The high point of cinema so far has been the American films made between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Roughly speaking, these dates constitute the New Hollywood period when failing studios turned to young, maverick directors influenced by the anarchistic re-making of genre cinema by European directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Movies like Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull are emblematic of this period of high art on the big screen where films about bikers, boxers and beautiful killers defied expectations while often also bringing boffo box office.

Another great American flick of the 1970′s is Alan Parker’s Midnight Express. Parker is a Brit, but the film was distributed by Columbia and written by the great Oliver Stone who won a screenwriting Oscar for adapting Billy Hayes’ memoir of getting arrested for hashish smuggling and being locked-up in a Turkish prison. Stone’s script is a brutal document and Parker puts his audience in Billy’s skin behind bars and bereft of hope. Brad Davis is unforgettable as Billy and while the film was shot in a Maltese fort the depictions of the cruelty of Turkish justice are so savage and real-seeming that Midnight Express was screened as a cautionary tale for U.S. Navy sailors visiting Turkey for years after the film’s release.

Celebrating 40 years of Midnight Express — and its amazing Giorgio Moroder soundtrack — here’s an episode of Locked Up Abroad featuring the real Billy Hayes and the harrowing true story of his time in Turkey…

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Jean-Luc Godard celebrated his 87th birthday on December 3 and even though I read a handful of articles and re-tweeted tweet I saw about the master I’m only getting around to mentioning it here. Maybe I was slow to this task because GODARD seems too massive for a quick mention in a blog post. He’s absolutely one of my favorite film directors and movies like Pierrot, Le Feu have had a direct impact on my own creating. While I love the frenzied physicality of Oliver Stone in his prime, and I’m in an eternal/fraternal wrestling match with John Cassavetes for the rest of my life, Godard’s marriage of incisive vision, and sensuous imagery and editing gives us a stylized cinema of cool that turns a critical eye back on the camera and even on the audience. I saw Godard’s 3D film Goodbye to Language the one time it screened in Nashville at the Nashville Film Festival back in 2015. A sampling of the critical response following the movie’s 2014 premiere at Cannes includes Antoine De Baecque writing that the film remained faithful to the ideals of the French New Wave by being “absolutely contemporary” and telling the truth of the modern age. While Éric Neuhoff of Le Figaro wrote that Godard was an “old senile adolescent” who had “lost his inspiration” and “has learned nothing about love, the couple [or] society”, and mocked the film’s fifteen-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Would you believe that they’re both right?

Here is Godard with Dick Cavett in a warm and charming interview from 1980.

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Getting started on the blog this week I was inspired by that Snowden trailer I just posted as well as an article I found while adding pages to my Flipboard magazine.

Before Oliver Stone became one of the most important directors of his generation he was one of the most important screenwriters of his generation — he wrote the screenplays for two of the greatest drug crime films of all time: Scarface and Midnight Express.

I read articles on my tablet phone while I’m making coffee in the morning just like American men used to rise and read the paper that landed on their front stoops. I’ve got my Flipboard app dialed-in on a stream full of drugs, conspiracies, old school counterculture, new school occultism, brain science, space science, cinema, poetry, contemporary art, street art, vintage erotica, philosophy, artificial intelligence and random recent stories that catch my eye. I’ve been following the escape, murder, capture and re-incarceration of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt. Along with that story I’ve been seeing lots of prison culture stuff on the app including this recent piece about a language experiment in a prison in Missouri where they’ve created a dictionary of prison slang. Here’s the word from Salon…

Before they set about compiling a dictionary of prison slang, the inmates at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, used words like viking (meaning a prisoner with poor personal hygiene) and Cadillac (meaning a cup of coffee with cream and sugar) without thinking about it too hard. But when a group of inmates put their private language under a microscope, they realized the way they use language reflects years of institutional history and serves as a unique window onto their experiences of prison life.

The dictionary—which I first heard about thanks to St. Louis Public Radio—came about as part of a prison education program operated by Saint Louis University and was conceived by English professor Paul Lynch, who volunteers at the Bonne Terre prison, a medium-/maximum-security facility. Inmates opted into the project by signing up for a class and worked on the dictionary with Lynch during two-hour sessions once a month.

Lynch said he introduced his students to the idea of creating their own dictionary by having them read part of Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything, a book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The idea, Lynch told me, was to show the inmates that a dictionary is not a book of rules but a description of language as it is used in real life at a particular moment in time. “The goal was to make the students see language as something more fluid and evolving than they’re probably accustomed to,” he said.

What happened next was essentially a series of classroom debates among inmates: about proper usage, what certain words really mean, and whether some were too outdated to be included. “Guys would get really worked up about it, in a very friendly and constructive way,” Lynch said.

These impassioned discussions revealed, among other things, the generational fault lines that divided the inmate population. There were certain words, Lynch said, that older guys knew that younger ones didn’t and vice versa. As a 51-year-old inmate named Stuart Grebing told St. Louis Public Radio, “Whether in softball or in handball or at the weight pile or whatever, you hear a conversation go on and you’re lost. You don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“One term we debated was dun-dun,” Lynch said, explaining that it was short for dungeon and referred to the prison segregation unit, where inmates are kept in solitary confinement. “Only the older guys had any memory of that word being used that way, so we wondered whether we should even include it, because it seemed to be almost gone. But we decided to include it with a note saying that it was almost obsolete.”

Another controversy involved the term 12/12, which refers to the date when an incarcerated person becomes completely free—meaning not just out of prison but off parole as well. “There was a big debate about how that word got used grammatically,” Lynch said. “The question was whether or not you should say ‘What’s your 12/12?’ versus ‘What’s your 12/12 date?’ Some guys said that was redundant. But others said, if you’re working with younger guys who are just learning the administrative ropes, you had to be more clear.”

