ELGRABLY If at present nearly everything boils down to distribution and marketing, how does this affect the filmmaker or the writer's story, and the quality of the work?
STONE I think it's really hurt it. I think packaging is a 20th-century phenomenon. Because television has reached new megalevels of competition, a negativity has set in where you don't necessarily have to be good, but you do have to destroy your opponent. You destroy the idea of your opponent. There's more negativism in the press that I've ever seen in my lifetime. Also, since I graduated NYU in 1971, film costs have gone up enormously, and the marketing costs of films have gone up even more. Now they're spending huge amounts to market each film and it's killing the budgets, the profitability of movies, making the risks harder to take. I've heard the same thing on a lesser degree with books. I know that publishers complain that they're being eaten up by [volume] book chains, by conglomerates that are buying them because they can't get their books out into the bookstores. And because so many bookstores are owned by these huge chains, the smaller houses can't get the shelf space.
GIFFORD I remember being scared to death for the first time when I walked into a bookstore and I realized that I was staring at the same book, stacked in a huge pile from the top down to the floor. In the past, where you might have had a hundred different titles on the wire rack, now you find ten or fifteen, so you don't have as much choice. Lack of choice and availability changes the stakes for a writer. Same thing with the movies—you go to a multiplex, seven out of ten screens are taken by Arnold [Schwarzenegger and other Hollywood studio fare]. I remember David Lynch telling me that when he wanted to re-release Eraserhead in this country, the so-called art theatre circuit was reduced to 45 screens in 17 cities [this in a nation with nearly 25,000 screens]. When I first moved to Berkeley, I remember being shocked because you could go to fifteen different theatres to see independent films, foreign films, art films. Now there's only one venue, and that's just barely surviving.
STONE Marketing has responded to an attention span that's been, let's say, diminished because of the tremendous availability of new product. At the same time, television seems to have cut into attention spans, and so has computerization and cybernetics—they've speeded up the process of selection and somehow they've enhanced the negativity and lack of reception toward things that don't immediately fit into pigeon holes. It must be harder for you, Barry, because the stuff you write is off-beat.<
ELGRABLY Pico Iyer commented on this recently when he wrote, "I worry about the relentless acceleration of the world, the dramatic shortening of our attention spans, and the temptation, under a bombardment of images, to value information before knowledge, and knowledge before wisdom." But isn't it the media's business to condense, simplify and sell information as entertainment, rather than convey knowledge or wisdom?
GIFFORD When "Wild at Heart" came out, critics commented that the film was totally unrealistic, they described the violence as cartoonish, but they didn't catch the satire in it. What they wanted to promote was the controversy between me and Lynch. They asked me if I resented what David had done to my novel, and I said no: he made his movie, I have my book. And they hated that. In the novel most of the violence takes place off-stage, while in the movie David put a lot of it on-stage. He took all the backstory and enacted it. The criticism at the time was that he had sensationalized the material. Was it gratuitous? It wasn't for him. He was the filmmaker. I said then that if I were going to make the film, I would have had Nicholas Ray direct it and it would've been made in 1958, with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But the media wanted to write about conflicts between David and I, not the fact that I had a great time [laughs]. I saw his Wild at Heart as a big, dark musical comedy.
STONE When the media does not like a film, there are no ends to which they would not go to discredit the film. They're very good at dishing it out, but they rarely report the actual content of what you say. I've been quoted a lot, as you know, but 80% of the time it's a misquote or out of context. After "JFK" people asked me if I had had any trouble from the C.I.A., but the greatest pressure came from the media. They attacked that movie before it was even made; a copy of the screenplay was stolen from these offices and disseminated to journalists [who were vehemently opposed to any conspiracy theory of President Kennedy's assassination]. The fact is that we have very little relationship to government in our daily life. Our real relationship is to media, because we get most of perceived reality, or received information, from media. I've always tried to affix the problem not so much with government but with the media. The greatest concentration of power is in the media, far more than in the judiciary, the executive branch or the legislature. And I'm not the first to say this—Nixon actually said it when he was run out of office in 1973.
[Stone is developing a feature about Richard Nixon; in his book The Powers That Be, historian David Halberstam, talking about the corporate media, made the claim that he Los Angeles Times in fact "created" Nixon by making him a political player.]
These [media] corporations, in my opinion, distort the reality of the world around us.
ELGRABLY Noam Chomsky would argue that the media manufactures our consensual agreement of reality, but he wouldn't entirely let government off the hook.
GIFFORD People are hard-put to believe the government line about anything anymore. I think they want to believe in a conspiracy theory, because it's more intriguing, it's Us against Them again.
ELGRABLY The late muckraker I.F. Stone always insisted that, "Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."
GIFFORD You know, I grew up in a sort of cynical way, because as a kid I was around racketeers and I would hear about how so-and-so is on somebody's payroll, political figures, sports figures, and how everything was down to the fix. My dad ran a book out of the basement of his place, but he never bet on a horse in his life. He said, "I'll never bet on anything that can't talk." This is a very cynical way for a kid to approach life, thinking about everything in terms of the fix, whether it's a political assassination or a horse race.
