Can Hollywood Solve JFK’s Murder?
Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone didn’t spend $40 million and shoot 650,000 feet of film to prove that the Warren Commission was right. Says Stone: “I’m fighting the battle of my life.”
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The provocateur
Last January a new Oliver Stone production company set up shop at the venerable Stoneleigh Hotel, just a short drive from Dealey Plaza. It rented substantially discounted rooms on a floor that the old hotel had yet to refurbish, installed 21-line phones, and stocked cases of Evian water. The company had an intriguing and revealing name: Camelot Productions. But its project remained top secret until February, when leaflets were posted around town picturing Uncle Sam in his famous finger-pointing war pose beneath the words “We Want You! Open Auditions for Oliver Stone’s Next Film.” In addition to the usual cattle call — “Men With Texas Accents, Policeman Types, and Senior Cowboys” — was this line: “JFK Motorcade Look-a-likes.”
The turnout set a record for Dallas filmmaking. On February 16, 11,000 people packed the Dallas Convention Center, where Stone helped select the faces who would create his apocalypse for the sixties. Dallas actors were cast as Jack and Jackie Kennedy, John and Nellie Connally, as well as almost sixty other roles. Two thousand extras were hired at $40 a day, plus meals, to pack the parade route. Camelot paid the owners of two hundred sixties-era cars approximately $60 a day. Location directors secured thirty locations around town. The Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel became Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club; the same Oak Cliff boardinghouse where Oswald lived became Gary Oldman’s cinematic flophouse.
But what was in the script? Few people knew, except that it somehow involved the JFK assassination. Stone was being so tight-lipped about his story, which he called Project X, that everyone involved was required to sign a confidentially agreement. Dallas was as excited as a starlet, so giddy over the prospects of stardom and at least $5 million for the local economy that she didn’t even ask about the role. Stone took cocktails at the homes of Trammell Crow and Clint Murchison III. He met the mayor at the Mansion on Turtle Creek and the Bunker Hunts at the Petroleum Club.
Oliver Stone was a hit with the new all-business Dallas. But to get what he wanted — to take over Dealey Plaza — he had to confront what he saw as the old self-conscious Dallas. “It doesn’t matter that we come into town and spend the money so people will have a job,” says Stone’s producer and facilitator, a Chinese immigrant named A. Kitman “Alex” Ho. “The only thing they care about is the sixth floor.”
Two months before the scheduled first day of shooting on April 15, Stone went before the board of the Dallas County Historical Foundation, which runs the assassination exhibit. Seeking permission to film on the sixth floor, Stone had laid the groundwork before his arrival, contributing $50,000 to the foundation. At the meeting, he said only once had he been asked for a script before getting permission to film at a location, and that was to use the Pentagon. But board chairman Lindalyn Adams was against Stone from the beginning. “My concern was that we had no idea what the script was going to be,” she says. “If we let that floor be used, that would be tantamount to condoning what the film would be about.”
In a Dallas Times Herald poll, readers voted three to two that Stone should be given access to the sixth floor. The vote by the historical foundation was closer — five to four — also in Stone’s favor. The battle, however, was not over. Stone still needed the approval of the Dallas County Commissioners’ Court, which not only had to ratify the move by the historical foundation but also controlled access to its headquarters — the old School Book Depository building.
Before the commissioners voted, Camelot’s location manager, Jeff Flach, handed over a $50,000 check as a sample of things to come. But Stone found a new antagonist in county judge Lee Jackson, a quiet, unassuming Republican with a strong sense of propriety. “I think it’s a tragic mistake to hang a For Rent sign on the sniper’s perch,” Jackson argued. He added that turning the seat of county government into a movie set for two months would be so disruptive that it would be hard for the commissioners to do their jobs. But Stone and his entourage were formidable lobbyists. “They are highly skilled at getting what they want,” says Jackson. “Their method is, at first, to describe a project as very simple. ‘It won’t really affect anyone too much, and this will be just fine, won’t it? And this won’t be a problem, will it?’ And then, three months later, what at first sounded like, perhaps, one camera from across the street, shooting from one hundred yards away, turns out to be occupying your building for two months.”
