Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today. "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened. Couldn't Stone have waited a few years? After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him. Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him. As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man: that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle. With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way. So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.
MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)
Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter. It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt. Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it. But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone: he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.
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