Film fame for

Press, 22 September 1987, Page 13

Film fame for

Gustav Hasford’s circumstances sound like a common story found on dust jackets of books.

Not long ago, he was living out of his car while working as a Los Angeles security guard, according to the “Los Angeles Times Magazine.” He had knocked around, writing while being in various stages of financial and personal distress, since being discharged from the Marine Corps in 1968.

Nine years after that discharge, he had managed to finish and have published “The Short-Timers,” the novel which inspired Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. It received critical acclaim, with a “Newsweek” critic saying it was the best novel to come out of the war.

But it made little money for the first-time novelist, who is now — because of the movie — on the verge of becoming much better known.

He has another novel about Private Joker finished, but so far, it has been rejected. Hasford says that some publishers have decided it could be politically offensive. In the manuscript of “The Phantom Blooper,” Private Joker is captured and decides to join the Viet Cong side of the war.

Hasford told a magazine writer that he had talked to

Stanley Kubrick for hours' oh 1 t the telephone, but had met the meticulous director only once. He had sent suggested seg-,,, ments of a screenplay .after, Kubrick bought the film rights to his book, and had struggled to have his work reflected in the screenwriting credits (along with Kubrick himself and Michael Herr). The character of Private Joker is based on his own Marine Corps experiences In Vietnam. • S'"

Hasford was working as, a Corps journalist when he got the chance to become a combat .correspondent, a fighting man (when the Tet Offensive action in Hue — the film’s second-half setting — was heaviest. Kubrick, a recluse who has lived in England for many years, has been called cold and unfeeling. In rare interviews, he admits his interest in going as deep as possible into details of a film as he works on IL ..

Pauline Kael, reviewing “Full Metal Jacket” in “The New Yorker,” has prepared his admirers for disappointment She dislikes the movie, and thinks he has cut himself off too much from America, and from people. She says “the emptiness of. his vision is numbing.” She says the film-making of the boot camp half of the movie “suggests a blunt Instrument grinding into your skull.”