Written In Stone: The Process Of A Propaganda Filmmaker

“He had always felt that nonfiction was by nature more important than fiction, but he loved the artistry and power of good prose, Nonfiction was the truth and the truth needed to be told; but it was fiction that had the power to move people to tears and, equally important, to action.”

Nowhere else has filmmaker Oliver Stone more utilized his favorite weapon of mixing fact and fiction to significant effect than in his 1991 Government conspiracy fantasy film surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy. JFK is probably Stone’s most profitable and predominant achievement as a filmmaker. The movie was a huge hit at the box office despite its three hours plus running time. Film critics mostly praised the movie thoroughly. If not for its content, then for its filmmaking wizardry. Since the day of its release, it has been tapped dry by conspiracy theorists, becoming the most visible and widely used source for communication on the John F. Kenney murder. The movie certainly worked its fraudulent magic on even a lot of intelligent and shrewd people. So much so that they were able to disregard all of the falsehoods and that is simply a trick of the trade of a brilliantly artistic yet duplicitous filmmaker. Stone’s knack as a creator has always been mixing nonfiction with fiction to profound effect. This is what all great filmmakers strive for and accomplish. Whether their films are based on a true story or not, in one way or another they all are making movies about real people whether they’re personally known or dreamt up. Filmmakers all try to get to some kind of truth out of using real people or even fictional characters. Some kind of truth is what they strive for. Whether about humanity or life surrounding it as we know it on some level or as a whole. However, pertaining to Oliver Stone there is an underlying deceptiveness that belies a much more sinister objective. Stone deliberately pumps non fiction with fiction in order to blur the lines between fantasy and reality for it to be more difficult to distinguish clearly between the two. In that respect he’s not a truth teller. He’s not clearing the clutter and exposing facts. He’s adding to the mess and chaos on purpose to make it easier to sneak in his deceptions. Stone prefers smoke and mirrors, and fog. Stone is a muckraker. Clouding up the air and manipulating the facts with artistic purposefulness. Stone enjoys creating movies that are set in times of turmoil, upheaval, and societal unrest because he enjoys making films using the same process of disorder, anarchy, and madness. His chosen subject matters are embroiled in turmoil and the films he makes explode within the same level of mayhem, commotion, and agitation. Stone gives the illusion that he’s searching for and has even found his way through all of that turbulence to the truth but what he’s doing is covering up the truth even more within his supposed search for it and uncovering of it. Stone wants viewers to believe the JFK assassination is a puzzle inside a mystery wrapped inside and enigma because the truth is too boring. The truth is too mundane and normal. The truth waters down all the self-created aggrandizing of his chosen personal character and the content of his art. The truth takes away the excuses he can use for his terrible acts of dishonesty and deceit. The truth takes away his excuse to maintain his nihilistic both sides do it approach to politics and his penchant for constructing a revisionist history. The truth is too harmless and unthreatening to an already paranoid society because Lee Harvey is dead. Stone needs the CIA and United States Military Industrial complex to have plotted and conducted the murder of their commander and chief to sell conspiracy thereby selling himself and his product. He needs the perpetrators to still be at large and still threatening. Stone has used this type of duplicity his entire life. Stone volunteered and enlisted in the Vietnam war. One on hand this speaks of a patriotic American sacrificing his life and doing his due diligence to protect the country and its citizens freedoms. It also tells the story of a narcissist who isn’t afraid to throw himself in harm’s way for a story to tell. It’s a way to be a victim of the Government’s tyranny so he can create a lifetime work supposedly exposing it and fighting against it. For that it’s the same reason Stone can’t let John F. Kennedy have been murdered by a lone white male who was also an infantryman in the armed services. That truth hits too close to the bone for Oliver Stone. He was a victim of the military industrial complex swiping up American children from poor families right out of their front yards and jetting them off thousands of miles away to pluck them down in the jungle to be used as killers and dead bodies for their profiteering of war. Stone wants to believe that Oswald was snatched up in much the same way. Plucked up by the government and plopped down in the Texas school book depository to do their evil by helping them kill the president and then be their patsy who takes the fall for it so they could remain in the Vietnam war and continue their racketeering. If Stone actually believes this, it’s no wonder why he’s been able to throw his whole life on this number like a poker chip in roulette and risk his entire reputation on maintaining and doubling down on this faith that he keeps in his soul almost like a deity. Stone is recognized by producers and actors he’s worked with for his obsessive tunnel vision personality. Stone is an obsessive personality which is partly the reason that he’s been such a productive filmmaker. Stone works hard to attain and deserve all of his achievements and there’s