To be more clear, here is a list of just some of the words that made the cut:

kite, n.: An informal message sent by a prisoner. According to Lynch, this is a word that has been picked up by correctional officers at Bonne Terre as well. “It’s not uncommon for a supervisor to say, if you have an issue with something, ‘just send me a kite.’ ”

two-for-three, n.: Used in bartering, as in “Let’s do a two-for-three: I’ll give you three bags of chips later if you give me two now.”

convict, prisoner, inmate, n.: These three words are used to distinguish between people based on how long they’ve been incarcerated and what level of respect they’ve earned. A convict is someone who’s been around the block, knows how to carry himself. An inmate is someone who’s new and green. Prisoner is neutral.

jail, v.: Refers to being skillful and considerate in one’s approach to being a prisoner or cellmate, as in “That guy doesn’t know how to jail.”

skate, v.: To be somewhere you’re not supposed to be, as in “I was skating yesterday afternoon and got caught.”

boat, n.: A plastic bed that is used when the prison is overcrowded.

pumpkin, n.: A term used for new arrivals at Bonne Terre because they wear orange jumpsuits instead of the gray and tan ones that inmates get after they’ve been processed. (The area where new inmates are processed is called the pumpkin patch.)

Now that you know some of the code that negotiates a life behind bars, here’s a story of the story that inspired Oliver Stone’s screenplay for Midnight Express. If you thought serving time in a Turkish prison for smuggling hash looked bad in that film wait until you learn the real life story from the delightfully gratuitous Locked Up Abroad and the real life Billy Hayes who lived to tell the tale…

Stay Awake!

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The passing of August 6th will forever recall the U.S.’s first atomic bombing in Japan at the city of Hiroshima in 1945.

Most Americans are taught that President Harry Truman made a nail-biting decision to drop the bomb in order to avoid a land war in Japan that would result in the death of countless Japanese and American soldiers alike. But is that really the story?

The debunking of this myth is the centerpiece of Oliver Stone’s miniseries, Untold History of the United States. Here, in “Episode 3: The Bomb,” Stone sets the stage for the struggle that ensues in the lead-up to the attack, providing strong evidence that many politicians and military men in positions of command deemed the bomb to be unnecessary. We’re told that Truman was a good man who did the right thing even though it was hard. What if Truman was an opportunist who did the wrong thing, and what if he did it because it was easier than standing up to his colleagues who felt the war simply had to be ended by the bomb in order to send a message to the Soviet Union?

Here is “The Bomb…”

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With the tragedy of the JFK assassination marking its 50th anniversary this month, I’m continuing my regular posts exploring that dark day in Dallas.

Not only was the assassination of JFK one of the most important events in U.S. history, the mystery that surrounds the tragedy created the modern conspiracy theory and continues to plague us with questions five decades later.

For a contemporary audience, it’s impossible to separate filmmaker Oliver Stone’s masterpiece JFK from the killing of the president in 1963. Both celebrated and scourged, Stone’s “counter myth” about the killing of Kennedy continues to divide audiences, sticking a bold, pointing finger directly into that wound in our national consciousness.

Oliver Stone’s son Sean played Kevin Costner’s son in the movie and here he sits down with his famous father and Buzzsaw host Tyrel Ventura to talk about Hollywood, conspiracy theories, the JFK film and the secret history of the assassination.

Here are Roger Ebert’s comments on the film’s superb cast and stunning editing in his original review of the 1991 film:

As Garrison, Kevin Costner gives a measured yet passionate performance. Like a man who has hold of an idea he cannot let go, he forges ahead, insisting that there is more to the assassination than meets the eye. Stone has surrounded him with an astonishing cast, able to give us the uncanny impression that we are seeing historical figures. There is Joe Pesci, squirming and hyperkenetic as David Ferrie, the alleged getaway pilot. Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw, hiding behind an impenetrable wall of bemusement. Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald. Donald Sutherland as “X” (actually Fletcher Prouty), the high-placed Pentagon official who thinks he knows why JFK was killed. Sissy Spacek, in the somewhat thankless role of Garrison’s wife, who fears for her family and marriage. And dozens of others, including Jack Lemmon, Ed Asner, Walter Matthau and Kevin Bacon in small, key roles, their faces vaguely familiar behind the facades of their characters.

Stone and his editors, Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, have somehow triumphed over the tumult of material here and made it work – made it grip and disturb us. The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche. John F. Kennedy was murdered. Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone. Who acted with him? Who knew?

Here’s the full interview:

What do you think? Do you have a theory about the assassination? Leave a comment and let’s see if we can’t come to our own conclusions.

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Kim Monaghan and I recorded an epic episode of Coincidence Control Network today. It’ll likely go live by Thursday. During the recording Monaghan was moved to declare his love for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. The legally elected Chavez has been vilified as a mad dictator despite the fact that his political roots reach back to his heroic resistance of the former Venezuelan government that ordered soldiers to kill citizens during an uprising.

Tonight, news reports that Chavez has died are all frantically emerging across the mediascape. Chavez had cancer and had contracted a severe infection.

Oliver Stone’s South of the Border (2009) profiles Chavez, picturing a hero of the Venezuelan people who is vilified for his anti-business politics – in other words, he wouldn’t take orders from America. The film also pictures Chavez as the de facto leader of a “pink wave” of socialist leaders who have emerged throughout the region: : Evo Morales of Bolivia; Cristina Kirchner and former president Néstor Kirchner of Argentina; Rafael Correa of Ecuador; Raúl Castro of Cuba; Fernando Lugo of Paraguay; and Lula da Silva of Brazil.

Tonight you’ll hear one, homogeneous story echoing across the mainstream media outlets. Here is another.

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