In fact, Oliver Stone’s career was never as outrageously conten-tious as this when it started, neither was it even at the putative height of his artistic and commercial powers in the decade that spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s. From unlikely writ-ing credits for The Hand (1981), which he also directed, Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) and 8 Million Ways to Die (Hal Ashby, 1986), to the more lauded and/ or cultish work for Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983) and Year of the Dragon (Michael Cimino, 1985), Stone’s early career CV gathered together solid and praiseworthy credentials that lined him up as a filmmaker with something important (and occasion-ally outlandish) to say. The somewhat over- the- top nature of several of the features above certainly could have their extravagance and virtuosity laid at the door of their respective directors, Milius, De Palma and Cimino: each of them an auteur, each coming out of the New Hollywood circle that emerged during the 1970s, and each with an outlook, sensibility and fascination for certain topics that Stone easily shared, and to which he subsequently devoted himself. All three were important influences on Stone’s acculturation as a director. Indeed, the connection and mutual regard help explain some of the determinants that made their screenwriting protégé’s career, if anything, even more flamboyant, extreme and ultimately successful, than their own.Most obviously, Cimino’s Oscar- winning The Deer Hunter (1978) set the benchmark for a grittier and more politically refined assess-ment of the Vietnam War that Stone built upon in a personal fashion, first with Platoon (1986), and then Born on the Fourth of July (1989). This latter production, which would later become the second part of Stone’s trilogy about the conflict, echoed Cimino’s own sense of despondency and fatigue with the war during the early 1970s, with his story hitting the screens more than a decade before Tom Cruise’s Academy- nominated performance as real- life veteran, Ron Kovic.