Recently watched the Oliver Stone movie JFK I realize this subject will have been beaten to death but how much of the movie was fact and how much dramatization?
Did Oliver have a valid point with his conclusions?
Since this question involves the ARTS, let’s try it in Cafe Society.
samclem
The movie JFK is a factual representation of history in the same way that “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” is a faithful account of the Cold War.
In other words, he made stuff up.
Make a note of how often Costner’s character starts a speech with “We don’t know, but we can speculate”, which I think gets quickly forgotten when we’re treated to scenes of actors shooting from grassy knolls and whatnot.
In all seriousness, no.
The facts as presented in the film that match real life facts are:
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the President and somebody shot him.
- Jim Garrison and Clay Shaw really did exist, as well as most of the supporting characters.
That’s about it. Most of the rest of the movie is baloney, either by:
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Twisting the facts by presenting the mundane as bieng amazing, the most preposterous example being the breathless talk about how Oswald’s shooting was impossible for a poor shot. It was a ridiculously easy shot, actually, that anyone could have made.
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Conflating facts; Stone, for instance, invents nonexistent eyewitnesses by combining the testimony of multiple real eyewitnesses.
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Just Plain Lying.
Refer to this web site for details:
Interestingly enough, nutjob Jim Garrison was replaced as DA by the far more sensible and sane Harry Connick Sr.
I’m still trying to figure out who exactly Stone wanted to blame for the assassination. It was the Mob, then the Cubans, then the military, and finally some combination of all three. Of course it had to be the military because JFK was just about to pull us out of Vietnam or maybe it was the Mob because of, ummmm, I dont remember or the Cubans because they didn’t like him.
Yeah, sorta like “Executive Action” from two decades earlier, where the conspiracy was Republicans, the CIA, and “Big Oil.”
I’m curious: how much did Stone’s “fudging” the facts prevent people from enjoying this movie? Personally, it didn’t bother me at all – I knew it was in many ways a fictionalized account of the shooting, but when I was watching it I still thought it was one of the most riveting movies I’d ever seen. My father, on the other hand, was much more bothered by the fabrications. I wonder if that’s a factor of age – my father’s old enough to remember the events, so maybe it has a more personal meaning to him. Anyone else?
Would that be the father of jazz singer Harry Connick Jr.?
Yep.
It’s been years since I saw the movie but I seem to recall some pretty unsubtle homophobia. Clay Shaw was evil in part because he was a decadent homosexual, as opposed to the fine upstanding family man Jim Garrison.
Shaw had nothing to do with the Kennedy assasination. Jim Garrison was, in reality, quite mad. Someone should sue Stone for slander.
I forgot about that- that was just weird. It was a gay Russo-Cuban conspiracy run by the CIA and directed by Gen. Lansdale or something.
The dead have no reputation to defame, legally, and the people who look the worst (especially Shaw) are dead. But I remember having the same thought when I saw him in the movie.
I saw the thing a few years ago, after reading that 100 Errors list. The deviations from fact bothered me because I don’t think Stone makes it clear just how much as changed or ‘improved.’ I don’t mind if he wanted to tell a better story, but some people (including movie critics) felt he was making a really important political statement and revealing new facts about the case. The cards at the end of the film about secret documents are wrong too, aren’t they? That’s not drama.
Jim Garrison also played Earl Warren in the movie. I have no idea why I’ve always found that interesting but Stone must have had a hard-on for the guy.
Another interesting debunking site I found just last week when thinking about this veyr topic.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/jfkmovie.htm
The question that led me to search was whether Clay Shaw REALLY identified himself as Clay Betrand in his booking.
It always seemed so implausible.
Then I found an exchange there that was MUCH more interesting than anything in the movie!
Stone lied on so many levels it’s hard to identify them all individually. But here’s some of the big points.
He showed the stories: He didn’t just have a character tell their story. He instead had the character start to tell their story and then cut to a scene showing what “happened”. The effect on the audience then was that they didn’t just see some character talking - they actually “witnessed” it themselves. Instead of having Weasel Smith saying on screen, “Yeah, three years ago when I was sleeping off a five day bender in the county drunk tank, I heard some other guy in the cell saying that Mr Rodgers and Julia Child arranged to kill Kennedy because he was going to cut funding for public television.” Stone instead would film a scene showing Mr Rodgers and Julia Child hiring a hitman. And he’d film it in a pseudo-documentary style that would make it look like a real historical recording.
He improved the stories: Suppose a character said that there was some guy meeting with the mob in Dallas. Stone would film the scene and have Tommy Lee Jones (who played Clay Shaw) play the part of the guy at the meeting. So the audience would think, “Wow, there was a witness who saw Shaw meeting with the Mob.” Except there wasn’t any such witness - the witness said “some guy” not “Clat Shaw”. It was Stone who decided to put Tommy Lee Jones in the scene.
He made stuff up: If all else failed, Stone just invented a character or a scene to move the story in the direction he wanted to go. The meeting with Colonel X, the military intelligence officer who confirmed everything for Garrison? There was no such meeting with any person like this. The scene where the cops planted Oswald’s fingerpirnts on the murder weapon? There was no witness who’s ever claimed to have seen that happen.
I am just so thrilled that Stone is taking on the 9/11 attacks, the most fruitful event for conspiracy freaks since, well, JFK.
Those poor buildings and people never had a chance, what with Moslems, Dubya, the neo-cons, the FBI, CIA, Israel, Allah, God, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Halliburton (or the oil industry) and now Mother Earth all gunning for them that fateful September morn.
This has always been my biggest gripe with him.
He clearly indicates that Garrison is speculating, but he films it as if the only logical solution is that it happened that way.
I saw this film in 11th Grade and it influenced me. It took me years to deprogram myself.
Now, because of this film, I am more inclined to believe that there was only one shooter and his name was Oswald.
Thanks for all you replies. Though I knew about the film from before I only actually managed to see it in its entirety just recently and found it a riveting compelling movie.
So many unanswered questions guess the whole truth will never be known even when the records are released in 2020 something.
Kwaf.
What I didn’t like was Oliver Stone’s clumsy mix of fact and fiction. This is one of those cases where the director needed to fish or cut bait on which movie he wanted, and just didn’t.
If JFK is about conspiracy theories, why people believe them, and why they’re so popular (which I think he was actually going after in the early scenes), screw the Noble Madman’s Crusade. Go completely all out with the conspiracy theories and get EVERYBODY involved. The paranoid leftists, the dumb rednecks, the out-of-touch executives, the rambling drunks, everybody. Keep the fictional characters front and center so nobody gets any foolish ideas of this being about facts, and have some fun with the dramatizations (personally, I would’ve gotten a huge kick at the poor guy being shot 156 times from 23 different angles). If JFK is a serious look at the assassination and the possibility of a conspiracy, keep the plot focused, make sure you can defend your assertions (even Michael Moore understands this, for crying out loud), tread carefully, and at the end, acknowledge that it’s only a theory and you can’t know for certain. Go half-in-half-out, you infuriate the viewers expecting an honest handling of the facts and confuse the viewers who want a riveting story. Not the way to go.
I’m not worried about Stone putting out lies (which aren’t going to affect anyone who didn’t believe them to begin with). I just wish he could’ve put his personal feelings aside long enough to make the movie as great as it should’ve been.
That said, I honestly didn’t get the “everyone did it” vibe. The movie makes it very clear that the federal government was behind the conspiracy. Not only does Stone completely forget about the Soviets, Cuban sympathizers, et al at the trial, he exonerates the Mafia (remember, Garrison’s advisor only suggested going after them because they were an easier target).