JFK is a 1991 American political thriller film co-written and directed by Oliver Stone. The film examines the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who came to believe that there was a government conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and that Lee Harvey Oswald was a scapegoat. The film's screenplay was adapted by Stone and Zachary Sklar from the books On the Trail of the Assassins by Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. Kevin Costner stars as Garrison, with an ensemble supporting cast including Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, Donald Sutherland, Laurie Metcalf, and narration by Martin Sheen.
JFKs embrace of conspiracy theories made it controversial. Many major American newspapers ran editorials accusing Stone of spreading untruths, including the claim that Kennedy was killed as part of a coup d'état to install Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in his place.
JFK was released by Warner Bros. on December 20, 1991. Despite the controversy, JFK received critical praise for its performances, directing, score, editing and cinematography. It also gradually picked up momentum at the box office after a slow start, grossing over $205 million worldwide, making it the sixth highest-grossing film of 1991 worldwide and Stone's highest-grossing film to date. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and won two for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing.
It was the first of three films Stone made about American presidents, followed by Nixon (1995) and W. (2008).
Plot During his farewell address in 1961, outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower warns about the build-up of the military-industrial complex. He is succeeded by John F. Kennedy as president, whose time in office is marked by the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Indochina wars until his assassination in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Ex-Marine and suspected Soviet defector Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested for the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit and arraigned with both murders but is killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his team investigate potential New Orleans links to the JFK assassination, including private pilot and activist David Ferrie, but their investigation is publicly rebuked by the federal government and Garrison closes the investigation.
The investigation is reopened in 1966 after Garrison reads the Warren Report and notices what he believes to be multiple inaccuracies, such as the single-bullet theory. Garrison and his staff interrogate people involved with Oswald and Ferrie, learning that the two were involved with the CIA in Operation Mongoose. One witness, Willie O'Keefe, a male prostitute serving five years in prison for solicitation, says that he witnessed Ferrie talking with a man called "Clay Bertrand" about assassinating Kennedy, and that he briefly met Oswald. Garrison and his team theorize Oswald never actually "defected" and was in fact an agent of the CIA who was betrayed and framed for the assassination.
In 1967, Garrison and his team talk to several witnesses, including Jean Hill, a teacher who says she witnessed a gunman shooting from the "grassy knoll", a small hill, that Secret Service threatened her into saying three shots came from the Texas School Book Depository from which Oswald was said to have shot Kennedy, and her testimony was altered by the Warren Commission. Garrison's staff also test fire an empty Carcano rifle from the Depository and conclude that Oswald was too poor a marksman to make the shots, and that there was more than one shooter. Garrison comes to believe that "Bertrand" is really New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw. Garrison interviews Shaw, who denies having ever met Ferrie, O'Keefe or Oswald.
Some key witnesses become scared and refuse to testify while others, such as Ruby and Ferrie, die in suspicious circumstances. Before his death, Ferrie tells Garrison that the CIA and the Mafia were working together to kill Fidel Castro, and that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Garrison meets a high-level figure in Washington, D.C., who identifies himself as "X", and who claims Kennedy's security in Dallas was deliberately neglected. He also suggests a coup d'état at the highest levels of government, implicating members of the CIA, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex, Secret Service, anti-Castro Cubans, the FBI, and then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson as either co-conspirators or as having motives to cover up the truth of the assassination. X suggests that Kennedy was killed because he wanted to pull the United States out of the Vietnam War, halt further actions against Cuba, and dismantle the CIA. X encourages Garrison to keep investigating and prosecute Shaw. Soon afterward, Garrison indicts Shaw with conspiring to murder Kennedy.
Garrison's marriage is strained when his wife Liz complains that he is spending more time on the case than with his own family. After a sinister phone call is made to their daughter, Liz accuses Garrison of being selfish and attacking Shaw only because of his homosexuality. Some of Garrison's staff begin to doubt his motives and disagree with his methods, and leave the investigation. One of them, Bill Broussard, is later revealed to have been an insider for the FBI for some time, and even plays a peripheral, undisclosed role in what seems to be an attempt to kidnap, murder or otherwise scare Garrison. In addition, Garrison is criticized in the media as wasting taxpayer money to investigate a conspiracy theory. Garrison suspects a connection with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Shaw's trial takes place in 1969. Garrison presents the court with a dismissal of the single-bullet theory, proposing a scenario involving three assassins firing six shots and framing Oswald for the murders of Kennedy and Tippit, all for the purpose of installing Johnson as president so he could escalate the war in Vietnam and enrich the defense industry. However, the jury acquits Shaw after less than one hour of deliberation. While his prosecution has failed, Garrison wins his wife and children's respect for his determination and so repairs his relationship with his family.
