Oliver Stone - Mainstream Success

Mainstream Success

Platoon brought Stone's name to a much wider audience. It also finally kickstarted a busy directing career, which saw him making nine films over the next decade. Alongside some negative reaction, Platoon won many rave reviews (Roger Ebert later called it the ninth best film of the 1980s), large audiences, and Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. In 2007, a film industry vote ranked it at number 83 in an American Film Institute "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies" poll of the previous century's best American movies. British TV channel Channel 4 voted Platoon as the sixth greatest war film ever made.

Platoon was the first of three films Stone has made about Vietnam: the others were Born on the Fourth of July (1989, for which he won his second Oscar for directing) and Heaven & Earth (1993), each dealing with different aspects of the war. Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about Stone's experience in combat; Born on the Fourth of July is based on the autobiography of US marine turned peace campaigner Ron Kovic; Heaven & Earth is based on the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, in which Le Ly Hayslip, recalls her life as a Vietnamese village girl drastically affected by the war, who finds another life in the USA.

During this same period, Stone directed one of his most ambitious, controversial and successful films to date, JFK (1991). His take on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy won him a Golden Globe for directing. Stone also directed the acclaimed Wall Street (1987), which won Michael Douglas an Academy Award for Best Actor as a ruthless Wall Street corporate raider; Talk Radio (1988), based on Eric Bogosian's Pulitzer-nominated play, and The Doors (1991), starring Val Kilmer as singer Jim Morrison.

I make my films like you're going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.