JFK (film)

When Stone set out to write the screenplay, he asked Sklar (who also edited Marrs' book) to co-write it with him and distill the Garrison and Marrs books and Rusconi's research into a script that would resemble what he called "a great detective movie."[12] Stone told Sklar his vision of the film:

I see the models as Z and Rashomon, I see the event in Dealey Plaza taking place in the first reel, and again in the eighth reel, and again later, and each time we're going to see it differently and with more illumination.[2]

Although he did employ ideas from Rashomon, his principal model for JFK was Z:

Somehow I had the impression that in Z you had the showing of the crime and then the re-showing of the crime throughout the picture until it was seen another way. That was the idea of JFK – that was the essence of it: basically, that's why I called it JFK. Not J dot F dot K dot. JFK. It was a code, like Z was a code, for he lives, American-style. As it was written it became more fascinating: it evolved into four DNA threads.[13]

Stone broke the film's structure down into four stories: Garrison investigating the New Orleans connection to the assassination; the research that revealed what Stone calls, "Oswald legend: who he was and how to try to inculcate that"; the recreation of the assassination at Dealey Plaza; and the information that the character of "X" imparts on Garrison, which Stone saw as the "means by which we were able to move between New Orleans, local, into the wider story of Dealey Plaza."[14] Sklar worked on the Garrison side of the story while Stone added the Oswald story, the events at Dealey Plaza and the "Mr. X" character.[12] Sklar spent a year researching and writing a 550-page triple-spaced screenplay and then Stone rewrote it and condensed it closer to normal screenplay length. Stone and Sklar used composite characters, most notably the "Mr. X" character played by Donald Sutherland. This was a technique that would be criticized in the press.[15] He was a mix of Richard Case Nagell and retired Air Force colonel Fletcher Prouty, another adviser for the film and who was a military liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon. Meeting Prouty was, for Stone, "one of the most extraordinary afternoons I've ever spent. Pretty much like in the movie, he just started to talk."[16] According to Stone,

I feel this was in the spirit of the truth because Garrison also met a deep throat type named Richard Case Nagell, who claimed to be a CIA agent and made Jim aware of a much larger scenario than the microcosm of New Orleans.[17]

The screenplay's early drafts suggested a four and a half-hour film with a potential budget of $40 million – double what Stone had agreed to with Warner Bros.[18] The director knew film mogul Arnon Milchan and met with him to help finance the film. Milchan was eager to work on the project and launch his new company, Regency Enterprises, with a high profile film like JFK.[19] Milchan made a deal with Warner Bros. to put up the money for the film. Stone managed to pare down his initial revision, a 190-page draft, to a 156-page shooting script.[20]

There were many advisers for the film, including Gerald Hemming, a former Marine who claimed involvement in various CIA activities, and Robert Groden, a self-proclaimed photographic expert and longtime JFK assassination researcher and author.[21]

Stone later published JFK: The Documented Screenplay, a heavily annotated version of the screenplay in which he cites sources for nearly every claim made in the film (ISBN 1557831270).

Trying to cast the role of Garrison, Stone sent copies of the script to Costner, Mel Gibson, and Harrison Ford. Initially, Costner turned Stone down. However, the actor's agent, Michael Ovitz, was a big fan of the project and helped Stone convince the actor to take the role.[22] Before accepting the role, Costner conducted extensive research on Garrison, including meeting the man and his enemies. Two months after finally signing on to play Garrison in January 1991, his film Dances with Wolves won seven Academy Awards and so his presence greatly enhanced JFK's bankability in the studio's eyes.[23]

Tommy Lee Jones was originally considered for another role that was ultimately cut from the film and Stone then decided to cast him as Shaw.[24] In preparation for the film, Jones interviewed Garrison on three different occasions and talked to others who had worked with Shaw and knew him.[25]

Stone originally wanted James Woods to play David Ferrie, but Woods wanted to play Garrison. Stone also approached Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich, who both turned down the role.[26]

Stone considered Marlon Brando for the role of Mr. X.[27]

According to Gary Oldman, very little was written about Oswald in the script. Stone gave him several plane tickets, a list of contacts, and told him to do his own research.[28] Oldman met with Oswald's wife, Marina, and her two daughters to prepare for the role.[29] Beata Poźniak studied 26 volumes of the Warren Report and spent time living with Marina Oswald. Since the script contained few lines for the Oswalds, Poźniak interviewed acquaintances of the Oswalds in order to improvise her scenes with Gary Oldman.

