Oliver Stone: Who Killed J.F.K.?

J.F.K. blown away,

What else do I have to say?

— Billy Joel,

We Didn’t Start the Fire

On Nov. 22, 1963, somebody blasted the skull of America open. In a few seconds of rifle fire in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, a time warp gaped. Slapped out of a pretty postwar reverie, we screamed bloody murder.

Oliver Stone screams bloody murder for a living. In his screenplays for Midnight Express and Scarface, he drew nightscapes of drug paranoia and police brutality. As writer-director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, the Vietnam vet exorcised his demons by portraying the war as a rite of passage — to fratricide. In Talk Radio he suggested that the penalty for a showman’s reckless truth telling was to be killed by his audience. Jim Morrison, in The Doors, pays a similar fee for fame; the poet’s capricious muse drives him to drugs, madness, death. Oddly enough, Stone’s tortured artistic mission — dispensing downers to a movie public famously addicted to escapism — has its upside. He pours so much dramatic juice into the hemlock blender that folks go to his films, and official Hollywood has rewarded Stone with three Oscars.

This past was prologue to his most outsize challenge: explaining the Kennedy assassination to his own satisfaction. Or anyone else’s. JFK, the electrifying melodrama opening nationwide this week, attracted brickbats months ago when a long article in the Washington Post cataloged historical “errors and absurdities” in Stone and Zachary Sklar’s screenplay. Assassination scholars ragged Stone for his naivete, his use of discredited testimony, his reliance on suspect “experts.” A TIME critic said that if Stone’s film “turns out to distort history, he may wind up doing more harm than homage to the memory of the fallen President.” Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist, has seen the film and believes it does all that and worse. He calls JFK “paranoid and fantastic,” full of “wild assertions” and propagating an idea that, “if widely accepted, would be contemptuous of the very constitutional government Mr. Stone’s film purports to uphold.”

Anybody want to see this movie? Warner Bros. hopes so; the studio (whose parent company also owns TIME) helped foot JFK’s $40 million tab. It is also counting on Kevin Costner, America’s No. 1 homegrown movie star, to lure audiences to what is at heart a high-voltage civics quiz. Though he doesn’t necessarily agree with every notion floated in the film, Costner is happy to play front man for Stone. “Oliver’s a patriot,” he says. “And I believe with him that the impact of this movie will be liberating. Any part of the truth — any discussion of what could be the truth — can only make us freer.”

But Costner’s coiled heroic presence is one more source of controversy, for the liberal icon of Dances with Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is playing Jim Garrison, who as New Orleans district attorney in the late ’60s prosecuted the only Kennedy assassination case that ever went to trial. And, quickly, out the window. The jury found the defendant, businessman Clay Shaw, not guilty in less time than last week’s West Palm Beach jurors took to exonerate William Kennedy Smith. For the past decade, Garrison (who appears in JFK as Chief Justice Earl Warren) has been part of America’s conspiracy industry — saint to some, buffoon to others.

In Stone’s mind, and in Costner’s presence, the Garrison of JFK is a hero: pure and simple. Upon learning that Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) had spent part of the summer in New Orleans, Garrison questions people who may have known the accused assailant: a ditsy homosexual named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), a hooker named Willie O’Keefe (Kevin Bacon), a hipster lawyer (John Candy), an alcoholic private eye (Jack Lemmon) — a lower-depths cast whose connections seem to hint at a dark secret. Perhaps even a conspiracy? Who dares call it treason?

The D.A. does. A dogged sleuth for the truth, Garrison gets tips from “X,” a disaffected military man (Donald Sutherland), help from his staff (Michael Rooker, Jay O. Sanders, Laurie Metcalf) and static from his wife (Sissy Spacek). By the time he has brought charges against the elegant debauchee Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), the movie’s Garrison is convinced of the breadth and enormity of this “secret murder at the heart of the American dream.”

So, you want to know, who killed the President and connived in the cover-up? Everybody! High officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas constabulary, all three armed services, Big Business and the White House. Everybody done it — everybody but Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, Oswald was probably a double agent during his “defection” to the U.S.S.R., where he may have provided information that helped the Soviets gun down Francis Gary Powers’ spy plane. He may also have been in cahoots with anti-Castro Cubans. But he didn’t shoot J.F.K.; he didn’t even shoot Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. The one man charged with the Kennedy assassination was precisely what he said he was: “a patsy.”

