Salvador
Salvador (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)
1986 / US-UK-Mexico / 122 minutes
“You’ve got to get close to get the truth… You get too close, you die.”
Director: Oliver Stone / Screenplay: Richard Boyle & Oliver Stone / Director of Photography: Robert Richardson / Music: Georges Delerue / Production: Gerald Green, Oliver Stone and John Daly for Hemdale / Cast: James Woods (Richard Boyle), James Belushi (Dr. Rock), Michael Murphy (Thomas Kelly), John Savage (John Cassady), Elpidia Carillo (Maria), Tony Plana (Major Max), Colby Chester (Jack Morgan), Cindy Gibb (Cathy Moore), Will MacMillan (Colonel Hyde), Valerie Wildman (Pauline Axelrod), Jose Carlos Ruiz (Archbishop Romero), Juan Fernandez (Army Lieutenant).
Before he started producing movies, John Daly managed Black Sabbath, promoted the Muhammad Ali / George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire and founded Hemdale Films. In 1984, Daly put up the bulk of the money for James Cameron to make his “Proper” feature debut with The Terminator. The following year, he would again give a filmmaker who’d also technically already had a couple of journeyman directing jobs the chance to make his “Real” first film.
Oliver Stone had recently written the Scarface script for Brian De Palma and had been trying to get his original screenplay Platoon, about his service in Vietnam, made for years. But when Daly offered him the money to do it, Stone suggested doing a different project first: another fact- based but contemporary story of ill- advised US military intervention titled Salvador.
Stone had met veteran photojournalist Richard Boyle through Ron Kovic some years earlier and the two had since been working on a semi- fictionalised script about Boyle’s experiences covering the civil war in El Salvador. Boyle had witnessed the country’s brutal military junta committing their US- backed atrocities firsthand and barely escaped with his life but incredibly, Stone’s original plan was to actually go to El Salvador to shoot the film.
The insanity of this earlier version of Salvador didn’t end there either- Stone had wanted to cast Boyle as himself (in addition to not being an actor, Boyle was also a notorious alcoholic and womaniser with an extremely difficult reputation) in the film. He had also written a second, fake screenplay which presented the Salvadorian government in a positive light in the hope that they could con them into supporting the production with it.
Fortunately, this ridiculously risky plan was never put into operation and, with the support of Hemdale, Stone cast James Woods as Boyle and shot in Mexico instead. Woods, although a vocal conservative who disliked the real Boyle, had impressed Stone enough to give him the lead role after meeting him for the supporting part of Dr. Rock, Boyle’s out of work DJ friend eventually played by Jim Belushi.
The film begins in San Francisco in 1980 with Boyle considered unemployable by most news agencies because of his drinking and aggressive attitude, his celebrated work covering Vietnam now long behind him. When his wife leaves him and he’s evicted from his apartment, Boyle convinces Rock to accompany him to El Salvador where he plans to do some freelance work to get himself back in the game.
Boyle is initially only interested in making money and partying. Unlike Rock, who has never even left the US before, he’s used to war zones and largely desensitised to the violence around them, convinced they’re untouchable as members of the American press (Stone’s original plan to shoot in El Salvador itself is echoed here- the real Boyle had told him that the government forces saw Scarface’s Tony Montana as a hero so would welcome his creator).
Reuniting with his old Salvadorian girlfriend Maria (Elpidia Carillo), Boyle witnesses the junta’s ARENA death squads assassinate a priest and execute students in the streets. Encouraged by Maria to change his ways after meeting their child, Boyle confronts Ambassador Thomas Kelly (Michael Murphy) and the military officers supporting the government forces at the US embassy. But American support for the regime only increases when Reagan wins the presidential election, with the junta deliberately targeting civilian populations and the death squads raping and murdering a group of nuns doing aid work.
Whilst Rock enjoys the local weed, women and cheap booze, Boyle finds himself identifying more with the country’s rebels, even accompanying his old photographer friend John Cassady (John Savage) to a guerrilla camp. With actual US forces now arriving to assist the government and the rebels planning a counter- attack, Boyle struggles to get his and Cassady’s pictures out of the country along with Maria and his son.
