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The 1986 war drama "Platoon" was Oliver Stone's fourth film as a director, but it proved to be his breakout in the public consciousness. Before 1986, Stone helmed two horror movies and a biopic of war photographer Richard Boyle ("Salvador"), but "Platoon" put him on the map. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director. Stone immediately emerged as an enfent terrible, ready to interrogate and criticize previously romanticized American institutions. He also became wildly ambitious, seemingly possessing the temerity to assume his films would change the way the public thinks. In some cases, he was right. 

Stone wore his politics on his sleeve, and often spoke about how much he hated the American right wing. Two of his films are deeply critical biopics of Republican presidents, and several of his more recent documentaries analyze politicians in power. He has turned his lens on Vladimir Putin,...

Exclusive: Three-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone has gone back to his roots for Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador and the Movie Game. Just published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the book is a personal reminiscence, the coming of age of a great filmmaker. Stone describes in detail everything from his experience in Vietnam, liberal drug use upon his return that once almost got him tried on drug smuggling charges, finding and losing love, and scratching his way from being a part-time cab driver to an Oscar winner for his Midnight Express script in just 18 months.

Chasing the Light is a gracefully written memoir with plenty of dish about the formation of a great career. Bottom line: Sure, talent helps, and Stone had it both as writer and director. But the real keys are an iron will to succeed and a...

How do you document a film with film? How is it possible to use the technology of writing with movement to incorporate everything on a film strip, and everything that surrounds it? Director John Torres’ “People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose” is a film that attempts to accomplish this mission.

According to the director’s statement, he found the footage of “Diary of Vietnam Rose” under the bed of a former Filipino sex icon. The film was shot by the “self-professed Messiah of Philippine Cinema” Celso Ad Castillo. Castillo was shooting the film when Oliver Stone was finishing “Platoon” on the same island. The consultant in Stone’s film, Richard Boyle, also had a part in “Vietnam Rose”. Meanwhile, on the main island, the People Power movement has already started. Marcos and his gangs were ousted. A democracy was reborn.

“People Power Bombshell: Vietnam Rose Diary” is screening...

How do you document a film with film? How is it possible to use the technology of writing with movement to incorporate everything on a film strip, and everything that surrounds it? Director John Torres’ “People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose” is a film that attempts to accomplish this mission.

According to the director’s statement, he found the footage of “Diary of Vietnam Rose” under the bed of a former Filipino sex icon. The film was shot by the “self-professed Messiah of Philippine Cinema” Celso Ad Castillo. Castillo was shooting the film when Oliver Stone was finishing “Platoon” on the same island. The consultant in Stone’s film, Richard Boyle, also had a part in “Vietnam Rose”. Meanwhile, on the main island, the People Power movement has already started. Marcos and his gangs were ousted. A democracy was reborn.

“People Power Bombshell: Vietnam Rose Diary” is screening...

Hemdale became one of the largest indie studios of the 80s with films like The Terminator and Platoon. Ryan charts its turbulent history...

When Platoon won four Oscars in 1987, it marked not only a new chapter in Oliver Stone's career as a filmmaker, but also the end of a decade-long battle. Since the 1970s, Stone had been struggling to make his harrowing account of the horrors he'd seen firsthand as a soldier in the Vietnam conflict, but was famously turned down by every major studio in Hollywood.

Platoon, and Stone, finally found sanctuary at a small independent studio with a grand-sounding name: the Hemdale Film Corporation. It was Hemdale, and its co-founder John Daly, that had taken a chance on Stone, and when Platoon came out in 1986, the gamble proved to be a shrewd one: its $6m investment was covered by the first month's ticket sales, and the film...

It’s been a long time since Oliver Stone made anything with as much punchy political grit as Salvador. As the first of two films (the other being Platoon) produced by John Daly (and released mind-bogglingly within months of each other in the spring of 1986) that reckoned with war and all of its cultivated cruelty, its recklessness and the underlying romanticism being ravaged from within. Stone’s film took up the, at that time, still active El Salvadoran peasant revolution and the Us funded murder and suppression of such an uprising, as its volatile subject, all through the eyes of a true-to-life conniving Hunter S. Thompson-esque photo journalist named Richard Boyle, who co-wrote the screenplay along with Stone and who’s on the ground experiences served as inspiration for the film. An Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor, raw in its depiction of the ugliness...

Blu-ray Release Date: Sept. 9, 2014

Price: Blu-ray $29.95

Studio: Twilight Time

James Woods is photo-journalist Richard Boyle in Salvador.

Salvador starring James Woods (Any Given Sunday), the 1986 war drama film directed and co-written by Oliver Stone (Savages) that established him as a take-no-prisoners, in-your-face left-leaning filmmaker, makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Twilight Time.

The film tells the story of a real-life American photo-journalist Richard Boyle (Woods) covering the Salvadoran Civil War who becomes entangled with both leftist guerrillas and the right-wing military. The film is sympathetic towards the left wing revolutionaries and strongly critical of the U.S.-supported death squads, focusing on the murder of four American churchwomen and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Also starring James Belushi, Michael Murphy, John Savage, Elpidia Carrillo and Cynthia Gibb the film was co-written by Boyle and was nominated for two Academy Awards—one for Woods as Best Actor and one for...

Odd List Mark Williams Jan 2, 2013

From superheroes in disguise to vain news anchors, Mark celebrates 12 particularly fine movie journalists...

With the news that Clark Kent has quit his job at the Daily Planet because of its preference for soft entertainment stories, the world of fictional journalism was rocked to its foundations. After all, he's been there since the Superman comics began in the 1940s, despite the lack of career progress. But, it seems the Man of Steel's civilian day-job has lost its appeal, and now he's going into business on his own.

Journalism is a topic that raises its head in films regularly across the genres, and it has provided some fine, and not so fine, examples of the hardy reporter, always on the lookout for the next scoop. Oftentimes, there is the route of the truth or the route of the fast buck, with the majority of those...

In 1986, over room service, the film director predicted that his next move would be a kid's movie

At the final wrap of this month's Savages, star Blake Lively distributed "I Survived Oliver Stone" T-shirts. But her experiences likely didn't match what Stone had been putting actors, crews, and himself, through prior to me interviewing him in September 1986. He'd jumped from directing Salvador in Mexico – where "half the crew were down with amoebic dysentery and the other half were starving" – to Platoon in the Philippines, where he'd allowed actors "no more than two hours sleep, in their fox-hole, and only two basic rations, each day, however gruelling".

Stone told me sweatily he'd sidestepped "the Hollywood meat-grinder" with gonzo spirit, agit-prop, dodgy finances, ad-hoc catering and "the dark humour of a severed ear served in a champagne glass".

He'd written Salvador with and about loose cannon journalist Richard Boyle, who had covered death squads,...