Chasing the Light

May 15, 2020
The celebrated and controversial filmmaker chronicles his journey "from the bottom back to the top of the Hollywood mountain." Stone knows how to grab a viewing audience--and readers. He begins by describing a complex, dangerous scene he was filming in Mexico for his "epic-scale" Salvador (1986). "It's everything that made the movies so exciting to me as a child--battles, passionate actions, momentous outcomes," he writes. This book covers Stone's first 40 years. Those who read the author's novel A Child's Night Dream (1997) will be familiar with his early years: French mother and soldier father who divorced when he was at boarding school; teaching in Saigon; time in the Merchant Marine. After Yale didn't work out, he enlisted in the Army and went to Vietnam. Stone engagingly describes his harrowing experiences, which included being bombed by friendly fire. At NYU, he learned his first basic lesson in film: "chasing the light." Teacher Martin Scorsese critiqued Stone's short about Vietnam: "Well--this is a filmmaker." After splitting with his wife, Stone worked on a number of screenplays, including one about his fellow soldiers and the "lies and war crimes" he observed: "I had to find meaning in that shitty little war." His screenplay for Platoon was "good, solid work--maybe some of the best stuff I'd done yet." Al Pacino was interested, but the time wasn't right. Stone's screenplay for Midnight Express won him a Golden Globe and an Oscar, which made him "a commodity in demand." However, he made errors in judgment with Seizure and The Hand, and he also had a "devil in my closet," cocaine, which he later kicked. His screenplay for Brian de Palma's Scarface opened doors and led to his writing and directing Salvador and Platoon. Stone recounts his life of ups and downs well; besides being an accomplished screenwriter, he's also a fine prose writer. To be continued? In the often tacky world of movie memoirs, Stone's will stand out for its hard-earned insights, integrity, and grace.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 27, 2020
Stone’s autobiography is every bit the stylish, unapologetic, and at times self-aggrandizing document one would expect based on his flamboyant films. Stone describes his upbringing as that of a consummate boomer, raised by wildly contrasting parents—a hustling Wall Street broker father and a French socialite mother. Volunteering for service in Vietnam after getting kicked out of Yale (“I remember staring at a long column of F’s—or was it zeros?”), Stone survived some vicious combat, then moved to N.Y.C.’s Lower East Side and drove a cab to support himself. After NYU film school (where Martin Scorsese taught him), he made an early splash as a screenwriter, winning an Oscar for Midnight Express in 1978, before the setback of his Hollywood directorial debut, the ill-received 1981 horror film The Hand. Writing Scarface (1983) was a comeback of sorts, even if the film initially received a poor critical reception. Then he went on a go-for-broke crusade to both write and direct more personal films, finally achieved with 1986’s Salvador. Stone’s subsequent hits, including JFK, Wall Street, and Platoon, receive short shrift here, and fans of those flicks will be left wishing Stone revisits them more extensively in a later volume. However, readers more interested in artists’ early struggles than in their glory days will be fascinated.

February 1, 2020

Of course, Stone goes behind the scenes of his many films, but the Academy Award-winning writer/director also discusses his childhood, his combat in Vietnam, and Hollywood in the generally tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.