Although almost everything in Salvador is based on real events (only the incident with the nuns briefly made it into the US news because they were American), it is still attacked by the usual suspects who accuse Stone of exaggerating things and taking a one- sided approach. They’ve presumably missed the sympathetic portrayal of Kelly (the real ambassador, Robert White did actually stand up to his superiors by refusing to cover up the murder of the nuns) and the scene of the rebels executing their prisoners just as brutally as the government forces, not to mention the casting of Woods.
Woods is disappointingly now a noisy Trump apologist like Jon Voight. But just as Voight often was, he is brilliant here. Stone liked him enough to cast him again in both Nixon (1995) and Any Given Sunday (1999) and they shared appetites similar to those of Boyle and Rock in the earlier part of the film (El Salvador boasts “The best pussy in the world” Boyle says to Rock, “Plus you can drive drunk and get anybody you want killed for fifty dollars”)!
The scenes of the more experienced Boyle trying to get the loudmouthed Rock out of harm’s way in the bars and streets will certainly feel familiar to anyone who has ever had to herd drunken mates loudly alerting everyone to their presence in English through hostile foreign nights. In fact, there’s a surprising amount of humour in Salvador and it begins almost as a comedy road movie with Woods and Belushi’s brilliant- and largely improvised- banter.
Of the Mexican cast, Elpidia Carillo and Juan Fernandez both got noticed with Carillo winning the only female role in Predator (1987) and Fernandez- who plays Major Max’s sinister lieutenant- later providing more memorable henchmen in Crocodile Dundee II (1988) and Executive Decision (1996).
Salvador was largely overshadowed by Stone’s next film upon release though, because he finally got to do Platoon straight afterwards and both ended up being released the same year. Stone then embarked on a remarkable, decade- long run of hits with Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Doors (1990) and JFK (1991) before semi- intentionally self destructing with Natural Born Killers in 1994.
After the catastrophic Middle East interventions of the ’00’s, the US government is a bit more subtle with it’s interference in Central America these days. Regime change operations now have nice- sounding front company names like “Human Rights Watch” but continue to stir up trouble in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Meanwhile, variations on Valerie Wildman’s Paulina Axelrod are seemingly all the establishment media have to offer now, dutifully repeating the official line on everything rather actually investigating or even questioning a word of it for fear of upsetting their corporate bosses.
As Stone said of the Reagan administration’s support for the Salvadorian junta: “It was as if a collective state of amnesia existed about Vietnam”. Like the soldier at the embassy in the film who tells Rock she’s too young to remember his generation’s war, the new load of disposable heroes with little to no memory of Afghanistan and Iraq are already signing up for the next one.
We now need the maverick independents like Boyle more than ever, unafraid to tell the truth and hold the powerful to account the way all journalists should be doing as the absolute minimum. Instead, most have become the powerful’s officially approved stenographers. As the guerrilla commander says in Salvador: “We are poor. The people in Washington are so rich. Why are they so blind”?
At least we still have Stone himself who is also more active than ever, continuing to challenge the establishment with his documentary work and in his interviews and writing. Snowden (2016) is his best film in years and had all his usual conservative detractors tying themselves in knots trying to condemn it.
I revisited Stone’s DVD commentary for a 2001 edition of Salvador for this book. In it, he casually reveals that the film actually used the budget Daly had shunted over from a different project that never got made (another Schwarzenegger picture called Outpost), But I was most struck by him mentioning a story he’d heard from various reliable sources about a 1983 confrontation between the Soviets and the US that had almost led to a nuclear exchange. Just last year, historian Taylor Downing published his book 1983: The World at the Brink, using the only recently declassified documents relating to the incident.
For someone so often dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, Stone has a habit of usually being proven right with time. His films may condense events and composite characters (always unavoidable in dramatisation) but his commitment to research and passion for finding the human truth of things is unparalleled.