virtually no debate whatsoever about that. Stone wrote Oscar winning screenplays in the 1970’s and became one of our most expert Directors by the mid 1980’s but Stone seems a filmmaker who is a perfect fit for today’s purposeful misinformation age. Stone has always been one of the more controversial directors of our time and he’s used valid criticisms that have come at him and at his films and flipped them into reverse psychology advertising for his films and career. This is a method used by hundreds of deceitful and unprincipled charlatans of today. Whether they are Conservative or Progressive every valid criticism hurled at them is hailed as an establishment attack, they use as a positive attribute to their character. Republicans were highly critical of Stone’s movie Platoon as any outside critique of our military is always met by them with wrath and cries of anti-patriotism. Even though they’re anti-government. Republicans still can’t solve the puzzle that the Military is the Government for some reason. It’s Ironic today considering that a huge chunk of the praise heaped at Stone is by right wingers who keep pushing the drug of Government conspiracies especially far-gone tea party QAnon Loons who agree with his loopy anti-government fantasies of the CIA, FBI, and Oswald. They share his hatred of The Democratic Party most notably Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton. They share the same reverence for Russian dictator and madman Vladimir Putin. They gel in a treaty that Juliane Assange and Edward Snowden are actually some kind of whistleblowing heroes. They believe WikiLeaks which pushed Pizzagate is a legitimate source of news. Stone is oddly silent about treasonous general and father of Qanon Mike Flynn but In 2016 Stone notoriously pushed Donald Trump as a dealmaker and Hillary Clinton as a Warhawk. This was a part of that deluded green party progressive axiom that somehow Donald Trump was going to walk ass backward and inexplicably stumble into an accidental revolution. Stone has a large following of young white males who grew up watching his movies and taking lessons from his self-publicized political stances. Stone’s influence is all over today’s delivery devices for what some call the news. In particular so called left leaning online news outlets, most notably Jacobin and The Intercept and its most famous alumni Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald and The Intercept could fittingly be described as if Oliver Stone had a baby, and it started a tabloid magazine. Stone was ferocious in his criticisms of tabloid being passed off as news in his 1994 satirical bloodbath movie Natural Born Killers. His stance has definitely relaxed since as he revels in posting links to nutty tabloid tea party and hard left websites and Alex Jones level derangement about Hollywood elites, illuminati sex parties. Stone’s influence on these news sites is obvious and abhorrent as they like their model Oliver twist created their own version of the news using manipulated facts and tabloid drama to push the reader into what they believe instead of just actual reporting so people can decide for themselves. Stone has been one to bill the expose of Russia and Putin meddling in the U.S election and people who believe it as farfetched and cooky. The man who made JFK and thinks that Oswald was the CIA’s handpicked choice to conduct their assassination plans thinks others are cooky. Stone has well deserved the criticism that has been leveled at him as he has unscrupulously loaded his films with purposeful inaccuracies and deceiving content, but just as Donald Trump, and Mike Flynn and the QAnon movie Sound Of Freedom he’s also maneuvered the criticism to his advantage to give off the misinterpretation that the wicked people he’s exposing are simply attacking him because he’s telling the truth about them. No matter what he is somehow in the right and always above reproach. It’s all given him a way to advertise his movies and himself. Today the way the public consumes information or more aptly misinformation is a great assistant for Stone. Any google search the first thing to come up is Wikipedia. Which is an incredibly inaccurate way to get any type of information. Type his name in a google search and you’re bound to find any valid criticism buried deep on the zillionth webpage. Right leaning film critics and journalists lambasted Stone for Platoon when it was originally released on Christmas Day 1986, but they are hardly the only ones. Stone collected much condemnation including that by fellow Vietnam war veterans for his portrayal of two sergeants warring against one another as in the story they both led two different outfits in one infantry. One sergeant murders the other in cold blood to cover up an illegal murder executed by himself. Based on reports from most Vietnam vets this is very much fiction and a liberty taken by Stone in the name of dramatic license. One Liberal film critic Marc Leepson wrote an article defending the film and Stone even going so far as calling the film’s accuracy “Unassailable.” A wildly erroneous assertion to say the least. Leepson is claiming that because Stone was in Vietnam the movie must be accurate because critics of the film weren’t there. Well, some of them were there and just because Stone was there doesn’t mean everything in Platoon is accurate or the truth. Stone was also around when Kennedy was murdered, and he got that wrong and lied about that through his teeth. Not that Platoon is in the same realm as JFK in terms of deceit and propaganda. It’s an exercise in anti-violence and anti-war. Stone taking liberties for dramatic license is legitimate in this case. He was there, he fought and risked his life, and he is allowed to make