Texas Monthly Review Texas Theater Event with Stone, Original JFK Film

[Benjamin Cole]

Looonnngg article on Stone at a JFKA event inside the Texas Theater, for screening of his 1991 film, JFK.  

Stands on it own, some good, some bad IMHO. Worth reading.  

Arts & Entertainment

Oliver Stone Brought ‘JFK’ Home

The director visited Oak Cliff's Texas Theatre for a special screening of his 1991 opus, which continues to blur fact and fiction.

By Sean O'Neal

October 14, 20241

 

Director Oliver Stone behind the scenes of JFK in Dealey Plaza.Warner Bros./Everett Collection

This October, fans of the horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can attend a special fiftieth anniversary screening on the lawn of Hooper’s, the Kingsland restaurant that’s situated inside the actual farmhouse that was used in the movie. Take it from me: It can be both thrilling and unnerving to step into the liminal space between fiction and reality, even without the cannibal aspect. To bear witness to the blurring of actual and imaginary history is an experience that even the most learned philosopher would struggle to describe, and I can only guess what it’s like to do it while noshing on a plate of pulled pork. 

The Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff offered a similarly disorienting experience earlier this month when it welcomed director Oliver Stone for a screening of his 1991 opus JFK inside the very room where accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended. JFK is uniquely suited to these kinds of head games because it lives within that uncanny overlap already. Stone’s film dramatizes the events surrounding the murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, by faithfully re-creating them on the very locations where they’d taken place. Historical facts are then blown up into an operatic frenzy, a postmodernist distortion that Stone has famously defended as a “countermyth” to the one proposed by the Warren Commission. 

JFK offers a dizzying convergence of reality and fantasy that ranks it among the all-time great American movies—and in the opinions of its detractors, as possibly the most dangerous film ever made. To see it where history was made—first as tragedy, then as a movie where a ludicrously wigged Joe Pesci screams about riddles wrapped in enigmas—was a chance to step through the looking glass with the filmmaker who has arguably done more than any other to cause us to question everything we see. 

“Are you ready for two hundred and six minutes of unrelenting paranoia?” the Dallas-based critic Matt Zoller Seitz asked by way of introduction, to which the packed house cheered in enthusiastic agreement. The audience that was gathered inside the Texas Theatre ranged dramatically in age, from graying seniors who could probably tell you exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot, to twentysomething movie buffs for whom JFK itself was ancient, inherited history. Still, as I wrote last year, even those folks who actually lived through the era have seen their recollections enhanced and even supplanted by what Alison Landsberg, a cultural history professor at George Mason University, has called our prosthetic memory of Kennedy’s assassination—a montage of sights, sounds, and feelings that have been largely shaped by pop culture. 

Chief among that assassination arcana is Stone’s JFK, which—with its hallucinatory blend of fact and speculation, its invocations of Shakespearean tragedy dosed with the spirit of a seventies conspiracy thriller—didn’t just weave those six seconds in Dallas into a persuasive narrative. It also inspired a never-cresting wave of paranoid-themed entertainment, from The X-Files to Call of Duty: Black Ops, which in turn nurtured a generation of skeptics, helping to foster the ambient unease that now colors nearly every aspect of our daily lives. 

Many of them had filled the Texas Theatre to give a hero’s welcome to the man and the film that had helped to bring conspiracy theories into the mainstream. And of course, it was also a strange sort of homecoming. We were watching JFK inside the very room where Oswald was arrested, just a half-mile from the intersection where he’d allegedly murdered Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit. When the Texas Theatre at last made its film cameo, there were whoops of proud recognition as multiple heads swiveled to gawk at the row of seats where Oswald had once sat—the same row where Gary Oldman was sitting on-screen, and now occupied by Oliver Stone and various other VIPs. My own head was among them. I couldn’t help it. This was the bizarro moment that many of us had come for, the singularity where reality and simulation, history and prosthetic memory collapsed in on themselves.  

