BEHIND THE SCREEN :

Stories from Pacific Street Films

BEHIND the SCREEN is a special feature of the Oliver Stone web page, allowing individuals who have actually worked with or know Oliver Stone to share their personal remembrances and inside stories on Stone, the man and director. This first series is provided to us by JOEL SUCHER and STEVEN FISCHLER of Pacific Street Films, the production company that produced OLIVER STONE: INSIDE/OUT, a documentary about Stone (produced with his eager cooperation) for both SHOWTIME and BBC in 1992. (The cameraman and editor for the documentary was Marty Toub). In fact, they tell me that they got such good stuff (they were on the set of JFK), that they are thinking about updating the piece. This documentary helped spread the Oliver Legend, or "myth" as some may consider it. Long before they worked with Stone to produce the incredible 1992 documentary, Joel and Steven were both classmates of Oliver's at NYU film school in the early 70's, so they have several interesting stories to tell, some that you may never have heard.

So through a series of updates from them to this page, here are some inside stories of Stone from Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler :

UPDATE!: (August 16, 2001) Pacific Street Films is currently working on a new "Back Story" behind the scenes documentary on the making of JFK for the American Movie Classics channel. They are also putting one together for Martin Scorsese's 1990 classic, Goodfellas. No broadcast dates are known as of yet, but stay tuned here or on the message board for more updates as they become available.

I guess the best place to begin is back in 1971, at NYU Film school, where both Steve and I were merrily playing at radical politics, while learning to use cameras and such at the film school. Since we belonged to a radical anarchist group called Transcendental Students, ("TS for short"), sporting a black flag with a red upturned finger, we were the terrors of the film school.

However, having a deeply imbedded sense of humor, we sometimes played the old practical joke. Martin Scorsese was our production teacher, and on one occasion, we burst into editing class screaming that SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) had decided to confiscate all student films of a "Bourgeois nature." No sooner had we finished our declaration, then a panicked rush to grab film reels, cans and outtakes commenced and a solid wall of neophyte directors unceremoniously elbowed one another to flee to the relative safety of their dorms. All except one. In the back stood a dour, sad-faced student, dressed in a flannel shirt, holding a small film can. He said he didn't think his film fell into the same category. We looked at the tape label on the side. It read "Far from Vietnam." He introduced himself as Oliver Stone, and he was holding his student film. He said it was a dramatization about a soldier who had returned from Vietnam.

After that, Oliver would often be seen around the periphery of the numerous anti-war demonstrations that took place at NYU -- but always with that same sad face...

MORE TO COME --

It was the first time we met Oliver.

And the stories continue (web posted on 07/15/98) :

Let me begin by making a slight correction to my first story. I think I mentioned that Oliver had made a student film called FAR FROM VIETNAM. This is incorrect -- in fact, the film was called LAST YEAR IN VIETNAM, about the experiences of a disillusioned veteran. FAR FROM VIETNAM was a film by the fabled French "Nouvelle Vague" director Alain Resnais, who in fact, was an influence on Oliver, along with other French filmmakers. (Oliver, you may know, is the product of an American father and French mother, and he is bilinqual).

Anyway, as I sketched out in the previous piece, Oliver was an extremely intense film school student. When you looked at Oliver you thought that this guy was the type to wind up on the roof of Main Building at NYU with an M-16 in hand, and a lot of potential targets.

At the time (1970), at NYU film school, there were three kinds of film students.The Sam Peckinpah impersonators, into the all form-no content school of violent filmmaking; the pretentious post-adolescent European directors,sporting dark glasses and French cigarettes, whose films invariably had two lovers racing in slow motion towards one another (usually in a wheat field) and intercut with a cucumber headed towards a donut hole. Then, there were the political filmmakers like ourselves (making meaningful films, of course). Oliver was a maverick of sorts, and had a little of all three in him. I've talked about LAST YEAR IN VIETNAM, his paen to the emotional legacy wrought by Vietnam. He branched out in MICHAEL AND MARY, a student film with a definite French "New Wave" influence. Incidentally, a wild cocktail party scene was put together by his mother, Jacqueline, with the help of her friends. Another student film, MAD MAN OF MARTINIQUE, was a strangely existentialistic gangster piece, where you can see bits of the sensibility he later employed in SCARFACE.

An interesting side-note. Oliver's father Lou, a stockbroker, always wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. But he admired an encouraged Oliver's writing and poetry -- except in one crucial area. Oliver's use of profanity horrified his conservative father. In fact, we were told, Lou often castigated his son, telling him he'd never succeed as a writer, he'd just be turning people off if he continued to use vulgarity. And, they would fight about this -- endlessly.

Anyway, we'll continue, next time, with Oliver's very first feature, SEIZURE, and his relationship with Scorsese (who was our production teacher, as well).

This Page Last Updated: 11/11/2001

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