Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Who Killed JFK? Oliver Stone Has Some Theories

It has been nearly 50 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, yet that event always seems like a current topic of conversation.

Oliver Stone
Indeed, it was precisely the topic of conversation earlier this month in Charlottesville, when film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone appeared at the Virginia Film Festival following a 20th-anniversary screening of his 1991 movie, JFK.

That film explores many of the alternative theories of the Kennedy assassination through the real-life character of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) and features some of the most offensively stereotypical portrayals of gay characters (played by, among others, Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, and Kevin Bacon) that one could expect from a self-described philosophically liberal film maker (see third video, below, and Stone's answer to my question about his personal political views).

Stone was interviewed on the stage of the Culbreth Theatre by Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, which is engaged in its own project marking the fiftieth anniversaries of significant events of the 1960s.  (The project began last year with a forum on the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates.)

I was at the Sabato-Stone colloquy on November 4 and recorded video of the entire event.  Here it is, in two parts.

Part I:

Part II:

Prior to joining Professor Sabato in the auditorium, Stone met with the Charlottesville news media in a rehearsal hall backstage. Here's the video of that exchange of questions and answers:
Considering that newly-published books about the Lincoln assassination (such as one by Fox News talk-show host Bill O'Reilly) are still selling briskly nearly 150 years after that event, we can expect to be airing, debunking, and re-airing Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories for many decades to come.
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