Unfortunately, anyone hoping for more insight into that—or any of Stone’s memories at all about filming in Oak Cliff—was left disappointed. Stone, who recently turned 78, seemed even shaggier than usual as he slumped onto the stage for the post-screening Q&A, his specific recollections dim and his answers growing increasingly discursive. (To be fair, he shot JFK more than thirty years ago. It was also nearing midnight by the time the whole thing wrapped.) He did offer some thoughts on Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, which he’d recently toured again, as well as the city’s tentative proposals to remake the site for a modern citizenry that, increasingly, remembers neither JFK nor JFK with much immediacy. “It should be a national monument and it should be preserved,” Stone said. “But there are people in this town who want to bury the past and cover it all up, so they put up a museum that pretends to pay homage to the truth—that we know is not accurate at all.” Here the crowd applauded again.

 

The idea that Dallas wants to hide its connection to the Kennedy assassination rings slightly false to me, especially at a site that sells commemorative shot glasses. But I can see Stone’s larger point about the museum’s attempt to control the narrative and avoid anything smacking of controversy. Oak Cliff, by contrast, has not made any attempt to pretty up its own past, although time—and gentrification—have largely allowed it to remain compartmentalized. 

Before the screening, I walked a half-mile up Madison Avenue to visit 214 W. Neely Street, where you can still see the duplex that Oswald and his wife, Marina, lived in during the months leading up to the assassination. Around the back there is still the scrubby yard, framed by the same rickety white picket fence and wooden staircase, where Oswald posed for the now-infamous photos holding the guns that were later linked to Kennedy and Tippit’s murders. The scene still looks much like it did on the cover of Life magazine, its contours immediately familiar. Yet it also seems eerily unreal, floating inside a wormhole suspended among the many boutiques, mosaic-tiled condos, and taco-and-wine bars that now line the nearby Bishop Arts district. 

There is no historical marker at Oswald’s former residence, although at the intersection of Madison and Davis around the corner, you will find a mural of Oswald’s mugshot plastered across the wall outside the Kings Club barber shop. The accused assassin’s face glowers next to a quote (attributed to John F. Kennedy) that reads, “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.” Another mile to the northwest lies the Lee Harvey Oswald Rooming House Museum, where you can rummage through the tiny bedroom that Oswald crashed in during the days preceding the assassination, still preserved in its 1963 vintage. 

The Texas Theatre has similarly embraced its own dark history, perhaps owing to the fact that it wouldn’t exist today without it: The theater was slated for demolition in 1990, and it was only through a last-minute intervention by Stone (who was then prepping JFK) and the rock musician Don Henley (who’d filmed part of his “The End of the Innocence” video inside) that the venue was spared. The theater has since leaned into its infamy, hosting other assassination-themed events like the one held on last year’s sixtieth anniversary, where it screened the actual movies that were playing during Oswald’s arrest, followed by a staged reading of the Warren Commission’s interviews with theater employees, and wrapping up with a showing of, yep, JFK. 

 

Perhaps because Oak Cliff was just a bit player in those events—because it was spared the accusations of corruption and simmering violence that so bedeviled Dallas in the national imagination in the years that followed—the neighborhood feels no need to cover up much of anything. It has welcomed, if warily, its circumstantial connection to the past, transforming it into street art, into dark tourism, and into a ghost story that, like Oswald’s old duplex, feels completely untethered to the life all around it. But even as the buildings themselves remain unchanged, whatever truth they have to offer about Lee Harvey Oswald is nevertheless colored by the legend that’s arisen around him—a legend that has largely been shaped by Stone. 

JFK is rife with half-truths, exaggerations, and even outright lies. For his part, Stone has never recanted anything about the film; in 2021, he even doubled down on them with a documentary sequel, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which he urged the Texas Theatre audience to seek out. And as Seitz gently pressed him on those criticisms, Stone defended himself by pointing out that he’d seeded many of those doubts into the film itself.  

He glancingly acknowledged the film’s most glaring misrepresentation. Its protagonist, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, was not the nobly quixotic, Frank Capra-esque hero that the film and Kevin Costner make him out to be, but rather an opportunistic bully who brought business magnate Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) to trial largely because of his prejudicial belief that Shaw had orchestrated the Kennedy assassination as a “homosexual thrill killing.” It’s an aspersion that Stone’s film plays into by depicting Shaw as an amyl nitrate–huffing deviant, but while talking to Seitz, Stone would only concede that “Garrison had a weak case.” Nevertheless, Stone maintained that the prosecutor’s instincts were sound. “I still feel very strongly that Garrison was correct,” he said. “He was on the right trail.”

