Monoray to publish filmmaker Oliver Stone's memoir

Octopus imprint Monoray has acquired a "no-holds-barred" memoir from film director Oliver Stone: Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing & Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador & The Movie Game.

Publisher Jake Lingwood acquired English language and exclusive UK Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein in association with David Larabell at CAA. It will be published as a £25 hardback on 21st July 2020.

Stone was behind a number of iconic Hollywood movies of the 1970s, '80s and '90s. He was the screenwriter for "Midnight Express", for which he received his first Academy Award; Scarface, starring Al Pacino; and "Wall Street", starring Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah. He is also known for his Vietnam triology, which he wrote and directed, starting with 1986's "Platoon" and also comprising "Born on the Fourth of July", bringing home the plight of US army veterans, and "Heaven & Earth". Other films to his name include "JFK" with Kevin Costner, "Nixon" with Anthony Hopkins, and "Natural Born Killers", exploring the nature of American TV and its use of violence.

According to Octopus, Stone's memoir will focus on the decade 1976-1986, "the period in which he grew as a writer, a director and as a man", telling "the story of his own unusual and often reckless life, in particular relating in pin-sharp detail the herculean effort of making some of his most important films, with unbounded candour".

Stone writes in his introduction to Chasing The Light it is "a story about making a dream at all costs, even without money. It’s about cutting corners, improvising, hustling, cobbling together workarounds to get movies made and into theaters, not knowing where the next payday is coming from—or the next monsoon or scorpion bite. It’s about not taking 'no' for an answer. It’s about lying outrageously, gritting it out with sweat and tears, surviving. It goes from a magical New York childhood to the Vietnam War and my struggles to come back from it, ending at the age of forty in the making of 'Platoon'. It’s about growing up. It’s about failure, loss of confidence. And it’s about early success and arrogance too. It’s about drugs, and the times we lived through politically and socially. It’s about imagination, dreaming up what you want and going out to make it happen. And of course it’s full of deceits, betrayals, crooks and heroes, people who bless you with their presence, and those who destroy you if you let them."

Stone will visit the UK to promote the book, and publication will be against the backdrop of the US election. 

Lingwood said: "Of all the books where an artist bares all in order to retell and understand their own journey, this is one of the best you will ever read. It is so rare to experience an artist, particularly a filmmaker being so honest with themselves and so frank about others, that Chasing the Light makes for an incredibly rich and eye-popping experience. I’m absolutely certain that this will become a classic and be read for years to come."