Everybody has that one magical, occasionally momentous summer: the one that lingers in your memories decades later. For me that was the summer of 1994: the first summer I spent the totality of in Toronto. I was living in a house on Ossington Avenue with a bunch of other Film School nerds – Alex Boothby, Marcus Moore, Warren P. Sonoda, and a theater student named Jason Jones (later of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart among other impressive credits). I served as production coordinator and unit manager on two music videos Warren directed that summer for a Nova Scotia band named Fire Rooster:
Summer 1994 was also the last great summer of the Lollapalooza line-up, which I attended at Molson park in Barrie Ontario just north of Toronto.
Owing to the fact I had money in the bank and a loose schedule with work it was in July post Lollapalooza that my buddy Mark, whose family was away on an Alaskan cruise, to come stay at his place in my old Scarborough stomping grounds, to grill burgers on the barbecue, to partake of the in-ground swimming pool, and to just enjoy being twenty-one years old. To this day exactly thirty years later the summer of 1994 remains the best summer of my life. Possibly because – and I have reflected on this before – it was probably the last truly care-free summer of my life which would become more complicated as the decade wore on. In my mind and memory the years of 1989-1994 reflect a certain moment in time and in my life almost diametrically opposed to the 1995-2000 stretch that was a lot less fun by comparison (though it had its moments as well).
In a strange way the summer of 1994 was a reflection of Generation X as well; we’d enjoyed a pretty good run the preceding decade or so as we moved to the forefront of the cultural focus. Our music, our movies, our media was dominating the marketplace with no signs of slowing. But as always on those clear summer days and warm summer nights you often miss the storm clouds gathered in the distance. But at the time t hey did feel distant to me. I was having the time of my life. Hanging out, hitting the bars, and watching movies. lots and lots of movies.
If there was jewel in the crown that was the Toronto movie theater scene back in the 1990s the Uptown Theater on Yonge Street just south of Bloor had claim to the prize. The Uptown, specifically “Uptown One” was the largest, most cavernous space with the largest screen short of the IMAX one at Ontario Place, and accompanied by earth-shaking THX-certified sound. For years it was the theater for the Toronto International Film Festival, hosting premieres, and the entirety of the Midnight Madness Film Series where my film school pals and I gorged ourselves on horror, sci-fi-suspense-action films during the glorious ten days of TIFF that kicked off that first week or so of school. It also hosted regular Midnight Movie screenings every Saturday; big-screen movies you needed to see on the big screen to fully appreciate them. Here was an opportunity to catch those movies we missed in theaters the first time around like Jaws, Die Hard, and The Shining.[1] And we availed ourselves of that opportunity every chance we got.
The great thing about these midnight screenings was they were almost always packed. Not just a few weirdo movie random types; these were large, diverse movie going crowds willfully denying themselves a good night of sleep to spend two hours beginning between 11:30 pm and 12:00 am to watch a movie they could have easily rented on video because they loved film. I will never forget the bloodcurdling shrieks of one woman sitting a few rows down from me during a screening of Aliens, as a face hugger was slowly picking its way towards an unawares Newt during the Med lab sequence. Same as I’ll never forget that moment in The Shining where I knew (through repeated viewings on video) which column Jack Torrance was hiding behind with his axe as hapless Dick Halloran approached and just had to wait for the audience to jump in their seats and scream.
The Uptown felt like a movie theater; a Movie Palace to be exact, for the main auditorium was enormous, dwarfing everyone who sat inside. The people who ran the Uptown seemed to genuinely enjoy their work too; so much so that on occasion they would surprise audiences with performances from local busker/fringe mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, who once serenaded a packed crowd of filmgoers with a song written for and about the Michael Bay film we were all there to see; Armageddon. The Uptown casts such a long shadow over the collective memories of all who went there that even today there are those in Toronto who mark its closing and eventual demolition (for a condo tower, natch)[2] as the beginning of the decline of Toronto’s movie going scene. All of the great – and to be fair not-so-great – theaters began to fall like dominoes in the early 2000s. The Uptown. The York. The Eglinton. The Hyland. The Hollywood. All replaced by glossy and garish multiplexes that promised Big Screens, Big Sounds, Big Experiences but always felt less special than a movie at the Uptown. Sure they had stadium seats, and state-of-the-art sound. But their lobbies were noisy, garish places with video games and attractions that cheapened the theatrical experience.
