Arts & Entertainment
Natural Born Talker: 5 Oliver Stone Quotes on Money, Military and Making Sense of U.S. History
The "JFK" director joins Peter Kuznick on Wednesday at Stevenson High School for a free screening of an episode of their documentary series.
RELATED: Oliver Stone to Visit Stevenson High School for Screening
The director's views on the inner workings American society and its political and economic systems are splashed wide across the screen in films like Platoon, JFK, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers and Nixon.
But sometimes, Stone best expresses himself when he's only using his words and not his filmmaking technique.
The Untold History of the United States Screening With Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
- When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 4
- Where: West auditorium, Adlai E. Stevenson High School, 1 Stevenson Dr., Lincolnshire
- More Info: Go to the Stevenson Foundation's website.
On Wednesday, the Oscar-winning filmmaker will join Peter Kuznick, a history professor and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, at Adlai E. Stevenson High School for a screening of an episode of The Untold History of the United States, the Showtime documentary series the two worked on together. A moderated discussion and an audience Q&A will follow the showing.
The free event will be at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 4, in Stevenson's west auditorium, according to the school's foundation, which is sponsoring the event. Attendees should enter the campus at Entrance 1 and park in Lot B.
The Untold History of the United States originally aired on the premium cable network in 2012 and ran for 12 episodes. The series―which also spawned a companion book written by Stone and Kuznick―re-examines the history of the Cold War, and how the events of that era have shaped this country's present.
In anticipation of Wednesday's screening, Patch collected five quotes from some of the director's past interviews to get his takes over years on the military, money and making sense out of this country's checkered and sometimes shadowed history.
1. On His Original History Lessons
"I grew up living in the heart of the American dream in New York City. My father was conservative. I served in the military and it took several years after that of seeing the world from the point-of-view of people who were exploited and abused to change my perception. And my films have also taught me about aspects of life. With Untold History I had the chance to really study and broaden my knowledge of the American past. And it's not the bill of goods they taught us in school."
―Canada.com, 2014
2. On the Most Evil Forces in the World
"Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else."
―Playboy, February 1988
3. On the Ultimate Peacemaker
"The Pax Americana, to me, is the dollar sign. It works. It may not be attractive. It's not pretty to see American businessmen running all around the world in plaid trousers, drinking whiskey. But what they're doing makes sense. Now it's been picked up more intelligently by the Japanese, the British, the Germans. But it brings education, health, and welfare to the rest of the world."
―Playboy, February 1988
4. On the Military-Industrial Complex
"[The expansion of the military-industrial complex has] only gotten worse because the money has gotten much bigger. Now we're in an impossible situation where we find ourselves driven into wars, driven into a hundred and some thirty countries where we have military alliances, military bases. We can't seem to get out of it. I'm not sure that any one single man, one president, can do anything about it."
― Straight.com, 2014
5. On War and Violence
"You see a coarsening of society through war. If you think not showing the coffins that come back to the United States is a solution, that's not so. We have to be more truthful about the nature of violence."
― Macleans, 2012
Get Patched In
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.
