The Movie

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What Stone actually made

I met Kevin Costner once. I had never much rated him in anything else, and I expected somebody smaller. He towered over me and gave me the single most emphatic handshake of my life. I can still feel it. But I will defend him as Jim Garrison to anybody. That long scene where he stands and speculates about what might have happened deserved a nomination. It is not just what is written. It is how he says it.¹

It is in my top five films and not because I agree with it. It is the production. The score, the action, the cutting, and the film stocks. Robert Richardson shot it on thirty-five millimeter, sixteen, eight, Super eight and video, color and black and white, so that real footage and staged footage sit in the same sequence and you cannot always tell which is which. It also gets the language of that world exactly right. Almost nothing tries that, and less succeeds.^{1, 2}

I came out of Black Hawk Down and said that will win for editing, and it did. What I did not know standing there was that the man who cut it, Pietro Scalia, had already won for cutting JFK. Two films a decade apart, the same pair of hands. A great deal of what an audience experiences as the look of a film is actually the cutting, and I had been responding to the same person twice without knowing it.^{1, 3}

Here is the thing almost nobody says about it. It is not a story. It is three hours of information dumps. Dates, names, memoranda, autopsy detail, ballistics. Woven so well into a narrative that you follow it like a thriller and never notice you are being briefed. That is extraordinarily hard to do. Most films that try to teach you something stop being films while they do it. This one never stops moving, and it is teaching the whole time.¹

The film tells you its subject in the first reel and everybody takes it for a history lesson. They show him with his family. The wife, the small children, the household the whole world had already seen a thousand times. Then they cut to him at a university lectern in June 1963 saying this: we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal. Family. Then children. Then mortal. Five months before Dallas.^{1, 4, 5}

Here is the argument the film is actually making, and almost nobody describes it this way. It is not saying a man was murdered. It is saying those shots were the opening of a war, and that the target was never a president. It was a way of living. That is why three hours about ballistics keeps returning to a kitchen. The Garrisons are drawn as the American family, without irony, and what closes in on them is the same thing that closed in on Elm Street. Dallas is the first shot. The dinner table is where the film shows you what was being shot at.¹

There is a scene where Garrison is in a public restroom at an airport and hears voices in the next stall, and understands he is being set up to be caught in something that would end him at home and in Louisiana. It is the whole film in ninety seconds. Everything else in three hours is evidence. That scene is what the evidence is for. Power that can reach into a plaza in Dallas can reach into a lavatory and take a man’s name. It was cut from the release. Most people who have seen this film have never seen the key to it.^{1, 6}

My favorite thing in that whole film is not a scene. It is the theme written for the Garrison family. Everything else in those three hours is argument. Evidence, accusation, a man wrecking his own life over a case. And underneath it there is this quiet domestic music, which is the thing all of it is costing him. That is what I hear in it. The emotional crack running through everything the events of that film are working to destroy.¹

When I lived in Los Angeles I saw John Williams conduct many times. The Hollywood Bowl, Academy events, more nights than I can count. In all those years I never once heard him conduct the music he wrote for that film. It is the score I would most like to have heard him play live, and it is the one I never got.¹

I have It’s a Wonderful Life at number three, sitting just under this one, and I do not think that is a coincidence. Capra’s film is two hours arguing that an ordinary American life in an ordinary American town is the most valuable thing there is. Stone’s film is three hours saying that exact thing came under attack on a Friday in November 1963 and has been under attack since. One of them shows you what is worth protecting. The other shows you the moment it stopped being safe. You cannot really have the first without defending it.¹

Who they played

Here is the thing I owe you after praising that film for three chapters. Some of the people in it existed exactly as shown, some existed and were changed, and some were made up out of several people and given a name. The film does not tell you which is which, and that is the fairest criticism anybody makes of it. So let me go through them, because the real ones are stranger than the invented ones.⁷

The twitching pilot in the bad wig is the one everybody remembers, and people assume he was exaggerated for the screen. He was not. The real man had lost every hair on his body to a medical condition, wore a mohair wig that did not fit, and drew his eyebrows on. He had flown for a major airline until they fired him. He kept mice in his apartment for cancer research. Joe Pesci was, if anything, dialing him down.⁸

The businessman is a real man, tried and acquitted, and the film puts him at the center of a murder conspiracy anyway. He had been a decorated Army major in the war. He built the city’s international trade center. A jury took under an hour to clear him and he died five years later with the accusation still attached. Whatever you think of the film, a named and acquitted man was made into the villain of a blockbuster, and he had no way to answer.⁹

The young man who tells the whole plot from a prison cell, played by Kevin Bacon, is not a person. He is invented, built mostly on the state’s actual witness with a great deal added. The real witness was an insurance salesman from Baton Rouge. He was not a prostitute, he was not in prison, and he only produced that story after he had been hypnotized and given sodium pentothal. The film gave the shakiest evidence in the case its most convincing performance.^{10, 11}

