When Oliver Stone said he wanted to take James Woods, Jim Belushi and acid-fried journalist Richard Boyle to El Salvador to make a film about [a US-suported army and death squads ] fighting a leftist insurgency, few gave him a chance of succeeding. Even fewer gave him a chance of coming back alive.

Who went south of the border to bring you Salvador?

Vietnam vet-turned-maverick filmmaker. Followed screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express with Best Director gongs for semi-autobiographical ‘Nam films Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July. Likes Indians and conspiracy theories. Dislikes the American government and women.

James Woods (Richard Boyle) – Lean American actor famed for his intensity, massive IQ and infamous affair with Sean Young. Oscar nominated for his remarkable turn as journalist Richard Boyle.

James Belushi (Dr Rock) – Thinner, less funny brother of John Belushi. A Saturday Night Live regular in the early 80s, Belushi blew his considerable Salvador cache on a succession of sickly family movies.

John Savage (John Cassady) – American leading man with an eclectic, eccentric CV (Do The Right Thing, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather Part III). Role in Salvador loosely based on real-life photo-journalist John Hoagland.

Richard Boyle (co-writer) – Respected investigative journalist and Olympic-level loon. Went to El Salvador in 1980 to cover the civil war for CNN. Accused Stone of failing to pay him his Salvador writer’s fee in full. Likes a drink.

Robert Richardson (director of photography) – A regular Stone collaborator, Richardson received Oscar nominations for his work on Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July.

Gerald Green (producer) – American producer and head of Pasta Productions.

John Daly (producer) – British independent producer and David Hemmings’ partner in Hemdale Films. Helped raise the money for Salvador, Platoon and The Terminator.

people and I love it. Good beer, beautiful women, cheap rent. What more do you want in life?

Oliver Stone: Richard Boyle was a friend of mine. He was always fun for a couple of laughs. He had a manuscript of short stories and incidents that had occurred in El Salvador. He pulled it out of the back seat of his car one day on the way to airport. He said; ‘You never know: there might be something there.’ I read it and I said; ‘This is it: this is the greatest story!’

Elizabeth Stone: Right after [Stone’s eldest son] Sean was born, Oliver put our house in New York on the block to get the money to shoot Salvador.

“El Salvador is a great place with great people and I love it. Good beer, beautiful women, cheap rent. What more do you want in life?”

Oliver Stone: Richard was staying at my house. Elizabeth wanted me to get him out of the house. One morning we woke up and he’d passed out in front of the TV. Elizabeth went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and everything was gone, everything had been drunk, even the baby’s formula was missing. She went back and looked at him and he was holding the baby’s formula. He’d drunk the whole fucking thing. He must’ve been blind drunk and just grabbed whatever was in the can.

Richard Boyle: Who doesn’t enjoy a drink?

Oliver Stone: The original idea was to shoot a semi-documentary in El Salvador starring Boyle as himself and Dr Rock as himself and we were going to get the Salvadorians to put up all their military equipment. Boyle took me down to El Salvador and we partied.

Richard Boyle: We met with [Robert] D’Abusisson’s generals. They liked Oliver because they loved Scarface.

Oliver Stone: These guys were slapping us on the back, drinking toasts to [Scarface’s] Tony Montana. They kept talking about their favourite scenes and acting out the killings. They’d go; ‘Tony Montana, mucho cajones [Lots of balls)! Ratta-tat-tat! Kill the fucking communists!’

Richard Boyle: It would have been great to make the movie in El Salvador, spend some hard currency, help the people out. But then people started dying so we had to think again.

Gerald Green: Oliver went to great lengths to explain that the film wasn’t going to be another Year Of Living Dangerously or Under Fire. I think that pleased everybody.

Oliver Stone: The problem with characters like Sidney Schanberg in The Killing Fields is that they were heroic characters. I found it a bit movie-ish that they no personal flaws. They were dignified, they were liberal and they were noble, whereas Richard Boyle is more of a second-rate with many personal flaws. I liked him because he was a gadfly. He’s such an irritating personality, but he does have this ability to get under your skin. And that’s the kind of character I wanted to do.