any piece of art depicting his own experiences no matter how many liberties he exercises and call it truth because it is his truth in this scenario, and nobody has the right to call him a liar but there were other people who were also there who have an opposing viewpoint altogether and don’t back Stone’s assessment. I don’t believe Platoon falls in the category of propaganda. The film, however, does expose certain eccentricities and details about Stone and how he made JFK a full-on propaganda movie. At the end of Platoon, it’s blatantly obvious that Stone goes pure Hollywood. Turning the movie into an action film. This is evidence that Stone, despite wanting to tell his and other vets’ story in a piece of art, is indeed a Hollywood filmmaker who wants to have his cake and eat it too. It comes out of necessity to sell a movie to Hollywood executives and give the audiences a violent action filled reward for sitting through the quiet parts of the movie. It’s also essential for Stone to get it both ways. An anti violent film packed with violence. Stone’s Oscar winning screenplay for Midnight Express, which won him his first academy award in 1978, is also based on a true story in which Stone also took many liberties. Stone’s screenplay is based on a book written by a white American man named William “Billy” Hayes who was arrested in 1970 for trying to smuggle the illegal drug hashish out of Turkey. Caught at the airport as he was about to board his US bound plane Hayes subsequently spent five years jailed in Turkey. He escaped from prison and upon his return to the US authored a novel of his experiences entitled Midnight Express which Stone adapted for the screen. Critics and members of the Turkish community publicly accused Stone and director Oliver Parker of perpetuating racial stereotypes and criticized their celluloid representation of Turkish authority in the film. Upon its release the Midnight Express film has had a persistent destructive influence on Americans perceptions toward Turkey. Even a quarter century after its release, people still cite the film as a reason not to visit Turkey. It has been disdained in the eyes of Turks as a racist misrepresentation of Turkey since its first screening. Midnight Express advocates a constant stereotype in respects to Turkish culture. This discourse structures a racist line that is advanced throughout the entire film. In 2007 Billy Hayes himself visited and in a widely publicized stunning press conference stated that the movie was “a gross exaggeration and one-sided misrepresentation of his experience in Turkey.” He expressed his regret and accepted responsibility for the damage the film inflicted on Turkey’s image worldwide for decades. According to Hayes, both Stone and Parker misrepresented his experiences during his incarceration and included major exaggerations of his treatment in jail and of his encounters with Turks during that time. Hayes told reporters in Istanbul that he has been trying for years to correct these misperceptions in the media, but that his voice was drowned by the powerful images created by the film and its makers. Underlining that he had made friendships with many Turks, before and after he was incarcerated, he noted that the movie’s storyline did not depict even one such “good Turk.” During his visit to Istanbul, Hayes also gave an interview to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he issued apologies to Turks for all the problems the film created and reiterated that many brutal scenes of mistreatment depicted in the movie did in fact not happen. His remarks last week in Istanbul are not the first time that Hayes publicly regretted Midnight Express. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, published on January 10, 2004, Hayes stated that “he feels awful that the film gave a brutal reputation to the entire nation of Turkey,” and that it also bothers him that it depicts all Turks as monsters. In Hayes’ words: “The message of ‘Midnight Express’ isn’t ‘Don’t go to Turkey. It’s ‘Don’t be an idiot like I was and try to smuggle drugs.” Consequently, neither Oliver Stone or Director Oliver Parker have ever apologized for the inaccuracies and racism that they filled into Midnight Express. Stone’s method is mixing reality with fiction and Hollywood tricknology to blur the lines between fact and fiction to create a sensation but to also create and instill mistrust in organizations and parts of society that he doesn’t care for. Stone wants viewers to feel the mistrust that he does of the Establishment, of Government and United States institutions and does his best work to generate illusions of crimes and wrongs that never happened in his films. Stone’s criticism of America’s political system particularly its war powers has been a consistent throughout his life. He authored a book called The Untold History Of The United States. It was mostly untold because it never happened the way Oliver describes in his book. The book is a chronicle of the united states twisted with the same manipulative techniques he uses in his films. There’s Wikipedia and there is also Oliverpedia or Stone language. Extraordinarily Stone gives mostly glowing compliments to certain Country’s Governments mainly Russia and Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela. There’s at least coming from Stone always a good excuse or forgiveness for any atrocities committed by foreign Governments on its people, but those excuses and that forgiveness vanishes when it comes to the United States. It’s difficult to believe for a second that Stone actually believes Lee Harvey Oswald is innocent or was killed by the CIA. Stone’s goal with JFK going back to when he decided to make it was to release misinformation that suited his