Stone’s book reads like an epic poem because he’s lived an epic life, one that is filled with and defined by war.

Stone, ever the thunderous dramatist, can’t help but lend the same fiery passion to the story of his early life and career that he does to his films. It’s a Hollywood insider story from the man who brought us Platoon, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and many other cage-rattling films. What sets Stone’s memoir apart, however, is its unflinching honesty and its bold, poetically inclined voice.

The book chronicles his many years of work, pain, loneliness, and rejection before he rose to become one of the most gifted and provocative filmmakers in Hollywood history.Ĭhasing the Light contains all the elements of a juicy Hollywood memoir: celebrity stories, behind-the-scenes battles, broken relationships, drug addiction, and, ultimately, the kind of success of which most of us can only dream. Stone makes it abundantly clear that he wasn’t merely handed his success. It is devoid of Hollywood glamour and mystique, opting instead for the brutal and harsh reality of what it takes to make it in such an overwhelmingly cutthroat business. Oliver Stone’s recent memoir doesn’t glaze over his harsher truths, they are the book’s primary focus. They are often gossipy fluff pieces that glaze over their authors’ harsher truths to focus on the success and glamour their luck, work, and talent has brought them. Narrated by the author.Celebrity memoirs can be highly entertaining reads but rarely make for great literature. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the high and low moments: We see meetings with Al Pacino over Stone's scripts for Scarface, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction following the failure of his first feature, The Hand (starring Michael Caine) his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface his stormy relationship with The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino the breathless hustles to finance the acclaimed and divisive Salvador and tensions behind the scenes of his first Academy Award–winning film, Midnight Express.Ĭhasing the Light is a true insider's look at Hollywood's years of upheaval in the 1970s and '80s. An intimate memoir by the controversial and outspoken, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his complicated New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface.īefore the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life.

Chasing The Light by Oliver Stone