The Nixon director’s new American history series sees him follow in the footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Steven Spielberg
The title of Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, the 10-part documentary series that starts its UK run this Friday (Sky Atlantic, 9pm), is carefully calculated to maximise on the celebrity of the film director, possibly surprising viewers at finding such a big-screen name in the small-screen listings.
Stone’s attempt to correct what he sees as US-centric teaching of 20th-century
history in American schools is full of arresting connections – sauerkraut was
renamed liberty cabbage in the US during the first world war and french fries became
freedom fries during the “war on terror” – and the British screening of his series is
subject to its own intriguing connection: this week’s announcement that the
American drama Bates Motel has been bought for broadcast in the UK by the
Universal Channel.
The A&E network series, a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror movie Psycho,
may look like TV cashing on a celluloid classic, but Hitchcock himself was a pioneer
of easy traffic between the screen media – and Stone can be seen as following his
example.
Either side of making Psycho, Hitchcock was working in television, directing a half-
hour drama and fronting the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-61) and The
Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962). This ecumenical attitude was not entirely artistic: as
depicted in the recent film Hitchcock, about the making of the horror movie, the
director had financial problems caused by having, due to studio scepticism, to part-
fund the film himself. But Hitchcock, as a populist and a self-advertiser (he had long
made cameo appearances in his movies), was also drawn to the possibility that the
younger art form offered of bringing his work and himself to simultaneous audiences
of millions.
In appearing as a presenter and host, Oliver Stone is directly following Hitchcock,
although his participation in Untold History is only vocal, consisting of almost hour-
long monologues on voice-over. But, in common with his cinematic near-
contemporary, Martin Scorsese, Stone has seen TV as an opportunity for
documentary rather than fiction.
Before his current factual project, the director of Nixon and JFK had presented
America Undercover, a show devoted to exposé documentaries, while the director of
Taxi Driver and Goodfellas has regularly contributed small-screen documentaries,
usually on the subject of music, including The Blues and Living in the Material
World. True, Scorsese directed the opening episode of Boardwalk Empire but he
withdrew to the production side afterwards.
But the movie director who has done most to suggest an artistic equality between TV
and cinema is David Lynch. His Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-91) challenged two powerful
beliefs: that TV drama was most suited to realism – Lynch worked within a police
procedural structure but introduced weirdness and surrealism – and that good
directors only worked in television as an apprenticeship for Hollywood. Twin Peaks
significantly reduced cinematic snobbery against broadcasting, not least because its
picture-house spin-off – Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Come Fire Walk With Me (1992) – was
a flop, while the first series of the TV drama, in which Agent Cooper investigates the
disappearance of Laura Palmer, remains a recognised classic which had huge
influence in freeing TV drama from the tyranny of linear narrative. Eventually, Lynch
himself proved too far ahead of executive taste with his next intended TV project,
Mulholland Drive, which was rejected when the network saw pilot material and
Lynch was forced to turn it into a feature film.
It may be significant that Lynch is also an artist: a profession in which there is less of
a hierarchy between different sizes and styles of art: the movie theatre and the living
room were simply different canvases to him. In the cases of two other directors with
substantial credits in both sizes of image, there was also a strong element of
gratitude. Steven Spielberg and Anthony Minghella had both begun in television, the
former learning his craft on episodes of Marcus Welby MD and Columbo, while the
latter was script editor on Phil Redmond’s children’s show Grange Hill and wrote for
Inspector Morse before making his debut as a writer-director with Truly Madly
Deeply, made by the BBC as a cinema-TV hybrid.
Partly as a result of these CVs – and also because they belonged to the first
generation to grow up with TV as a standard part of life – neither directed ever
succumbed to the disdain for the goggle-box that is common in Hollywood. Both
returned there even after winning Oscars, attracted by the greater space that TV
offers for storytelling. Poignantly, Minghella’s final directing work, screened after his
death in 2008, was on the BBC1 Sunday night drama The No 1 Ladies Detective
Agency. Spielberg’s work for the medium includes the impressive war epics Band of
Brothers and The Pacific, although he has risked lowering the value of his name in
TV credits with looser executive-producer attachments to trash such as Smash.
So, while some movie purists may regard Bates Motel as a vulgarisation of a classic
film, it follows a model of cross-pollination established by Hitchcock and which
sensible directors, including Spielberg and Stone, now follow.
Mark Lawson – Wednesday 17 April 2013 – guardian.co.uk