BEFORE: The end is coming - I can wrap this Doc Block up in just over a week if I can just stop adding more skip days. Well, I have to work and I have to sleep and I have to line films up with birthdays, it's just what I do.
This seems like maybe a bit of a weird doc because it appears to be a mix of a promotional piece for the 1991 Oliver Stone film "JFK", while at the same time serving as a recounting of the Kennedy assassination timeline and aftermath, and detailing the extent of the overlying conspiracy theories. Sure, and if you've got any time left over in those 90 minutes, please also update us on where Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried and what's being kept in Area 51 - if it's not too much trouble. Look after the Marilyn Monroe documentary turned out to be a big nothing-burger, I'm not really expecting too much tonight. It has been a really long time since I watched the "JFK" film, so maybe there's time for a rewatch of that, which would of course be an off-the-books viewing. Films which I've already seen before are exempt from my annual stats, and take place at my discretion.
This is, however, another chance to cross another U.S. state off the list with another "Get to Know a State" profile, and with Jim Garrison's investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw and other people in New Orleans, and considering that I covered Texas already, tonight's state is therefore LOUISIANA.
Date admitted to the U.S.: April 30, 1812 (18th state)
Claim to fame: The Louisiana Purchase, sure, the big deal that like doubled the size of the U.S. They also seem very proud of their food down there but I have my own opinions.
Nickname: Pelican State or Bayou State or Sportsman's Paradise (?)
State Motto: "Union, Justice, Confidence"
State Flower: Magnolia
State Bird: Brown pelican
State Insect: Honeybee
State Tree: Bald Cypress
State Crustacean: Crawfish
State Bird: Brown pelican
State Reptile: Alligator. Sure, on the bayou.
State Fish: Crappie
State Instrument: Diatonic accordion
Notable Sports Teams: Saints? Is that an NFL team? I think an NBA team moved down there and changed its name to the Pelicans, too. The next step down is apparently a rugby team and the college football thing. LSU Tigers and Louisiana Tech Bulldogs, plus various Jaguars, Tigers and Ragin' Cajuns.
Fun Facts: The state is named for King Louis XIV and belonged to France, Spain and France again before the big Purchase. The culture is a mix of French, Creole, Cajun (Acadian), Spanish, Native American and West African people and their traditions.
I have been to Louisiana! We drove from Houston to New Orleans on BBQ Crawl #2 in 2018, we were there the week before Halloween and we went on a Spooky Ghost Tour, one that really was about famous murders, the ghost thing was kind of tangential, assuming all murder sites are haunted. We also visited a museum that had one exhibit about Hurricane Katrina and another about Mardi Gras costumes, fun stuff. I know we had beignets from the city's 2nd most popular cafe, and I had a shrimp po'boy at a restaurant/bar. We stayed in a hotel next to a riverboat casino and ate more New Orleans food at their buffet - found out that I'm not really a fan of gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish etouffe or muffalettas, which is basically everything they're so proud of down there. Anyway, now I'm at 26 states visited out of 43 profiles, I'm over the 50% mark!
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson carry over from "Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan".
THE PLOT: A behind-the-scenes documentary on Oliver Stone's controversial epic "JFK" (1991) featuring interviews with the cast, the director and the personalities who remember the facts concerning the November 22, 1963 event, while analyzing the facts, myths and rumors about Kennedy's assassination.
AFTER: Yes, we are moving ahead with our plan to re-watch the "JFK" film, we'll try to get through half of it tonight and the second half tomorrow, it's simply too long to watch in one sitting. My wife needs smoke breaks, I need bathroom breaks, and I need to be properly caffeinated or you know, right after dinner works too, we can be full and not distracted by being hungry or thirsty or tired or being on our phones. This will be the FIRST time I've seen the film in many years, and since the last time, I've been to both Dallas and New Orleans. We visited the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, we saw the Oswald sniper's nest and the grassy knoll. This was in 2018, and surprisingly very little has changed around Dealey Plaza since 1963 - or maybe it has, and it all just LOOKS the same, I don't know.
But a strange thing happened when we got down on ground level, after visiting the Assassination Museum on the sixth floor. We stood on the grassy knoll, near that monument-like thing, and I looked down Elm St. and in my mind's eye, I could SEE the President's car turning the corner and coming toward me. Probably because I've seen the famous footage, including the Zapruder film, so many times. I think standing in the "Zapruder spot" must have triggered it, also there was a medium-sized "X" painted on the street, so you will know what happened directly over that X. Also a street vendor was selling newspapers that were replicas of that day's edition, to really drive the point home that somehow we had both time-traveled back to November 1963. Well, I felt very morbid and gross after that, let's say, so we didn't hang around for long and we headed over to a BBQ place because it was my birthday. (Jeez, if we really had time traveled back I couldn't have celebrated my birthday because I wasn't born yet.)
