An intimate memoir by the controversial and outspoken Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his complicated New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the high and low moments: We see meetings with Al Pacino over Stone's scripts for Scarface, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July; the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction following the failure of his first feature, The Hand (starring Michael Caine); his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface; his stormy relationship with The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino; the breathless hustles to finance the acclaimed and divisive Salvador; and tensions behind the scenes of his first Academy Award-winning film, Midnight Express. Chasing the Light is a true insider's look at Hollywood's years of upheaval in the 1970s and '80s.

Ranging from 1981 to 1997, the 15 conversations featured in this collection reveal a man frustrated by what he sees as the hypocrisies of American politics, of conservatism, and of the Hollywood film industry. Though the subjects of "Nixon, JFK, Born on the 4th of July, The Doors", and "Heaven and Earth" are rooted in the turbulent 1960s, Stone as interviewee and filmmaker is firmly entrenched in the present. Film stills.

Stone himself serves as guide to this no-holds-barred retrospective—an extremely candid and comprehensive monograph of the renowned and controversial writer, director, and cinematic historian in interview form. Over the course of five years, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone (Midnight Express, Scarface, Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Snowden) and New York Times bestselling author Matt Zoller Seitz (The Wes Anderson Collection) discussed, debated, and deconstructed the arc of Stone's outspoken, controversial life and career with extraordinary candor. This book collects those conversations for the first time, including anecdotes about Stone's childhood, Vietnam, his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his continual struggle to reinvent himself as an artist. Their dialogue is illustrated by hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and documents from Stone's personal archive, dating back to Stone's birth: personal snapshots, private correspondence, annotated script pages and storyboards, behind-the-scenes photography, and production files from all of his films to date—through 2016's Snowden, and including Stone's epic Showtime mini-series Untold HIstory of the United States. Critical commentary from Seitz on each of Stone's films is joined by original essays from filmmaker Ramin Bahrani; writer, editor, and educator Kiese Laymon; writer and actor Jim Beaver; and film critics Walter Chaw, Michael Guarnieri, Kim Morgan, and Alissa Wilkinson. At once a complex analysis of a master director’s vision and a painfully honest critical biography in widescreen technicolor, The Oliver Stone Experience is as daring, intense, and provocative as Stone’s films—it's an Oliver Stone movie about Oliver Stone, in the form of a book. Both this book and Stone’s highly anticipated film, Snowden, will be released in September 2016 to coincide with Stone’s seventieth birthday (September 15, 1946). Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz: Mad Men Carousel, The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Wes Anderson Collection.

The life of the filmmaker from his childhood in Manhattan, through his experiences in Viet Nam, two marriages, and move from writing screenplays to directing Acadamy Award winning movies.

This is the companion book to the Hollywood film, "Nixon". It includes the annotated screenplay, an interview with Oliver Stone, essays by prominent figures associated with Nixon and Watergate, previously classified memos and documents from the Nixon White House, and transcripts of Nixon's taped conversations in the Oval Office. Oliver Stone is the director, producer and co-author of "Nixon".

Oliver Stone is a master of in-your-face movie making. In picture after picture - in what the director refers to as "wakeup cinema" - he takes on big, controversial topics and verges on filmic assault of the audience to drive home his point of view. Stone's artistic warfare, evidenced in such widely seen films as Platoon and JFK, has brought him acclaim as one of the few commercially successful Hollywood directors unafraid to make bold, meaningful films and has brought him criticism as a self-anointed sayer of the truth on whatever subject his eye comes to rest. His provocative style has triggered an enormous critical response, with interviews, reviews, and commentaries numbering in the thousands - remarkable especially for a filmmaker whose first noteworthy film, Salvador, opened in 1986. In this thoroughgoing assessment of Stone's life and work, Frank Beaver not only uses the rich response to the films to inform his own analysis but makes the case that the director has used it as well. There is, Beaver suggests, "a telling symbiosis between critical response and ongoing practice in Stone's emergence as a unique director". Beaver explores the way in which criticism has undeniably helped to shape the course of Stone's ideas and filmmaking techniques.

"Text in this work is taken from the transcript from the author's documentary on Showtime, which was based on the Gallery Books publication titled The untold history of the United States"--Title page verso.