ELGRABLY Why don't we see more films like "Citizen Kane" today, films which take on the great government and corporate myths?
STONE I think a lot of movie themes have had an anti-corporate, anti-big business flavor. The problem is that the enemy is hidden. The subtlety of international megacorporations who control your lives is so persuasive and seductive and it's such a truth that it's almost like attacking your mother or your father. And that's a cultural no-no. You cannot bite the hand that feeds you, the hand that gives you money, gives you a job, security and food and provides you with a defense establishment, and basically provides you with cradle-to-grave security. That's the idea being promoted by beneficial capitalism, which is not small-business capitalism but big-business capitalism. Corporations have their hands in our pockets so deeply that they hardly pay taxes anymore. In this country [real] corporate taxes have dropped from about 25% to 7%.
Most of the money moves around the world now. It's not American money. There's a positive side to that, in that we don't have nationalism anymore, although we have a stupid brand of nationism, and fundamentalism, which Barry writes about. I'm telling you something very contradictory here. My feelings are that supra-nationalism is McDonald's, yet McDonald's is not American, McDonald's is everywhere. The money just moves from bank to bank. It's just a wire transfer. That's why we don't readily attack it, because it's part of our system, it's in you. You're bitten by the virus; how can you attack what you are?
GIFFORD Frank Capra made several films that were, on the surface at any rate, critical of big business, but I think that while he was expressing a dislike of greed, of manipulation, what he was really doing was reinforcing the American system. I'm not sure there is anything wrong with free enterprise itself, it's greed that's a problem. There's always somebody who wants to take 15 cookies and leave you one.
ELGRABLY Isn't "New World Order" merely a euphemism for "corporate dictatorship"?
STONE [long pause]...Ah, I would prefer the phrase "corporate control," or "corporate supra-nationalism." Competition is still a factor.
ELGRABLY How can cinema represent struggles for social justice and economic equality?
STONE Through imagination. Films can deal in...class warfare and struggle, but it would have to be done with a leap of the imagination to engage an audience. The adage is always true that people will not go to the movies to be educated.
ELGRABLY The second part of the quote from Pico Iyer goes on to say, "I worry about the intrusions of the media in all our lives, whether as subject or object...[and] about the increasing loneliness in America, where family and community are sometimes replaced by technology."
GIFFORD He has a right to be worried. Nothing's going to stop this technology from advancing, except the end of the world, which is advancing faster than the technology. The environmental situation is so dire that it's a race.
ELGRABLY [to Stone] Do you ever worry that film might be in danger of becoming too much about the technology it uses?
STONE Absolutely. I think that filmmakers have a lot of weaponry [at their disposal], and they sometimes don't concentrate enough on life experience. They have ignored that because the money is in shock and sensationalism. You can always make the imagery, but the hardest thing to do is to create an internal dialogue, an internal tension. That's the key to good screenwriting. I think screenwriting is a wonderful art form that has been neglected. There is a snobbism that comes from playwrights and from novelists, from both sides, and in between is the lotus of the 20th-century art form: it's the screenwriter.
GIFFORD I think screenwriting is an element of film art, or rather a component of it. I wrote the screenplay for Perdita Durango, and Bigas Luna [who is going to direct it in the United States and has done his own revisions] just sent me a letter. He says, "I hope you realize I'm trying to make a good movie based on or inspired by your book, rather than simply translate the book onto the screen. This is necessarily so since I find some things quite difficult for me. They go well in your context, but somehow they have to become mine. Don't forget, you were born in Chicago and know the ins and outs of the underworld. I was born next to the Mediterranean, a little sea for little children, and I took first communion in the Romanic Monastery of Gedrables in Barcelona. But 'Perdita Durango' will be tough and sexy, haunting and unforgettable. Avanza coño."
ELGRABLY Approximately 80% of the movies seen in Europe are American-made, and 80% of those are made in Hollywood and are developed, directed, produced and marketed by a younger generation of studio people that has been called "the television generation." We wonder, does the work of the great directors of the past—Welles, Visconti, Hawks, Ford, Pabst, Fellini, Lubitsch, Wilder, Godard et al—have much influence on this generation?
GIFFORD The younger directors are people who have, for the most part, taken a look at what's gone before. You mention Fellini. I was in Rome the day he died. I arrived on the Day of the Dead. And Fellini of course couldn't get money to make movies the last ten years of his life, or longer. It was very difficult for him. The studio that he in fact made, Cinecittà, is pretty much reduced to nothing. Fellini was certainly not favored by producers and the money people, yet when he died the national television station ran his movies for the next three days, continuously, and at the bottom of the screen it said, "Il maestro."
STONE I believe the answer to that question is yes. Film schools are booming. I know that those directors' work is being looked at. I also know that attention spans are tighter and more television-oriented, smaller-screen oriented, so there's probably a marriage between the old tradition and the new, which you see on MTV. My work represents that to some degree—I'm very aware of traditional filmmaking and I'm also very aware of MTV.
