A Thread about the film JFK

And the Rooker! How can you forget Michael Rooker?

...

I seriously need to stop raving about all this before I stain my pants.

Never stopped Stone!

And Stone was up front (eventually, maybe? I don't remember if he said this all along) about the history being fucked; "it's a myth, yeah, but it's a myth to counter the equally-false one we've been handed by the gov't," sentiments to that effect. Hell, I'd like to see more intentionally-fucked history in movies, without it being played for laughs; there could be a lot of material there.

As for the ensemble cast thing: anything else about the movie aside, has the "huge cast of famous people" thing been done better than in this? Altman's good with that, but I don't know if he ever did it quite this well, especially if you don't count Short Cuts.

(Okay, I forgot about that one. I'd have to see it again, though.)

sadly this important historical revelation is nowhere reflected in stone's film

"the parallax effect" and "three days of the condor" are two pretty good 70s 12-ft-lizard movies abt assassination politics

JFK is *made* by that mr. x/sutherland sequence,but yep those techniques of multi-film stock/editing craziness etc seemed brilliant/insane/eye-popping in '92. nobody else had done anything like that.
in fact 'nbk' was just re-hashing most of them shot for shot and
no-one noticed as they hadn't seen jfk in the 1st place. it was a seriously under-watched film at the time, but at 2 hrs 20 minutes
even in it's original non-director's cut that isn't surprising.

stone never ever ever said anything about it being the whole truth.
it was well known that x was based on prouty, although
obviously the waters are yet more muddied around the conspiracy by the fact that he goes too far the other way in trying to convince us of his version, but hey it asked a lot of questions, and it made people ask more questions etc etc.
empire magazine gave it some kind of weird 'inspiration' award about 5 years ago for some reason and stone showed up, gave a speech looking genuinely touched, moved etc.

there was an *astonishing* episode of DISPATCHES (channel 4, uk)
which i had seen early 90's ('91 ?) not long before seeing the movie,
and that was all facts no theory, it definitely helped to see something like that beforehand.

sutherland's fave bit of all his 80's/90's work he says.
3 months prep for 1 days' acting by all accnts. one day !

" does that sound like a bunch of coincidences to you mr garrison ? ...not for one moment"

Of course, Alexander will be when he stops blaming the gays and ethnics for everything that's wrong with the world. Naturally. I should really see Salvador. It's got James Woods and it's not a revisionist take on American history. Whew.

Yes, Sutherland was great. Though I really wish they'd given John Candy more scenes.

That documentary "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" and the follow up are also worth watching if you are interested in the Kennedy assassination. I think Stone nicked more from it than he would want to admit.

still a really good movie!

That's what I always say, too.

This pitch is copyright, btw.

(I must have time on my hands)

(posner quotes ballistics expert donahue to refute criticism of the "magic bullet" theory but gets his name wrong)

(ps my friend adair's decisive refutation of posner's book: "Jesus, look at that man's HAIR OIL!!") (this shd also have been in stone's film)

it claims the secret servicemen surrounding him DID know, but covered it up as it was an accident and oswald had already shot jfk fatally and why introduce irrelevancies which wd damage an innocent if clumsy colleague's career needlessly blah blah

the witnesses on the verge etc were anyway notoriously all over the place as to where the various shots came from in terms of puffs of smoke, drifts of smoke and sounds of shots complete w.echoes, plus already looking all directions away from the cars bcz oswald had already fired twice (missed car altogether first time, hit kennedy AND connaly second time)

hickey WAS armed with this gun: that's historically attested to, and visible in some of the photos, esp.the later ones where the motorcade is speeding to the hospital and he's holding it pointed upwards

plus also there's photographic studies of what direction a pumpkin wrapped in masking tape will lurch if you fire a gun into it

Blimey Mark. Full-on shit there. Er, I'll go with it, but LHO managed a fatal shot? Or maybe he *would* have if CIA guy hadn't? I'm well outta my depth, my Dad was mad into it and I was all yeah yeah: classic conspiracy scene: Annie Hall.

The motorcade sped on...

i think oswald did it end-of-story, but if you want a good conspiracy, menninger's is my favourite on aesthetix-of-slapstick grounds

Or just read Posner's book.

Quite honestly though the most despicable thing about JFK the film is that it names and implicates Clay Shaw as being involved in the killing, when in reality he was just a businessman with an extremely tenuous connection to the CIA. Garrison was a scumbag, really. Tried to indict a guy from Cali in the JFK plot, because he once wrote him the prez a threatening letter.

I have a friend who always gets pretty mad at historical inaccuracies in movies (esp regarding world war II movies).

