Warner Bros, release starring Michael Caine. Though jeered by mainstream critics, a few well- attuned critics in the fan press noticed that it was essentially a slicker, denser rewrite of SEIZURE— in which an artist is attacked not by his own imaginary characters, but by the (severed) hand that brought those characters to life; it was a superior fantasy based not only in male castra­ tion anxieties, but a work of autobiography la­ menting Stone’s loss of the CONAN project. Incredibly, THE HAND managed to fare worse at the box office than SEIZURE, which had at least enjoyed some successful playdates prior to the collapse of its distributor. THE HAND was followed by more successful


screenplays—SCARFACE (1983), THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON and 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (both 1985)—which gave Stone the latitude to return to directing permanently... with SALVADOR (still his finest film to date) and his long-shelved screen­ play, PLATOON (both 1986). In the years since PLATOON swept the 1986


Oscars for Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Director, Stone has refused to discuss SEIZURE at any length, and usually drops it from his resumé altogether.


rp I he past became undeniable when SEI­ZURE resurfaced on home video from Prism Enter­ tainment in the late 1980s. Earlier this year, it was reissued by Starmaker Video, in SP and SLP sell- through editions. (The Starmaker tape runs a few seconds short, due to a crude splice—just before Hervé Villechaize breaks through the window— that eliminates Gerald [Richard Cox]’s line, “You see, it’s only your guilty conscience, Charles.”) SEIZURE refuses to be forgotten. While cover­


ing Stone’s latest feature, NATURAL BORN KILL­ERS (1994), ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY devoted a sidebar to his feature debut. Stone would only say of the film: “I guess I wasn’t much of a horror director,” refusing to supply a more definitive account of the film’s production. Fortunately, one exists. In the director’s own words. Almost twenty years have passed since Oliver


Stone reminisced into a cassette recorder, trusting me to organize his thoughts into some kind of presentable shape. But the behind-the-scenes pho­ tos never materialized, and therefore, as I was warned by my editor, the article never materialized in CINEFANTASTIQÜE. Since beginning VIDEO WATCHDOG in 1990,


I’ve been urged by people aware of the orphaned 32


manuscript to publish it myself, but till now I’ve always felt a kind of superstition about it, the “bad luck” that Oliver once described to me as a kind of cosmic punishment for having spoken the truth. My mind was eventually changed after meeting Martine Beswicke and Mary Woronov, both of whom listened to the story I’ve just recounted and agreed that the story behind the making of SEI­ZURE is important and still needs to be told. Rereading my original article, I found it needed


more revising than I cared to invest. But my transcript of the Stone tapes, on the other hand, remains a fascinating, instructive and sometimes hilarious document—an essential, heretofore miss­ ing chapter from the career of one of the most gifted and productive American film directors of our century.


well has SEIZURE itself endured? Looking at the film today, I must admit that I’m


not as bowled over as I was twenty years ago. The film is poorly paced, miserably scored, and it suffers from murky night photography and wretched, amateurish makeup; yet it somehow holds together, thanks to the conviction of its performances and Stone’s eloquent script, which ventured into the realm of “confrontational horror” years before David Cronenberg made the films that resulted in the coining of that term. The sequence near dawn, in which Serge (Roger De Koven) walks serenely to the chopping block and instructs the executioner Jackal (Henry Baker) to “Make it quick and neat, my friend; I have a pressing appointment to keep” possesses a singular resonance of horror and elegy, unduplicated until Stone himself struck a similar harmonic in the opening moments of PLATOON. These evocations of “grace under fire” could have been filmed only by someone who had witnessed enough real life horror to come to terms with it, befriending death in a way that only true survivors can. In light of NATURAL BORN KILLERS (which


Warner Home Video will release on videocas­ sette in January 1995), SEIZURE becomes wo­ ven ever more integrally into the webwork of Stone’s oeuvre—it marks the earliest expression of his definitive theme, in all its guises: the intrusion of violence into people’s everyday lives... the burden of uneasy consciences... the horrors of War coming home... the urgent entreaty to “Wake up—or die!” And so here, at long last, is the first appear­


ance in print of (what I presume to be) Oliver Stone’s first interview. —TL

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