PLATOON 251
film school, made a short 16-mm film about the war (Last Year in Vietnam, 1971),
and wrote a number of other screenplays, among them Seizure (1974; his first one
made into a film) and “The Platoon,” a Vietnam War film script that recycled char-
acters and structure from “Break.” Sidney Lumet wanted to direct it in 1976, but
producer Martin Bregman was not able to secure studio backing; the script was
deemed too grim and realistic a vision of the Vietnam War. Stone next wrote Alan
Parker’s Midnight Express (1978). The film was a hit, but the studios continued to
pass on “The Platoon.” A frustrated Stone soldiered on, writing the scripts for The
Hand (1981, a low- budget horror film that he also directed), John Milius’s Conan
the Barbarian (1982), Brian De Palma’s gangster epic Scarface (1983), Michael Cimi-
no’s Year of the Dragon (1985), and Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). In
1984 Dino De Laurentiis secured financing for “The Platoon.” Pre- production work
began but soon ground to a halt when De Laurentiis could not find a distributor.
“The Platoon” and another Oliver Stone script for what would become Salvador were
then passed onto John Daly, the head of Hemdale, a British production com pany.
Daly read both scripts, pronounced them “ great stuff,” and offered Stone the choice
as to which he preferred to film first. Superstitious that something would again go
wrong with “The Platoon,” Stone opted to shoot Salvador first. After finishing Sal-
vador at the end of 1985, Stone began pre- production on Platoon, as it was now
called. He assembled a stellar cast: Martin Sheen’s son, Charlie Sheen, in the lead
role as Pfc. Chris Taylor; Tom Berenger as the Ahab- like Sgt. Barnes; Willem Dafoe
as Barnes’ nemesis, Sgt. Gordon Elias (hired over Denzel Washington); and John C.
McGinley, Forest Whitaker, and Johnny Depp. James Woods, who had starred in
Salvador, was also offered a part in Platoon but, sated on jungle shoots, turned it
down. Oliver Stone realized that his actors would need to be subjected to extreme
discomfort if they were going to look and behave like U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, so he
hired Vietnam veteran Dale Dye (founder of Warriors, Inc., a com pany that provides
military expertise to Hollywood war films). As Platoon’s technical advisor, Dye’s
mandate was to put the principal cast members through a rigorous, immersive
14- day military training regimen that included forced marches in full combat gear
and schooled them in weapons, ordnance, tactics, ambushes, first aid, medevac,
radio use, etc. He also limited food and water intake and had his tired actors take
turns keeping a two- hour watch at night, as real soldiers would have done in Viet-
nam. The object was “to mess with [the actors’] heads so we could get that dog- tired,
don’t give a damn attitude, the anger, and the irritation... the casual approach to
death” (Saporito, 2015).
Production
Just days before the Platoon shoot was scheduled to start in the Philippines, pro-
duction was nearly canceled because of po liti cal unrest. A “ People’s Revolution”
had suddenly erupted, which para lyzed the nation and rendered filmmaking out
of the question. Luckily, Ferdinand Marcos, the Philippines’ unutterably corrupt
president, was persuaded to flee the country for asylum in Hawaii on 25 Febru-
ary 1986. Filming began on 27 February as scheduled and lasted nine weeks (54
shooting days). The studio made an agreement with the Philippine army, allowing