Within these pages are intricately woven tales of movie funding, rejections, guerrilla-style filming in Mexico and the Philippines, days spent in editing bays, and one awkward Golden Globes speech for winning Best Screenplay for Midnight Express. Scenes and situations that would have been relegated to anecdote treatment in a much longer memoir are actually given time to breathe and develop.

This fine focus on the pivotal 1970s / 1980s movie scene is actually much appreciated. None of Stone’s recent documentaries are referenced - documentaries that have proved controversial and earned many detractors (just Google his Stephen Colbert interview on The Putin Interviews). Also, his takes on JFK, Nixon and Jim Morrison are not covered. Even though the development of Born on the Fourth of July is described in detail, how he got that long-gestating script off the ground is likely fodder for a sequel one day. The new book, running more than 300 pages, is not a soup-to-nuts tale because Stone decides to end these autobiographical stories right after Platoon’s win for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Oliver Stone, the prolific filmmaker who has won multiple Academy Awards, had a string of hit 1980s films that dissected recent history, and the lessons from those cinematic days are now the subject of his new memoir, Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Image courtesy of HMH / Provided by official site with permission.

Chasing the light by oliver stone