James Woods: Hollywood wasn’t hot on the idea of Salvador, but Oliver was: red hot.

Oliver Stone: I intended to make the movie by hook or by crook. I knew up front that Salvador was going to be a very hard sell. I felt we would have to do it independently as best we could. But it was worth it to do it that way, because we were free and we shot a script that no American studio would ever have allowed to be shot. And John Daly, a delightful kind of British rascal, made it easier, as did Gerald Green. Daly saw these two scuzzbags, Boyle and Dr Rock, as funny, almost in Monty Python-esque terms. And Gerald had some tax deal where if he could make his movies in Mexico, he could get them financed. Gerald had this Arnold Schwarzenegger project called Outpost, and Schwarezenegger couldn’t fulfil his obligations, so all during shooting we were called Outpost because we had that slot.

James Woods: I’d heard of Oliver as being this crazy, druggy, gifted writer. I liked him right away. His reputation preceded him, bolstered I have to say by Oliver’s own efforts: he was very good at getting himself in the headlines of people’s minds. But he was never afraid to be who he was.

Oliver Stone: I had very good luck with the script. It was easy to cast. I was just amazed by the co-operation I got from the actors, all of them. In any film, that kind of co-operation is always welcome. In Salvador, it was almost a necessity.

Michael Murphy: Originally, Oliver talked about Richard playing himself but I don’t think that was ever a serious consideration. And besides Boyle didn’t play Boyle as well as James Woods played him.

“Richard was staying at my house. One morning we woke up and he’d passed out in front of the TV, everything had been drunk, even the baby’s formula was missing. He must’ve been blind drunk and just grabbed whatever was in the can.”

James Woods: Oliver wanted me to play Dr Rock but when I read the screenplay, I got excited about the idea of playing the lead because it was such a great role.

Oliver Stone: Richard is much worse than Jimmy. Richard’s a very colourful character. Jimmy didn’t want to play him as raggedy and scummy as Richard really is. Jimmy felt he made Richard more attractive to a larger group of people. People say; ‘That’s attractive?!’ But the real Richard is far worse.

Richard Boyle: So much of this movie’s real. I’m real, Dr Rock’s real, my girlfriend’s real. Major Max is real – we changed his name but he’s real. (The real character-bad character at that—was the arch criminal CIA-connected Col. D’Aubuisson.)

John Savage: My character was based on the photo-journalist John Hoagland. I have a line in the film about capturing the nobility of human suffering and death in these tragic situations. That’s what Cassady’s trying to do.

Oliver Stone: Dr Rock, Boyle’s companion in the film, was a real guy, but he never went to Salvador. I said; ‘Let’s take him to Salvador then and see what happens.’ Take this character who’s freaked out by anything and put him there. And that became the key to making the movie work.

James Belushi: Dr Rock’s a wonderful character – a genuine ’60s throwback. To me, it was like creating a totally fictional character. He was ignorant of Central American issues like most of the American public, so I feel like I was a touchstone for the audience. My character discovers El Salvador as the audience does.

Oliver Stone: I had to do this movie fast because I never knew when the money would dry up.

Gerald Green: It was the toughest movie I’ve made in my life. I’ve done pictures far bigger. We were the co-production company for Dune and that movie was easy compared to Salvador.

James Woods: We were all just nuts. I don’t know why we were nuts but I think it was in the nature of the picture. I’m playing this lunatic and we’re riding fucking burros up in the woods. John Savage is a brilliant, unheralded, unappreciated nutcase great actor. Oliver is a fucking lunatic.

James Belushi: I like Jimmy [Woods] and all but he always has to have the last word in a scene. He would improvise things to call attention to himself. There was this scene where I was explaining some things I felt were pretty important and right in the middle of my fucking speech, Jimmy pulls out a switchblade and clicks it open right into the camera. So they have to cut over to him for a close-up during my speech. I told Jimmy; ‘If you pull that knife again in one of my scenes, I’m going to open the goddamn glove compartment and pull out a gun and start waving it around.’

James Woods: With Jim Belushi, I didn’t know him at all beforehand and we took an instant liking to each other.