Believe who will. Scoff who chooses. But save your outrage for matters of greater moment than even a major motion picture. It’s a tribute to Stone’s contentious showmanship that folks are het up about JFK, though it is neither the first nor the last movie assault on the Warren Commission Report. The 1973 film Executive Action hypothesized that leaders of the military-industrial complex conspired to kill J.F.K. A scheme even more toxic percolated through the 1979 movie Winter Kills, based on Richard Condon’s novel: that a President very like Jack Kennedy could be assassinated by his own father. In February comes Ruby, from a Stephen Davis play about the man who really did shoot Oswald. And in April, Libra, based on Don DeLillo’s fantasia about Oswald, his mother and the CIA, begins filming under John Malkovich’s direction. Earlier this year, Libra’s producers claimed that Stone had used his clout to torpedo their production, a charge Stone heatedly denies.

Stone should have shown more confidence in his own film. 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.

Stone assembles and presents his material like a brilliant, eccentric professor, dazzling you with free-form insights even as he’s poking you — oops! — in the eye with his pointer. He uses a canny mix of documentary footage (including the Zapruder film) and re-enactments in 8-mm, 16-mm and 35- mm black-and-white and color to buttress, refute or footnote testimony. “We didn’t worry about everything not fitting,” says co-film editor Joe Hutshing. “The idea was to create a tapestry, with various textures, grain sizes and colors.”

The film also employs clever, subtle sound effects. When, during the first interrogation of Clay Shaw, Garrison springs Willie O’Keefe’s name, we hear a dingdong! In story terms, it is a doorbell that cues the prostitute’s . appearance at Shaw’s front door (with a subtextual aural gag: the prancing stud as Avon lady). But it also alerts the viewer that, after much digging, Garrison has come close to pay dirt. “The sound has a subliminal effect,” Hutshing says. “It’s like perfume — it brings you back to that period.”

In his earlier films, Stone could go bats, with prowling cameras and screaming actors; but JFK is, for all its bravura, compact and controlled. Perhaps no Hollywood director has made a film with so many speaking parts or data; JFK is a crash briefing with great visual aids. If David Ferrie mentions a thunderstorm, Stone will lock it in your mind with a quick image of lightning splitting the Texas sky. Throughout, Stone juggles fact and supposition with such dervish dexterity that even when he drops a ball, he never loses his intense poise.

As storyteller, Stone is catering a buffet banquet of conspiracy theories; you can gorge on them or just graze. He tells his audience what every entertainer says: entertain this notion. Suspend disbelief. Let’s pretend. What if? Superficially, movies are a persuasive medium because they exist in the present tense, not the conditional. Each picture is happening before our eyes; each Stone film fantasy is, for the moment it is on the screen, the moviegoer’s reality.

But because films are fictions — because even a naive viewer knows Kevin Costner is an actor playing a moviemaker’s interpretation of a man named Jim Garrison — the events they portray need not be factual, or even probable; they must only be plausible. Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d’etat into fodder for renewed debate. The movie recognizes that history is not only what we are told to believe; often it is gossip that becomes gospel.

Does Stone see himself as a political director? “Not at all,” he says. “I am trying to be a dramatist.” And a dramatist looks for a pattern. Coincidences, random motives and the privately festering grudges of a lone nut may be the small sad facts behind the Kennedy assassination, but they satisfy no one’s demands — least of all Stone’s — for the coherence of myth. The director needs a big-picture view to make his big picture work. And a hero like the movie’s Garrison needs a martyr like the movie’s Kennedy. The President must be restored to Camelot; the philanderer of revisionist history must be revised again, shown in home movies as a loving husband, a doting dad. More important, he must be a crusader who not only is determined to achieve his noble aims but also is aware of mortal danger from his enemies. If he was killed by Oswald alone, then Kennedy was no martyr — just the victim of really rotten luck.

Stone argues that Kennedy was so progressive, so “soft on communism” (and on Castro) and so popular that the right-wing establishment was driven to kill him. But this is a romantic, perhaps fantasy, J.F.K.; he can as easily be seen as a cold warrior with star quality. He believed in the domino theory of communism storming across Asia; he exercised superpower machismo by eyeballing the Soviet Union over its Cuban missiles until Khrushchev blinked. He took flak from liberals for appointing segregationist Southerners as judges in federal courts. Martin Luther King Jr., not Kennedy, was the moral leader of the civil rights movement — rights confirmed only in Lyndon Johnson’s tenure.

