Do We Get to Win This Time? is a podcast about how Hollywood has depicted and defined the Vietnam War. You can listen on the Big Picture feed. The following is an excerpt from Episode 8: “I Love America.”
It was August 1972, and Ron Kovic—sitting in his wheelchair, his shirt covered with buttons and medals—was in a park, being interviewed for a documentary. His hair was long and stringy, and he sported an impressive handlebar mustache. Kovic and several other vets had traveled to Miami that summer for the Republican National Convention, to protest the war.
By this point, it had been four years since Kovic was shot and paralyzed in Vietnam. When he returned, he was haunted by his experiences during the war. In one incident, he’d accidentally killed Vietnamese children; during another, he’d mistakenly shot a U.S. corporal.
As Kovic explained to the cameras that day in 1972, his time in Vietnam had curdled his view of the war—and of the government that had sent him there.
“All you had to do was go out on a patrol and shoot up a bunch of civilians, or put a bullet through a baby, or something like that, and your head began to change,” Kovic said during one interview.
During this time, Kovic became one of the anti-war movement’s most outspoken figures. One of his speeches had even helped inspire Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning hit Coming Home.
In the mid-’70s, while living in Southern California, Kovic started working on his memoir. Using a typewriter he’d bought for 42 bucks at a local Sears, he stayed up late night after night, churning out pages for Born on the Fourth of July. It chronicled his transformation from all-American true believer to angry survivor—a man who, in his own words, had given his “dead dick for John Wayne.”
Kovic’s memoir was published in 1976, and it turned him into a counterculture hero. So when Hollywood approached Kovic about turning his book into a film, he was elated.
By 1978, Al Pacino had agreed to play Kovic, and the two men began hanging out in New York City. During the day, Kovic would spend hours talking with Pacino, who was growing a mustache and letting his hair go long. And at night, Kovic would sometimes dance in his wheelchair at the infamous nightclub Studio 54.
Kovic was living it up—and who could blame him? As he later said of this period: “[I ate] $45 hamburgers from room service. It was the opposite of the rat-infested VA hospital. … I was somebody.”
After an early script for Born on the Fourth of July fell apart, the producers hired Oliver Stone, who’d just started making a name for himself as a writer. He’d read Kovic’s book when it was released, and felt an immediate connection. It wasn’t just their time in Vietnam that bonded them—it was their time in the U.S. The two men were born just a few months apart, and had come of age in the ’50s, when they were inundated with violent tales of U.S. exceptionalism.
“It was not just about John Wayne; it was about the TVs,” Stone says. “On television, where numerous shows, Westerns promoting heroism [and violence]. … It was in movies, it was in TV, it was in comics, it was everywhere. It was just the American way of life. It was like it came along with your Wheaties.”
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Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July screenplay begins with Kovic as a bright-eyed, clean-cut young jock from the suburbs. It follows him to hell and back as he’s wounded in Vietnam, and ends with Kovic’s transformation into a loud and long-haired anti-war hero. Stone finished his script in the late ’70s, but he wasn’t yet an established filmmaker, so the job of directing Born on the Fourth of July went to William Friedkin, who’d made some of the coolest movies of the decade, including The Exorcist and The French Connection.
Rehearsals soon got underway. But one day, not long before filming was set to begin, Kovic was summoned to a swank downtown hotel to meet Pacino. As soon as he saw the actor’s face, Kovic could tell something was wrong: Pacino had shaved off his mustache. Sure enough, the movie was dead—a victim of money issues, or Pacino issues, or possibly both. Whatever the reason, Kovic was crushed. As he told a reporter: “My dream was dead.”
Stone was equally devastated, but swore not to give up on the movie.
It would take more than a decade for Stone to follow through on his word. During those years, Ronald Reagan would come to power, the memorial wall would be brought to life, and millions of Americans would begin reflecting upon the long-term aftershocks of Vietnam—including many Americans who’d done their fighting back home.
Stone had kept busy since the movie first fell apart in the late ’70s. Quick recap: He picked up an Academy Award for writing Midnight Express; gave himself a James Woods–sized headache while filming Salvador; and then earned the world’s attention with Platoon. Afterward, Stone had another hit with Wall Street, his Oscar-winning attack on modern capitalism.
In Hollywood, speed—for lack of a better word—is good. And Stone jumped on the chance to make Born on the Fourth of July his final film of the ’80s.
By then, Kovic’s book was more than 10 years old. And in the years following its release, Americans had learned more about how difficult life had been for veterans after the war. Some struggled with nightmares, fits of rage—even suicidal urges. As the years went on, more and more vets began asking for help.
Those talks led to the organization of veterans’ advocacy groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America, which formed in 1979. They also spurred a conversation about “PTSD”—which at the time was barely known outside academic and medical circles. By 1980, the American Psychiatric Association would formally acknowledge PTSD as a mental disorder. By definition, it could be applied to anyone who had experienced a distressing event that’s “outside the range of usual human experience.”
But despite the increased awareness of PTSD, Hollywood insisted on treating many Vietnam-vet characters as ticking time bombs.
That big-screen stereotype had first taken hold in the ’70s, but it exploded in the ’80s. Action-dramas with catchy titles like The Exterminator and The Park Is Mine depict vets who no longer fit into society—and who push back violently.
And throughout the decade, you could even find stressed-out or unpredictable Vietnam-vet characters in horror movies and comedies, even if their PTSD is reduced to a quick one-liner.
This all gave Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July movie extra urgency. The film would almost be a rebuttal to all those Vietnam-vet clichés—the story of a man whose anger leads him not to commit violence, but to seek out peace. Ron Kovic would be a very different kind of big-screen veteran—and Stone would need a very different breed of actor to play him.
So it was inevitable that he’d turn to the most popular, most powerful, and most intense movie star of the late ’80s: Tom Cruise.