beliefs politically and purposely seep them into people’s minds and the culture. Like the Jim Garrison the man who his film is about Stone wanted to fully discredit the Warren Commission and their report on their findings in the assassination solely because he wants to discredit and build hatred toward the U.S Government. It’s all manufactured nebulous rage until you give it a good lie to rest on making it in his mind justified. Every anniversary of The murder of John F Kennedy Stone is back with another celebration of his thirty-year-old film to try to rile people up and make more income doing it. This year he released a new documentary called JFK: A Second Look. Stone and other conspiracy buffs can take as many looks as they want at his film and the case but that doesn’t change any facts. Facts that Stone claims are in dispute. But it’s not the facts that are in dispute, it’s his opinions that are in dispute with the facts. Stone makes concessions and takes liberties with the facts like most filmmakers. His lead character in JFK is Jim Garrison. Jim Garrison was an unethical New Orleans D.A. He wasn’t attractive nor was he likable or a nice person. Enter super likable and attractive Actor Kevin Costner to play him. This is nothing innovative or earthshattering for films based on real people. Hollywood takes liberties for many reasons, one of which is that they have a large stable of good-looking charming people with raging charisma to burn through celluloid. Casting a movie star for a leading role is what they do. Stone uses Costner instead of Garrison to help cast his spell of manipulation. There’s rarely been a more enigmatic actor in history than Gary Oldman, yet most people would walk across the street to get away from Lee Harvey Oswald if they faced him bopping toward them down canal street. Oldman gives Oswald a charismatic alluring quality and a handsomeness that the real man just didn’t possess. He always makes him seem sane when the real Oswald was off the wall bonkers and impossible to understand in many ways. These are standard casting decisions for Hollywood films. But it’s also a great weapon for a sneaky filmmaker to manipulate the truth more easily. To more effectively create the illusion that this real person was someone other than who they were. What Stone purposely leaves out of JFK could make a longer movie than his own. What is missing from Stone’s three hour plus film and even missing from a four-hour version complete with deleted scenes is any evidence as to the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. The witness who saw him shooting his rifle from the sixth-floor window. The three witnesses on the fifth floor watching the parade heard shots coming from above them from the fifth floor. Stone brings up Oswald’s palm print found on the rifle eluding the fact that someone involved in this government shadow conspiracy operation went down into the morgue where Oswald’s body was and placed his hand on the rifle creating the print. Which is completely ridiculous and unnecessary considering that it was Oswald’s gun. His prints were bound to be found on it whether he shot it that day or not. But these are serpentine practices developed and used by Stone over and over. Stone leaves out that Oswald’s fingerprints were all over the sixth floor including the boxes used to build the sniper’s nest. Oswald’s fingerprints were on the paper bag that witnesses watched him carry into the book depository that morning. The bag was left near the Sniper’s nest and the bag Oswald claimed contained Curtain rods. By the end JFK Stone and Garrison are in full throttled cold sweat conspiracy mode. They have the F.B.I., C.I.A, The Military, Cubans, Mafia, and even “the gay underworld” of New Orleans all conspiring together to kill Kennedy. Stone ratchets up the tension and the drama. As Garrison played by Costner goes into a completely unhinged trance detailing to the jury about teams of assassins moving in on Dealey Plaza and the Book Depository completely unnoticed helped along by the mass of attention focused on The President’s motorcade. The ending of Costner’s speech in the courtroom isn’t attached to any reality about the case but a tear-filled feeling that is turned into an operatic emotional bloodletting about the country and its betrayal by its Government. It would be very touching and emotive if this specific claim of betrayal ever actually happened, but it didn’t. In odd segments of his depiction of the assassination Stone even has Oswald oddly missing from the action. In one wild hypothesis a completely different assassin is shooting from the sixth floor and wipes the gun free of prints leaving the gun in the sniper’s nest. In the sequence Stone gives off the sense that Oswald is just somewhere watching the parade or otherwise completely uninvolved as Government dispatchers set him up as a patsy. But not a single witness see’s any of these rogue marksmen come or go they just see Oswald. The Military would have cased the area with a fine-tooth comb, but they just happen to allow a man Abraham Zapruder who couldn’t be more obvious standing along the route film the entire thing with his home movie camera. Stone leaves out Oswald’s tempestuous relationship with his wife and the fact that the night before the assassination he visited her in to ask her to take him back and she told him “No”. Oswald’s wife Marina later said that had she known he was going to kill Kennedy she wouldn’t have told him no. Stone leaves out Oswald’s failed suicide attempt in Russia after being denied his Russian citizenship he had so hoped for. Stone leaves out much of Oswald’s true personality as a deeply disturbed, violent and angry man. Oswald had a deep anger, yet Stone portrays him