A View To A Kill - The Making Of JFK
Even 30 years after it debuted, Oliver Stone's true-life (or is it?) conspiracy thriller is still stiring up controversy...
There really is no shortage of good suspects when it comes to the assassination of John F Kennedy - Lee Harvey Oswald, anti-Casto Cubans, the Mafia, the FBI, the CIA. And then there’s Oliver Stone who, in the words of Bill Maher “thinks they all did it, kinda like in Batman where all the crooks form an underworld alliance of evildoers. And they have a lair.”
If Stone’s theory is somewhat laughable, his vehicle for it, JFK, is anything but. A dizzying cocktail of hard fact, grand deceit and expert storytelling, the film could convince even the most ardent Lone Gunman theorist that JFK was done in by a conspiracy with a cast so big as to rival Ben-Hur’s.
Using his industry power to assemble a stellar cast and his understanding of the filmmaking process to pull off a technical triumph as dazzling as it’s duplicitous, Stone carved out a superb sham of a movie that exposes exactly what cinema can, but probably shouldn’t, be. When JFK hit the screen, the shit hit the fan. Some 30 years later, the smell still kinda lingers.
While Spike Lee might bang on about being the only person who could have made Malcolm X, Oliver Stone really was the one man who could have brought JFK to fruition. Only Stone possessed the combination of enough box-office clout to attract financing, sufficient industry kudos to attract major talent, and a hard enough nose to cop the criticism such a project was bound to provoke. Stone also possessed the rights to On The Trail Of The Assassins, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s account of his attempt to convict local businessman Clay Shaw for his involvement in a conspiracy to murder John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
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