Thirty Years Ago, ‘Natural Born Killers’ Tackled How Media Cashes In On Celebrity Criminals

For several years after the film’s release, its producers were senselessly accused of inspiring ‘copycat murders.’

Screen shot from the promotional trailer for “Natural Born Killers” | Credit: Warner Bros.

My former boss Jane Hamsher was a producer for director Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” Her experiences with Stone frequently came up while I worked for the progressive news website that she founded called Firedoglake.

It was not until long after she shut down FDL in 2014 that I sought out a copy of “Killer Instinct.” The tell-all book chronicles how she and fellow producer Don Murphy made one of the most controversial films of the 1990s. Reading this engrossing memoir, I learned that director Quentin Tarantino had accused Hamsher of stealing the script that he wrote for the film. After spreading this lie, Tarantino sent Hamsher a lewd letter seemingly trying to hook up with her.

“Natural Born Killers” was released 30 years ago on August 26, 1994. A far more deviant “Badlands” (1973) for an age of mass media consumption, the film immediately divided critics, and famously Stone, Hamsher, and those involved in the production were blamed in the press for inspiring so-called copycat murders.

Yet on opening weekend, the movie knocked director Robert Zemeckis’ “Forrest Gump” — Paramount’s highest-grossing film until “Titanic” (1997) — out of the number one spot at the box office.

Read the full retrospective over at Kevin’s movie publication “The Wide Shot.”