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This past was prologue to his most outsize challenge: explaining the Kennedy assassination to his own satisfaction. Or anyone else's. JFK, the electrifying melodrama opening nationwide this week, attracted brickbats months ago when a long article in the Washington Post cataloged historical "errors and absurdities" in Stone and Zachary Sklar's screenplay. Assassination scholars ragged Stone for his naivete, his use of discredited testimony, his reliance on suspect "experts." A TIME critic said that if Stone's film "turns out to distort history, he may wind up doing more harm than homage to the memory of the fallen President...
Anybody want to see this movie? Warner Bros. hopes so; the studio (whose parent company also owns TIME) helped foot JFK's $40 million tab. It is also counting on Kevin Costner, America's No. 1 homegrown movie star, to lure audiences to what is at heart a high-voltage civics quiz. Though he doesn't necessarily agree with every notion floated in the film, Costner is happy to play front man for Stone. "Oliver's a patriot," he says. "And I believe with him that the impact of this movie will be liberating. Any part of the truth...
...only Kennedy assassination case that ever went to trial. And, quickly, out the window. The jury found the defendant, businessman Clay Shaw, not guilty in less time than last week's West Palm Beach jurors took to exonerate William Kennedy Smith. For the past decade, Garrison (who appears in JFK as Chief Justice Earl Warren) has been part of America's conspiracy industry -- saint to some, buffoon to others...
...location in Dealey Plaza, actors and crew filmed the motorcade re- enactment with super-8 movie cameras. "The idea," says co-film editor Pietro Scalia, "was to create a point of view so that this section has an amateurish look." After much wrangling, the JFK company secured use of the Texas School Book Depository, from which shots were fired on Nov. 22. The sixth floor had become a museum, so the moviemakers used the seventh floor there and, for appropriate perspective of the motorcade, the sixth floor of an adjacent building. Stone also filmed at the Dallas police headquarters, where...
...crucial historical footage was the Zapruder film, for a copy of which Stone paid $40,000. "It's the most important visual record we have of the assassination," says Sklar. "To make a movie without it is to miss a lot." Over and over, at the climax of JFK, Garrison plays the fatal shot -- tragedy as therapy -- to help solve the mystery and restore the fearful impact of the day that yanked a nation out of its cocoon of innocence. For all its cynicism, or even paranoia, about official venality, the film is a call for a kind of informed...