Put simply: The Uptown was the theater you went to when you wanted the best possible movie-going experience. When a highly anticipated movie was scheduled to play there, the line to get in routinely stretched around the block, which is where I, along with elementary school friend Mark and high-school/college friend Nathalie and hundreds of others found ourselves on Saturday August 29, 1994 as we queued near the front of that line to see a new Oliver Stone film called Natural Born Killers.
Outside of John Carpenter has any filmmaker has had as impressive a consecutive run of movies as Stone? Beginning in 1985 and ending just ten years later he directed Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. Stone was very much a filmmaker of his time; that mid-80s to mid-90s run. In that decade he had his finger as firmly on the pulse of the movie-going public as Spielberg and Lucas had from 1975-1985; not as a box-office juggernaut but for sheer gallons of ink spilled in discussing the controversial filmmaker’s body of work.
Controversy has been Stone’s thing pretty much from the start of his mainstream career. He had a spotty, unremarkable run as a low-budget schlock director in the 1970s before breaking out with his screenplay for Midnight Express, followed by ones for Conan the Barbarian and Scarface sparking that now perennial conversation of whether movies have become too violent. But his landmark Platoon put him on the map and again courted controversy with its depiction of soldiers doing less than honorable things in the jungle, most notably in the film’s central My Lai-inspired village massacre. But it was also a powerful metaphoric tale of seduction, of the embodiments of good (Willem Dafoe’s Christ-like Sgt. Elias) and evil (Tom Berringer’s brutal Sgt. Barnes) vying for the soul of wide-eyed youth Taylor (Charlie Sheen). Platoon, which I saw in the theater in Lake Placid NY while on a ski trip with my parents, knocked me on my ass. I wasn’t the only one: as the credits rolled my dad and I stood up to leave and realized we were the only ones in the packed cinema who were standing.
Stone seemed to dial back on that aspect of his work, and what’s remarkable about his subsequent films is in how tame they are. The heroes and villains of Wall Street (greed), Talk Radio (racists), Born on the Fourth of July (an indifferent government) and even The Doors (excess) are both conventional and easily identifiable. Nobody in a Stone film is an innocent though; all of them are tainted by their original sins, even Born’s paralyzed vet turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic, who joins the army to fight the commies in Viet Nam and is “enlightened” by a single VC bullet to the chest.
Stone dealt in broad strokes drama; subtlety was never his strong suit nor was it his intent. His messaging was graffiti sprayed over the steps of the US Capitol; a message best communicated by being shouted to the masses. How well that worked for you was all a matter of opinion. Some hated his proselytizing; others embraced it because it was so clear-cut obvious. It was blunt, straight-forward, lacking in nuance. It was an internet-era filmmaking before the internet really took hold.
But audiences were unprepared for 1991’s JFK; his propulsive, occasionally convincing, always thrilling deep dive into conspiracies revolving around the assassination of the president on November 22, 1963; a date that loomed as large in the Boomer psyche as September 11, 2001 would in the memories of subsequent generations. JFK was unforgettable both for the subject matter but also for the way the film was presented, in a dizzying montage of varied film formats, aggressive narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage including the famous Zapruder film showing the back of the president’s head blown out over and over and over (“Back and to the left … back and to the left … back and to the left”) again.[3]
Had JFK been a sluggish historical drama it might not have garnered much notice; to that point Stone’s films had earned respectable dollars at the box office but never blockbusters. JFK changed that with its top-flight cast a virtual murderer’s row of talent; Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Bacon, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Jay O Sanders, Sally Kirkland, Wayne Knight, Tony Plana, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bob Gunton, Donald Sutherland (in one of the greatest single-scene performances in film history), and Joe Pesci. The $40 million dollar JFK earned $200 million worldwide, making the three-hour plus film a genuine success. In late 1991 it was the movie you had to see; I recall attempting on two separate occasions to see it in Kingston, and the film being sold out by the time we got to the box office window.[4]
But even to my impressionable teenaged mind Stone’s JFK was hokum, albeit entertaining hokum; a mix of narration, fast cuts, mixed media, all of it creating a propulsive story that’s convincing because it moves so fast. And had I seen JFK in the theater in 1991 (it wouldn’t be until 1994 that I, along with Warren, went to see it at the Paradise Cinema not far from the rental we were sharing) I would be writing about it and not Natural Born Killers, which came along barely than three years later and proved to be an even more controversial film. As though Stone himself was saying: “You want controversy!? I’ll give you controversy!”
