More on Oliver Stone

[marcus]

There was an article in The Sunday Times yesterday, written by Robin Lane Fox. Apparently he is the 'historical adviser' for Oliver Stone on the forthcoming Alexander film.Apart from the fact that the article was rather convoluted and difficult to understand, it has given me more faith in Stone producing the best film! Robin Lane Fox has also been promised a front row saddle in the charge of the Companion Cavalry (lucky devil!).All the bestMarcus

[Linda]

The Sunday Times - ReviewJanuary 05, 2003First action hero
Hollywood has taken up Alexander the Great and his biographer Robin Lane Fox canGÇÖt wait to ride in the Macedonian cavalry charge
On June 10, 323BC, Alexander the Great died in mysterious circumstances in Babylon, aged 32. This year he will live again, courtesy of the big names in Hollywood. They are all after him GÇö Martin Scorsese, Sir Ridley Scott, Baz Luhrmann and the king of them all, Oliver Stone.Why all this Alexander mania? In his spectacular career he conquered the Near East all the way from Egypt to Afghanistan and the Punjab. He won an enormous victory over the combined armies of the ancient Persian empire in lands that are now in modern Iraq.The leaders and priests of Babylon staged a memorable welcome to try to save their city. It all reads like a modern American dream. But the reasons for the new fascination with the conqueror are not only political.Thirty years ago, in 1973, I published my history of Alexander. Since then, I have lived a life shot through with othersGÇÖ strange, recurrent obsessions with the young hero. More than 1m copies later, I have seen them come and go GÇö top American businessmen convinced that they have found long-lost details of AlexanderGÇÖs grave, or Fidel Castro, who is an Alexander enthusiast and wanted to know from me the military details of his many victories.Edwina Currie cites my book as the inspiration that propelled her to take up her public career. Worse, a high-society London lady even believed that Alexander was the lover of Catherine the Great in Moscow and that she was his only surviving descendant.I have also seen the obsessions of the great film-makers. One after another they have set themselves up for Alexander, tried to involve me in their dreams and talked freely of their new fascination with historyGÇÖs greatest conqueror, the ultimate challenge.In the mid-1970s, it began with Gregory Peck. Yes, he had read my book and, white-suited, he relaxed in the Ritz in Piccadilly and told me of his determination to cast himself as the elderly Craterus, AlexanderGÇÖs most stubbornly Macedonian companion. Next it was the turn of Time-Life Films, which threw millions of dollars behind a fur-coated producer from the American South, best-known for a documentary on the state penitentiaries. His research team spent months in Italy, one of the few Mediterranean countries that Alexander never visited.Realising the error, the hea

[Linda]

Realising the error, the head of Time-Life Films summoned me to New York and assured me that he would hand over the project to a leading director, together with my veto on historical absurdities. Sadly, the hatchetmen got to him first. I returned to Oxford to find a fatal fax: they had sacked him.Never mind. Where Time faltered, Spielberg was quick to step in. In California, well-thumbed copies of my book had caught the imagination of Steven and his fellow directors. AlexanderGÇÖs story, they realised, has the spell of extreme youth. Aged 25, he had conquered the eastern empire of the Persian kings, who had seemed immovable for 200 years. He was thousands of times richer than anyone else in the known Greek world. He was also convinced that he was the son of the god Zeus.
SpielbergGÇÖs directors, people with Christian names like Menno, would interrupt my Oxford tutorials on the problems of AlexanderGÇÖs taxation and pose heartfelt questions about his extraordinary capacity to hold his drink. Then, after his mixed results with The Color Purple, the fateful fax arrived again. GÇ£Steven has gone out of youth,GÇ¥ it read, GÇ£we leave Alexander to you.GÇ¥Not entirely to me, I have to say. George Lucas now beckoned in the wings, with the evident intention of cutting the great man down to a size somewhat nearer his own. There were also persistent flickers of interest from television and rumours that Liz Taylor would come back for a final throw as the Persian queen mother. And then, since 1997, it has been Oliver Stone and the rest of the pack.They are in extremely distinguished company. True, Alexander the Great did some dreadful things. He murdered a senior officer in a straightforward quarrel. His army looted, slaughtered and torched hundreds of thousands of people as far as northwestern India, a land which nobody from mainland Greece had ever seen before. The challenge, though, is also to explain why so many thousands of his men adored him and were inspired by him, and why his personal style of kingship led them, even at the age of 60 or more, into yet more trials and conquests which would terrify all of us today.Many of my academic colleagues show next to no taste or admiration for the subject. Some of them prefer the administration of the Roman empire. Despite them, AlexanderGÇÖs rapport with the young is wonderfully unstoppable. The great questions of his career and personal appeal are questions which they, above all, best appreciate. They meet them at

[Linda]