Feelings are what JFK is really about—the pervasive sense that, as Stone put it, “the system is all lies and deceit” and that “they just don’t tell the truth to the American public.” In Stone’s estimation, this “they” is bipartisan and all-encompassing. As Seitz pointed out, JFK is part of a thematically connected oeuvre of Stone’s films, from Platoon to Snowden, that grapple with what the director termed on stage the Beast, a multipronged monster that includes the U.S. military, defense contractors like Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics, the Wall Street investors who profit from them, the politicians who keep feeding it new wars, and finally, the media, which Stone asserted remains not just biased, but actively controlled by the CIA. 

The inability—or refusal—to kill the Beast is why Stone believes, he said, that “I don’t think we’ve had a good president” since Kennedy, going on to skewer even sacred Texas cows Lyndon B. Johnson (“a no good son of a bitch”) and George W. Bush (“put us in the shithole forever”) to cheers from the audience. “It’s not gonna happen with Kamala Harris, that’s for sure,” he added. The crowd cheered that as well.

In JFK, these feelings reach a fever pitch with the epic monologue delivered by the late Donald Sutherland as Mr. X, an anonymous insider who unspools a showy stem-winder about a secret shadow government orchestrating a coup d’etat on Kennedy in service of the military-industrial machine. Mr. X insists that the specifics of who killed Kennedy, and how they actually managed to pull it off don’t actually matter: “The how and the who is just scenery for the public,” he says. The only real question is why. 

 

Sutherland’s speech earned rapturous applause from the audience—as well it should, seeing as it’s one of the most hypnotically compelling exposition dumps ever committed to film. But watching those sixteen minutes now, you can also feel the enmity and polarization of the last decade taking shape, as this proto-QAnon sows the cryptic seeds that would eventually bloom into increasingly byzantine suspicions about everything from voting to football games.

It was thrilling to watch this movie that had inspired so many of us to grow up questioning everything inside the oddly sacred space that had played a part in it. But it was also unnerving to hear Stone assert so confidently that the CIA still controls the modern media, and that what the government has labeled “misinformation” is actually “so necessary to cleanse all the pollution that has accumulated in this river.” Like watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while chowing down on a big chunk of meat, it can frankly be a little nauseating to take in JFK right now, especially at a time when trust is at an all time low and none of us can seem to agree on basic facts. We are awash in the conspiracies that it inspired, propagated by folks who don’t care about who or how but only their convictions of why. 

That nexus where fiction and reality collapse is now all around us; that “unrelenting paranoia” has gone on much, much longer than just 206 minutes. As I write this article, there are people on social media convinced that the devastating hurricanes in Florida were actually created by the Democrats to influence the presidential election. Even my CIA handlers can’t give me advice on how to begin to counteract that. 

 

 

Edited October 20 by Benjamin Cole

[Pat Speer]

I agree. A nice article. Well worth reading. Thanks for sharing. 

Edited October 20 by Pat Speer

[Jonathan Cohen]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

I agree. A nice article. Well worth reading. Thanks for sharing. 

Agreed. A well-written and well-reasoned analysis of the many half-truths and outright distortions found in the film.

[Robert Morrow]

The Texas Monthly author Sean O'Neal is someone - like the great many who have written for Texas Monthly (including almost all of the managing editors), is someone WHO BELIEVES THE WARREN REPORT GOT IT RIGHT.

Texas Monthly is a longtime cover up operation for both Lyndon Johnson and the Bush Crime Family for decades.

And speaking of the "military-industrial complex" making money off of the Vietnam War - the very owner of the Texas School Book Depository Building D.H. Byrd was an LBJ insider and he and his pal James Ling of Dallas made very large buys into LTV stock in November, 1963 - either just before or just after the JFK assassination and both of these men MADE A TON OF MONEY OFF OF THE VIETNAM WAR.

