JFK (movie)

JFK is a film, first released in Canada and the United States on December 20, 1991, which purports to tell the history of the President of the United States John F. Kennedy's assassination.

The film follows the 1967 to 1969 investigation led by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) and interweaves flashbacks of the theories behind the assassination with actual assassination movie films footage, such as the Zapruder film.

JFK stars Kevin Costner, Ron Rifkin, Donald Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Sissy Spacek, Joe Pesci, John Candy, Brian Doyle-Murray, Gary Grubbs, Wayne Knight, Vincent D'Onofrio, 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.

Ironically, 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, non-speaking role.

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

One of the characters in the movie, "General X," (played by Sutherland) was loosely based on L. Fletcher Prouty's theories and actual military experience. (However, at the time of the assassination Prouty had no connection to Presidential security as is implied in the film). Prouty was a former Colonel in the Air Force and military liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon who wrote the 1975, (1992 republished) book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, was also used as an advisor for the movie.

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

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

In JFK, as in what actually occurred, Garrison indicted for trial a New Orleans international businessman Clay Shaw for being involved in the 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 involved behind the assassination, but that there was not enough evidence presented at trial to link Shaw to the conspiracy, this is mostly based on pro-Garrison books. Other sources have the juries giving different views on the idea of a conspiracy.

The film suggests that President Kennedy was killed by a group opposed to Kennedy's policies, especially his reluctance to invade Cuba as the CIA had planned to overthrow Communist Fidel Castro since 1959, and Kennedy's plan to withdraw American armed forces from the Vietnam War (the President had preliminarily approved a withdrawal of 1,000 men to be completed by the end of 1963). Members of the CIA, Mafia, the military-industrial complex, Secret Service, FBI, and Kennedy's vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson are also implicated as co-conspirators with motives responsible 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 and inaccuracies

Even while JFK was still being filmed, the media generated considerable controversy when it speculated as to the film's accuracy and Stone's motives in making the film; JFK also encouraged general discussion about the Kennedy assassination. Some people accepted Stone's theories, at least in part, while others have argued Stone exceeded the limits of fictional license and was guilty of deliberate distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods.

The film is also widely regarded as conspiracy theory. Some of Garrison/Costner's allegations are 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.

Other things are not clearly explained in the movie, particularly Lee Harvey Oswald's wandering political loyalties--at various times in the film he is seen associating with anti-communists, such as anti-Castro Cuban exiles in America and white Russians, and at other times it is suggested he had communist sympathies, such as with pro-Castro communists and the Soviet Union.

The film's lengthy narrative and vast plot create some self-contradiction. For instance, at one point in the film Garrison/Costner mentions that Oswald, were he the lone gunman, would have had only 5.6 seconds to fire three rounds from his bolt-action carbine (pausing to reload between each shot) and would have had to hit a small moving target a long distance away, in spite of the unreliability of his weapon, his own reputedly poor marksmanship, and a tree partially obstructing his shot. Garrison/Costner cites a test the FBI conducted, in which one of their sharpshooters was unable to perform this feat, as evidence for the unlikelihood of this scenario. However, near the end of the film, during the courtroom trial of Clay Shaw, Garrison/Costner discusses the so-called "magic bullet" theory--that the third bullet followed a very strange flight path to inflict seven varying wounds on John F. Kennedy and John Connally, who sat in the car's passenger seat, in front of Kennedy. Here he dismisses out-of-hand an FBI ballistics test showing that this scenario might have occurred, simply because the test was conducted by the FBI.

The general public's reactions, outcries, and contacting their Congressional representatives to the film led directly to the formation of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board in 1992. The bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The ARRB worked until 1998 interviewing witnesses (some of whom had never been interviewed before), the U.S. government purchasing the Zapruder film, and making assassination-related still classified documents that were still being withheld from public scrutiny available for the public (thousands of pages are still being withheld classified as of 2004). By ARRB law, all assassination related documents that have not been destroyed will be made public by 2017.

In his 1993 miniseries, Wild Palms - set in 2007 - Stone had a small cameo 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 the film was right.