- Trending Titles
- Booktok Made Me Read It
- Find Your Way to Another World
- Diverse Reads for Kids & Teens
- Cuddle Up with a YA Romance
- Thrillers for Teens
- Feel Good Reads
- Being Young and In Love
- Baddies in Books
- Books to Rule Us All (YA)
- Read with Pride
- See all
Chasing the Light
Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game
Before moving to Los Angeles and the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while working odd jobs in Manhattan. Stone recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the highs and lows: meetings with Al Pacino over Stone's early scripts; the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction; the failure of his first feature; his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface; and much more. Chasing the Light is a true insider's guide to Hollywood's razor-edged years of upheaval in the 1970s and '80s with untold stories of decade-defining films from the man behind the camera.
"Chasing the Light shows a man who still runs towards the gunfire. This is, you will gather, a tremendous book—readable, funny, and harrowing. It's also full of movie-making gossip, scandal, and fun." —Sunday Times (London)
"Oliver, in honest and sometimes brutal fashion, lays it out — what it took for him to get to where he hoped to be . . . Bravo. Bravo. Bravo." —Spike Lee, Academy Award-winning director and producer
''Oliver Stone is a giant provocateur in the Hollywood movie system. His autobiography is a fascinating exposure of Stone's inner life and his powerful, all devouring energy and genius that drove him to become one of the world's greatest filmmakers." —Sir Anthony Hopkins, a multi-award–winning film actor, director, and producer
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
February 27, 2024 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780358345664
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780358345664
- File size: 14086 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
Kirkus
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.
-
Publisher's Weekly
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. -
Library Journal
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.
-
Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
Loading
Why is availability limited?
×Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.
The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:
×Read-along ebook
×The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.