Oliver Stone Rewrites History — Again

Filmmaker Oliver Stone mounts his biggest challenge ever to the received wisdom in a new feature in The New York Times Magazine. Below are selected excerpts:

- Stone often comes to understand, too late, the consequences of his words. In Spain, he talked openly about the furor that ensued when, in 2010, a British journalist asked him why people were so fixated on memorializing the Holocaust, considering, as he told her, that “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians” than he did to the Jews and that the Russians lost “25, 30 million” in the war. It was, Stone claimed, because of what he called “the Jewish domination of the media” and Israel’s “powerful lobby in Washington.”

- But Stone isn’t a kid anymore. He’s 66, sometimes wears hearing aids and can’t shake off hangovers the way he used to. (“Two vodkas or two tequilas and a few glasses of wine, that’s the edge for me,” he said.)

- Spend any time with Stone, and you’ll soon discover that he lacks what you might call the deliberation gene, whatever prevents us from saying things that will get us in trouble, lose us friendships, even jobs. Years ago, a producer on “Nixon” related that when he first introduced Stone to his mother, Stone declared, “You look Chinese.” (She was not.)

Read the entire article here.