TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122391/1223421.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14.5 KB | 350 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 74

Plunging into the Labyrinth


Feisty filmmaker Oliver Stone counters criticisms of the
conspiracy theory and cover-up scenario in his "tsunami wave" of
a movie, JFK

By LANCE MORROW and MARTHA SMILGIS and Oliver Stone


    Q. In JFK you commingle real news footage with re-created
historical scenes. Do you consider the film a docudrama, a work
of fact or fiction?

    A. Am I a zebra? Am I a giraffe? What color are my spots?
These are categorizations, and I tend to resist them. During the
trial Jim Garrison says, let's speculate for a moment what
happened that day. He goes on to speculate as to the events as
they might have happened with more than one shooter. So I'm
giving you a detailed outlaw history or counter-myth. A myth
represents the true inner spiritual meaning of an event. I think
the Warren Commission was a myth, and I think this movie,
hopefully, if it's accepted by the public, will at least move
people away from the Warren Commission and consider the
possibility that there was a coup d'etat that removed President
Kennedy.


    Q. Do you feel you as a filmmaker have a responsibility to
historical fact?

    A. Whenever you start to dictate to an artist his "social
responsibility" you get into an area of censorship. I think the
artist has the right to interpret and reinterpret history and
the events of his time. It's up to the artist himself to
determine his own ethics by his own conscience.


    Q. Are you comfortable with this film in your own
conscience?

    A. Totally. I dispute the "objective" version of events in
Dealey Plaza as stated by the Warren Commission. The entire
Warren Commission Report, 26 volumes, is a rat's nest of
conflicting facts, and that's been pointed out not just by me
but by many critics before me.


    Q. Is it accurate to say that you think the assassinations
of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are
linked?

    A. I think the removal of the three most progressive
leaders of the '60s during a time of bitterness and dissension
and civil war in this country is very much tied into the
assassination. I use the term civil war in its full
implications, going back to the 1960s, where we were divided
between hawks and doves, hippies and straights. These three
leaders were pulling out of the war in Vietnam and shaking up
the country. Civil rights, the cold war itself, everything was
in question. There's no doubt that these three killings are
linked, and it worked. That's what's amazing. They pulled it
off.


    Q. Who's "they"? Who do you think has profited from the
Kennedy and King assassinations?

    A. As shown in the movie, the money that was involved was
enormous by any standard. Cold war money. It's not just Vietnam
money. It's military-industrial money. It's nuclear money. It's
the American war economy that Eisenhower warned us about, that
came into being in this country in the 1940s, after World War
II. It's also the continuation of the covert state, the
invisible government that operates in this country and seems to
be an unelected parallel government to our legitimate
government. The CIA and military intelligence all got out of
hand somewhere in the 1960s. It suddenly reached another level,
where the concept of assassination -- the wet affair,
liquidation -- became the vogue.


    Q. When you say a parallel government, do you mean a
specific arm of the Executive Branch, like "special ops"?

    A. It's a moving, fluid thing, a series of forces at play.
It's not necessarily individuals. Military-industrial interests
are at stake. That puts into play certain forces. We have had
many incidents recently, with Oliver North, with Richard
Secord, the whole Iran-contra business. We've seen the scale on
which arms are moved around the world. We've seen secret deals.
There's more going on than ever meets the eye, and there's more
going on than is ever written about in the newspapers.


    Q. Why did you pick Garrison as the focal point of JFK?

    A. Because in Jim I found a worthy protagonist, a vehicle
to include all the research that was done in the case. I
respect Jim. He put himself out there and led with his chin. His
was a flawed investigation, but he did his best. He was one of
a very few who early on said that the government did it. Which
was an astounding statement in 1967, a very scary one.


    Q. It's still an astounding statement. Americans have the
strong sense that their government is their government. They
don't have the sense that, say, the Russians have had for
generations, that the government belongs to the people who have
seized power.