1986 / US-UK-Mexico / 122 minutes
“You’ve got to get close to get the truth… You get too close, you die.”
Director: Oliver Stone / Screenplay: Richard Boyle & Oliver Stone / Director of Photography: Robert Richardson / Music: Georges Delerue / Production: Gerald Green, Oliver Stone and John Daly for Hemdale / Cast: James Woods (Richard Boyle), James Belushi (Dr. Rock), Michael Murphy (Thomas Kelly), John Savage (John Cassady), Elpidia Carillo (Maria), Tony Plana (Major Max), Colby Chester (Jack Morgan), Cindy Gibb (Cathy Moore), Will MacMillan (Colonel Hyde), Valerie Wildman (Pauline Axelrod), Jose Carlos Ruiz (Archbishop Romero), Juan Fernandez (Army Lieutenant).
Before he started producing movies, John Daly managed Black Sabbath, promoted the Muhammad Ali / George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire and founded Hemdale Films. In 1984, Daly put up the bulk of the money for James Cameron to make his “Proper” feature debut with The Terminator. The following year, he would again give a filmmaker who’d also technically already had a couple of journeyman directing jobs the chance to make his “Real” first film.
Oliver Stone had recently written the Scarface script for Brian De Palma and had been trying to get his original screenplay Platoon, about his service in Vietnam, made for years. But when Daly offered him the money to do it, Stone suggested doing a different project first: another fact- based but contemporary story of ill- advised US military intervention titled Salvador.
Stone had met veteran photojournalist Richard Boyle through Ron Kovic some years earlier and the two had since been working on a semi- fictionalised script about Boyle’s experiences covering the civil war in El Salvador. Boyle had witnessed the country’s brutal military junta committing their US- backed atrocities firsthand and barely escaped with his life but incredibly, Stone’s original plan was to actually go to El Salvador to shoot the film.
The insanity of this earlier version of Salvador didn’t end there either- Stone had wanted to cast Boyle as himself (in addition to not being an actor, Boyle was also a notorious alcoholic and womaniser with an extremely difficult reputation) in the film. He had also written a second, fake screenplay which presented the Salvadorian government in a positive light in the hope that they could con them into supporting the production with it.
Fortunately, this ridiculously risky plan was never put into operation and, with the support of Hemdale, Stone cast James Woods as Boyle and shot in Mexico instead. Woods, although a vocal conservative who disliked the real Boyle, had impressed Stone enough to give him the lead role after meeting him for the supporting part of Dr. Rock, Boyle’s out of work DJ friend eventually played by Jim Belushi.
The film begins in San Francisco in 1980 with Boyle considered unemployable by most news agencies because of his drinking and aggressive attitude, his celebrated work covering Vietnam now long behind him. When his wife leaves him and he’s evicted from his apartment, Boyle convinces Rock to accompany him to El Salvador where he plans to do some freelance work to get himself back in the game.
Boyle is initially only interested in making money and partying. Unlike Rock, who has never even left the US before, he’s used to war zones and largely desensitised to the violence around them, convinced they’re untouchable as members of the American press (Stone’s original plan to shoot in El Salvador itself is echoed here- the real Boyle had told him that the government forces saw Scarface’s Tony Montana as a hero so would welcome his creator).
Reuniting with his old Salvadorian girlfriend Maria (Elpidia Carillo), Boyle witnesses the junta’s ARENA death squads assassinate a priest and execute students in the streets. Encouraged by Maria to change his ways after meeting their child, Boyle confronts Ambassador Thomas Kelly (Michael Murphy) and the military officers supporting the government forces at the US embassy. But American support for the regime only increases when Reagan wins the presidential election, with the junta deliberately targeting civilian populations and the death squads raping and murdering a group of nuns doing aid work.
Whilst Rock enjoys the local weed, women and cheap booze, Boyle finds himself identifying more with the country’s rebels, even accompanying his old photographer friend John Cassady (John Savage) to a guerrilla camp. With actual US forces now arriving to assist the government and the rebels planning a counter- attack, Boyle struggles to get his and Cassady’s pictures out of the country along with Maria and his son.
