Jonathan Frid as SEIZURE’S tortured dreamer, Edmund Blackstone.
them read it. Of course, after that, I never heard from either of them again.
gruelingly on, Stone’s star was clearly on the ascent in Hollywood. After investing years of toil on stillborn movie projects with Robert Bolt and Mark Rydell (“ I love the guy,” Oliver confided in one of several letters to me), Stone wrote a screenplay that sold, got a green light, and became Alan Parker’s MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978). During this exciting period, Oliver became more difficult to reach by phone... and more difficult. When I did reach him, it was a changed fellow 1 encountered— cranky, morose and foul-tempered—no longer interested in discussing his maiden effort. (In the Showtime documentary OLIVER STONE INSIDE/ OUT, Stone admits that he was using a combina­ tion of hard drugs, including cocaine and heroin, during this period.) He had used some of his newfound money to buy a 35mm print of SEIZURE and told me that he wished he could buy all the prints back and melt them down. He finally tired of hearing my excuses about why our article never ran in CFQ, and suggested
A my unrewarded, unpaid efforts dragged
that we just drop the whole thing. “SEIZURE was just one piece of bad luck after another, for every­ one involved, and now it’s been passed down to you,” he said. “My advice is to move on.” The night MIDNIGHT EXPRESS won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, I sent Oliver a telegram of con­ gratulations. It was the last communication that passed between us. In 1979 it was announced that Stone would
direct CONAN THE BARBARIAN for producer Ed­ ward Pressman, based on his own screenplay. In 1982, while I was covering the filming of VIDEODROME in Toronto, Ontario, makeup artist Rick Baker told me: “There was a page in Oliver’s script that said something like ‘A hundred million different demons from Hell walk over the hillside,’ and I said, ‘Oliver, do you have any idea how many a hundred million demons from Hell really is?’ I started to explain how hard it was to design even ten different demons from Hell, and he kind of held his stomach and disappeared into the bathroom— for a really long time. A couple of days later, he bowed out of the project altogether.” Eventually, Oliver Stone resurfaced under some­
what surprising circumstances—as a horror film director. The picture was THE HAND (1981), a
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