Many actors were willing to waive their normal fees because of the nature of the project and to lend their support.[26] Martin Sheen provided the opening narration. Jim Garrison played Chief Justice Earl Warren, during the scene in which he questions Jack Ruby in a Dallas jail and in a TV appearance. Assassination witness Beverly Oliver, who claims to be the "Babushka Lady" seen in the Zapruder film, also appeared in a cameo in Ruby's club. Sean Stone, Oliver Stone's son, plays Garrison's oldest son Jasper. Perry Russo, one of the sources for the fictional character Willie O'Keefe, appeared in a cameo as an angry bar patron who says Oswald should get a medal for shooting Kennedy.

The story revolves around Costner's Jim Garrison, with a large cast of well-known actors in supporting roles. Stone was inspired by the casting model of the documentary epic The Longest Day, which he had admired as a child: "It was realistic, but it had a lot of stars ... the supporting cast provides a map of the American psyche: familiar, comfortable faces that walk you through a winding path in the dark woods."[23]

Cinematographer Robert Richardson was a week and a half into shooting City of Hope for John Sayles when he got word that Stone was thinking about making JFK. By the time principal photography wrapped on City of Hope, Richardson was ready to make Stone's film. To prepare, Richardson read up on various JFK assassination books starting with On the Trail of the Assassins and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.[30]

The original idea was to film the opening sequence in 1.33:1 aspect ratio in order to simulate the TV screens that were available at the time of the assassination, then transition to 1.85:1 when Garrison began his investigation, and finally switch to 2.35:1 for scenes occurring in 1968 and later. However, because of time constraints and logistics, Richardson was forced to abandon this approach.[30]

Stone wanted to recreate the Kennedy assassination in Dealey Plaza. His producers had to pay the Dallas City Council a substantial amount of money to hire police to reroute traffic and close streets for three weeks.[31] He only had ten days to shoot all of the footage he needed and so he used seven cameras (two 35 mm and five 16 mm) and 14 film stocks.[30] Getting permission to shoot in the Texas School Book Depository was more difficult. They had to pay $50,000 to put someone in the window from which Oswald was supposed to have shot Kennedy.[31] They were allowed to film in that location only between certain hours with only five people on the floor at one time: the camera crew, an actor and Stone. Co-producer Clayton Townsend has said that the hardest part was getting the permission to restore the building to the way it looked back in 1963. It took five months of negotiation.[31]

The production spent $4 million to restore Dealey Plaza to 1963 conditions.[32] Stone utilized a variety of film stocks. Richardson said, "It depends whether you want to shoot in 35 or 16 or Super 8. In many cases the lighting has to be different."[33] For certain shots in the film, Stone employed multiple camera crews shooting at once, using five cameras at the same time in different formats. Richardson said of Stone's style of direction, "Oliver disdains convention, he tries to force you into things that are not classic. There's this constant need to stretch."[30] This forced the cinematographer to use lighting in diverse positions and rely very little on classic lighting modes. Shooting began on April 15, 1991 and ended on July 31, lasting 78 days with filming finished four-and-a-half months before the release date.[34]

JFK marked a fundamental change in the way that Stone constructed his films: a subjective lateral presentation of the plot, with the editing's rhythm carrying the story.[35] Stone brought in Hank Corwin, an editor of commercials, to help edit the film. Stone chose him because his "chaotic mind" was "totally alien to the film form."[35] "But he had not developed the long form yet. And so a lot of his cuts were very chaotic."[35] Stone employed extensive use of flashbacks within flashbacks for a specific effect. He said in an interview,

I wanted to do the film on two or three levels – sound and picture would take us back, and we'd go from one flashback to another, and then that flashback would go inside another flashback ... I wanted multiple layers because reading the Warren Commission Report is like drowning.[9]

Because of being shot on various sized film stocks, conventional 35mm film editing was impossible. Although digital editing was in nascent form, LightWorks and AVID were still not available as editing systems when editing began on JFK. For that reason, all the footage was transferred to 3/4" videotape and edited on videotape. The 35mm film negative, along with the other sized film stocks were then conformed to match the videotape edit.

Years after its release, Stone said of the film that it "was the beginning of a new era for me in terms of film making because it's not just about a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. It's also about the way we look at our recent history ... It shifts from black and white to color, and then back again, and views people from offbeat angles."[36]

Because of his enormous commitment to Steven Spielberg's Hook, which opened the same month as JFK, composer John Williams did not have time to compose a conventional score for the entire film. Instead he composed and conducted six musical sequences in full for JFK before he saw the film in its entirety.[37] Soon after recording this music, he traveled to New Orleans where Stone was still shooting the film and saw approximately an hour's worth of edited footage and dailies. Williams remembers, "I thought his handling of Lee Harvey Oswald was particularly strong, and I understood some of the atmosphere of the film – the sordid elements, the underside of New Orleans."[37] Stone and his team then actually cut the film to fit Williams' music after the composer had scored and recorded musical cues in addition to the six he had done prior to seeing the film. For the motorcade sequence, Williams described the score he composed as "strongly kinetic music, music of interlocking rhythmic disciplines."[37] The composer remembered the moment he learned of Kennedy's assassination and it stuck with him for years. This was a significant factor in his deciding to work on the film. Williams said, "This is a very resonant subject for people of my generation, and that's why I welcomed the opportunity to participate in this film."[37]