Natural Born Killers feels born from the response JFK received in the mainstream press and the often vicious, vitriolic attacks Stone himself received from politicians and pundits, not to mention what I am sure were many angry letters sent to his production office. Stone was personally affronted by the JFK backlash and identified the news media as the main culprit, accusing them of whipping up negative reviews and creating controversy all at the behest of their corporate masters. The news media who, in Stone’s mind, had for three decades perpetuated the “myth” of Kennedy’s assassination, toeing the Warren Commission’s line about Oswald being the lone gunman.
And yet Stone himself even identified that while the old guard hated JFK, it tested and played very well to the filmgoers born after the assassination: Generation X. The ones much more willing to cast a wary, distrustful eye to their governments, their leaders, even their parents. Like he too saw this next generation as more willing to ask tough questions of what the news deigned to show them.
If only there were a project he could make to draw from that audience …
It took a little while to figure out what that project would be. Stone followed JFK with Heaven & Earth, the “third part” of his loosely connected Vietnam trilogy, this time focusing on the experiences of a Vietnamese woman caught up in the war. The film’s mixed critical response and box office failure seemed an additional rebuke. Here was Stone addressing his critics and attempting to tell a woman-centered story about the horrors of war, only to have it be soundly rejected, presumably as an additional punishment for stirring the conspiracy pot. The failure of Heaven & Earth seemed to light a fire in Stone. All he needed was the right project.
Then producers Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher passed Stone a screenplay they’d optioned by a young writer on the up-and-up named Quentin Tarantino. Natural Born Killers was an incendiary black comedy about two thrill-killers, married couple Mickey and Mallory Knox, and how they become media superstars, aided and abetted by the same tabloid news media that depends ratings-wise on their exploits. The 90s saw the rise of tabloid and “Reality TV” which was another “only in the 90s” innovation that would rise to dominance beginning in the early 2000s beginning with MTV’s The Real World – a “documentary” about a group of 20-something GenX-ers cohabitating in a NYC loft – that made minor celebrities out of “normal” people (until the next season’s cast came along, and the next, and the next …)
“Reality TV” extended to the actual real world, and incendiary criminal acts became daytime news fodder as well. Court cases like Eric and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbitt and – in a bit of real-life-to-showbiz synergy nobody saw coming, OJ Simpson, captured the public’s attention whether we wanted it or not. You couldn’t avoid knowing who Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were because the nightly news blasted you with every bit of information about them. The Goldman-Simpson Murders occurred earlier the summer of Natural Born Killers’ release, prompting Stone to add in a shot of OJ – still a year away from his trial – at his arraignment to the film’s closing montage weeks before release. With the first Gulf War resolving itself too quickly for the news media to really make bank it was looking for something – anything – to draw in viewers and keep them there as 24-hour news network CNN made its bid for dominance and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was waiting in the wings, lunching its 24-hour channel in 1996.