James Belushi: There’s a scene where we come out of this armoured personnel carrier and get into the back of an open truck. So Oliver says; ‘Jim Belushi, you come out first and walk in front with your hands over your head and get into the truck, and then Jimmy Woods, you come walking right behind him.’ So we get out and start to walk, and Jimmy literally knocks my arm out of the way, and sort of elbows his way in front of me, and we get into he truck and I’m pissed and Jimmy won’t shut up. He’s improvising all these lines because he knows that as long as he’s talking, the camera has to stay on him. And I finally said; ‘Will you shut up!’ Oliver left it in the movie because it fits, but it’s really just me telling Woods to shut the fuck up!

James Woods: Belushi and I would always tease each other.  And the same thing with Savage. I remember when the three of us would be in the same scene, Oliver would say; ‘This will be a struggle to see who’s going to steal the scene.’ But, of course, that situation is what makes for great movie making.

“I intended to make the movie by hook or by crook. I knew up front that Salvador was going to be a very hard sell. I felt we would have to do it independently as best we could.”

Robert Richardson: Jimmy Woods made a decision to go at Oliver, deliberately push him. He pushed Oliver hard, and Oliver ended up pushing back. The two of them just came to that end, ego against ego. As a result, his performance is what it is, and that’s one of the reasons I believe it’s so fine.

Oliver Stone: Jimmy’s like the guy you want to punch out at school, He drove everybody crazy. The crew, me, his fellow actors. Everyone wanted to kill him because we had no money and we really had to depend on his mercy. He was the biggest single star in the entire thing. When someone is always reminding you of that, it becomes tiresome.

James Woods: Oliver and I are great friends now, and were then, but there was a lot of tension between us during the making of the film. At one point, I was strapped down to the street with these squibs running up my legs because I was supposed to get shot, and this Mexican pilot was about to fly this old plane real low right over me. Just before the scene starts, I hear Oliver say; ‘God, I miss combat.’ So I think; ‘You get down here and be wired to the damn street with his screwy plane flying over you then! ‘

John Savage: We teased each other, we played practical jokes on one another. A lot of the time, we did it because we were bored or restless. We were never really nasty to each other but we did take it too far sometimes. I remember, one time, we really pissed off Jimmy Woods and he left the set. He just got up and headed to the airport on foot!

James Woods: I’d got so pissed off with Oliver and John, I left the set. So, I’m in the middle of nowhere in Mexico and I’m hitchhiking. None of the trucks are stopping. I’m going; ‘Why the fuck aren’t they stopping?’ What I don’t realise is that Oliver is at the head of the road waving down the cars, saying; ‘There’s a crazy gringo with a .45. Don’t pick him up because he’ll shoot you!’

Michael Murphy: Jimmy Woods is a great, great actor. That incredible confession scene, that whole scene came straight out of his head.

James Woods: I remember the day we were shooting the Romero assassination scene at the church and Oliver said; ‘Maybe you should do a confession.’ And I said; ‘Oh, really?’ So I asked for the lines, but he said; ‘I don’t want to give you lines. I want you to just look into that dark murky soul of yours and come up with whatever you want. And I said; ‘Okay, fair enough.’ We didn’t even do a rehearsal. What you saw was the first time it came out of my mouth. When I got done, Oliver said; ‘It’s frightening the shit that you think of.’

Oliver Stone: We ran out of funds in Mexico. We had to struggle for every dollar.

Robert Richardson:  The crew was union and if you didn’t pay them on time each week, they wouldn’t work. There was a feeling that each day would be our last. Perhaps Oliver drew inspiration from the uncertainty.

Oliver Stone: It was a complicated scam, getting the movie finished. It involved acts of high piracy, buccaneering and skulduggery.

James Woods: One time I got a phone call through to my agent and he said; ‘You haven’t been paid for two weeks so come home.’ And I said; ‘I’m not going to do that to Oliver. Tomorrow’s our biggest day.’ He said they were going to fuck me so I should split.

Oliver Stone: We took over this entire town for a week to shoot the battle of Santa Ana. The mayor was great. He loved movies. We redesigned his office and used it as a whorehouse set, with real prostitutes. He liked the decor so much he kept it that way, red walls and all. Later, he said; ‘Go ahead, blow up the whole fucking City Hall,’ and we blew it to pieces.

