Oliver Stone is a well-known American film director, so well known, in fact, most people would be able to name at least two or three of his films without pause for thought. Born on the Fourth of July, Wall Street, and Platoon instantly spring to mind, followed, with the briefest pause, by Midnight Express and Natural Born Killers. Stone is known for being “controversial” but James M. Welsh and Donald M. Whaley, co-author-editors of The Oliver Stone Encyclopedia go further and describe Stone as a “puzzle”. In the introduction to their work they ask “Why Oliver Stone?” When Stone first entered film making after having seen combat in the Vietnam War, he initially worked with directors, Michael Cimino and John Milius, which linked Stone with right-wing politics before he began to veer towards the left with Salvador (1986) which criticised American foreign policy. He was further linked with anti-war protestors with such films as Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Nixon (1995), then toward popular culture, radical life-styles with The Doors (1991) and extremely controversial films such as JFK and Natural Born Killers. Stone's father was a stock broker and republican, but Wall Street (1987) was dedicated to his father, but critical of financial villains and corruption. The two-part introduction (all 27 pages of it) then asks if Stone is “liberal, leftist, or what?” Those who have viewed Oliver Stone's films would agree, probably, that he is a political film maker and the editors take a view that “Stone is not merely liberal or leftist, but radical, and, beyond that, not merely radical, but even, possibly, in one point in his career, a radical anarchist who doesn't exactly throw bombs but makes volatile and explosive films”. It is interesting that the editors identify from the beginning the thematic concerns of the Stone films which might be classified as follows: excessive corporate money making and greed; Vietnam from the outside in; US foreign policy and Latin America; corrupt politics and oppressive government; and the media running amok. Within the introduction, the author-editors ponder on their presentation, a format which they first used in their earlier The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia (Welsh et al., 2010) (RR 2011/336) which was to present a “kaleidoscopic” approach but one which is personalised and which readers expect to be objective. This work has certainly fulfilled these aims.
I enjoyed the author-editors debating their own “kaleidoscopic” approach, where they consider, (nothing at all to do with Stone!), whether the “encyclopedic ideal” is “outdated and old fashioned in the current post-modern era” particularly having regard to the fact that, after 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica “the mother of all encyclopaedias” closed its covers forever and the final print edition was 32 volumes in 2010. So, it is asked, is it “swimming up-stream” in “producing a print encyclopedia, concerning an artist who worked on film, and hoping that someone may notice”? Well, say the authors, “the least we could do was to try and make it personable”.
Did they succeed? Absolutely, in my opinion. The A-Z entries are enjoyable, not a word I usually use for an encyclopedia. Going back to the print versus online encyclopedia arguments, this encyclopedia has the true “browsing” quality which the directness of the online encyclopedia lacks, and probably, will forever lack. Not only do the A-Z entries include all of the films, producers, actors, personalities, etc., but there are entries for notable films that Stone has influenced (doubtless there are many others). One such is one of my favourites Boiler Room (2000), written and directed by Ben Younger about young brokers and Stone's influence is such that the actors in the film are quoting lines from Stone's Wall Street!
I confess a sudden surprised pause in my browsing when I came up against Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) born at Stratford Upon Avon who established his dramatic credentials in Elizabethan London during the 1590 s … and had to carefully read through the Shakespeare/Stone link. “Echoes of Shakespeare are to be found in several of Oliver Stone films; Hamlet and Julius Caesar, for example, in JFK (1991); Richard III in Tony Montana, the central killer of Scarface scripted by Oliver Stone for Director Brian DePalma; and Macbeth in Nixon”.
There are numerous black and white illustrations in this book which is laid out well with a good size and clear type font. I was quite sad when I finally reached Zinn, Howard (1922-2010) a radical historian activist and public intellectual who was sympathetic to Oliver Stone and who appears in Sean Stone's documentary Dangerous Dynasty, The Bush Legacy (2008). Happily it is not quite the end as there are two enjoyable appendices, one of which is a fairly lengthy “reception piece” written by historian Tom Prasch at the time of the JFK (1991) release, and in appendix B some interviews by the film critic, John Carter Tibbetts about Platoon and Salvador. The book ends with a selected bibliography, and an extremely thorough index.
If it hasn't become obvious already, I found this book thoroughly enjoyable. I could talk forever about it – there are so many gems in the A-Z entries. There is a point in the introduction where the author-editors refer to themselves in writing the book as “we have struggled through this book”. I can think of quite a number of works where it may well have been a struggle for the author, but where the reading is a struggle for the reader. This is, happily, not one of those works; it is thorough but perfectly readable and a work that strongly deserves a wide readership. I would have no hesitation in placing it among film books in a public library as well as recommending it for students of the cinema and film studies courses at university and college. It really is a great read.
