Exclusive Video: Oliver Stone Throws A Tantrum About The Internet At Terra Speaking Engagement
14 October 2009, 4:31 PM. By Cindy Casares
Last night, Guanabee attended a speaking engagement for which director Oliver Stone was paid, ($75,000, according to one Terra employee), to speak with Terra CEO and founder Fernando Madeira about the future of the internet. Terra, in case you don’t know, bills themselves as a, “leading entertainment, news and sports hub for U.S. Hispanics.” Which is why it was somewhat surprising when Stone proceeded to tell his host, and all the internet entrepreneurs in the audience at The New Museum in Manhattan, what a “disaster” the internet is. As the conversation wore on, it became clear that we were in the presence of an aging and angry man coming to terms with his growing irrelevance in the face of internet entertainment culture. Basically, Stone doesn’t believe anything (video or otherwise) on the internet can be called art because “it’s not the way [he] grew up.” It’s not what he calls, “watching a movie.” He then summed up the internet thusly: “These kids” “jump in a pool” [and video tape it] and “call it a movie.”
I’ve heard the democratic argument [for the internet] and I’m not an elitist, but Winston Churchill did make some kind of sense when he said the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. Let’s not kid ourselves. A mashup is not a movie. It’s offensive.
Speaking of mash-ups, here’s one featuring some of Stone’s best pearls from last night with text transcribed below.
Certainly at the beginning of this thing, the internet was an enemy. It was just a disaster for people like me who are classically trained in film school.
You can watch movies on little screens all the time. You can watch three minutes of a movie, seven minutes of a movie. You can call that watching a movie. That’s not the way I grew up. That’s not the way I like movies that are narratives with content.
Now, possibly, and I won’t be around, the synthesis will come, maybe the screens will become bigger and it won’t be so cold and my eyes won’t go crazy.
Film does exist unto itself. To mix it up with the internet is to confuse it entirely. It’s like watching an opera on tape. More eyeballs see it, so what? Is fine art for all these eyeballs? If most eyeballs can’t appreciate a movie, if they can’t appreciate fine art, I’d rather make a movie for people who appreciate it.
You cannot have your neighbor come over and jump in the pool and have a party and call that a movie. Some kids come over and one of them strangles the other and they call that a fucking movie. It’s a joke. It’s jerking off in front of the camera and that’s what most people are doing and I’m sick of it.
Jerking off in front of a camera. Something Oliver Stone knows something about. (Cough! JFK, Nixon, The Doors, South Of The Border, cough!) Stone’s final point makes it clear he’s in the midst of an existential crisis, probably exacerbated by his last decade and a half of movies having been lukewarmly received by most of the world. If he is forced, via the internet, to compete with “6 billion people showing off,” Stone wonders aloud, “Is there no hierarchy of quality? What is life for?”
The internet is a [...] tool. If everybody just wants to jump on the tool and say I, hey I can [...] make a mashup, or I can create my own news show, or show you my gymnastic ability, what is it about? We’ve got 6 billion people showing off. I don’t understand. How do you judge? What is life for? Is there a hierarchy of quality or not? Or is it all the same?
That’s something you’ll have to come to terms with on your own, Oliver. Perhaps you could do an internet search for some self-help.
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“That’s not the way I like movies that are narratives with content”
Then why did he make Alexander?
Oliver Stone? New media? Hispanics? Where is the connection here? How could this possibly gone well?
This is clearly the case of a big fan going insane over the possibility of actually having a conversation with Oliver Stone, even if he had to pay for it. There’s no other explanation.
Actually, Stone may have a point here, although he seems to have expressed it less than graciously.
Philip Jose Farmer touched on this theme in his novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” set in a future where the “gummint” pays everyone a salary so that they don’t have to work and can instead follow their muses and create art.
The problem is, most of what is produced is absolute garbage. People are forced to confront the fact that the vast majority of them have no artistic or creative talent whatsoever. This leads to massive depression and, eventually, the complete breakdown of the family unit.
This is a gross oversimplification of the story, but a solid hour or so perusing the most popular videos on YouTube could lead one to conclude that Farmer put his finger on something that was coming down the pike a half-century or so later.
Maybe Stone is our canary in the coalmine here.
Or maybe he’s just a grumpy old man.
What do I know?
It’s not that the ills Stone mentions don’t exist, but he acts as if a) those things are all that exists on the internet and b) anyone is saying the crap on YouTube is “art” or “a movie.” No one is saying the crap on YouTube is a movie, but some stuff on YouTube and on the internet does constitute a well thought-out, well executed movie or piece of news or whatever. The fact that he turns his nose up at “little screens” because that’s not how he grew up pretty much gives away his generational bias.
Well…in his defense, I’m not sure it’s really a generational bias.
An occupational bias, maybe.
After all, he’s a filmmaker. Movies have traditionally been photographed — i.e., framed, lit, composed, etc. — to be viewed on a very large screen in a darkened room, not on an iPod.
This is what I meant when I said he was perhaps not expressing his point very well.
Maybe he should stay away from words and just stick to images.
Yeah, cuz that’s going so well for him.
I dunno — I thought “World Trade Center” was pretty good. Got me and my dad choked up towards the end — can’t say that’s ever happened with any other movie.
He’s made some great stuff. Who cares if he’s nuts? I think guys like that just enjoy going crazy to stave off boredom. Like Michael Eisner going Duck Hunting…
http://mankabros.com/chairmans-blog/2009/10/duck-hunting-with-michael-eisn.html
guess he’s never watched a movie on TV or Video…….
Cough! - Grindhouse, Evita screenplay, Any Given Sunday, tiresome USA network conspiracy-documentaries about JFK & Reagan - Cough! Hack! Cough!
Grindhouse?
There you can watch it online full time.
http://www.playhitmusics.com