Austin Film Festival to honor Oliver Stone

The Austin Film Festival, another one of the countless small festivals around the United States, will be honoring Oliver Stone this year. The festival will take place from October 11-18 and is kind of an oddity among the festival circuit. Its focus is screenwriters, with panels composed almost entirely of television and film writers, including Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich), William Broyles Jr. (Flags of Our Fathers, Jarhead) and many others.

Oliver Stone will be honored with the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award, for work on such films as Scarface, Born on the Fourth of July and, um... World Trade Center. Well they can't all be winners. For good or bad, Stone has become an institution in Hollywood, but he's not known so much for the subtlety of his writing so much as the bombastic nature of his films. The AFF's choice of him for the award implies an affirmation of traditional Hollywood aesthetics, despite the normally independent nature of film festivals.

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