Executive Action is perhaps the most famous conspiracy thriller about the John Kennedy assassination, with the exception of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Recently released CIA records in the CREST database show that they were keeping an eye the production and how it was being received. The articles even detail how the CIA may have threatened or tried to stop the production of the film.
Source: CIA Open Source Records on Executive Action | Spy Culture
The film that would come to bear his name “represented a trauma for our grandfather,” Alexandra Zapruder writes. “It was a source of pain for the Kennedys. It was a reminder of crushing disappointment and abandoned plans for my parents’ generation. It was a burden. It was an intrusion. It was a serious and complicated responsibility.”
Source: ‘Twenty-Six Seconds,’ by Alexandra Zapruder – San Francisco Chronicle
In 1960, the group was granted direct access to John F. Kennedy, filming him on the campaign trail and eventually in the Oval Office. This resulted in three films of remarkable, behind-closed-doors intimacy—Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, and Crisis—and, following the president’s assassination, the poetic short Faces of November.
Source: The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates- The Criterion Collection (HT/ejc)
The debut of Plaza Man reminds us that “the cinema of assassination inspired by JFK” never ceases grow.
Send me links to the YouTube trailers of your favorite JFK film (feature, documentary, fictional, factual, or foreign).
Or just watch:
(THE VIDEO REFERRED TO IN THIS PIECE HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR TECHNICAL REASONS)
Last year, Chris Vogner, movie critic for the Dallas Morning News, reminded us how the first broadcast of Abraham Zapruder’s film of JFK’s assassination on ABC TV in March 1975 changed American popular culture.
From the Guardian.com, “The Parallax View: a JFK conspiracy film that gets it right.”
Its called the Alvy Singer Syndrome. Woody Allen explains.
Despite a big budget and a host of A-list actors, Tom Hanks’s JFK flick “Parkland” proved to be a dud, As I wrote here last year, “The fact that the movie tanked at the box office and puzzled critics indicated its presentation of JFK’s murder as a fairly ordinary homicide in Texas had no resonance, even with elite media organizations imbued with a cultural affinity for the lone gunman theory.
But the story of the forces behind the making of the movie, explored in James DiEugenio’s book “Reclaiming Parkland,” is an in-depth tale of the collusive culture-making machinery of Hollywood and major news organizations.
From DiEugenio’s website, Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassination:
The assassination of President Kennedy was, among other things, a seminal event in the history of mediated imagery.
From the moment Abraham Zapruder captured the gunfire that killed the president to Olvier Stone’s 1991 hit “JFK”, to the present when Hollywood still seek to explore, exploit, and explain November 22, 1963, projected film has been a key–perhaps the key–to the way we visualize and understand JFK’s death. Read more
“Belief that sinister forces were behind the assassination of JFK fed into movies — and still does — from a photographer obsessively enlarging an image in “Blow Up” (’66) to Angelina Jolie’s spy game in “Salt” (’10).
A photo gallery from TheWrap.
Rolling Stone asked: “Will the government ever release all of the [JFK] assassination records?”
Oiiver Stone, director of “JFK,” the movie, replied: “That’s a tough question.”
They’re staying away in droves from Tom Hanks’s sad, sad movie. Read more
The cinema of assassination has a new entre.
In The Monitor of Brownsville, Texas, native son Tony Zavaleta, talks about his independently made JFK film that will open in November.
Peter Landesman, journalist turned director, tackles the JFK story
I’ve criticized Tom Hanks’s upcoming JFK film, “Parkland,” for what I expect will be its simplistic treatment of the causes of the assassination. (Examples here and here.)
Now its time to let the film’s director, former journalist Peter Landesman, give his side of the story. He spoke with the Hollywood Reporter on Friday.
Q. The assassination story has been revisited many times, from many different perspectives. What inspired you to make this movie?