Although almost everything in Salvador is based on real events (only the incident with the nuns briefly made it into the US news because they were American), it is still attacked by the usual suspects who accuse Stone of exaggerating things and taking a one- sided approach. They’ve presumably missed the sympathetic portrayal of Kelly (the real ambassador, Robert White did actually stand up to his superiors by refusing to cover up the murder of the nuns) and the scene of the rebels executing their prisoners just as brutally as the government forces, not to mention the casting of Woods.
Woods is disappointingly now a noisy Trump apologist like Jon Voight. But just as Voight often was, he is brilliant here. Stone liked him enough to cast him again in both Nixon (1995) and Any Given Sunday (1999) and they shared appetites similar to those of Boyle and Rock in the earlier part of the film (El Salvador boasts “The best pussy in the world” Boyle says to Rock, “Plus you can drive drunk and get anybody you want killed for fifty dollars”)!
The scenes of the more experienced Boyle trying to get the loudmouthed Rock out of harm’s way in the bars and streets will certainly feel familiar to anyone who has ever had to herd drunken mates loudly alerting everyone to their presence in English through hostile foreign nights. In fact, there’s a surprising amount of humour in Salvador and it begins almost as a comedy road movie with Woods and Belushi’s brilliant- and largely improvised- banter.
Of the Mexican cast, Elpidia Carillo and Juan Fernandez both got noticed with Carillo winning the only female role in Predator (1987) and Fernandez- who plays Major Max’s sinister lieutenant- later providing more memorable henchmen in Crocodile Dundee II (1988) and Executive Decision (1996).
Salvador was largely overshadowed by Stone’s next film upon release though, because he finally got to do Platoon straight afterwards and both ended up being released the same year. Stone then embarked on a remarkable, decade- long run of hits with Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), The Doors (1990) and JFK (1991) before semi- intentionally self destructing with Natural Born Killers in 1994.
After the catastrophic Middle East interventions of the ’00’s, the US government is a bit more subtle with it’s interference in Central America these days. Regime change operations now have nice- sounding front company names like “Human Rights Watch” but continue to stir up trouble in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Meanwhile, variations on Valerie Wildman’s Paulina Axelrod are seemingly all the establishment media have to offer now, dutifully repeating the official line on everything rather actually investigating or even questioning a word of it for fear of upsetting their corporate bosses.
As Stone said of the Reagan administration’s support for the Salvadorian junta: “It was as if a collective state of amnesia existed about Vietnam”. Like the soldier at the embassy in the film who tells Rock she’s too young to remember his generation’s war, the new load of disposable heroes with little to no memory of Afghanistan and Iraq are already signing up for the next one.
We now need the maverick independents like Boyle more than ever, unafraid to tell the truth and hold the powerful to account the way all journalists should be doing as the absolute minimum. Instead, most have become the powerful’s officially approved stenographers. As the guerrilla commander says in Salvador: “We are poor. The people in Washington are so rich. Why are they so blind”?
At least we still have Stone himself who is also more active than ever, continuing to challenge the establishment with his documentary work and in his interviews and writing. Snowden (2016) is his best film in years and had all his usual conservative detractors tying themselves in knots trying to condemn it.
I revisited Stone’s DVD commentary for a 2001 edition of Salvador for this book. In it, he casually reveals that the film actually used the budget Daly had shunted over from a different project that never got made (another Schwarzenegger picture called Outpost), But I was most struck by him mentioning a story he’d heard from various reliable sources about a 1983 confrontation between the Soviets and the US that had almost led to a nuclear exchange. Just last year, historian Taylor Downing published his book 1983: The World at the Brink, using the only recently declassified documents relating to the incident.
For someone so often dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, Stone has a habit of usually being proven right with time. His films may condense events and composite characters (always unavoidable in dramatisation) but his commitment to research and passion for finding the human truth of things is unparalleled.
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