James Belushi: We were shooting the battle and Oliver got the idea of having these rebel troops riding in on horseback and charging the tanks. There wasn’t any money in the budget. But Oliver wanted that fucking cavalry. Gerald Green’s saying; ‘We don’t have the money.’ And Oliver says; ‘Then take my salary. I’ve got $25,000 coming, take that and get those fucking horses.’ He didn’t care about the money.

Oliver Stone: I always feel like a little bit of me dies when I finish a movie.

James Woods:  The film was over. Oliver just sat down on the curb. He had this kind of stunned look, amazed that he’d actually managed to finish the picture. I sat down beside him. I said; ‘You know what? I think you made a great film. And all this stuff I fought about was because I really wanted this film to be like no other.’ And he said; ‘Yeah, everything we did made it better.’

Oliver Stone: We had tremendous battles in the editing room. Daly and I fought on everything. There were moments that were really bristly where I felt like he was going to throw me out.

“We were all just nuts. I’m playing this lunatic and we’re riding fucking burros up in the woods. John Savage is a brilliant, unheralded, unappreciated nutcase great actor. Oliver is a fucking lunatic.”

John Daly: Oliver puts 1000% of himself into a film. It’s all up on the screen. For Salvador, he waived his salary and expenses. I think he would have given up his house. I don’t think he goes and directs a film. I think he lives a film. It’s a rare quality.

Oliver Stone: The feeling was that people in America didn’t know how they were supposed to react to the movie which I found kind of sad. Dr Strangelove was a perfect amalgam of humour and seriousness about a subject that is extremely dark. There’s no reason the subject of Salvadoran death squads has to be solemn.

James Woods: I saw the final cut of the film. I watched it with the music for the first time. All of a sudden I thought; ‘My God: I thought it was this little movie. Am I wrong or is this a Great Movie?’ Bob Dylan was there and said; ‘This is the greatest movie I’ve ever seen.’

Oliver Stone: The reviews from the liberal press were often sympathetic, but there was what I call a ‘smothering blanket’ reaction from the conservative press where they don’t take you on, they don’t engage you, they simply ignore you. ‘Time’ completely ignored the movie: it was as if it didn’t exist.

John Savage: Salvador got incredibly mixed reviews. The people that liked it really liked it. But there was a lot of talk about whether Oliver was a communist and whether he loved America and, if he didn’t, why he didn’t just leave and go and live in El Salvador. (The brainwash at work. The idea that our filthy foreign policy represents us.—Eds.)

Oliver Stone: The only reason the picture survived was the video revolution. Salvador did very well on video. People started talking about it and it got nominated for two Oscars, for Best Screenplay and Best Actor. That wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for video.

John Daly: Salvador is a great film. If it had come out after Platoon, it would have had a completely different reception.

Oliver Stone: I worked without pay for a year, but it was worth every single moment of it. It was a tough movie to make, but it has an edge, it has a madness and it has an anarchy, which is good.

James Woods: People always see things from their own point-of-view. The reason I like Salvador is because it shows all sides just as they happened.

Oliver Stone: We were against such odds. I had so many roadblocks to make that picture. And I got enough of what I wanted in there. We shot Salvador the way it looks – hand-held, urgent – I love that movie. It was an ugly duckling. It went after American policy in Central America and it said some things Americans didn’t want to hear.

The film industry is often considered a bastion of the political left. But that’s simply not true

BY STEVEN J. ROSS

Political Hollywood started much earlier than most people realize. In 1918, FBI leaders William J. Burns and J. Edgar Hoover were so worried about the power of movie stars to affect the political consciousness of a nation that they ordered secret agents to maintain close surveillance over suspected Hollywood radicals. Four years later, Bureau agents confirmed their worst fears. “Numerous movie stars,” they reported, were taking “an active part in the Red movement in this country” and were hatching a plan to circulate “Communist propaganda  … via the movies.”

