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Stone talks on 'paranoia,' media hype

Oliver Stone, director of some of the most acclaimed and controversial films of this era, spoke to a packed Hill Auditorium audience last night.

Stone, whose recent films include "Natural Born Killers," "Nixon" and "JFK," spoke about his life as a filmmaker and the media's influence on society.

"This evening is going to be about paranoia and betrayal and danger and death," Stone said, playing off his renegade image.

Stone said he began to question authority at a young age. During a boyhood trip to France, he said he was struck by the country's state of denial concerning its leaders' collaboration with the Nazis.

"The vast majority of people had been neutral, and in some ways collaborated with the Germans," Stone said.

Stone also said growing up in the 1950s during the McCarthy hearings and the Communist witch hunt provided a backdrop to his later views.

"It's very funny, being accused of being paranoid all my life, when this was the way we were raised," he said.

Stone, whose first success as a director was in 1986 with the Academy Award-winning "Platoon," said the film was based on largely autobiographical material. He described the sense of elation he felt at its success.

"It was a wonderful high, as good as it gets to be," Stone said. "The reviews were good and the box office was good."

Stone said the film helped society come to grips with its involvement in Vietnam, a release he said had been contained "like scorpions in a bottle."

He also said America would have fought a similar war in Central America in the 1980s, had the Iran-Contra scandal not come to the surface.

Stone said he is fearful of what he described as the country's tendency to forget and fabricate its own recent history.

"The Gulf of Tonkin was a wholly manufactured incident that 20 years later was proved to be a hoax," Stone said. "And the journalists believed it."

When "JFK" was released in 1991, Stone said he felt the sting of the news media's bite.

The film, which depicted an elaborate conspiracy working for the assassination of President Kennedy, drew fire for his interpretation of the killing.

"The price to pay is that I became the object of much criticism, partly from the political press," he said. "They (the press) want to make the news. They want to tell you what to think, what is fit to think."

He warned of the media's growing monopoly on information.

"I lived through this whole thing, where you watch the media go one way and then the other," Stone said. He described the press as "a vast beast that just sniffs where the wind goes."

Stone encouraged upcoming generations to question authority and societal norms. "The '80s, and so far the '90s, have been an age of repression, an age of conformity. ... I look to the newer generation because that's where the brains lie, that's where the hopes lie."

Students in the audience gave mixed reactions to Stone's ideas.

"I think his personalizing history is very good, because that's how we experience everyday events," said LSA junior Kristin Smith.

"It gives you a feel for the emotions he felt and the struggles he had," she said.

Kinesiology senior Phil Daman said he was "disappointed" that in his speech Stone portrayed his work as fact instead of "the vision of one particular interpretation."

"His truth is no more fact than that of anyone who he discounts," Daman said. "As a filmmaker, he should take history only as his definition of history."