SFTH: Milius - The Words in Pictures

"Milius" (15)

Released by StudioCanal. Available now

Price: £19.99  Our rating:  8.5 / 10

A profile of controversial writer and director John Milius hits the shelves this month courtesy of StudioCanal. There are rather too many talking heads populating this portrait, but what an ensemble they turn out to be. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola rub shoulders with Sam Elliott, Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss to recall the life and times of the man who wrote Apocalypse Now. Coppola’s Vietnam War epic is surely at the top of many a movie buff’s lexicon when it comes to favourite quotes. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning...” was a Milius special. “Charlie don’t surf!” was another. When it came to memorable dialogue Milius was a writing machine.

He was also a maverick when the word meant something. Several of his friends and associates recall the gun loving, surf rolling, cigar chomping, sombrero wearing doyen of the National Rifle Association as an almost fictional character made up by himself.

Part samurai warrior (thanks to an early christening in Kurosawa movies), part rough rider (he’s a devotee of President Teddy Roosevelt) and self-styled “Zen Anarchist” Milius eventually became bigger than his reputation and landed smack bang on the modern blacklist that Hollywood denies exists. Much of that was down to what many perceived as his rabid right-wing views as expressed in Red Dawn in which a hardy band of orphaned school kids take on the might of Soviet Russia, and win.

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