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NBK took quite some time to take shape. It began as a script by Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs), then got spun and spindled: Tarantino is credited with the story, Stone and his collaborators David Veloz and Richard Rutowski with the screenplay. Meanwhile, NBK was acquiring a bizarre new resonance. "When I started," says Stone, "this was a surreal piece. Now, thanks to Bobbitt and Menendez and Tonya Harding, it's become satire. By the time I'd finished, fact had caught up to fiction. O.J. is the final blowout."
It's still on the surreal side, and not just in the carnage that almost earned the picture an NC-17 rating (see box). NBK is also a blanket indictment of the American family (breeders of abuse), the justice system (sadistic and incompetent) and the avid media that find in tabloid crime the no-brain modern equivalent of Greek tragedy. And intentionally or not, NBK romanticizes its hero and heroine, because they are smarter and sexier than their pursuers. As the kid in the movie's fake news footage says, "If I was a mass murderer, I'd be Mickey and Mallory."
Stone is always ready to defend his movies' most outlandish theses. O.K., Oliver, hit it: "Let's look at the statistics. Violent crime has remained flat over the past 20 years. But the perception of crime has changed; now it's the No. 1 enemy. Every night on the news it's back-to-back murder and body bags. Even the national news is perverted, because the news has become a profit-oriented enterprise since Tisch took over CBS. It's the old yellow journalism. Now that communism is dead, they need new demons. This virus has infected us all -- the demons within us and among us."
NBK may have little new to say about those demons, but it has plenty to show, in images that mix beauty and horror, atrocity and comedy. Angels and red horses glide across the night sky. Mallory's family life is played as a grotesque sitcom that ends when her awful father (Rodney Dangerfield) is beaten to death and her weak mother is set ablaze. When Mickey and Mallory visit an Indian shaman (Russell Means), the words demon and too much tv are superimposed on their torsos. Flashes of Hitler and Stalin, insects and rhinos, The Wild Bunch and Midnight Express (the film whose screenplay won Stone his first Oscar) explode on the window of a motel room while the two ( make love and a hostage looks on. As the Cowboy Junkies' ethereal version of Sweet Jane plays on the sound track, they make a blood pact, and the drops form cartoon snakes -- a big motif here.
In all three stages of the project -- writing, shooting, editing -- Stone encouraged everybody to go higher, wilder. "The set was intense and exciting," recalls Harrelson, a bit of a real-life brawler whose father is in prison for murder. "Oliver played an incessant barrage of wild music to get you going. The crew would jam the music, then fire shotguns into the air." All the actors felt this electricity, like a searchlight or a cattle prod. "Oliver shot at a feverish pace," Sizemore says, "54 days and no standing around. It was managed chaos."