Some cranberry sauce and stuffing spilling out and a torn-up turkey....perfect time for a jfk conversation.

you know i don't like these tribal rituals

having finished the Summers book awhile back, what i appreciated about it was how he simply lays out all the information he believes to be truthful or believable, and doesn't really buy into any one theory specifically. he leans hard on the mob/disgruntled Cuban exiles aspect, hinting at both possibilities linked to those groups: that Oswald was directly involved, or wound up trapped in a vise by others.

I love how much Scorsese is just straight up trollling in this scene. https://t.co/TApD2d822C

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) November 27, 2019

FUCK YEAH

- testify

- me

- testify

- lol no chance in hell

If they can kill the president of the United States, do you think they're gonna think twice about a two-bit showgirl like me?

I just rewatched last weekend. Everything everyone said is correct.

fuck yeah!

Ain't got no reason to LAH to ya, I'm already IN jail!

Pretty flowery for Dave Ferrie.

We're way overdue another crack at hitting this level of dreamy mania with a similarly stacked cast. My body is ready for QAnon.

i dreamt last night that the cause of jfk's assassination was bob-a-job week

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, October 15, 2003 5:52 PM (fifteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still the only good theory imo

― mark s, Friday, 17 May 2019 15:02 (eight months ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't make me tap the sign

Maybe Shaw is an agent. I don't know. But as a covert operator, he is wide open for blackmail because of his ho-mo-sex-u-ality.

been playing a lot of quarantine playstation and the other day both my controllers died and i was genuinely upset and whispered: "both of them, both brothers?"

ahahaha

nice

ECHOES

you heard ECHOES

Kennedy's as dead as that crab meat, the government's alive and breathing. You gonna line up with a dead man, Jimbo?

Willie O'Keefe : You don't know shit 'cause you've never been fucked in the ass!

And I knew Allen Dulles very well. I briefed him many a time in his house. He was also General Y's benefactor. But for the life of me I still can't figure out why Dulles was appointed to investigate Kennedy's death. The man who had fired him.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, November 22, 2019

Sutherland’s my new fave on todays rewatch

Wise bunch of birds…

Worth checking out the *alternate* versions of the Sutherland scene, originally it was two different sections of the film; the second half of his monolgue was the film's last scene and he (and Costner) were made-up to look older. Annoyingly the Stone commentary track is all over the version on YouTube but it's better than nowt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glfTYMH59lk

i'm watching this for the first time since it came out. since it was 3 hours and i would have been 8 or so at the time, this makes it a movie i would have went to with my dad, who was not really a movie guy. more of an action movies + braveheart kind of guy. anyway, makes me think he really wanted to see it, i guess.

joe pesci's southern accent is _killing me_

wise buncha birds

very very few people know about this alright

Thinking about Kevin Costner JFK anime glasses pic.twitter.com/XdEDPGsug2

— christian (@speederaserhead) November 27, 2020

is Karl still watching it

Love how this is being blamed for the bad things in the US.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jfk-oliver-stone-conspiracy-theory-russian-disinformation-1260223/

paywalled for me :(

paywalled for you? or hidden from you deliberately by the fbi?

Oliver Stone once made brilliant movies like Platoon, which won Oscars for best picture and best director. These days, he’s a tinfoil-hatted fabricator. His new documentary — JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, premiering on Showtime on, you guessed it, Nov. 22 — is rooted in a big lie. It comes 30 years after the premiere of JFK, a film unrivaled in the annals of American cinematic propaganda. Both are based on the undying delusion that President Kennedy was murdered by the Deep State: The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by the military-industrial complex.

Do you believe that the CIA killed JFK? Millions of Americans suspect so. Let me ask you, then: Why do they believe it?

The tale can be traced to a Russian disinformation operation. It came from the same arsenal of political warfare that convinced half the world that the U.S. Army created AIDS. The one that monkey-wrenched the 2016 election for Donald Trump. The one now flooding the internet with deadly lies about the coronavirus and vaccines. The goals of these campaigns were one and the same: to divide Americans, to pour salt in our self-inflicted wounds, and ultimately to convince you that there is no truth. That crackpot fantasies are cold hard realities. That “conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts,” as Stone proclaims in JFK Revisited.

Disinformation works best when it contains a kernel of truth. And, in truth, the Kennedy assassination is the black hole of American history. It has sucked better minds than Stone’s down into darkness. It has taught generations of Americans to be highly skeptical of the Official Government Version of events. It made the grassy knoll our town commons.

But what you believe about it boils down to this: Either Lee Harvey Oswald, trained by the United States Marines as a sharpshooter before he defected to the Soviet Union, got off a million-to-one shot in Dallas. He acted alone. Or he was an instrument of a conspiracy so immense that it staggers the mind.

