You Know You're Watching an Oliver Stone Movie If:

1. The Vietnam War is mentioned...The war is mentioned in all his major films except Any Given Sunday.
   
2. The actual person, who the movie portrays, plays a cameo in the film...In Platoon, Stone, who the movie is based on, plays an officer blown up in a bunker.  In Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic plays a paraplegic in the Fourth of July parade at the beginning of the movie.  In JFK, Jim Garrison plays Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.  In Heaven and Earth, Le Ly Hayslip plays a jeweler...In Salvador, Rick Boyle, who did not make a cameo appearance, co-wrote the screenplay with Stone and shared an Oscar nomination with him.
   
3. The visual effects are so mind numbing that to understand the movie, you much watch it again...In JFK, the flash frames were so numerous that it would take a thousand to watch it and correctly add the frames up.  In Natural Born Killers, the frames come fast again, but some are animated, black and white, or distorted.  In Any Given Sunday, Stone got his hands on the same image-shaker that was used in Saving Private Ryan, which caused the images to be even more distorted.
   
4. The movie is good…Of 12 movies directed by Stone, Roger Ebert has recommended 10 (6 of the 10 he gave 4 stars).  He also named JFK one of the ten best films of the 1990s and of all time.
   

• Educated at Yale and NYU
  
• Has 3 children: Sean Stone, Michael Stone & Tara Chong Stone
  
• His mother met his father while his father was in France during WWII.
  
• His father was a successful stockbroker on Wall Street, but had financial setbacks due to some bad investments and a divorce; Wall Street was modeled after him
  
• Speaks French fluently
  

• Has been divorced twice
  
• Was once jailed in Mexico for possession of marijuana; moved to France to kick a cocaine habit; arrested in 1999 for drunk driving