Backing Jackson was Martin Jurow, the producer or supervisor of more than fifty films, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Terms of Endearment, and a Dallas resident for twenty years. He was the executive producer of a ten-minute assassination film, narrated by Walter Cronkite, which runs on the sixth floor. Now in his seventies, Jurow spoke not as a film producer but as a concerned citizen. And he was concerned about turning over the sixth floor to Oliver Stone. “Some people are so beheaded by Hollywood glamour that they lose sight of their own mentality and morals,” he says today. He preached to the commissioners in a similar vein.
“No matter what is in that agreement, that contract means nothing,” Jurow told the commissioners’ court. “When a director like Oliver Stone comes in, he will brook no interference. And what I am deeply concerned about is something that no on has even mentioned. Who has read the script? ... [People will say] you must have read the script before you gave him permission to go in and take over this entire building, this seat of government, this site of a memorial? … At least know what you’re getting into as far as what’s the story going to be. He’s no documentary filmmaker. He’s a challenger. He’s a provocateur.”
But Hollywood is hard to resist. After much debate, the commissioners gave Stone what he wanted: access to their building’s roof, lobby, exterior, jury room, parking lot, and a section of the county jail — even limited access to the sixth floor. The building’s window trim would be returned to its original orange. Its exact 1963 exterior would be recreated with theatrical scaffolding. Its walls and roof would be crowned with the original Texas School Book Depository signs. As rent, Camelot Productions would pay Dallas County nearly $84,000 for the right to use its building for nine weeks, including $15,000 for the seventh floor and rooftop, $4,350 a month for lost parking revenues, and $150 a day to use the exterior of the building. (Also 23 days worth of late charges were added for missing the May 14 deadline for restoring the building to its previous condition.) But the commissioners had one stipulation: they would be given a free prerelease preview of the film, at which time they would decide whether Dallas County would be given a credit — or a disclaimer.
“A Thousand and One Vultures”
“I’m fighting the battle of my life,” says Oliver Stone. He is sitting in a conference room at Lantana Center in Santa Monica, California. In the adjoining editing rooms, kids in jeans and JFK-theme T-shirts work frantically on 650,000 feet of film to give birth to JFK. The editing-room walls display an autographed portrait of a newly inaugurated Lyndon Johnson and an ancient panorama of Dealey Plaza, while film reels cover every inch of desk and floor.
Stone always looks haggard — his wrinkled white shirts, red socks, and harried demeanor have become part of his persona — but now the pressure is palpable. His brow is sweating. His eyes are red and glassy. His wispy black hair shows the effect of his hands having run though it. His entire being exudes exhaustion — the result of his year-long war with a hostile press, combative assassination buffs, and zealous defenders of the Warren Commission, all of whom have attempted to portray Oliver Stone as the biggest assassination buffoon since Jim Garrison. As Gary Oldman says, “This is not Home Alone.”
“There’s a thousand and one vultures out there,” groans Stone, “crouched on their rocks, saying, ‘Ah, here come Stone.’ They want to come down and just peck out my eyes and rip my guts out. I’m such a target in a way, because I’ve attacked big things. And now I’ve got not only the usual Hollywood vultures on my tail, I’ve got a lot of the paid-off journalist hacks that are working on the East Coast with their recipied political theories, who resent the outsider, the rebel with a different theory.”
He leans back in his chair and stares. “Are you gonna attack me, Mark?” he asks. “Are you after me, Mark? … Is your editor cool? Is this gonna be a rip job on me?
“I think it’s pretty ugly,” he continues. “I think the press is motivated, in part, by fear. Fear of new facts. Or fear of a new spirit emerging about this Kennedy issue. There’s a desire to keep thing covered up, to keep things hidden. And to scoff at Garrison is easy. But the Warren Commission is the official story, and the official myth, and its foundations, as painted by its apologists in the press, are tainted, deeply tainted. There’s too many loose screws in there.”
The attacks began last February, when Harold Weisberg, an assassination researcher and author, sent Stone a scathing letter. Calling Garrison’s investigation “a tragedy” and any film based on it “a travesty,” Weisberg wrote Stone, “As an investigator, Jim Garrison could not find a pubic hair in an overworked and under-cleaned whorehouse at rush hour.” Weisberg says he didn’t receive a reply from Stone. But soon he knew plenty about the movie; somehow he obtained a first draft of the screenplay (now in its seventh draft) and sent it to his old friend George Lardner, Jr., who reports on national security issues for the Washington Post.
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