As the new documentary opens, Stone paces down Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President Kennedy was killed, the same place where QAnon crazies gathered recently to await the miraculous resurrection of JFK Jr. and the divine reinauguration of Trump. The director promises his audience that he is about to solve the murder mystery, to “piece together what really happened that day and discover the reasons why.”

Brace yourself: he doesn’t.

The dark beast of JFK Revisited is Allen Dulles, a founding father of the CIA and its director from February 1953 to November 1961. I know a fair amount about Dulles; my history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, lays a multitude of sins at his feet. Dulles often grievously misled Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. He oversaw CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala which ushered in dictatorships. His top officers tried to kill Fidel Castro, enlisting the Mafia. He blithely convinced JFK to carry out the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, which was his downfall as Director of Central Intelligence.

Stone pegs Dulles as a presiding genius of the plot against the president. To begin building this case, he tells us that Dulles and the CIA backed a failed military coup aimed at assassinating President Charles de Gaulle of France. That’s another lie spun by Moscow.

Like the cold-war CIA, the KGB paid editors and reporters around the world to print stories that could advance the Kremlin’s international agendas. In the late 1950’s, it created a directorate to undermine America. Department D — D as in dezinformatsiya — aimed to bend and shape public opinion, and above all to defame the United States. The Department of Disinformation was the world’s first industrial factory of fake news.

A KGB-scripted story about the CIA’s plot to kill De Gaulle first appeared in a daily newspaper, Paese Sera, published in Rome and backed by the Italian Communist Party, a few days after the Bay of Pigs. It was republished in Moscow by the Soviet party organ, Pravda; then in France, and finally across the globe. That was, and is, the M.O. of Russian disinformation operations: start a fire, fan the flames, and blow the smoke around the world.

Six years later, Paese Sera planted the seed that flowered into JFK. And therein lies a tale. (One first told in 2001 by the historian Max Holland in The Wilson Quarterly, a now-defunct political science journal.)

On March 1, 1967, the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, arrested Clay Shaw, the director of the city’s International Trade Mart and a somewhat-closeted gay man, and charged him with a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The D.A. told reporters that what happened in Dallas had been “a homosexual thrill-killing.” Three days later, Paese Sera named Shaw as a conduit for CIA funds for espionage and dirty tricks in Rome. The story, crafted by the KGB, ricocheted around the world, landing in New York on the front page of a New Left weekly, the National Guardian, on March 18.

Garrison seized upon it. He fed the falsehood to a friendly newspaper reporter in New Orleans and it landed on page one. He told the world that Shaw was a longtime CIA operative. (He wasn’t, though he had been a casual part-time contact on questions of commerce, one among some 150,000 Americans who volunteered information to the cold-war CIA.) The prosecutor then doubled down. He proclaimed that the CIA had plotted to kill Kennedy and then covered up the conspiracy, that Oswald had been under its control, that the agency was “infinitely more powerful than the Gestapo,” and that it had masterminded a coup d’etat in America in the name of anticommunism.

On Feb. 6, 1969, Garrison put Clay Shaw on trial. His witnesses were a parade of perjurers from the seamier quarters of New Orleans. He presented no evidence tying the CIA to his case. But in his summation, he asked the jurors to strike a righteous blow against the Deep State’s “murder of the truth.” They took 54 minutes to acquit.

Garrison’s tragicomedy had two lasting effects on the United States. The first was immediate: After he announced his charges, the number of Americans who believed that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy skyrocketed. A majority still believe it. The second took 20 years.

Garrison spent a decade turning his case into a book called On The Trail Of The Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy. The co-conspirators in this opus included the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police department, the Warren Commission, the Secret Service, anti-Castro Cubans, the United States Army, and the Navy pathologists who autopsied JFK. Fifteen publishers rejected it until it was picked up by William Schaap and Ellen Ray at Sheridan Square Press in 1988. (The couple had worked with Phillip Agee, a CIA defector, publishing Covert Action Information Bulletin, a magazine devoted to exposing the Agency’s operations and officers. Agee received a strong assist from Russian intelligence, according to KGB records. No evidence whatsoever links Schaap and Ray, now both deceased, to the Russians.)

On The Trail Of The Assassins would prove to be a hit with the public. Shortly before its publication, as Schaap later recounted, “at a film festival in Havana, we ran into Oliver Stone. And Ellen said to him, ‘Have I got a property for you!’ Because we knew he was an assassination freak, we gave him an advance copy of the book…. Of course, Oliver Stone won’t admit to any of this!”

