and the reprehensible $ INatural Born Killers would not rate a book-length study.

Stone’s short list begins with Platoon, the Vietnam war movie that told America “the enemy was in us.” According to Riordan, “the film was neither ” pro- nor antiwar in most people’s minds. It was simply the truth.” (Salvador, released the same year, is a more conventional work of advocacy; it does not pretend to enshrine Simple Truth.)

While deeply autobiographical, Platoon is best classified as a fictional memoir. Critics accorded it the gravity of historical record, reveling in a dep ict ion of the ugly American vet that seemed to validate the era’s war protests and draft evasions. And where the truth posed a personal threat to Stone — as when the depiction of war crimes in the movie raised the question of personal culpability — he could always retreat into the sanctuary of fiction.

Not so with Born on the Fourth of July, based on the memoir of Ron Kovic, a gung-ho Marine turned antiwar demonstrator. Riordan uncritically perpetuates the falsehoods of the movie and trivializes the point-by-point refutations of $ IBorn that dogged it in the months prior to the Academy Awards.

Even Riordan, however, has doubts about Stone’s depiction of Kovic’s pilgrimage to Venus, Georgia, supposedly to visit the family of a fellow soldier Kovic had accidentally killed. This critical sequence, after which Kovic emerges a war protester, never took place in real life. According to Kovic’s officier, it is unlikely the killing occurred. There is no Venus, Georgia, and Kovic contacted no family.

Here is Stone’s rationale for what his film shows: “Ron did confess to killing his own man in his book. I felt I could show him writing the book, but I’d rather show him going to Georgia and finding those people because he thought about it repeatedly. He had dreams about it and even located where they were. I thought Ron had in a sense acted this out by writing about it,$ N which is a significant confession, so I took the liberty of actually having him go down there in the film. In the movie it becomes a key scene because . . . it allows him to . . . deal with the reality of what he did. That frees him up to become a public persona who is ready to go out into the world and become a spokesman. You can’t go public like that until you conquer it within your private self” (italics added).

Stone’s explanation, for what it’s worth, represents a significant shift from his original defense of the movie (not mentioned by Riordan): “I’m the biographer,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m obviously telling Ron’s story. I’m not screwing with the facts.”

The Doors, the story of rock star Jim Morrison, followed Born. It was a fiopola, both in the press and at the bank. Still, it allowed Stone to chronicle the flip side of the Vietnam experience and to sample aspects of the sixties he had missed. As Riordan points out, Stone is what cinematographer Bob Richardson calls a “Method director,” one who internalizes his protagonists” lives. To re-create the life of Jim Morrison, Stone turned to drugs (peyote), sex (much), and rock’n’roll (The Doors). (During the rush of publicity for Nixon, watch for Stone’s square coat-and-tie style.) “Maybe I did fail with The Doors,” Stone told Riordan, whose previous books include a work on Jim Morrison. “But if I did, it’s just between Jim and me. I know I tried my best to do something that could live up to him. And I think he would’ve loved it. But, ultimately, it’s just between him and me.”

Four years have passed since JFK came under attack from both right and left for portraying the Kennedy assassination through the eyes of the widely discredited Jim Garrison as a secret coup d’6tat carried out to satisfy the greed of the military-industrial complex. It is here that Riordan fails most shamefully in his duties as biographer by not including one meaningful, accurate critique of the movie.

Typical of the scanty context Riordan offers is this: “To be sure, Garrison . . . had his flaws as an investigator, but the more substantiated criticisms impugned his eccentricity rather than his motives. “Jim Garrison made many mistakes,” Stone concedes. “He trusted a lot of weirdos and followed a lot of fake leads. But he went out on a limb, way out, even when he knew he was facing long odds.'” The flaws, the fake leads, remain amorphous. Riordan dutifully lists the titles of critical pieces, but he rarely provides more information than where the articles appeared and how many pages they ran.

Stone, at his most disingenuous, points to markers within the movie that supposedly flag its flights of fancy: “We clearly differentiate between fact and theory in the film.

Any person familiar with film technique knows that when we cut to something like [Jack] Ruby picking up a bullet in the hospital in black and white, it’s a hypothetical image. Or when Garrison’s talking about the bullet being placed on the stretcher and we cut to a hand putting a bullet on the stretcher — people realize that is conjecture. . . . It’s the same with the dialogue. The differences between Garrison’s conjecture and what was established or proven in his mind is clear, and I stand behind those points.”

Oliver Stone once told 60 Minutes he was “trying to understand the world through movies, trying to shape the world through movies, reshape it.” Truer wo rds he never spoke. Much has been written about the power of celluloid to sugge st and inspire, and, in Oliver Stone’s technically adept hands , to reconfigure a span of history. As witnesses to onscreen events, movie audiences-particularly young, post-literate audiences — retain Stone’s vision of the past in such a way that it begins to take on the guise of memory and the power of myth.

By now, it is obvious the man is long embarked on a mission to recreate the s eminal events of the age in order to undermine a country he inexplicably loathe s, even as it enriches and lionizes him. Having assumed the role of national hi storian, Oliver Stone, is trying to define our sense of ourselves as a people, and he’s doing it with help from corporate America, the Disneys and the Warner Brothers who stand behind him.

By Diana West;