AWARDS/
FOUNDER'S DIRECTING AWARD: OLIVER STONE
An Evening with Oliver Stone
Wednesday, April 27, 7:00 pm
Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
1881 Post Street (at Fillmore)
$20 members, $25 general
The Film Society is proud to present the 2011 Founder's Directing Award to three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone, one of the most popular and respected filmmakers in the United States. Stone will be honored at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas with an onstage interview about his extensive directing career and a selection of clips from his films will be followed by a screening of Salvador on the 25th anniversary of its release.
Oliver Stone has won Academy Awards for directing Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and received the Best Adapted Screenplay award for Midnight Express (1978). Some of his other celebrated titles include Wall Street (1987), Salvador (1986), JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Nixon (1995).
The Founder’s Directing Award will be presented at Film Society Awards Night. The award is presented each year to a master of world cinema and is given in memory of Irving M. Levin, visionary founder of the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1957. The Founder's Directing Award is made possible by Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston.
Oliver Stone: Auteur, Provocateur
By Dennis Harvey
No American filmmaker of the last quarter-century has so successfully inhabited the mainstream while attracting and thoroughly enjoying controversy as Oliver Stone. In some respects he’s our cinematic Norman Mailer, a celebrity auteur who blazes through different genres, magnetizing criticism and scoffers (as well as Oscars), but in one way or another is always placing his hairy mitts on the pulse of America’s body politic.
Raised in New England affluence, he dropped out of Yale after one year to teach English in South Vietnam then returned in 1967 as a combat-duty US Army enlistee, earning a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Graduating from New York University’s film school (with Martin Scorsese a teacher), he made his feature directorial debut with the eccentric 1974 B horror Seizure, followed by 1981's The Hand. But a more serious, often grandly ambitious take on genre conventions emerged in a series of high-profile screenplays including the Oscar-winning Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, and the controversial Year of the Dragon.
1986’s intensely political Salvador won acclaim. But it was that year’s Platoon—first of a trilogy pondering our Vietnam War legacy—that secured his place in the top rank of Hollywood directors, winning Stone a second Oscar in that capacity.
Since then his path has been both characteristic and consistently surprising. He tackled go-go Reaganomics in Wall Street (then another era's boom/bust abandon in last year's sequel Money Never Sleeps), the ’60s at their druggiest (The Doors), pro football (Any Given Sunday), bisexual conquerors of antiquity (Alexander—the cinematic equivalent of Mailer’s Ancient Evenings), and 9/11 heroism (World Trade Center). He’s lit a fire under no fewer than three U.S. presidencies via JFK, Nixon and W.—the latter a satirical yet not entirely unsympathetic portrait (Stone is never simplistic about abusers of power) released when the Decider himself was still in office.
Then there’s the wild provocation of Natural Born Killers; his documentary sitdowns with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez; producer duties on projects as diverse as Reversal of Fortune, TV sci-fi mini Wild Palms, The Joy Luck Club and cult indie Freeway.
To say nothing of his stylistic invention, frequently using multiple camera formats in one film. Or his track record of memorable performances: Has Tom Cruise ever been more relatable than in Born on the Fourth of July? Michael Douglas edgier than as Wall Street’s reptilian Gordon Gekko? Will there ever be a better Jim Morrison or Condi Rice than Stone coaxed from Val Kilmer and Thandie Newton, respectively?
Now 64, Oliver Stone hardly seems mellowed with age—he's one Hollywood institution who remains a wild card.
Dennis Harvey is a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and writes regularly for Variety, SF360.org, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Previous recipients
2010 Walter Salles
2009 Francis Ford Coppola
2008 Mike Leigh
2007 Spike Lee
2006 Werner Herzog
2005 Taylor Hackford
2004 Milos Forman
2003 Robert Altman
Previously Known as Akira Kurosawa Award
2002 Warren Beatty
2001 Clint Eastwood
2000 Abbas Kiarostami
1999 Arturo Ripstein
1998 Im Kwon-Taek
1997 Francesco Rosi
1996 Arthur Penn
1995 Stanley Donen
1994 Manoel De Oliveira
1993 Ousmane Sembčne
1992 Satyajit Ray
1991 Marcel Carnč
1990 Jirí Menzel
1989 Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1988 Robert Bresson
1987 Michael Powell
1986 Akira Kurosawa