External video
"JFK and its Depiction of History", hosted by the American University School of Communication, January 22, 1992, C-SPAN

The film has been well received by both cinema critics and regular audiences. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 84% based on 64 reviews, with an average rating of 7.70/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "As history, Oliver Stone's JFK is dubious, but as filmmaking it's electric, cramming a ton of information and excitement into its three-hour runtime and making great use of its outstanding cast."[38] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average of 72 out of 100 based on 29 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[39] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[40]

The film's production and release were subject to intense scrutiny and criticism. A few weeks after shooting had begun, on May 14, 1991, Jon Margolis wrote in the Chicago Tribune that JFK was "an insult to the intelligence."[41] Five days later, The Washington Post ran a scathing article by national security correspondent George Lardner titled, "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland" that used the first draft of the JFK screenplay to blast it for "the absurdities and palpable untruths in Garrison's book and Stone's rendition of it."[42] The article pointed out that Garrison lost his case against Clay Shaw and that he inflated his case by trying to use Shaw's homosexual relationships to prove guilt by association.[42] Stone responded to Lardner's article by hiring a public relations firm that specialized in political issues. Other critical articles soon followed. Anthony Lewis in The New York Times stated that the film "tells us that our government cannot be trusted to give an honest account of a Presidential assassination."[41] Washington Post columnist George Will called Stone "a man of technical skill, scant education and negligible conscience."[41]

Time ran its own critique of the film-in-progress on June 10, 1991 and alleged that Stone was trying to suppress a rival JFK assassination film based on Don DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra. Stone rebutted these claims in a letter to the magazine.[43]

Richard Corliss, Time's film critic, wrote:

Whatever one's suspicions about its use or abuse of the evidence, JFK is a knockout. Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer's complacency. Stone's picture is, in both meanings of the word, sensational: it's tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex.[44]

The filmmaker ended up splitting his time between making his film, responding to criticism, and conducting a publicity campaign of his own that saw him "omnipresent, from CBS Evening News, to Oprah."[35] However, the Lardner Post piece stung the most because Lardner had stolen a copy of the script. Stone recalls, "He had the first draft, and I went through probably six or seven drafts."[43]

Upon theatrical release, it polarized critics. The New York Times ran an article by Bernard Weinraub entitled, "Hollywood Wonders If Warner Brothers let JFK Go Too Far." The article called for intervention by the studio: "At what point does a studio exercise its leverage and blunt the highly charged message of a film maker like Oliver Stone?"[41] The newspaper also ran a review of the film by Vincent Canby who wrote, "Mr. Stone's hyperbolic style of film making is familiar: lots of short, often hysterical scenes tumbling one after another, backed by a soundtrack that is layered, strudel-like, with noises, dialogue, music, more noises, more dialogue."[45] Pat Dowell, film critic for The Washingtonian, had her 34-word capsule review for the January issue rejected by her editor John Limpert on the grounds that he did not want the magazine to give a positive review to a film he felt was "preposterous."[41] Dowell resigned in protest.[41]

The Miami Herald said about the controversy in its review, "the focus on the trivialities of personality conveniently prevents us from having to confront the tough questions [Stone's] film raises."[46] However, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two thumbs up on their television show.[47] Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Siskel called the film "thoroughly compelling" and suggested that while it contained "gross alterations of fact," Stone had "the right to speculate on American history."[48] Ebert praised the film in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, saying,

The achievement of the film is not that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination, because it does not, or even that it vindicates Garrison, who is seen here as a man often whistling in the dark. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger which ever since 1963 has been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche.[49]

Rita Kempley in The Washington Post wrote,

Quoting everyone from Shakespeare to Hitler to bolster their arguments, Stone and Sklar present a gripping alternative to the Warren Commission's conclusion. A marvelously paranoid thriller featuring a closetful of spies, moles, pro-commies and Cuban freedom-fighters, the whole thing might have been thought up by Robert Ludlum.[50]