LBJ insiders Dallas investors D.H. Byrd and James Ling bought 132,000 shares of LTV stock at $16/share in November, 1963. By 1967 the military contractor was trading at a whopping $169/share https://robertmorrowpoliticalresearchblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/lyndon-johnsons-dallas-tx-insider-pals.html

D.H. Byrd also took the TSBD sniper's window to his home as a trophy to go along with his other big game KILLS that he kept on the wall there.

[Ron Bulman]

15 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Even my CIA handlers can’t give me advice on how to begin to counteract that. 

 

[James DiEugenio]

What a load of baloney.  The Texas Monthly is the worst periodical in the state  on the JFK case.

That Sutherland's speech was somehow related to Q'Anon?  Utter rubbish.  Everything in that speech was true and for the first time in cinema history a mass audience was exposed to what the CIA had done abroad in the name of democracy, and it was not very democratic. To compare that with Q'Anon is simple nutty.

As far as Garrison, he was one of the best DA's the city ever had.  When I asked John Volz, who worked for both, to compare him with Harry Connick, he smiled and said there was no comparison, Connick was so bad. Garrison professionalized the office and depoliticized it.  He did not have a case reversed in something like five years which is really remarkable.  As per Shaw, the reason JG went after him is because he was convinced he was Bertrand, and he was.  The question then being: Why did you call Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?

To prevent being asked this question Shaw prevaricated his head off about everything: about knowing Ferrie, about knowing Oswald, and about never working for the CIA.  We now know the CIA deliberately hid that association and it took the ARRB to expose it.  As lawyers James Comey and Trey Gowdy said, when a suspect lies about material facts it is a dead giveaway for an obstruction charge.  And BTW Shaw did this in all public venues, on the stand, in the papers, on TV and in magazines.  He was a non stop BS artist.

Even the CIA was shocked about this fact: that he had not even told his lawyers about it.

Just remember this: Shaw's aide de camp, Jessie Core, just happened to be at Oswald's leafleting on Canal Street before the ITM incident.  He picked up one of Oswald's leaflets.  It had the 544 Camp Street address on it. Core sent that to the FBI office with an arrow and then a marking on the address. He did not want the same thing to happen at the ITM.  Because he was arranging the coverage to be there. 

And according to the employees at WDSU, it was on schedule when they came in that day.

 

Edited October 20 by James DiEugenio

[Pat Speer]

5 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

What a load of baloney.  The Texas Monthly is the worst periodical in the state  on the JFK case.

That Sutherland's speech was somehow related to Q'Anon?  Utter rubbish.  Everything in that speech was true and for the first time in cinema history a mass audience was exposed to what the CIA had done abroad in the name of democracy, and it was not very democratic. To compare that with Q'Anon is simple nutty.

As far as Garrison, he was one of the best DA's the city ever had.  When I asked John Volz, who worked for both, to compare him with Harry Connick, he smiled and said there was no comparison, Connick was so bad. Garrison professionalized the office and depoliticized it.  He did not have a case reversed in something like five years which is really remarkable.  As per Shaw, the reason JG went after him is because he was convinced he was Bertrand, and he was.  The question then being: Why did you call Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?

To prevent being asked this question Shaw prevaricated his head off about everything: about knowing Ferrie, about knowing Oswald, and about never working for the CIA.  We now know the CIA deliberately hid that association and it took the ARRB to expose it.  As lawyers James Comey and Trey Gowdy said, when a suspect lies about material facts it is a dead giveaway for an obstruction charge.  And BTW Shaw did this in all public venues, on the stand, in the papers, on TV and in magazines.  He was a non stop BS artist.

Even the CIA was shocked about this fact: that he had not even told his lawyers about it.

Just remember this: Shaw's aide de camp, Jessie Core, just happened to be at Oswald's leafleting on Canal Street before the ITM incident.  He picked up one of Oswald's leaflets.  It had the 544 Camp Street address on it. Core sent that to the FBI office with an arrow and then a marking on the address. He did not want the same thing to happen at the ITM.  Because he was arranging the coverage to be there. 

And according to the employees at WDSU, it was on schedule when they came in that day.

 

Uhh... the Sutherland speech pre-dates QAnon, but can be seen as one of the inspirations behind it. 

The Sutherland speech involves a shadowy figure, an anonymous insider, spewing government secrets to an investigator.