as a possibly misunderstood patriot. As crazy as Oswald is for killing JFK he’s just as crazy in his attempted getaway. Leaving the rifle in the building. Obviously, he can’t take it out. His mind must have been frenzied beyond comprehension at that point. It’s one thing to think about it and set it all up. It’s one thing to be aiming your rifle at the President Of The United States head but to actually pull the trigger and know who hit him buy you have got a whole new world on your hands in your mind and pumping through your heart and body. Oswald could have put the rifle back in the paper bag it was sitting right there. In Stone’s fantasy as in others they all make it seem as if Oswald had bigger plans than just to kill Kennedy. He didn’t. That was the plan. Oswald didn’t plan anything after that. Most JFK Conspiracy theoreticians connect the portion of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address referencing the military industrial complex directly to Kennedy’s assassination and Stone being the big Conspiracy propagandist himself is no different as he opens JFK with that very speech. Implying a direct connection between the Military and JFK’s death, one would ask the question “Why didn’t the military then kill Eisenhower?” Set to the background music of the beating of Military drums. Stone is once again using this for two reasons to slip misinformation by easier. Kennedy is the commander and chief so naturally military drumbeats fit here but Stone is additionally using the military drumbeats as the theme music to Kennedy’s murder to set the idea in everyone mind and install the feeling that Kennedy is being murdered by the Military. Oswald is a former Marine but that’s the only connection to the Military and Kennedy’s murder. But Stone rejects such notions partially because it destroys his idea that the government is to blame for everything including everything the lone white male nutcase does. The strongest Argument the Film JFK makes is when Garrison and one of his detectives are inside the book Depository looking at what Oswald saw through the scope of his rifle. Garrison asks” Why not shoot Kennedy when he is coming up Houston there’s plenty of time it’s right out in the open.” This seems like a solid argument until you realize that had Oswald done that everyone would know immediately where the shots were coming from and look right up at the book depository unmistakable in the horizon where he was in the window. Oswald waited to shoot Kennedy from behind because shooting a man in the back is always easier and where the shots are coming from are less obvious especially within the echoes of Dealey Plaza. Garrison argues against himself with this question considering his strong belief in the Government’s use of distraction within the “triangulated crossfire.” theory. Stone also has no problem lying to others or himself, in fact he relied on it for his entire career. Stone’s films are a mix of fact and fiction to fulfill fiction over fact by confusing the two on such a mass level it’s hard to distinguish between the two. Stone is the wrong man to deliver the truth to anyone. Stone has long claimed to be a liberal, but he seems more like a libertarian who uses covert devices to smuggle right wing ideologies into progressivism. Stone has strong sentiments toward Republican heads of state like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. The only two politicians he’s ever chosen to make films about. In his 1995 film about the President and the Watergate scandal Stone is able to find every complexity, nuance, and gray areas to defend the character and decisions he made to find sympathy with Nixon. Nixon may have been a crook and a liar but he had all of these other positive traits as a person and gifts as a politician. As Stone has always describes it and became almost the tagline of the movie “Nixon has greatness in his grasp.” Republican presidents are just a few tools away from being great yet in talking about Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all of that recognition of a complicated character study and strive to humanize magically dissolve. Stone can cultivate many ways to humanize Vladimir Putin but maintains a very firm stance that Barack Obama is a snake and Hillary Clinton is a war monger with no other nuance to add to their careers or their character whatsoever. With Democrats evil is always the finality and with Republicans there are further details and excuses and a chance to be great. With Stone the road always goes on with Republicans, yet Democrats get road closed signs and detour signs thrown at them. In a 1997 Interview with Charlie Rose the interviewer points out that Stone has become something of a cottage industry onto himself. Rose declares how Stone sells “his truth” to such a large portion of the public that he has become his own genre, his own brand. Stone has sold that brand with great impact and frankly it’s frightening and also scary how casually Rose explains this fact. Oliver Stone has put bad ideas and blatant lies into millions of people’s minds and has laid down a very public blueprint of how to do it and how to keep doing it. Oliver Stone is a man who fits right in with today’s method of deception of information. Possible because he’s always been one of the architects of the methods for delivery devices created to push extensive misinformation that runs wild today. Oliver Stone has mostly succeeded overwhelmingly in creating illusions that make people believe his conspiracies by appealing to their mistrustful nature and angry spirit by conflating issues. Mostly Oliver Stone makes people want to believe that all of these conspiracies are true but its all a remarkable magic trick by a magnificent magician.