The movie, “Seven Days in May,” was a prescient political thriller. President Kennedy, who worried about the power of the right-wing, particularly generals who defied civilian control, encouraged the making of the movie before he was struck down on November 22, 1963.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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. …
“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).