Chasing the Light

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.