The Cold War politicians who launched the Red Scare’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s also feared the power of movie stars to alter the way people thought and acted. They understood that movie audiences were also voters, and they asked themselves: Who would people be more likely to listen to: drab politicians or glamorous stars? What if left-leaning celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Edward G. Robinson used their star appeal to promote radical causes, especially Communist causes?

Such fears about radicalism in the movie industry reflect long-standing conventional wisdom that Hollywood has always been a bastion of the political left. Conventional wisdom, however, is wrong on two counts. First, Hollywood has a longer history of conservatism than liberalism. It was the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party, that established the first political beachhead in Hollywood. Second, and far more surprising, although the Hollywood left has been more numerous and visible, the Hollywood right — led by Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, and Arnold Schwarzenegger — has had a greater impact on American political life. The Hollywood left has been more effective in publicizing and raising funds for various causes. But if we ask who has done more to change the American government, the answer is the Hollywood right. The Hollywood left has the political glitz, but the Hollywood right sought, won, and exercised electoral power.

Can such a counterintuitive argument really be true? What did the Hollywood right achieve to merit such a claim? There have been two foundational changes in twentieth-century U.S. politics. The first was the creation of a welfare state under Franklin D. Roosevelt, a development that established a new relationship between government and the governed and crystallized differences among conservatives, liberals, and radicals. The second was the gradual dismantling of the welfare state that began under a movie star, Ronald Reagan. The conservative revolution of the 1980s could not have happened without the groundwork laid by Louis B. Mayer, his protégé George Murphy, and his protégé Ronald Reagan.

Although movie industry conservatives began wielding power in the 1920s, the Hollywood right did not emerge as a major force in American politics until after the postwar era. Once they did, their impact was tremendous. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Murphy and Reagan used their fame, charm, and communication skills to help build an insurgent grassroots constituency by speaking to conservative groups throughout the nation. The two stars articulated an ideological agenda that called for dismantling the New Deal, returning power to the state and local levels, reducing taxes, and waging war against all foes of American security — Communists in particular. During the mid-1960s, the two former stars designed innovative campaign strategies that drew on their experiences as actors to accomplish what more established politicians like the prickly Barry Goldwater could not do: sell conservatism to a wide range of previously skeptical voters. By making conservatism palatable, Murphy and Reagan helped make the conservative revolution possible.

The movie industry began as a small-scale business with hundreds of producers, distributors, and exhibitors scattered throughout the country. There was little political engagement by actors and actresses during the early silent era because the star system was still emerging and performers did not want to risk losing their audience by engaging in partisan activities. The 1920s signaled the rise of a new type of film industry, an oligarchic studio system centered in Los Angeles and financed by some of the largest industrial and financial institutions in the nation. As the studio system known as “Hollywood” matured, so too did the focus of political engagement. With a business-oriented Republican Party dominating the national scene throughout the decade, powerful studio figures such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Louis B. Mayer turned to electoral politics both to meet the needs of his industry and to advance the fortunes of his favored party.

More than any other figure, Mayer was responsible for bringing the Republican Party to Hollywood and Hollywood to the Republican Party. Mayer was not a movie star, but he created stars and pioneered the uses of stardom and media for partisan ends. During his tenure as studio chief and head of the California GOP, he injected showmanship into the party’s nominating conventions, showed Republicans how to employ radio more effectively, and inaugurated the first “dirty tricks” campaign by employing fake newsreels in 1934 to defeat Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair. Hollywood Democrats had no one to rival the power of the man who helped swing the 1928 Republican presidential nomination to his good friend Herbert Hoover.

The end of the studio system in the late 1940s and early 1950s freed actors and actresses to speak out on a wide range of issues. Just as the Depression and New Deal sparked the rise of the Hollywood left, the Cold War and the Red Scare gave powerful new life to the Hollywood right. The publicity generated by the House Un-American Activities Committee hastened the rise of the Cold War and Hollywood’s Cold Warriors. Led by George Murphy and then by Ronald Reagan, a small number of ideologically driven stars engaged in conservative movement politics. Unlike issue-oriented politics, which focused on a discrete set of problems, movement politics demanded a long-term commitment aimed at restructuring the very foundations of American government.