Stone loved the script. It represented his chance to take some retaliatory shots at the media who had eviscerated him and make them, not the killer couple, the true villains of the story. In Stone’s mind (and in his massive rewrite, aided by Richard Rutowski and David Veloz, of Tarantino’s screenplay – the budding auteur only got a story credit), Mickey and Mallory are victims of the same trash media and insidious reach of television that made Stone himself Public Enemy #1. Mickey’s fleetingly glimpsed childhood is one of abuse and murder and suicide. Mallory lives in a home under constant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her domineering father (Rodney Dangerfield) and doormat of a mother (Edie McClurg); that flashback plays out as a deranged sitcom with laugh track called “I Love Mallory”, filmed on a soundstage with big bulky TV cameras. Mickey’s entrance is to audience applause, and tasteless jokes get the laugh-track treatment.
Mickey and Mallory were young punks (and killers, let’s be clear) but are simultaneously the only three-dimensional characters in the film. The rest of the main cast – Tom Sizemore’s media-savvy super-cop Jack Scagnetti, Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden Dwight McClusky, and Robert Downey Jr.’s trash tabloid reporter Wayne Gayle – are all cartoon characters played to an even more cartoonish hilt. The only actor who comes close to projecting any sense of gravitas is activist turned actor Russell Means, who cuts a sympathetic, short-lived figure in his brief role as a Native American who takes Mickey and Mallory in during their desert wanderings.[5]
Natural Born Killers is a surreal road-trip through the American psyche, or at least that’s how I imagine Stone described it. Everything in it is played to the nth degree, from teenage serial killer groupies proclaiming Mickey and Mallory “the biggest thing in murder since Manson” to the Superbowl Sunday prison post-game broadcast interview an incarcerated Mickey gives to Gayle that ends up stirring the prisoners to riot by speaking some hard, harsh truths about America, about human nature, about life and how all of ours are exploited by wealthy parasites who get rich off others’ miseries. It’s a crude film in violence, in action, in dialogue, but it is never boring. Viewed in the present it sometimes feels and looks like the pre-internet-pre-cell phone-pre-social media outrage cycle world that it definitely is. Yet it also reads as a warning about where America was heading with its obsession with fame and fortune and celebrity. Gazing about the current hell-scape of influencers and social media stars and provocateurs stirring up outrage in an attempt to go viral and boost their own SEOs, the world Natural Born Killers prophesized has become our reality.
But in one particular area Natural Born Killers genuinely stuck the landing and one must give credit to producer Jane Hamsher, who assembled a series of mixtapes for Stone to listen to while driving around scouting locations through the US southwest. Tapes loaded with the crème of the crop of angry, aggressive GenX-centric music. The idea being this was the music and these were the bands people like Mickey and Mallory would have grown up with, who expressed the rage of a generation crying to be heard. Stone responded with genuine enthusiasm; despite being nearly fifty years old, the film he produced was squarely dropped into GenX territory. Its soundtrack, produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, was an exercise in audio overload featuring L7, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, Dr. Dre, Leonard Cohen, Rage Against The Machine, Diamanda Galas, Marilyn Manson, The Specials, The Melvins, and Duane Eddy that played out in the film and on its accompanying soundtrack album as one long uninterrupted fever dream of music, like an Adderall-addicted teen scanning through the radio station settings. And it was that soundtrack that led to Natural Born Killers becoming one of those “of the moment” movies that captured the imaginations of its intended audience; GenX.
As to why it hit so hard, one has to look at Natural Born Killers in the context of the year in which it was released for 1994 was a volatile year for GenX beginning with the suicide of Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Alternative Nation had been shattered to pieces and it was looking for something to grasp onto with the same spirit Nevermind had brought to the mainstream. Bands like Oasis, Blur, and Green Day tried to fill the void and while soon to become megastars in their own right, they all lacked that rage Cobain delivered in his guttural howl so well; unlike Cobain, these artists wanted to be superstars.
TV was no help either, at the time preoccupied with the ongoing OJ Simpson saga. The movies of that summer had also been a bit of a letdown. Yes, there were megahits like The Lion King and Forrest Gump and Speed, but for young adults culturally immersed in nose-rings, tattoos, dyed hair, and loud aggressive music they were all pretty safely mainstream. While Tarantino’s next film, Pulp Fiction, astounded everyone by winning the Palm D’Or at that summer’s Cannes Film Festival it wasn’t due to be released until that October. That was the environment Natural Born Killers was about to cannonball itself into.
