JFK (film)

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JFK is an American film, first released on December 20, 1991, which purports to tell the history surrounding the President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The film went on to win two Academy Awards, and was nominated for eight in total, including Best Picture. However it lost out for Best Picture to Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs. Film critic Roger Ebert went on to name it one of the top ten films of the decade.

Contents

1 About the film
2 Synopsis
3 Controversy
4 Academy Awards
5 Trivia
6 External links

About the film

The film follows the 1967 to 1969 investigation led by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) as he investigates the assassination of President Kennedy.

JFK stars Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman (as Lee Harvey Oswald), Ron Rifkin, Donald Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Jay O. Sanders, Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, John Candy, Brian Doyle-Murray, Gary Grubbs, Wayne Knight, Vincent D'Onofrio, Edward Asner, Jack Lemmon, Michael Rooker and Pruitt Taylor Vince. The movie was adapted by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar from the books On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. Stone directed it. During the filming Dealey Plaza was completely restored to how it looked on November 22, 1963.

JFK won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Tommy Lee Jones), Best Director, Best Music, Original Score, Best Sound, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, and Best Picture.

The real Jim Garrison, a severe critic of the Warren Commission, plays Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren in the film. Supposed assassination witness Beverly Oliver, who claimed to be the Babushka lady, also appeared in a cameo role.

Among the many advisors for the film were Gerald Hemming, a former Marine who has claimed involvement in various CIA activities, Robert Groden, a photographic expert and longtime JFK assassination researcher and author, and actual assassination witness Jean Hill.

One of the characters in the movie, "Mr. X" (played by Donald Sutherland), was loosely based on the theories and military experience of L. Fletcher Prouty, another advisor for the movie. However, unlike "Mr. X", Prouty had no connection to Presidential security at the time of the assassination. Prouty was a former Colonel in the Air Force, and military liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon. He wrote the 1975 book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, (republished in 1992).

Upon release, JFK earned mostly favorable reviews and was financially successful, earning over US $205 million during its initial movie run.

Synopsis

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie opens with a summary of John F. Kennedy's years as President—emphasising the events that, in Stone's thesis, would lead to his assassination—which finally builds to a reconstruction of the assassination on November 22nd, 1963. The movie then switches to following New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, as he learns about the assassination—and, importantly, of potential links between the assassination and New Orleans. Attempting to help the government's investigation, Garrison and his team investigate the New Orleans links, and bring in several potential accomplices before being forced to let them go - and being rebuked—by the federal authorities. As suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is himself assassinated by Jack Ruby, Garrison closes the investigation, but remains uneasy about what has happened. The investigation is later reopened in 1967.

In JFK, as actually occurred, Garrison indicted a New Orleans based international businessman, Clay Shaw, for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy. In March 1969, a jury acquitted Shaw of the charges after less than an hour of deliberation. Although the film portrays members of that jury stating publicly that they believed there was a conspiracy behind the assassination (but not enough evidence to link Shaw to that conspiracy), this is mostly based on disputed claims in pro-Garrison books. Other sources have the juries giving different views on the idea of a conspiracy.

Members of the CIA, Mafia, the military-industrial complex, Secret Service, FBI, and Kennedy's vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson are implicated as co-conspirators with motives for Kennedy's assassination and/or the cover-up afterwards. Stone has stated that the movie JFK was "intended as counter-fiction to the Warren Commission's fiction."

Controversy

Even while JFK was being filmed, considerable controversy was generated by media speculation as to the film's accuracy and Stone's motives in making the film; JFK also encouraged general interest about the Kennedy assassination. Some people accepted Stone's theories, at least in part. Others have argued that Stone exceeded the limits: some minor errors might have been overlooked as an inherent compromise in compressing several years worth of events (or alleged events) into a few hours, but critics charged that Stone was guilty of substantial deliberate distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods.

Some regard the film's version of events as an unfounded conspiracy theory. Some of Garrison's allegations are apparently based on circumstantial evidence (such as his immediate conclusion, upon viewing the assassination of Robert Kennedy on TV, that the two assassinations must be linked).

The film suggests that President Kennedy was killed by a group opposed to Kennedy's policies, especially his reluctance to invade Cuba (the CIA had planned to overthrow Cuba's communist president Fidel Castro since 1959) and his plan to withdraw American armed forces from Vietnam. Kennedy had preliminarily approved a withdrawal of 1,000 men to be completed by the end of 1963. However, that would have left more than 20,000 US military advisors in Vietnam; further, Kennedy was assassinated mere weeks after South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a coup d'etat aided and abetted by Kennedy.

For a time, the film caused some confusion and public outcry. Many members of the public raised their concerns about the alleged conspiracy with their Congressional representatives, and this led to the passage of the The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (also known as the JFK Act) and the formation of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board. The Act was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in late October 1992. The ARRB worked until 1998. Witnesses were interviewed (some for the first time), the U.S. government purchased the Zapruder film, and previously classified documents relating to the assassination were finally made available to public scrutiny (though thousands of pages are still being withheld as of 2005). By ARRB law, all assassination related documents that have not been destroyed will be made public by 2017.

Academy Awards

Award	Person
Best Cinematography	Robert Richardson
Best Film Editing	Joe Hutshing Pietro Scalia
Nominated:
Best Actor in a Supporting Role	Tommy Lee Jones
Best Director	Oliver Stone
Best Original Score	John Williams
Best Picture	A. Kitman Ho Oliver Stone
Best Sound	Michael Minkler Gregg Landaker Tod A. Maitland
Best Adapted Screenplay	Oliver Stone Zachary Sklar

Trivia

In his 1993 miniseries, Wild Palms – set in 2007 – Stone had a small cameo appearance in which he played himself on a television interview program, where he revealed that the documents pertaining to the assassination had been made public and that the film's version of events had been proven right.

This is the only film in which both Walter Matthau (Senator Long) and Jack Lemmon (Jack Martin) appear, but do not share a scene together.

The film makes extensive use of subliminal imagery. In one scene, a close-up of the "Umbrella Man" is replaced by Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw—only to vanish a second or two later. Some frames have apparently been doctored to contain images of Presidents Reagan and Bush. The film contains a number of images of skulls, often glimpsed for just a few frames. One repeated shot of the Clay Shaw character, sitting against a green background and waving to someone, has a large skull in the background. [link] The film also avoids use of the color red—except for dealing with the moment of the assassination itself.

The scene where David Ferrie admits to Jim Garrison and his team that there was indeed a conspiracy against the president was entirely fictional. In reality, Ferrie never confessed that he was involved in a conspiracy nor did he confirm that an underground effort was ever organized against Kennedy.

The scene in the courtroom where Garrison makes his "second shooter" demonstration was spoofed in a 1992 Seinfeld episode ("The Boyfriend"). In the episode, Jerry uses Newman as one of the people in his own "second spitter" demonstration. Wayne Knight, who plays Newman in the series, also had a small role in this film, and was one of the people in Garrison's demonstration.

A two-part episode of Quantum Leap ("Lee Harvey Oswald") was created largely as a response to Stone's film. The episode attempted to debunk many of the conspiracy theories proposed by the film, and suggested that Oswald was indeed the lone assassin.

External links

Films by Oliver Stone

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