On Christmas Day, the Los Angeles Times ran a critical article entitled "Suppression of the Facts Grants Stone a Broad Brush."[51] New York Newsday followed suit the next day with two articles – "The Blurred Vision of JFK" and "The Many Theories of a Jolly Green Giant." A few days later, the Chicago Sun-Times followed suit with "Stone's Film Trashes Facts, Dishonors J.F.K." Jack Valenti, then president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, denounced Stone's film in a seven-page statement. He wrote: "In much the same way, young German boys and girls in 1941 were mesmerized by Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, in which Adolf Hitler was depicted as a newborn God. Both JFK and Triumph of the Will are equally a propaganda masterpiece and equally a hoax. Mr. Stone and Leni Riefenstahl have another genetic linkage: neither of them carried a disclaimer on their film that its contents were mostly pure fiction."[52] Stone recalls in an interview, "I can't even remember all the threats, there were so many of them."[51]

TIME magazine ranked it the fourth best film of 1991,[53] while also including it in "Top 10 Historically Misleading Films" in 2011.[54]

Roger Ebert went on to name Stone's film as the year's best and one of the top ten films of the decade[55][56] as well as one of The Great Movies.[57] Gene Siskel ranked it the seventh best film of the year.[58] The Sydney Morning Herald named JFK as the best film of 1991.[59] Entertainment Weekly ranked it the 5th Most Controversial Movie Ever.[60]

Ebert's future colleague Richard Roeper was less complimentary: "One can admire Stone's filmmaking skills and the performances here while denouncing the utter crapola presented as 'evidence' of a conspiracy to murder."[61] Roeper applauded the film's "dazzling array of filmmaking techniques and a stellar roster of actors" but criticized Stone's narrative: "As a work of fantastical fiction, JFK is an interesting if overblown vision of a parallel universe. As a dramatic interpretation of events, it's journalistically bankrupt nonsense."[61]

Harry Connick Sr., the New Orleans district attorney who defeated Garrison in 1973, criticized Stone's view of the assassination: "Stone was either unaware of the details and particulars of the Clay Shaw investigation and trial or, if he was aware, that didn't get in his way of what he perceived to be the way the case should have been."[62] In his book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a history of the assassination published 16 years after the film's release, Vincent Bugliosi devoted an entire chapter to Garrison's prosecution of Shaw and Stone's subsequent film.[63] Bugliosi lists thirty-two separate "lies and fabrications"[64] in Stone's film and describes the film as "one continuous lie in which Stone couldn't find any level of deception and invention beyond which he was unwilling to go."[65] David R. Wrone stated that "80 percent of the film is in factual error" and rejected the premise of a conspiracy involving the CIA and the so-called military-industrial complex as "irrational."[66] Warren Commission investigator David Belin called the film "a big lie that would make Adolf Hitler proud".[67] Former Indiana Representative Floyd Fithian, who had served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations said the film had manipulated the past.[68]

JFK was released in theaters on December 20, 1991. In its first week of release, JFK tied with Beauty and the Beast for fifth place in the U.S. box office and its critics began to say it was a flop.[51] Warner Brothers executives argued that this was at least partly because the film's long running time meant it had had fewer screenings than other films.[51] Box-office picked up momentum, however, in part due to a $15 million marketing campaign from the studio.[35] By the first week in January 1992, it had grossed over $50 million worldwide, eventually earning over $200 million worldwide and $70 million in the United States during its initial run.[69]

Garrison's estate subsequently sued Warner Bros. for a share of the film's profits, alleging fraud perpetrated through a book-keeping practice known as "Hollywood accounting."[70] The lawsuit contended that JFK made in excess of $150 million worldwide but the studio claimed that, under its "net profits" accounting formula, the film earned no money, and that Garrison's estate did not receive any of the more than $1 million net profits income he was due.[70]

Upon winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Director – Motion Picture, Stone said in his acceptance speech: A terrible lie was told to us 28 years ago. I hope that this film can be the first step in righting that wrong.[78]

Entertainment Weekly ranked JFK as one of the 25 "Powerful Political Thrillers".[79] In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the ninth best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership.[80]

• Riordan, James (September 1996) Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. New York: Aurum Press. ISBN 1-85410-444-6
• Salewicz, Chris (February 1998) Oliver Stone: Close Up: The Making of His Movies. Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 0-7528-1820-1
• Stone, Oliver (February 2000) JFK: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books. ISBN 1-55783-127-0

• Mark C. Carnes (Fall 1996). "Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies". Cineaste.
• Gary Crowdus (May 1992). "Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview with Oliver Stone". Cineaste.
• Eric Hamburg (September 2002). JFK, Nixon, Oliver Stone and Me: An Idealist's Journey from Capitol Hill to Hollywood Hell. PublicAffairs. ISBN 1-58648-029-4.
• Robert Brent Toplin (1996). History by Hollywood "JFK: Fact, Fiction, and Supposition," pp. 45–78. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06536-0