'80s Roulette: BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

Oliver Stone paints an unflinching portrait of America's relationship with its fighting men

I have (almost) every single movie released in theaters in the ‘80s in the United States on a hard drive and once I week, I’m going to hit shuffle and review whatever film comes up first.

Welcome to ‘80s Roulette!

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DECEMBER 20, 1989

Born on the Fourth of July
Tom Cruise, Bryan Larkin, Raymond J. Barry, Caroline Kava, Josh Evans, Seth Allen, Jamie Talisman, Sean Stone, Anne Bobby, Jenna von Oÿ, Samantha Larkin, Erika Geminder, Amanda Davis, Kevin Harvey Morse, John Getz, David Warshofsky, Jason Gedrick, Michael Compotaro, Paul Abbott, Bill Allen, William Baldwin, Claude Brooks, Michael Guess, James Le Gros, William Mapother, Christopher W. Mills, Byron Minns, Ben Wright, Markus Flanagan, R.D. Call, John Falch, Dan Furnad, Fred Geise, Greg Hackbarth, Donald Wilson, Kyra Sedgwick, Jessica Prunell, Frank Whaley, Jason Klein, Jerry Levine, Lane R. Davis, Richard Panebianco, Johnny Pinto, Rob Camilletti, J.R. Nutt, Stephen Baldwin, Philip Amelio, Michael McTighe, Cody Beard, Ryan Beadle, Harold Woloschin, Richard Grusin, Tom Berenger, Richard Haus, Mel Allen, Ed Lauter, Liz Moore, Sean McGraw, Oliver Stone, Dale Dye, Norma Moore, Stacey Moseley, Mike Miller, Ellen Pasternack, Joy Zapata, Bob Tillotson, Corkey Ford, Rocky Carroll, Sami Chester, Chris Pedersen, Chris Walker, Willie Minor, David Herman, Bruce MacVittie, Damien Leake, David Neidorf, Paul Sanchez, Richard Lubin, Norman D. Wilson, Peter Benson, Sergio Scognamiglio, Billie Neal, Richard Poe, Bob Gunton, Vivica A. Fox, Mark Moses, Abbie Hoffman, Jake Weber, Reg E. Cathey, Edie Brickell, Keri Roebuck, Geoff Garza, Joseph P. Reidy, Willem Dafoe, Tom Sizemore, Andy Lauer, Michael Wincott, Ivan Kane, Ed Jupp Jr., Michael Sulsona, Cordelia Conzalez, Karen Newman, Begonya Plaza, Edith Diaz, Anthony Pena, Eduardo Ricaro, Holly Marie Combs, Mike Starr, Beau Starr, Rick Masters, John Del Regno, Gale Mayron, Lisa Barnes, Melinda Renna, Tony Frank, Jayne Haynes, Lili Taylor, Elbert Lewis, Peter Crombie, Kevin G. McGuire, Ken Osborne, Alan Toy, Chuck Pfeiffer, Frank Girardeau, William Wallace, Chip Moody, Eagle Eye Cherry, Brian Tarantina, Frank Cavestani, Jimmy L. Parker, William G. Knight, David Carriere, John William Galt, Jack McGee, Kristel Otney, Pamela S. Neill, Jodi Long, Michelle Hurst, John C. McGinley, Wayne Knight, Elizabeth Hoffman, Lucinda Jenney, Lorraine Morin-Torre, Annie McEnroe, Daniel Baldwin, Réal Andrews
cinematography by Robert Richardson
music by John Williams
screenplay by Oliver Stone & Ron Kovic
based on the book by Ron Kovic
produced by A. Kitman Ho and Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone
Rated R
2 hrs 25 mins

Ron Kovic grows up eager to volunteer as a US soldier, but after Vietnam, he is left physically broken and emotionally devastated and has to learn to live again.

It seems like a distant memory now, but there was a time when Oliver Stone was one of the most exciting filmmakers on the planet, and every new film by him was greeted as a major event. I was 19 when this came out, and I was absolutely rabid to see it for a variety of reasons. I was dying to see Oliver Stone engage with Vietnam again, but from a different story angle, and I was a huge Tom Cruise fan because it felt like he was handing himself over to interesting filmmakers and doing whatever they dared him to do. Seeing the two of them work together felt like it was inevitable and dangerous and thrilling all at once.

Part of what I love about Stone’s work, especially his biggest films, is the way he engaged in countercultural American mythmaking, an attempt to own the way we think about an entire decade. In 1976, when Martin Bregman optioned the rights to the autobiography of Ron Kovic, he let Kovic try to write the screenplay first. Even with Al Pacino attached to star, the project was put in turnaround, and Bregman reached out to Stone. While his breakthrough film, Platoon, didn’t hit theaters until 1986, Stone worked as a writer for most of the ‘70s, and Bregman was the first one to option Platoon to try to get it made. He felt like Stone was the one who could crack the code, so he put Stone together with Kovic to work on turning the book into a screenplay that made sense of the sprawling story as a movie. This would have been a year after Dog Day Afternoon, and thinking about that version of the film, I wish I could have seen it. That seems like a perfect fit at a perfect moment, and it would have been wildly ballsy to make that film less than a year after we pulled out of Saigon. Talk about a fresh wound.