Seeing Natural Born Killers on opening weekend truly felt like participating in an act of generational rebellion. The film was already being called “dangerous” and “incendiary” and “irresponsible”; naturally we had to see it in the best theater possible. As already stated the line to get into Uptown 1 stretched around the block but Mark, Nathalie, and I were near the front. We had tickets, but what we didn’t have were the best seats in the house. That was my job to secure and I knew, from numerous screenings at the Uptown that they were in the first row. Normally the first row is where you don’t want to sit as it’s right up against the screen, but the Uptown’s design was as such that the first row put you up against a lengthy apron leading to the screen further back, and you could put your feet up on the edge of it and stretch out (if there was one failing in the Uptown’s design it was the lack of leg-room).
So I was ready to do my part, and once they tore our tickets and let us inside the building I was off like a shot, racing up the long staircase while the rest crowded onto the escalator. I was in the theater, bounding for the front row, and managed to secure the three seats in dead center before either Mark or Nathalie knew what had happened to me. On locating me right where I said I would be, they were amused, but appreciative for having the best seats that night for what would be an epic experience.
And to be fair, if the experience of seeing Natural Born Killers was better than the actual movie, you couldn’t fault it or us for feeling that way. We did enjoy the movie because we were all the right age – in our early 20s – for its blend of satire, violence, humor, and anger. The audience was fully on-board, laughing at the blood and gore, cheering when the villains got their just desserts, and just tripping out on the truly wild visuals; even compared to JFK, Natural Born Killers looks and feels like no film Stone – indeed anyone – had made before or since.
There was a definite split in reactions to it as well and the split happened right along generational lines: in short GenX loved Killers and Boomers loathed it. In hindsight it’s not difficult to see why in both cases. What the movie and Stone seemed to be saying was this is the world we’ve created for ourselves. A world where ratings, where profit, drives all, and as long as Mickey and Mallory promise Big Ratings and Ad Revenue they’re not only safe but dare we say necessary to keep that spice flowing even if it means a few people get killed along the way.
Stone’s film ends with a roll-call of then sensational media figures Erik and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbit, Tonya Harding, and the Big Kahuna himself OJ Simpson – at the time just arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her friend – everybody in that audience at the Uptown recognized them because we’d been inundated with news stories courtesy of the tabloid culture that came to infest mass media discourse in the 1990s and never really went away. Every week a new outrage, every year another Trial of the Century and on and on and on. Fiction became fact by sheer repetition. TV gurus like Oprah elevated shills like Drs. Phil, Oz, and for all I know Frankenstein as well.
In short, the world Natural Born Killers depicted was a Boomer Creation, and a world GenX had no choice but to live in. What Stone and company were pointing to was something we all had come to realize; that the media was not our friend. That the days of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather were coming to an end. Truth was less important than ratings, allowing the Rupert Murdoch’s and Clear Channels and Sinclair Broadcastings of the world to buy up the competition was a genuinely bad thing that was just the first salvo in a decades-long decline in independent voice and independent everything.
Natural Born Killers marked the end of the Stone Decade. Never again would the filmmaker capture the public’s imagination and ire in quite the same way. His post-Killers output of Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, (multiple cuts of) Alexander, W., World Trade Center, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages, and Snowden, while all possessed of their own merits just didn’t have the same zing as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Those movies put him on the map, and simultaneously made him the punchline to many lesser types’ jokes.
Viewed through the passage of time though he was a filmmaker unlike any other working at the time with the possible exception of Martin Scorsese. But whereas Scorsese’s obsessions were of the rot in the human soul, Stone’s was the rot at the heart of American Identity, extending to his early 2000s documentary series “The Untold History of the United States” which blames American interventionism for every ill and evil of the twentieth century (while simultaneously hand-waving away the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as aberrations of rather than features of totalitarian communist ideology).