[In an interview in National Perspectives Quarterly, following the hoopla surrounding JFK, Stone explained that JFK was "one of the fastest movies made. It is like splinters to the brain. We had 2,500 cuts, maybe 2,200 set-ups. We were assaulting the senses in a kind of new-wave technique. We wanted to get to the [un]conscious.
"...As a filmmaker, I do believe in what might be called 'Dionysian politics.' I believe in unleashing the pure wash of emotion across the mind to let you see the inner myth, the spirit of the thing. Then, when the cold light of reason hits you as you walk out of the theatre, the sense of truth will remain lodged beyond reason in the depths of your being, or it will be killed by the superego of the critics." Stone used this same technique in the making of Natural Born Killers.]
GIFFORD ...For me, as a filmgoer, Natural Born Killers was pretty overwhelming. At the same time, I understood that you were also trying to show how the technology is really not giving you time to catch up with events. I thought what happened in the second half of the film, in the prison, was absorbing, and Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal of the warden was terrific. There was so much truth in that because it really happened in this country a few years ago, when rioting prisoners had cut off prisoners' penises and hung them on a clothesline. What you didn't show was even more horrifying than what ended up in the movie.
ELGRABLY In her book The Reenchantment of Art, Suzi Gablick argues that we live in an era in which we all have a renewed responsibility for the survival of the planet, but that "the addictive nature of consumer society separates us from an awareness of ourselves as visionary beings." Must the artist today have a "responsible" vision to communicate?<
GIFFORD The novelist? The artist? The artist's only responsibility is to his own vision. If he wants to proselytize, let him proselytize. All I think about is the story, and what happens in the story. How it makes people feel and think and see or do is another matter.
STONE Responsibility is a word I shrink from, because it implies an outer directive, although think we all do feel a sense of social responsibility. I think the artist's vision should always seek to struggle, to expand and to conflict...As a filmmaker, I have always responded as a dreamer, not as a doer. I don't build houses, I don't make the waters run, pump electricity, explore the universe. I don't doctor to people...all I really do is dream.
[Stone's production company, Ixtlan, is named after Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan. In that book, Castaneda learns that it is the journey that matters, not actually getting to Ixtlan, which the Yaqui Indian don Juan uses as a metaphor for an unreachable locus of wisdom. Don Juan also wanted the anthropologist to learn how "to see" the world, as opposed to merely "looking" at it.]
GIFFORD Remember what Ezra Pound said, which was "make it new." He wrote a book called Make It New. And that's all that really matters here. I think that Quentin Tarantino, to talk about the flavor of the month, is a very bright guy and an interesting filmmaker, whether he makes Reservoir Dogs based on a Chinese film, or writes True Romance based on, I don't know, Wild at Heart and Badlands, or if he makes Pulp Fiction based on a dozen different things. He has a knack for turning it into something different. In that regard I applaud him. The trouble is that when you do something well and catch people's imagination, they overpraise you, and that's problematic because you know they're later going to turn around and sock you in the jaw. André Gide suggested that a writer should lose 50% of his audience with each new book, because you know that you'll pick up that 50% that you lost, and often they're readers who never really understood your work in the first place. They were there out of fashion or for one reason or another. That's true of me, it'll be true of Quentin Tarantino, it certainly is true of David Lynch and Oliver Stone
ELGRABLY What does the future look like from here?
STONE That's an internal, organic question that you have to deal with yourself, a very personal relationship you have with your faith, your love, your heart, your creativity, your penis [smiles]. We all die, we all have our moment, our energy. Some people could say it's a decomposing universe and others would say it's a recomposing universe...I suppose I sound pessimistic, but I'm not in my heart. I'm a filmmaker. I am optimistic, but I'm taking dramatic license to be optimistic. I do feel that the media can be used for good purpose in the 21st century, that a golden age could be upon us, a higher consciousness through computers and communication. In a sort of Buckminster Fuller paradigm, people would be smarter because they have to be, in order to make the earth system work...although we are subject to the whims of the marketplace.
GIFFORD ...I don't think about the marketplace while I'm writing. Vampire books may be selling well this year but I'm not going to write a vampire book just because they're selling; I write what I want and hope there are enough people interested in both the writing and what I have to say that they buy a few copies so I can keep some food on the table.
ELGRABLY Then you don't go out of your way to exploit the media for the purposes of selling your work?
GIFFORD If you're Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger, you withdraw entirely and maybe you become even more famous because of your reclusiveness. In my case, because my novels receive almost no advertising in this country, I go out on book tours, I do signings and readings and I talk to students on college campuses...I think the artist is walking a fine line, however, because the work should always speak for itself. I'm going to be dead in a little while, and whoever's left to read the books or talk about them or write about them, they're going to come to their own conclusions, and that's the best way. I think that there are a lot of very skilled performers who are writers, a lot of people who really sell their work very successfully, and others that don't—which doesn't say that one is a better writer than the other. It's a tricky business.<
![Sahara [Photo: George Steinmetz]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5575e4ace4b0c73f725bc5cd/1434047166345-WCEI46KQR2AEBDFGQKTC/image-asset.jpeg)
