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Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. Oliver Stone's USA: Film, History, and Controversy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. 360 pp. $34.95.
Writer and director Oliver Stone must be a serious filmmaker deserving serious treatment. Why else would scholars of history and film dissect nine of Stone's films for a university press book? But there may be a less flattering explanation: Stone is an effective filmmaker whose disturbing questions and outrageous statements would be ignored if they were not directed toward tens of millions of moviegoers. As the saying goes, it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
Stone has been squeaking on celluloid and in public to the point of becoming a parody of himself. His contributions to Oliver Stone's USA, two essays that make up nearly a third of the...