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, Murphy and Reagan joined with conservative groups around the nation in an effort to overturn the most important liberal achievement of the twentieth century, the New Deal state. By reshaping the partisan uses of television and skillfully employing it to sell conservative messages, the two men reshaped American politics for the next five decades. During their political careers, Murphy, who was elected California’s senator in 1964, and Reagan, elected governor in 1966, preached the politics of fear and reassurance, of dire foreign threats coupled with reassuring promises to preserve domestic tranquility. Their rivals on the left preached the politics of hope and guilt, of what America could be but how prejudice and selfishness prevented us from realizing those dreams. In the skillful hands of Murphy and especially Reagan, fear and reassurance proved a far greater motivator of voters than hope and guilt.

Charlton Heston, who began his political life on the left and gravitated to the right, was the first prominent practitioner of image politics. His monumental performance as Moses in “The Ten Commandments” (1956), and subsequent roles in which he played three saints, three presidents, and two geniuses, allowed him to forge a cinematic persona of such gravitas that he repeatedly used it to lend authority to his offscreen role as political spokesman. In the 1960s, he championed civil rights. However, following the fracturing of the Democratic Party in 1968 and the decline of its longstanding New Deal coalition, Heston moved to the right. Working tirelessly on behalf of conservative causes and candidates, “Moses,” as many thought of him, used his involvement with the National Rifle Association to help swing several key states to George Bush in 2000 and thereby enable him to win the presidency.

The democratization of Democratic Party leadership that pushed Heston to the right opened new opportunities for left stars such as Warren Beatty to play a prominent role in national politics. Drawing on his skills as an actor, director, writer, and producer, Beatty served as part of the inner circle of three presidential campaigns, helping to shape the messages and media strategies of George McGovern’s run in 1972 and Gary Hart’s two unsuccessful bids in 1984 and 1988. Like Charlie Chaplin, Harry Belafonte, and Jane Fonda, Beatty also opened his own production company and used the screen to convey his political ideas to millions of potential voters. At a time when American politics were shifting increasingly rightward, he made two left films — “Reds” (1981) and “Bulworth” (1998) — that few other major actors would have touched.

The explosion of 24/7 news and entertainment media in the late twentieth century opened opportunities for yet another form of political engagement. Arnold Schwarzenegger merged Mayer’s, Murphy’s, and Reagan’s creative use of media with Heston’s use of image politics to fashion a new era of celebrity politics. Often ridiculed in the press as a political lightweight, the Austrian-born star understood what many establishment figures did not: entertainment venues such as “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” were not a debasement of politics but an expansion of the arenas in which political dialogue could occur, especially among Americans who tended not to vote. During his run for governor in California’s 2003 recall election, the popular action hero relied on these outlets rather than on mainstream newspapers or television news shows to spread his message to voters. With few allies in the state’s conservative-dominated GOP, Schwarzenegger’s victory demonstrated that candidates no longer needed to have deep roots in one of the parties. Image and celebrity were now powerful enough to win an election without traditional party support.

As Murphy and Reagan, and others, demonstrated, movie stars do more than just show us how to dress, look, or love. They teach us how to think and act politically. “If an actor can be influential selling deodorants,” Marlon Brando explained just before the 1963 March on Washington, “he can be just as useful selling ideas.” Speaking more recently about the relative importance of Washington and Hollywood in the public mind, former Republican turned Democratic Senator Arlen Specter remarked, “Quite candidly, when Hollywood speaks the world listens. Sometimes when Washington speaks, the world snoozes.”

Americans have long maintained a love/hate relationship with movie stars. Audiences connect with movie stars at an emotional level and with a sense of intimacy they rarely feel about politicians. We love stars when they remain faithful to our fantasy images of them, but we condemn them when they reveal their flaws or disagree with our politics. The public “choose the stars and then make Gods of them,” director William deMille observed in 1935. “They feel a peculiar sense of ownership in these romantic figures they have created — and, of course, an equal sense of outrage in those cases where their idols turn out to have feet of clay.

Reprinted from “Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics” by Steven J. Ross with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Steven J. Ross.

An eminent historian of film, Steven J. Ross is recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Award and author of the prize-winning book, “Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America.”