Many of my academic colleagues show next to no taste or admiration for the subject. Some of them prefer the administration of the Roman empire. Despite them, AlexanderGÇÖs rapport with the young is wonderfully unstoppable. The great questions of his career and personal appeal are questions which they, above all, best appreciate. They meet them at the same age as Alexander, but by then he had achieved so much more.Long before Hollywood woke up to him, the great names in ancient history had taken him to heart. Ptolemy, Hannibal, Pompey and Julius Caesar were all fascinated by his fame and glory. A fictitious romance about Alexander developed in the Greek world after his death. It was translated into dozens of languages throughout the medieval world. It is probably historyGÇÖs bestselling novel. Traces of the legendary Alexander can even be found in the Koran.As each would-be producer has come and gone, my terms for co- operation have remained the same. What I want instead of royalties is the chance to go back to AlexanderGÇÖs age and join in. As fascination with him has continued throughout my life, I have begun to reflect on my past. It is becoming increasingly likely that I once knew the great man myself.Greek thinkers, including Plato, believed in reincarnation, the living of one life after another beyond the grave. Two thousand three hundred years ago, it is all plain to me. At the time I was a commanding officer in the Macedonian cavalry, galloping without stirrups across the Middle East, with my eye on AlexanderGÇÖs leadership, at the front of our deadly, wedge-shaped battle formation. I loved him despite his vices.For years afterwards, nobody could persuade me to speak about it. I retired with my memories to work conscientiously for the poor and to lay out a garden (now lost) in a secret valley in western Asia.Only if an old comrade appeared and if the drink flowed by the gallon, as it did in AlexanderGÇÖs presence, would we ever go back over all that we knew. As the moon came we would talk about it fondly: what drove him on, what drove us through such hardships, through deserts, up the foothills of the Himalayas and through Indian armies in a torrential monsoon.At last, I have the chance to come back to life. Scorsese and his film seem to have gone backwards. Baz Luhrmann is basing his film only on the fictions of the amiable Italian novelist, Valerio Manfredi. The one to put your money on is Oliver Stone. He has the finance, the distri

[Linda]

At last, I have the chance to come back to life. Scorsese and his film seem to have gone backwards. Baz Luhrmann is basing his film only on the fictions of the amiable Italian novelist, Valerio Manfredi. The one to put your money on is Oliver Stone. He has the finance, the distributor and Colin Farrell is set to be Alexander.Stone is the one who has forced me to break silence. He has bribed me to say how it really was, with the offer of which I have dreamt. When his cameras roll, I am under contract to be in the first flight of each Macedonian cavalry charge. Beside me are members of the Spanish Riding School and behind, the backup of the Moroccan army. The subtitle of the film ought to be Robin Rides Again.Night after night from California, Stone has been questioning me with remarkable persistence. Did Alexander ever take fright in battle? How exactly did he have sex with his Persian eunuch? Was his first wife, the exquisite Roxane, really so innocent? What about his parentsGÇÖ quarrelling, his exceptional capacity for drink and his relationship with gods and heroes? It can only be a typically ironic joke by the Greek god Zeus on high that, as Stone prepares to film, Hollywood has decided to cast AlexanderGÇÖs mythical hero Achilles in an unrelated film in the person of none other than Brad Pitt.For historians, one of the fascinations about Alexander is the gaps in what we can never know. I leave it to Oliver Stone to fill them out, recognising that they give such scope for the imagination.Stone is the man for the job. Like Alexander, he has an oriental wife. Like Alexander, he looks back on parents who had their turbulent times. Unlike me, he has had personal experience of war, albeit in the different theatre of Vietnam.He speaks fondly of his days at New York University and the inspiring courses on Greek mythology before he joined the famous film studies school. He is the real professional. He knows exactly where the film Gladiator was shoddily shot and put together. After his own films on Kennedy and Nixon, and his free injection of fiction into fact, what better field for StoneGÇÖs own imagination than Alexander, where so much is still so uncertain? I have not yet seen the script, but StoneGÇÖs questions suggest that it will electrify historians. It will certainly come clean about the sexual activity. Like so many men in Greek antiquity, Alexander had sex with women or with men.Today, we would call him bisexual but the ancients had no

[Linda]

Today, we would call him bisexual but the ancients had no idea of such innate nature. At times, on the nightly telephone, I have seen my advisory role in the light of Abraham, as he interceded with God for the doomed city of Sodom. At least I have tried to plead for history, whatever the great director decides to make of it. Actually, sodomy is the right analogy. As Stone put it to me, he knows how to put GÇ£bums on seatsGÇ¥, and that means, in this case, bums on screen. Bigger stars, like Johnny Depp, cried off.On my mantelpiece, I have the postcard confirming my appointment. It is a black-and-white photograph of the Cuban cavalry preparing to charge with a note from Oliver suggesting: GÇ£That could be you, professor, somewhere in the middle.GÇ¥ Put me up front, please, Mr Stone. We historians of warfare long to know if a troop of cavalry will charge an elephant head-on. This autumn, in the desert, I have a chance to find the answer. Whatever it is, we will be sharing it with you before another year is up.Robin Lane Fox is a fellow of New College, Oxford, and reader in ancient history***************************************************Or you can just read the article online - although I don't think it is archived. Apologies for any copyright infingement...Interesting article, although I see he trots out that old thing about ancients having no concept of different sexualities, in spite of the evidence in Plato's Phaedo of fundamental natures, but.....my old gripe!Linda

[marcus]

Well, Linda, you obviously have more time your hands than I do! I couldn't be bothered even to contemplate posting the whole article!All the bestMarcus