oliver stone

Naming Characters

When writing dialog it’s important to give each character their own voice. What often happens is we begin writing before our characters are sufficiently developed and they all end up sounding alike. This can be worked out in rewriting, but until each character comes to life they usually all sound the same. For me, characters […]

King and Chris in Platoon

King as Moral Center

Elaborating on my discussion of the moral center in films… “The first casualty of war is innocence.” That’s the tagline for Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), a film that’s different from other Viet Nam war stories because it’s not about two countries fighting each other. Rather, it’s a story about a country at war with itself. […]

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