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I enjoyed the film very much, and believe it to be quite an accomplishment in film making. Audiences did not imagine that they were viewing a completely accurate documentary of the JFK conspiracy and assassination, but a cinematic dramatization. Stone himself described his film as a rebuttal to the Warren Commission Report (which was one of the greatest cover-ups in American history): "To fight a great myth with a counter-myth."
The screen play was based upon Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins, and Jim Marr's Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a highly regarded book in the JFK assassination researcher community.
I had the seen the film when it was released, and enjoyed it as a good movie: great cast, wonderful cinematography and editing. But since that time I've read a dozen or so of the best researched books I could find on the subject, and I continue to read and be fascinating by the events. When I saw the film again a few years ago, I was surprised that much of the material was accurate, based upon what I'd read. But there again, Stone's picture was written for maximum dramatic effect.
A reasonable similarity might be drawn to Stone's film Snowden, in comparison to Laura Poitras' Citizenfour. Stone's movie was a dramatization of incidents and circumstances derived from interviews with Mr. Snowden and other sources; whereas Poitras' piece was the real deal, from the horse's mouth. Likewise Stone benefited from many hours of interviews with D.A. Jim Garrison.
A fact that amazes me is that Garrison's investigation --which was continuously hampered and blocked by the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other governmental sources-- and the indictment of Clay Shaw was the singular instance of anyone being brought to trial in all the mammoth and myriad investigations during the entire 54 years since the assassination.
The various assassination commissions were embarrassing farces; the C.I.A. was involved in the planning and execution of the plot; there were 2, probably 3 gunmen assassins (and Oswald was likely not one of them). If these facts were brought out in JFK, then Stone has done the American public a big service, because the government will never, ever release the full C.I.A records. They simply cannot.
I was 19 years old when JFK was gunned down. It was a horrendous national shock and grief that this country has not experienced since that time. Keep in mind, there was no internet, no cell phones. We relied on 3 or 4 TV channels, and newspapers that were no more credible then than they are now. It took many weeks to get the full report of what allegedly happened. But even then we suspected that we were being lied to. And by the time the Warren Commission report was released, few believed in their conclusions.
So it's frustrating that one of the great criminal tragedies of modern times will never have a conclusion or a resolution. But Stone's JFK did not harm those efforts.
~Doc
Last edited by GulfportDoc; 09-21-17 at 10:12 AM.