When Oliver Stone claimed he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist: “It’s a ridiculous accusation”

(Credits: YouTube Still)

Oliver Stone was once described as Hollywood’s angriest director, and if you’ve watched any of his films, it’s not hard to see why. The man who directed the searing war dramas Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, pushed the boundaries of good taste with Natural Born Killers, and exposed the evils of capitalism in Wall Street has never been the kind to make a lighthearted romp. Over the years, though, he was tagged with another label, one which aggravated him much more than simply being called angry. In fact, he has vehemently fought back against the accusation that he is a conspiracy theorist, calling the notion ridiculous.

In 1988, Stone read former Louisiana District Attorney Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins, which dealt with his indictment of businessman Clay Shaw for being part of a conspiracy to assassinate US President John F Kennedy in 1963. Stone combined this book with Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs and co-wrote a mammoth screenplay with journalist Zachary Sklar entitled JFK.

Stone imagined a political thriller that would push back against the official findings of the Warren Commission, which declared in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy. Stone admitted that, like so many other Americans, he believed the commission’s report for many years. However, he told the Los Angeles Times that he realised there must have been more to the assassination when he “started to get into the investigation, which brought me into another world”.

Ultimately, Stone saw his film as a “counter-myth” to the Commission’s “fictional myth”. The movie posited that the CIA, Mafia, FBI, Secret Service, and the military-industrial complex conspired to kill Kennedy – who wanted the US to withdraw from the Vietnam War – and install Lyndon B Johnson as President in his place.

To Stone, he was turning events that never added up satisfactorily into a compelling movie package. In an ideal world, the film would make people more inclined to question the official versions of events when they see them on the news. However, he lamented, “I was naïve. I thought the movie would be appreciated as an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, like all of my films had been. But in this case, I touched the third rail.”

Before the film even came out, Stone’s credibility was attacked by members of the mainstream media. CBS’ Dan Rather and The Washington Post’s Tom Wicker argued his embrace of conspiracy theories in the film was dangerous. After all, how would regular Americans differentiate between the truth and fiction when Stone threw it all together in such head-spinning fashion? Never mind that this argument insults the intelligence of filmgoers, who are usually savvy enough to realise what is real footage, and what is a creation of Hollywood.

In spite of the controversy, JFK became Stone’s highest-grossing film and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. He also revealed people regularly tell him, “JFK opened my eyes not only to the story but to the way film can be used”, which was always his intention. However, the belief that Stone was a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist stuck, and he sadly confessed, “That was the end of my period where I could at least get films made without all these accusations and misunderstandings“.

Ultimately, Stone has always been someone who thinks the public should question authority. He admitted in 1991, “I hate conventional thought. I always did. I think I went through a period of being institutionalised myself, in boarding schools, the Army, Merchant Marine and college, in the 1960s. I’ve seen conventional thinking, and I’m always rebelling against it.”

However, Stone is adamant that dismissing him as a conspiracy theorist is “a ridiculous accusation”. He isn’t someone who believes Nazis live on the moon or that aliens have been visiting Earth for years – those crackpots are easy to dismiss. Instead, he thinks most conspiracy theories are much closer to home, and he sees evidence of them popping up all the time, whether within the worlds of big business, politics, or the institutions we trust every day.

Indeed, he implored people to “Look at the news. Look at what’s going on. The US government has been lying for years, and if you believe them, you’re a fool”.

Related Topics