The man on the bench in Washington who explains the whole machine, played by Donald Sutherland, is called X and is never named. He is a real person, a retired Air Force colonel who had run military support for the intelligence agencies, and I have quoted him at length elsewhere in this book. The scene is invented. The man is not. What he said on his own account, in his own name, is on the record and is stranger than the scene.¹²

Two small parts are the actual origin of the case. Jack Lemmon plays the man who worked around a New Orleans detective agency and told police, while drinking in 1963, that the pilot was involved. Walter Matthau plays the United States senator who told Garrison on a flight that he did not believe the Warren Report. Two of the great American comic actors, cast as the drunk and the senator who between them started the only prosecution in this case.^{11, 10}

The investigators in Garrison’s office are largely composites, several real staff folded into one character with a made-up name. That is a normal screenwriting solution to a crowded true story and I do not object to it in principle. It costs something here, though. When a composite doubts the boss on screen, the audience receives it as a real man’s real doubt, and there is no real man to check. Invented people cannot be fact-checked, which is exactly why they are convenient.¹³

Now the detail I love most in the whole production. The real Jim Garrison, still alive, appears in the film. He is not playing himself. Costner is playing him. Garrison is cast as Earl Warren, the chief justice whose report he spent his career attacking, and he plays him straight, in a courtroom, opposite the actor playing him. He died the year after it came out. Nobody has ever made a stranger casting decision and nobody has needed to.¹⁴

The other Oswald episode

Nine months after Oliver Stone’s film, an American network aired a two-part episode of a science fiction series in which the hero travels through time and lands inside the body of Lee Harvey Oswald. It follows him from the Marines through Russia to the sixth floor. On its face that is the least serious treatment of this subject ever broadcast. It is, in one specific respect, the best sourced piece of Oswald drama anybody has ever made.¹⁵

The creator of that series had been a United States Marine. He served in the same air control squadron as Oswald, and he has said he nearly came to blows with him in a supply shed over the fact that the man was sitting there reading a Soviet newspaper. He put that moment in the episode, and he wrote himself into the scene under his own name, playing the sergeant. A network drama about Oswald, written by somebody who had stood in a room and argued with him.¹⁶

†And he made it as an answer. His position, from having known the man, was that Oswald was exactly what he appeared to be, and that turning him into somebody’s instrument was the part that was not true. So 1992 gave you two accounts of the same person, one from a director working from documents and one from a writer working from memory, and they contradict each other completely. Neither is evidence. It is worth knowing that the memory came down on the dull side.^{17, 18}

The director I never spoke to

I have never spoken to Oliver Stone. I studied that screenplay for years. As a piece of structure it is extraordinary, the way it stacks one idea on the next until you cannot put it down. I saw him once, at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, where I lived for a long time. I did not go over. I let him have his lunch and I had mine. The honest reason is that I did not know what I would have asked him.¹

I have thought about that since, and I think it is what happens in most extreme moments of meeting somebody you do not know. You are not composing a question. You are just inside the moment, watching it happen to you. If I had said anything it would not have been about the case at all. I would have thanked him for the book he published documenting that screenplay, annotated, with the sources laid out beside the scenes.¹⁹

And I should be honest that this is out of character for me. I am not a book person. I am not a screenplay person. I do not read annotated shooting scripts for pleasure and I never have. That one absorbed me completely, and it was not the subject that did it. It was watching what one man could do with ideas, and how much craftsmanship it takes to make three hours of documents feel like a thriller.¹⁹

There is a whole book to be written about Oliver Stone’s JFK, because a lot of what it is actually saying went past people. Not whether it is accurate. That argument is settled and it loses. What it does with structure. I spent the better part of a decade in the film industry, which mostly taught me how rarely anything lands at all. That one landed hard enough to change a law. It is worth understanding how.^{20, 21}

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

21 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

1. personal, the narrator's own account
2. Robert Richardson, ASC, interviews on the photography of JFK, 1992
3. Academy Awards, Best Film Editing, 1992 (Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia) and 2002 (Pietro Scalia)
4. John F. Kennedy, commencement address at American University, Washington DC, 10 June 1963 ('A Strategy of Peace')
5. JFK, 1991, theatrical cut, opening sequence
6. JFK: The Director's Cut, 1993, 205 minutes, restored material absent from the 188-minute 1991 theatrical release
7. JFK, Warner Bros., 1991, screenplay by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar
8. HSCA final report 1979, volume IX, on David Ferrie
9. trial record, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, 1969
10. HSCA final report 1979, volume X
11. JFK, Warner Bros., 1991
12. L. Fletcher Prouty, published interviews and writings
13. JFK, Warner Bros., 1991, screenplay credits and character notes
14. JFK, Warner Bros., 1991, cast credits
15. Quantum Leap, Lee Harvey Oswald, parts one and two, broadcast 22 September 1992
16. Donald P. Bellisario, published interviews on the making of the episode
17. Donald P. Bellisario, published interviews
18. the author's assessment
19. personal, the author's own account
20. personal
21. JFK Records Act of 1992, passed the year after the film's release