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The Oliver Stone Encyclopedia ed. by James M. Welsh and Donald M. Whaley (review)

2015; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1548-9922

Zachary Ingle,

Cinema and Media Studies

The Oliver Stone Encyclopedia James M. Welsh and Donald M. Whaley, eds. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2013Oliver Stone has rarely lacked for attention among those invested in the intersection of film and history. Although Stone once said, I do think of myself as a cinematic historian now or ever and, to the best of my knowledge, have made that claim, still, many regard him as a (postmodern) historian working in the medium of film; the recent publication of his Untold History of the United States would only seem to enhance this reputation. The Oliver Stone Encyclopedia follows other filmmaker encyclopedias Scarecrow has recently published, including those on Ridley Scott and Francis Ford Coppola. James Welsh (who also co-edited the Coppola encyclopedia) and Donald Whaley have given Oliver Stone the encyclopedia treatment, with a stated goal: Going against the mainstream...this book will attempt to set the critical record straight in an attempt to see that Oliver Stone gets appropriate credit for the consistent and intelligent vision of work he has completed. Like it or not (xiii).Most of these double-columned entries were penned by Welsh and are on individuals associated with Stone's films, the majority being actor biographies, which are often marked with a playful tone; his entry on Kevin Costner follows up a mention of his Waterworld (1995) character as part fish with a description of his character in The Postman (1997) as having all the personality of a dead fish. Besides the actors, the other major collaborators with entries are the producers and co-screenwriters of Stone's films. Only a few other collaborators are included, such as Academy Award-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson, who worked with Stone from Salvador (1986) to U Turn (1997) to establish one of the notable director-cinematographer relationships in history, but none of the editors who helped make Stone's work so distinctive (such as Hank Corwin, or even David Brenner or Joe Hutshing, the latter two having edited six Stone films) get the same treatment. For that matter, there are no entries under editing or montage, leaving untouched one of the features that made films like JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Nixon (1995) stand out in 1990s American cinema. The film entries themselves range from two pages (The Hand [1981]) to ten (Nixon) and typically include summary, analysis, and a note on the film's reception.The decision as to what entries to include is somewhat perplexing. For instance, Boiler Room (2000) merits a brief entry because the editors consider it influenced greatly by Wall Street (1987), yet films on which he acted as producer or executive producer are only listed (an entry on the Stone production, The People vs. Larry Flynt [1996], may have been more helpful than one, say, on Jamie Foxx). Conversely, the films Stone wrote but did direct (e.g., Midnight Express [1978], Conan the Barbarian [1982]) are given full entries, with information concerning the extent of his involvement. The editors also helpfully include some of Stone's unrealized projects (Crazy Horse) and unproduced screenplays (Tom Mix and Pancho Villa), but Noriega, a major project in the 1990s that never came to fruition. …