    A. You really think that? Maybe you're right. I may be in
the minority. I just think the American people smell a rat.


    Q. Given our motley society, why couldn't a lone gunman
have shot Kennedy? Why does it have to be a conspiracy?

    A. Assassins through history have always proclaimed their
act. They've been proud of it. They've killed for a political
reason. But Oswald always said, "I didn't do it. I'm a patsy."
And we have an enormous accumulation of physical evidence that
makes it very difficult to buy that one gunman could have done
that kind of shooting job.


    Q. You stood in the window with that rifle and worked the
bolt?

    A. Not only that, but we created the motorcade. We had a
massive motorcade moving through that ravine called Dealey
Plaza. We fired. We heard the shots and echoes too. We did more
of an enactment than the FBI ever did, and by the way, their
best marksmen were never able to match Oswald's feat.


    Q. In JFK the media, including TIME and LIFE, cover up the
assassination conspiracy. Do you truly believe the press was
CIA-infiltrated?

    A. I feel that the American reaction to the crime was to
simplify it, to deal with good guys and bad guys and a lone
gunman and John Wayne theatrics. The European press was much
more skeptical, because they saw in this assassination political
forces at play. The press in fact never did ask why Kennedy was
killed. They immediately were, in a sense, trivialized by the
questions of who and how. It all became a matter of scenery --
Oswald, Ruby. Scenery distracts from the essential questions.
Who benefited? Who had the power to cover it up? I don't point
the finger of evil intention, but it is documented that the
agency spent quite a bit of money to keep a leg up in
journalism, that there were a lot of people working on their
payroll.


    Q. Specifically what evidence do you believe the press
covered up?

    A. Among other things, you have LIFE buying the Zapruder
film and burying it and not showing it to the American public.*
Eventually it was made available, but only 12 years later.
Garrison was the first one, I think, to get it out in a public
forum with the trial in 1969. He subpoenaed Time-Life and
succeeded in getting the film shown to a limited audience.


    Q. What is the importance of the Zapruder film?

    A. I think the most conclusive thing it shows is the fatal
head shot coming from the front, from the fence. In addition,
it shows the time frame of the shots, which makes it very
difficult to believe Oswald fired three shots in 5.6 seconds.
And of course it raises the whole question of how Connally and
Kennedy were hit by the same bullet.


    Q. From what you're saying, you would have 400 of the most
notable media people in America knowing about a conspiracy to
kill Kennedy.

    A. I don't know that 400 people have to know anything. I
think there is such a form of informational equilibrium that
preserves the status quo that you can virtually call it silent
consent.


    Q. Why did you put famous actors -- Jack Lemmon, Walter
Matthau, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, Ed Asner -- into small
roles?

    A. They help us along the road because the material might
be in some sense dry and arcane to many people. Each actor has a
little riddle or an obstacle for Garrison, who has to work his
way around it to move farther into the heart of the labyrinth,
where the Cretan Minotaur lives.


    Q. Isn't Garrison's wife, the character played by Sissy
Spacek, simplified in the film?

    A. I didn't misinterpret his wife at all. That's the way
she was. Garrison's investigation threatened her family life.
They had five kids, and he was not home. We didn't practice
politically correct feminism to try to make her into something
she was not. What we did -- you could fault me for it -- was put
a woman D.A. into his staff. He did not have a woman D.A.


    Q. Do you expect to see negative reaction to JFK?

    A. I think older white males will have a major problem
with it. I think the younger generation will be more open.


    Q. The older generation has a memory of the event, the
younger generation doesn't. What is your sense of responsibility
to this younger, video generation, which will accept your movie
as truth and history?

    A. We did a lot of homework. I had a dozen technical
advisers going over the script with a fine-tooth comb.
Everything that we have in there we stand behind. What is
speculation is clearly speculation. We did not throw in any
facts that we felt were wrong. I did make some composites. I've
admitted that. I made it very clear [in interviews], for
example, that Garrison never really met with the character
called "X," played by Donald Sutherland, who explains the
dimensions of the CIA conspiracy.


    Q. You have drawn together many threads of conspiratorial
theory in the film. Are you endorsing everything or simply
advancing them as possibilities?