Such a figure might prove quite inspirational to someone looking to xxxxx the public. 

Of course we don't know the inspiration behind Q because we don't know Q. 

But it can not be disputed that people engaged in political behavior will embrace and emulate fictional characters. I mean, how many protesters over the years have worn V for Vendetta masks...without even thinking about Guy Fawkes?. Thousands, if not Millions...

Edited October 20 by Pat Speer

[James DiEugenio]

Oh please Pat, read the article.

And then read up on QAnon. A world of difference.  To even place people like us in the same sentence with QAnon is insulting.

And that is no mysterious character, its supposed to be Prouty who knew all about what he was saying.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

When I see an article/video published  on the JFKA/RFK1A, whether I agree or not, I often re-post here, to help everyone better understand the news environment. 

I like seeing all points of view on the JFKA/RFK1A, and subsequent related events or news coverage.  

Regarding the origins of QAnon, or JewAnon, or left-wing or right-wing nutballs, or anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic crackpots...they all got a mainline boost by the JFKA/RFK1A. 

That is, the idea that government and allied media are covering up the truth, and are being run by shadowy figures.  This appears to be at least somewhat a truth regarding the JFKA/RFK1A. 

In this regard, yes, the JFK film's Prouty gave strength to the idea that one man, or a specific point of view (or set of biases), can tell you The Real Truth about what is happening behind the curtains. And that Real Truth is one that eludes your less-enlightened political adversaries or those with another point of view on the JFKA/RFK1A. You are cool as you know The Real Truth. 

I am not saying there is no such thing as truth, or relative merit. 

Indeed, I strongly suspect there were at least two gunman on 11/22, and that LHO was involved in that day's events.

That is not everyone's point of view, and intelligent people disagree with me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 21 by Benjamin Cole

[Ron Bulman]

On 10/19/2024 at 8:58 AM, Benjamin Cole said:

“It should be a national monument and it should be preserved,” Stone said. “But there are people in this town who want to bury the past and cover it all up, so they put up a museum that pretends to pay homage to the truth—that we know is not accurate at all.” Here the crowd applauded again.

That's the best part of the article.  The guy seems to have a bias against Stone and the film from the get-go.

I've noted this before.  I let my subscription to Texas Monthly expire after the 50th anniversary because they chose Hugh Aynesworth to write the feature article on that subject for their November issue that year.  No question he was a Mockingbird, so what dose that make them?

 

[James DiEugenio]

Everything that Prouty said on that walk about CIA activiities was accurate.

Just as what he said about Vietnam was accurate.

And so was what he said about the lack of Secret Service protection and the 112th.

Why do we have to go through all this again?

I have read up about QAnon.  Those people are utterly fruity and I do not even want to go into the details. 

Yes, the JFK movement did likely cause a decline in belief in government, but it was warranted on the evidence.

I think, and many others do, that QAnon is a hoax.

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

Everything that Prouty said on that walk about CIA activiities was accurate.

Just as what he said about Vietnam was accurate.

And so was what he said about the lack of Secret Service protection and the 112th.

Why do we have to go through all this again?

I have read up about QAnon.  Those people are utterly fruity and I do not even want to go into the details. 

Yes, the JFK movement did likely cause a decline in belief in government, but it was warranted on the evidence.

I think, and many others do, that QAnon is a hoax.

JD-

Not to belabor a point...

That is the point: Prouty-Sutherland is seen as telling the truth, while government and media lie. 

This reality gives support (unfortunately or otherwise) to other non-mainstream alternative views, including QAnon, JewAnon, anti-Semitic crackpots, moon-landing and 9/11 tales, and so on.

I am not comparing these latter-day beliefs with the JFKA/RFK1A research. 

It did not help that the policy of the US government and media for two years was that COVID-19 did not come from a lab, and that only cranks believed that. Social media actually banned discussions about the lab origins of C19. Now...who can anymore trust anything public health officials say? 

So, as a nation, we are reaping what we have sowed. There has been so much lying and dissembling, and decades of declining living standards, and unnecessary wars...that large fractions of the public have lost faith in major US institutions, and believe in non-mainstream alternative narratives.