Oliver Stone on Vietnam collaborator ?
WASHINGTON - Columbia Pictures is playing down the
possibility that writer-director Oliver Stone will make a movie about Bobby
Garwood, the only U.S. serviceman convicted of collaborating with the enemy
in Vietnam.
Stone's office said it is too soon to talk about the project.
Garwood went missing from the Marine Base at Danang on Sept. 28, 1965.
When U.S. prisoners of war were returned in 1973, Garwood remained in
Vietnam. He did not come back to the United States until 1979. In 1981 he
was tried by court-martial and convicted of collaboration and mistreatment
of a U.S. prisoner of war.
Last month the Hollywood trade paper Variety reported that Stone is
writing and is attached to direct a film based on the 1997 book "Spite
House," by former television producer Monika Jensen-Stevenson. "Spite House"
has been widely criticized as an attempt to rehabilitate Garwood at the
expense of the Marine Corps.
According to the Web site www.miafacts.org , put
together by retired Army Col. Joe Schlatter, former chief of the Defense
Intelligence Agency Special Office for POW-MIA Affairs and former deputy
director of the Defense POW-MIA Office, Jensen-Stevenson based her book on
interviews with Garwood and one other source. She disregarded the trial
transcript as well as the accounts of American prisoners of war who knew
Garwood in captivity. From the debriefings of these servicemen and from
captured enemy documents, the government determined that Garwood had carried
weapons while with the Viet Cong and had assisted in the interrogation of
U.S. prisoners.
In "Spite House," Jensen-Stevenson printed Garwood's charge that a former
U.S. Army doctor had acted improperly in captivity. The physician had been
one of the principal witnesses against Garwood at his court martial. After a
threatened libel suit, Jensen-Stevenson took out an advertisement that
appeared in the Dec. 24, 1999, issues of the New York Times. In the ad, she
acknowledged Garwood as the sole source and apologized to the doctor.
The controversial and multitalented Stone is known for making films that
portray the U.S. government and its institutions in the worst possible
light, especially in matters pertaining to the Vietnam War. Stone served
honorably as a combat infantryman in the Army's 25th Division.
In 1986 critics who never had been within 10,000 miles of Southeast Asia
hailed Stone's "Platoon" as, at long last, the "real" Vietnam war movie.
Stone packed "Platoon" with atrocities and deviant behavior, presenting them
as the norm for U.S. soldiers.
In 1999 Stone's company commander, Robert L. Hemphill, published his
memoir "Platoon -- Bravo Company," partly as a corrective to the widely
acclaimed film, which had won Stone Academy Awards for best picture and best
director in 1986.
United Press International interviewed Hemphill by phone Wednesday from
his home in Gouldsboro, Pa. The retired lieutenant colonel said that from
the accounts of men who knew the future filmmaker well, Stone was a very
good, even overzealous, soldier.
Stone "got shot pretty seriously" on Jan. 15, 1968, Hemphill said. On that
day, two of Bravo Company's platoons were mauled, one by fire from an enemy
bunker.
"I sent the platoon that Stone was in to extract them out of the danger
zone, and Stone and two other guys decided that they were going to take out
the bunker," he said. "So they charged the bunker, and all three were
medevaced along with those already wounded."
Hemphill said that somewhere along the way, Stone "had become radicalized
in some manner."
On Monday UPI requested a phone interview with Stone to ask about his
plans for the Garwood production. A spokesman at Stone's Ixtlan Productions
in Santa Monica, Calif. -- who asked not to be identified -- called back
Wednesday to say that Variety had "sort of jumped the gun in getting it (the
story) out there. There's really nothing to talk about since it's still kind
of developing. You might want to try back in a couple months or so," the
spokesman said.
On Tuesday Columbia Pictures spokeswoman Susan Tick said the project is
merely in development.
"I mean, it's a long, long, long way from production," she told UPI. "It's
just one of those things that's sort of in the background being looked at."
Tick asked the reporter what his interest was, and she was told that
Garwood was a convicted collaborator.
"It could be one of those things that never gets made," she said. "There's
no script, no nothing."
By Lou Marano - United Press International - June 13, 2001.
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