    A. I think I pulled back in the movie from some of my own
beliefs and probably softened some of my own conclusions for
fear of seeming too aggressive and bullying about information.


    Q. With this film, aren't you joining the ranks of the
conspiracy industry and commercializing a national tragedy?

    A. It's a cottage industry but not necessarily a very
lucrative one. The movie faces commercial risk. It has to appeal
on a large level to justify itself.


    Q. From many of your films it seems you see America as an
ugly, disturbed country populated with sinister characters.

    A. Talk Radio is the darkest film I've made, but I don't
personally feel that way about America. I have a lot more hope
for America. I see it as a totally homogeneous land, and I love
its vastness and its freedom. My mother is French. She was an
immigrant who came over here in 1946. In a sense I'm half
immigrant. I think that the best part of America is its lack of
pretension and snobbism. If anything, in my work I've tried to
veer away from the elites that I think have corrupted and made
cynical the American Dream. I hark back to an immigrant belief
in the goodness of this country. I find it coming still from
Asia, Mexico, Latin America, Europe. I think movies in a sense
thrive on that democracy.


    Q. Where were you on Nov. 22, 1963?

    A. In my room during a lunch break at the Hill School in
Pennsylvania. My reaction was very similar to Jim's in the
movie. A fellow student ran into the room and said, "They just
shot the President." It was shocking to me because Kennedy was
a handsome young man. I loved his rhetoric. Politically, I was
against him because I was for Nixon and Goldwater. But in my
heart I could not help being moved by his charisma. I was very
sad for the family. We watched TV the whole weekend, just like
in the movie. Then we moved on with our lives. We didn't really
think about it. That was the point.


    Q. When did you begin to develop an intuition that maybe
it wasn't Oswald alone, that maybe there was a conspiracy?

    A. I began to distrust the government through my Vietnam
experience, when I started to see the degree of lying and
corruption that was going on. When I came back from the war, I
began to redefine the way I had grown up. I started writing
screenplays more aggressively protesting the authority of this
government. I wrote Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. I
had heard the Oswald stories, but I had honestly been defeated
by the size of the literature, and I didn't see its implications
in my life, as to how it affected the beginnings of the Vietnam
War. And then Garrison's book was given to me. I read it and saw
its implications as a thriller -- a whydunit.


    Q. You have been called a chronicler of the '60s and the
last of the '60s radicals. What does the '60s mean to you?

    A. First of all, I was never a radical in the '60s. I was,
if anything, very straight. I went to school. I went to
Vietnam. I was very slow in coming around. I do think the '60s
is a determinant decade for the '90s, because people in my
generation -- I'm 45 now -- are coming to power. We're the next
power base of this country. We all grew up in the cold war. We
were born in the dawn of the nuclear age. So the '60s is really
determining what's going to happen in the '90s.


    Q. You once said that Kennedy's assassination spawned the
race riots, the hippie movement, organized protests and the
drug culture. Do you think his death alone was responsible for
this tide?

    A. Yes, in a metaphorical sense. I think there was an
erosion of trust in the government on the subconscious level.
On the conscious level, we moved on. We buried Oswald and got
rid of Ruby. The nightmare went away. But subconsciously the
major fissure had occurred. Historians in the 21st century are
going to point to this as a key moment in American history.


    Q. Quite apart from whether there was a small, limited
conspiracy, isn't the movie saying that it was in the general
interest of Lyndon Johnson that Kennedy be assassinated and the
war in Vietnam go forward?

    A. Kings are killed. It is the nature of political powers.
I have no problem believing this. I can see where certain
people do, and I can see where you might think I'm crazy. The
film is a bit subversive in its approach. But a film can often
be subversive to the subconscious. It comes out and it's often
criticized and reviled, but it lasts. It's sort of like a
tsunami wave. It starts out miles and miles from the beach. You
hear a noise that just moves fast under the water. Then without
warning it hits the beach, an explosion. Obviously, this film
is going to be denied; there will be some decrying and reviling.
All the errors are going to be attacked. It will be
discredited. Yet it will survive.