The Screengrab

Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today.  "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened.  Couldn't Stone have waited a few years?  After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him.  Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him.  As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man:  that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle.  With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way.  So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter.  It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt.  Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it.  But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone:  he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

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When Entertainment Weekly chose Curtis Mayfield's stunning soundtrack to the 1972 blaxploitation classic Superfly as one of the top ten soundtracks of all time, they referred to it as "a textbook case of a soundtrack that artistically dwarfs the film that spawned it".  We're not sure we'd go as far as to say 'dwarfs' -- Gordon Parks' film is not without its merits (including some good performances, a real sense of moral tension and ambiguity, and some swell photography), especially when compared with other films of its sort.  But there's no denying that the combination of music and lyrics to be found on this release, on his own Curtom Records label, represent a high point in Curtis Mayfield's already-stellar career and will probably stand as an all-time great of 1970s funk and soul music long after the movie's artistic merits have been forgotten.  It's an album that belongs on any list of all-time great soundtracks, to be sure, but also on a list of the very best records of all time.

Intended as a combination soundtrack and score to the Gordon Parks film, Superfly also functions as a sort of concept album on its own.  The lyrics retell the story that takes place in the movie, in Mayfield's own words; in the hands of someone less talented, this would have been a disaster, coming across as either cheesy or pretentious.  But Mayfield's wise, sensitive storytelling gets it all just right, presenting a much more morally complex story than even the movie dares to tell and spelling out the essential tragedies of its characters in his smooth, insinuating soul tenor.  The music is likewise unbeatable:  a perfect transition from the smooth, hopeful soul of his earlier work (both alone and as a member of the Impressions) and the raw funk that would come to characterize black music later in the decade.  It's marked by lovely piano riffs, catchy horns, solid bass and drum work, and of course, Mayfield's unmistakable waka-waka guitar.  The movie (financed at least in part by Gordon Parks' dentist) wasn't expected to make much money, and neither was the soundtrack, but both proved to be runaway successes:  the soundtrack album produced two million-selling singles which not only gave Mayfield a huge post-Impressions payday, but assured his financial stability for the remainder of the decade as he was given more and more soundtrack work.  It's a rare soundtrack that can be appreciated solely on its own merits, distinct from the action of the film that inspired it; but much more than this, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly almost seems to be the score to an another, better movie altogether:  it stands alone and succeeds not only for what it is, but as something better than it was ever intended to be.

Due to the runaway popularity and vast influence of the Superfly soundtrack (it's probably the most heavily sampled album on 1980s and 1990s rap singles outside of the collected works of James Brown), it's been issued in a number of formats.  If you can, seek out the 1997 Rhino Records 25th anniversary collection, which features demo versions of the songs, additional selections from the underrated score, radio spots for the movie, and an excellent interview with Curtis Mayfield.

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THE FUGITIVE (1993)



The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

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