JFK and its new sequel are, with artistic embellishments, cinematic transcriptions of Jim Garrison’s delusions. The original movie convinced millions more Americans that the version of history wrought by Stone and Garrison was true. National surveys taken after JFK was released showed that three-quarters of those polled believed the CIA had murdered the President. And that, along with the end of the cold war, provoked Congress to begin declassifying millions of records relating to the assassination — a task that remains incomplete nearly three decades later. Both Trump and President Biden have delayed disclosures required under law, though a new set of documents is set to be unwrapped before Christmas.

I’ve spent half my life reporting, writing, and reading about the CIA and American intelligence. I remember the Kennedy assassination; I’ve studied the evidence. And I can’t tell you that there wasn’t a conspiracy. Maybe it was the Russians. Could have been the Cubans. Might have been the Mafia. Maybe there’s a mind-blowing bombshell in the still-classified archives of the government. But I seriously doubt it.

I can tell you for a fact that our democracy is suffocating under an avalanche of disinformation. Trump won the 2020 election! Covid vaccines are seeded with microchips! Democrats are blood-sucking pedophile communists! 9/11 was an inside job! Our body politic is being poisoned by lies. They stalk the land like brain-eating zombies. And we can’t seem to kill them.

We have a moral obligation to call bullshit when we see it. Especially when public figures promote lies for profit. Stone’s JFK films are fantasies. Conspiracy theories are not facts. They’re a kind of collective psychosis. And they’re driving our country down the road to hell.

In This Article: CIA, conspiracy theories, FBI, JFK, Oliver Stone

the whole thing I never understood is the whole thing seems to be that the CIA killed him because he was a threat to the military industrial complex and US foreign policy which I never got the sense he was in any real way?

fuck yeah!

xp I guess it depends on which Kennedy you focus on, the guy who gave speeches about ending colonialism and was pissed off about the Bay of Pigs, or the guy running to Nixon’s right on Cuba and missiles. The Cuba podcast Blowback definitely leans toward the former, but they provided an interesting contrast of Kennedy promoting peace and understanding post-Bay of Pigs, and at the same time delivering hard-line speeches about intolerance for Communism.

read the devil's chessboard! it's the best! it explains the theory more like a web of things that were going on, not just that a guy is a threat so let's murder him

Love how this is being blamed for the bad things in the US.

this is the funniest tweet of the week

Twitter allowed a hashtag pushing a conspiracy theory about the CIA and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to trend nationally. It appears that it was due to an account urging users to get the hashtag trending. pic.twitter.com/oRcdW9VRjN

— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) November 22, 2021

harbl otm

how's your mousse

Honestly the ~only~ time I have any time for Oliver Stone is when he is feeding at the JFK trough.

Weiner sounds like he hates fun

um how soon we forget The Doors, the finest motion picture of our times

16 yo me agrees w you

but jfk is the only Stone movie i can watch

a little surprised jacobin of all places ran it, but this is a great interview w/ stone:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/oliver-stone-talks-to-jacobin-about-jfks-killing

it’s been a while since i went on my jfk book reading spree, but basically everything he says here is solid as far as i can tell

However, this is, as we say, bullshit:

Now, you can argue that we don’t know what would have happened, but the man, Kennedy, we try to establish, was an anti-colonialist. He’d been involved in Algeria, he’d been involved in Vietnam as early as 1954. And he said repeatedly these Third World countries needed their independence, and he was against the concept of a Cold War, against communism being used as an excuse to suppress independence — in the Congo, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Algeria, all over the world. And in Latin America, especially, he was very strong with his Alliance for Progress.

It’s a unique spin on Boomer Camelot fetishism.

DO NOT. FORGET. YOUR DYING KING.

the whole thing I never understood is the whole thing seems to be that the CIA killed him because he was a threat to the military industrial complex and US foreign policy which I never got the sense he was in any real way?
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, November 24, 2021 12:13 AM (nineteen hours ago)

this is a fair criticism and it’s true that oliver stone does go overboard in sentimentalizing jfk himself. (though it’s nothing compared to what he did with jim garrison; the anti-conspiracy writers basically got that one right, as far as i can tell.)

but i saw a comment about this somewhere that I’ve never been able to get out of my head. roughly: “the important question isn’t whether noam chomsky thinks jfk was a threat to the foreign policy status quo, it’s whether *allen dulles* thought he was.”

Right, and Kennedy’s true foreign policy intentions may have been less of a concern than his level of anger with the CIA for making him look like an asshole.

A new piece from ILX vet Dorian L

https://unherd.com/2021/11/oliver-stones-seductive-conspiracies/