Cast
Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison Kevin Bacon as Willie O'Keefe Tommy Lee Jones as Clay Shaw / Clay Bertrand Laurie Metcalf as Susie Cox Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald Michael Rooker as Bill Broussard Jay O. Sanders as Lou Ivon Sissy Spacek as Liz Garrison Joe Pesci as David Ferrie Beata Poźniak as Marina Oswald Porter Jack Lemmon as Jack Martin Walter Matthau as Senator Russell B. Long Donald Sutherland as Mr. X Ed Asner as Guy Banister Brian Doyle-Murray as Jack Ruby John Candy as Dean Andrews Jr. Sally Kirkland as Rose Cheramie Wayne Knight as Numa Bertel Pruitt Taylor Vince as Lee Bowers Tony Plana as Carlos Bringuier Vincent D'Onofrio as Bill Newman Dale Dye as General Y Lolita Davidovich as Beverly Oliver Ellen McElduff as Jean Hill John Larroquette as Jerry Johnson Willem Oltmans as George de Mohrenschildt Tomas Milian as Leopoldo Gary Grubbs as Al Oser Ron Rifkin as Mr. Goldberg / Spiesel Peter Maloney as Colonel Finck John Finnegan as Judge Haggerty Wayne Tippit as FBI Agent Frank Jo Anderson as Julia Ann Mercer Bob Gunton as News Anchor Frank Whaley as Imposter Oswald Jim Garrison as Earl Warren Martin Sheen as Narrator
Production Zachary Sklar, a journalist and a professor of journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, met Garrison in 1987 and helped him rewrite a manuscript that he was working on about Kennedy's assassination. He changed it from a scholarly book in the third person to "a detective story – a whydunnit" in the first person. Sklar edited the book and it was published in 1988. While attending the Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Cuba, Oliver Stone met Sheridan Square Press publisher Ellen Ray on an elevator. She had published Jim Garrison's book On the Trail of the Assassins.Riordan 1996, p. 351. Ray had gone to New Orleans and worked with Garrison in 1967. She gave Stone a copy of Garrison's book and told him to read it.Riordan 1996, p. 352. He did and quickly bought the film rights with $250,000 of his own money to prevent talk going around the studios about projects he might be developing.Salewicz 1998, p. 80.
Kennedy's assassination had always had a profound effect on Stone: "The Kennedy murder was one of the signal events of the postwar generation, my generation." Stone met Garrison and grilled him with a variety of questions for three hours. Garrison stood up to Stone's questioning and then got up and left. His pride and dignity impressed the director.Riordan 1996, p. 353. Stone's impressions from their meeting were that "Garrison made many mistakes. He trusted a lot of weirdos and followed a lot of fake leads. But he went out on a limb, way out. And he kept going, even when he knew he was facing long odds."Riordan 1996, p. 354.
Stone was not interested in making a film about Garrison's life, but rather the story behind the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. He also bought the film rights to Jim Marrs' book Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. One of the filmmaker's primary goals with JFK was to provide a rebuttal to the Warren Commission's report that he believed was "a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a counter-myth."Riordan 1996, p. 355. Even though Marrs' book collected many theories, Stone was hungry for more and hired Jane Rusconi, a recent Yale University graduate, to lead a team of researchers and assemble as much information about the assassination as possible while the director completed post-production on Born on the Fourth of July. Stone read two dozen books on the assassination while Rusconi read between 100 and 200 books on the subject.
By December 1989, Stone began approaching studios to back his film. While in pre-production on The Doors, he met with three executives at Warner Bros. Pictures who wanted him to make a film about Howard Hughes.Riordan 1996, p. 356. However, Warren Beatty owned the rights and so Stone pitched JFK. Studio president and chief operating officer Terry Semel liked the idea. He had a reputation for making political and controversial films, including All the President's Men, The Parallax View, and The Killing Fields.Riordan 1996, p. 357. Stone made a handshake deal with Warner Bros. whereby the studio would get all the rights to the film and put up $20 million for the budget. The director did this so that the screenplay would not be widely read and bid on, and he also knew that the material was potentially dangerous and wanted only one studio to finance it. Finally, Stone liked Semel's track record of producing political films.
Screenplay When Stone set out to write the screenplay, he asked Sklar (who also edited Marrs' book) to co-write it with him and distill the Garrison and Marrs books and Rusconi's research into a script that would resemble what he called "a great detective movie".Riordan 1996, p. 358. Stone told Sklar his vision of the film: Although he did employ ideas from Rashomon, his principal model for JFK was Z: Stone broke the film's structure down into four stories: Garrison investigating the New Orleans connection to the assassination; the research that revealed what Stone calls, "Oswald legend: who he was and how to try to inculcate that"; the recreation of the assassination at Dealey Plaza; and the information that the character of "X" imparts on Garrison, which Stone saw as the "means by which we were able to move between New Orleans, local, into the wider story of Dealey Plaza."Salewicz 1998, pp. 82–83.