In a similar way Natural Born Killers ended up marking the end of the GenX era as well – the angry, volatile brand of it anyway that had dominated the discourse and culture for that first half of this tumultuous decade — which was always a minority, albeit a vocal one. That rage of being a rat in its cage which began in 1989 had lost its way by the end of 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead, the economy was improving, things were looking better than they had at the beginning of the decade. Britpop took the wheel and promised happier, bouncier times. Grunge would soon become a footnote; an outsized one in GenX memory to be fair, but still a footnote. Music was becoming lighter, brighter, peppier, and spicier.
Yes, GenY was making its voice heard and they had the internet as their megaphone. The next five years would look very different from the previous five. Grungy black and white was becoming Gen Ys boy bands and pop princesses. It all made NBK feel like the last hurrah for Alternative Nation as well. I would go back to see the movie in the theater two more times, and I’ve since seen it numerous times more on DVD. Somehow we (my roommates and I) acquired a big bus-shelter sized NBK poster for the living room wall where it hung pretty much until we all moved out at the end of 1996. I’ve revisited in times since but I’m a much older man now and it doesn’t posses that lightning in a bottle it did in 1994. Life looks a lot different in your fifties than it did in your twenties and while I’m still angry at the state of the world I work hard on my side to improve it in whatever ways I can. Certainly not through the barrel of a gun. Definitely not by staring at a screen.
And despite 1994’s summer weighing outsized in my mind there have been great summers to follow, not coincidentally all of which have occurred since my son was born. Nothing makes you appreciate summers more than your child to share them with you. His experiences become your re-experiences, from summers on Cape Cod (1982 and 2024 respectively) to relaxing poolside (1994 and 2024), movies, museums, activities and adventure. Life is what you make it and that applies too to summer.
Looking back today, as dangerous, incendiary and irresponsible as Natural Born Killers may have seemed one cannot deny that it was onto something. What seemed an exaggerated cartoon portrayal of American life in 1994 has sadly become more prescient now as we’ve hurtled into the third decade of the 21st Century. There’s a full laundry list of atrocities – Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Tr**p – that have come to pass since Natural Born Killers’ release to be met with a largely benumbed gaze as “just another day in America ending with Y”. Mass media has given way to social media and its amplification of everyone’s voices to little benefit. Because of algorithms always seeming to hand a bullhorn to the very worst aspects and voices in society it keeps people watching and sharing and scrolling. It makes celebrities of stupidity and ignorance, it platforms cruelty and delivers hatred to an audience addicted to its flavor. If Killers was made today Mickey and Mallory would have been social media stars, broadcasting their crimes on TikTok to millions of adoring fans and spurred countless of copycat murderous couples killing for Internet clout.
In one of life’s many ironies the then-present day critics of Stone’s film would likely admit now that as offensive to their sensibilities the film was then, in the cold hard light of today it looks positively quaint compared to the daily outrage and insanities we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s a shame Stone is more or less retired from filmmaking; he could make a hell of a movie about our present day nightmare.
[1] The Uptown staff were also big movie fans, so much so that the tickets for that screening of The Shining were deliberately misspell to read “The Shinning” in reference to a popular spoof from The Simpsons TV show.
[2] The reason the always profitable Uptown closed? It was sued for not being wheelchair accessible. When the court ordered them to make it compliant, the prohibitive cost of a retrofit led the Famous Players chain to shutter the building and sell the property to a developer. In a tragic twist to the story, during the demolition of the building a wall collapsed onto an ESL school housed next door, killing one.
[3] So mainstream was JFK that it was parodied in an infamous episode of Seinfeld.
[4] Think of that: a three-hour plus film about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination selling out multiple times. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or not. It wouldn’t be until sometime in the mid-90s I finally saw JFK on the big screen, at a rep screening at Toronto’s Paradise Theater with my roommate (now president of the Director’s Guild of Canada) Warren Sonoda.
[5] In this post-The Doors film Stone hadn’t quite let go of his obsessions with Native American mysticism.
ADDENDUM:
A reader asked about the significance of this entry’s title. It comes from a great song by the great 90s hip-hop group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy “Television, The Drug of a Nation”, the message of which might just as well apply to the internet culture of today.