page_title: Oliver Stone
section_title: 1970s
hierarchical_section_title: Oliver Stone / Writing and directing career / 1970s
caption_attribution_description: Oliver Stone
context_page_description: William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer, and writer.
  Stone won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as writer of Midnight Express, and wrote the gangster movie Scarface. Stone achieved prominence as writer and director of the war drama Platoon, which won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Platoon was the first in a trilogy of films based on the Vietnam War, in which Stone served as an infantry soldier. He continued the series with Born on the Fourth of July —for which Stone won his second Best Director Oscar—and Heaven & Earth. Stone's other works include the Salvadoran Civil War-based drama Salvador; the financial drama Wall Street and its sequel Money Never Sleeps; the Jim Morrison biographical film The Doors; the satirical black comedy crime film Natural Born Killers; a trilogy of films based on the American Presidency: JFK, Nixon, and W.; and Snowden.
  Many of Stone's films focus on controversial American political issues during the late 20th century, and as such were considered contentious at the times of their releases.
context_section_description: Stone graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film in 1971, where his professors included director and fellow NYU alumnus Martin Scorsese. The same year, he had a small acting role in the comedy The Battle of Love's Return. Stone made a short, well received 12-minute film Last Year in Viet Nam. He worked as a taxi driver, film production assistant, messenger, and salesman before making his mark in film as a screenwriter in the late 1970s, in the period between his first two films as a director: horror films Seizure and The Hand.
  In 1979, Stone was awarded his first Oscar, after adapting true-life prison story Midnight Express into the successful film of the same name for British director Alan Parker (the two men would later collaborate on the 1996 movie of stage musical Evita).  Stone's screenplay for Midnight Express was much criticized for its inaccuracies in portraying the events described in the book and vilifying the Turkish people. The original author, Billy Hayes, around whom the film is set, spoke out against the film, protesting that he had many Turkish friends while in jail. Stone later apologized to Turkey for over-dramatizing the script, while not repudiating the film's stark brutality or the reality of Turkish prisons.
caption: Stone in February 1987
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