This Buried Exchange Between Oliver Stone and Chevy Chase Is One of the Golden Globes’s Most Awkward Moments

The year was 1979, and Oliver Stone had taken a few hits of coke, a quaalude (or two), and drank several glasses of wine before winning Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express at the Golden Globes.

As the director remembered it in a 2020 essay for GQ, the "devil was in me that night." As he watched the show from the audience, he had felt growing frustration over the celebration of "television cop shows" and disappointment that movies like Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July weren't getting recognition.

"I’d seen the shows, disliked most of them, representing the triumph of Nixon’s 'law and order' world, jailing the underclass, the Black, the Spanish as 'bad guy' drug dealers, outsiders," he recalled. "All these actors and producers being lauded for fawning over cops. I hated the whole self-congratulatory air of the night."

What happened next has been largely scrubbed from the internet. Stone doesn't have a verbatim account of what he said when he took the stage to accept the award, but what he recalled trying to say was, "You know, we arrest people for drugs, and we throw them in jail ... and we make heroes of the people who do that..."

Then, he recalled, the booing and hissing began. Host Chevy Chase stepped in and said, "Just say ‘thank you’ and leave the stage." The awkward moment got even worse as Stone was escorted off the platform.

"My message was clearly lost. I was embarrassed when I walked back to our film’s table," Stone recalled, adding that he returned home "sad and ashamed."

Midnight Express director Alan Parker told the writer he had ruined their chances at an Oscar win, reportedly saying,  "You just blew it, Oliver. That was your Oscar. Think you’ll ever get one now? The worst thing is you hurt the film."

Despite Parker's warning, Stone scooped up a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Midnight Express. That time around, he kept it short and sweet.

"God help me now. Remember, this audience doesn’t want a lecture on the War on Drugs; anyway, most didn’t agree with me, or they wanted a crackdown on drugs, or they just didn’t want to think about it," he thought at the time. "... Be cool, man, say what you gotta say quickly and get off."