Stone’s Garrison is semifictional as well, and open to charges of distortion. As played with understated power by Costner, in his specs and rumpled jacket, Garrison is the ordinary decent man whose search for truth makes him extraordinary in a time of national fear and cowardice. Borrowing the quest plot from Hamlet (or Star Wars), JFK sends its hero out to avenge the murder of his spiritual father, Jack Kennedy. “This is not a biography of Jim Garrison,” Costner says. “He was just the flagpole Oliver tied the events around. Was he right? I’m not sure. I tried to play him without judging him. That’s somebody else’s job. My job was to validate him as a character. It’s up to the moviegoer to decide whether what he says is valid.”

What wasn’t valid, some supporters of conspiracy scenarios charge, was the real Garrison’s tactics. In mythologizing the D.A., JFK ignores allegations that he bullied witnesses and suppressed a polygraph test. These moral zits would deface the hero’s image — and Stone’s too, since he likely sees himself as a modern movie Garrison, a brave man vilified for unearthing the sordid, cleansing truth. If Stone wants to raise the Garrison flagpole and sit on it, waving elaborate theories as if they were the Stars and Stripes, fine. But he should make his method clear to the audience. JFK needs to carry the warning: This is a drama based on fact and conjecture.

Under its breath, the movie says as much. It prefixes some scenes with a “For all we know, it could have been . . .” or a “Let’s just for a moment speculate, shall we?” Stone embraces contradictions, or maybe he just trucks over them. What Garrison tells his staff, Stone tells his viewers: “Now we’re through the looking glass here, people. White is black, and black is white.” But the film’s true epigraph might be the counsel that “X” gives Garrison: “Don’t take my word. Do your own work — your own thinkin’.”

“Nobody is claiming that the movie is the truth,” says Sklar, the editor of Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. “But Oliver wanted to find out as much as he could about the assassination and get close to the full truth, which he, like many people, thinks has never been told.”

Stone hired Sklar to work on the script, which was also based on Jim Marrs’ study, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. He boiled Sklar’s 550-page first draft down to 160 pages and interpolated extensive flashbacks, in the style of Rashomon and Z. By April 1991, when filming began, Stone, Sklar and co-producer A. Kitman Ho had interviewed more than 200 people.

The actors became detectives too. “It’s like being a journalist,” Oldman said of his research into Oswald’s character. “We all became assassination buffs. Marina ((Oswald’s Russian-born widow)) had a tape that she let me see. It had a section leading up to the line, ‘I’m just a patsy.’ Oliver saw it, and he said, ‘Let’s restage that scene.’ ” Spacek spent time with Garrison’s ex-wife Liz. “The sense I got from her,” the actress says, “is of a woman living the life she wanted to live until her husband’s obsession came through. She was proud of Jim, but his obsession went so far.”

On location in Dealey Plaza, actors and crew filmed the motorcade re- enactment with super-8 movie cameras. “The idea,” says co-film editor Pietro Scalia, “was to create a point of view so that this section has an amateurish look.” After much wrangling, the JFK company secured use of the Texas School Book Depository, from which shots were fired on Nov. 22. The sixth floor had become a museum, so the moviemakers used the seventh floor there and, for appropriate perspective of the motorcade, the sixth floor of an adjacent building. Stone also filmed at the Dallas police headquarters, where Jack Ruby killed Oswald. “The police were very cooperative,” says production designer Victor Kempster. “They let us strip out computers in the offices and put in 1960s furniture. That included changing doorways to fit the film footage.”

% The crucial historical footage was the Zapruder film, for a copy of which Stone paid $40,000. “It’s the most important visual record we have of the assassination,” says Sklar. “To make a movie without it is to miss a lot.” Over and over, at the climax of JFK, Garrison plays the fatal shot — tragedy as therapy — to help solve the mystery and restore the fearful impact of the day that yanked a nation out of its cocoon of innocence. For all its cynicism, or even paranoia, about official venality, the film is a call for a kind of informed innocence. Stone says: Open your eyes wide, like a child’s. Look around. See what fits. And Costner’s summation is right out of an old Frank Capra movie in its declaration of principle in the face of murderous odds. Lost causes, as Capra’s Mr. Smith said, are the only causes worth fighting for.

To Stone’s old enemies, JFK may be another volatile brew of megalomania and macho sentiment. To his new critics, the film may seem deliriously irresponsible, madly muttering like a street raver. But to readers of myriad espionage novels and political-science fictions, in which the CIA or some other gentlemen’s cabal is always the villain, the movie’s thesis will be a familiar web spinning of high-level malevolence. JFK is Ludlum or Le Carre, but for real.

Or — crucial distinction — for reel. Memorize this mantra, conspiracy buffs and guardians of public respectability: JFK is only a movie. And, on its own pugnacious terms — the only terms Oliver Stone would ever accept — a terrific one.