Source: David Mamet To Direct ‘2 Days/1963’, About Sam Giancana’s Role In JFK Murder – Deadline
The drama will focus on previously untold events that took place during the 48 hours before the assassination of America’s 35th president in November 1963
Mamet, best known for his stage plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, is also a political conservative and prolific screenwriter with a long-standing interest in JFK’s assassination.
While “2 Days/1963” indicates Mamet belongs to the “Mafia-done-it” school of JFK scholarship, the playwrite also believes the Zapruder film was altered. I’m skeptical of that proposition myself, but serious people, like Doug Horne, make the case, so I don’t dismiss the possibility entirely. The CIA’s handling of the film is one of those unsolved JFK’s mysteries.
From Deadline:
“The mob theory was part of what director Oliver Stone presented in the film JFK, which focused on findings by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) that contradicted the lone gunman conclusion by the Warren Commission. When Celozzi’s script was sent to Mamet, it reawakened the writer-director’s own skepticism that he felt a decade ago when he was going to direct a movie about inconsistencies in the Zapruder film, the only known visual chronicle of Kennedy’s final moments.”
“I wrote a really good script based on the Zapruder film about 10 years ago, Cate Blanchett was going to do it and we were all ready to start shooting it and then the money guy pulled out,” Mamet told Deadline, who acknowledges the difficulty of definitively declaring what actually happened that tragic day. “There was a wonderful physicist named Richard Fynman who said the great discoveries in science aren’t when someone says, ‘Eureka I have found it,’ but when the scientist says, ‘Hey, that’s funny.’ I was inspired to get into the Zapruder film for the idea that several of the frames were missing, which they are. One of the frames had actually been altered. Why has the film been altered, that’s funny. When you look at the secret panel on assassinations, their secret findings were held and were supposed to be released last year. But they said, we’re holding some of them back. I said to myself, that’s funny. What does it mean, I don’t know, but it means something.”