So the Oliver Stone film and this doc both follow the same pattern, making their cases via the "shovel" method. That's when they shovel so much evidence in front of us that we get buried in it, and we're forced to admit that OK, yes, this sure is an awful lot of evidence, and therefore the conspiracy theories simply MUST be true. They're possible, sure, but evidence can be misleading and is not always convincing, in fact some of the pieces may not be convincing at all and the conspiracy nuts might be hoping that we don't notice that. Oswald was friends with Jack Ruby, Oswald was trained by the military and kept on a base in Tokyo, he was questioned for 12 hours without a lawyer present and there's no record of what the police asked him. Any of these by themselves are fine, but then when you put them together, it's very easy to assume that they add up to something.
It would be extremely difficult for anyone to shoot three rounds in six seconds. Oswald's rifle initially didn't have any prints on it, then later had his palm print. The amount of damage done to the bodies of Kennedy and Gov. Connally by so few bullets meant that one bullet would have had to leave Connally's body, turn around mid-air and enter JFK's body from another angle, the so-called "magic bullet" theory. Yes, if you put them all together you certainly might come to the conclusion that there were more assassins than just one, more bullets and more shooters.
There's also no shortage of suspects, because there's the Cubans who hated Kennedy, the Mafia, the dreaded "military industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us about, then the FBI that was run by Hoover, who also had a grudge against JFK, the CIA, the KGB and then there's the most/least obvious suspect of all, Vice President Johnson, who of course would become President after JFK's death, and then be able to tackle the war in Vietnam, Texas style. I'm not saying LBJ was an evil man, for all I know he was a sweetheart of a person, but if it were a movie, I would certainly not rule out the VP as a suspect.
Now, I was raised in Massachusetts, a place where a Kennedy could really do no wrong - a Kennedy could have affairs or leave a girl behind in a car to drown and we wouldn't think much of it, they'd still have our support. But when I visited the Sixth Floor museum, I saw a Texas newspaper editorial from 1963 hanging on the wall, pointing out that JFK was a terrible President who had bungled the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs and should be subject to charges of treason. This shocked me, I had no idea that he was so hated in the Dallas area, and if someone in the Dallas area hates you, you really should consider a bullet-proof vest, just saying. Riding through Dallas in an open-top car was probably asking for trouble, also taking THAT route past a bunch of buildings, making that turn onto Elm St. - as one of the characters in the "JFK" film points out, it's like driving into a kill zone. And then the car SLOWS DOWN? WTF?
Look, the Warren Commission clearly bungled their investigation, it was perfunctory at best, and the members were under pressure to keep focused on the original theory, that Oswald acted alone, was a crazy nut-job loose cannon, and that this was unlikely to happen again. Mistakes were clearly made during the original investigation, and probably the Warren Commission repeated those mistakes while adding a bunch of new mistakes of their own. They didn't call enough witnesses, they didn't explore every line of questioning, they didn't do their due diligence. Also, they were hampered by the fact that many of the witnesses from Dealey Plaza had died, maybe a few too many of them had "untimely accidents" that prevented them from speaking about what they saw that didn't fit the lone gunman theory.
Here's what I think, because there were so many people and factions who were against JFK and wanted things to improve with him out of the picture - we're seeing this now with Trump, who has survived what, three assassination attempts? People get unhappy with the war, the economy, the loss of their abortion rights, and all of the lies, thousands of them, so they tell themselves that assassination is the only way. Different people come to this conclusion at different times, every nutjob has a different breaking point. But for JFK in Dallas, I think a lot of different factions turned up in the same place on the same day and had the same idea. It was a scheduling mix-up, that's all. Oswald showed up, the CIA showed up, the KGB and Cuban assassins probably car-pooled together, the mob hit-men were there - it was really quite a mess because they all saw each other setting up in different places and there was almost like a total turf war. "Wait, how come you get the grassy knoll, and I get the very uncomfortable overpass?" "Hey, how come you get a fence to lean on, and I just have this stupid stack of books? It's not fair!" That's not really a conspiracy, it's just friendly competition, really, they didn't coordinate, I mean if they had coordinated together they would have all picked different cities on different days, to maximize their chances.
So naturally when they other groups heard the first shot, it turned into a free-for-all. And then the President's car slowed down before speeding away, jeezus, that's just like an invitation for the people on the grassy knoll and the guys on the overpass to open fire. Really, this explains so much, because if you stick with the "lone gunman in the book depository" there's just no way that Oswald's shot from behind could cause the most damage to the BACK of JFK's head, and we can throw out the "magic bullet" theory as there's no need to explain how three bullets made like eight entry wounds. But this way the conspiracy nuts are also wrong, because the different factions in Dealey Plaza were NOT working together, there were just like three or four different groups who all wanted to kill JFK for various reasons. No conspiracy, just over-scheduling, and you know, it happens.
We just had a report in the news that the Secret Service did some decoy work to protect Trump after a summit in Turkey, after a credible (?) threat due to the continuing war in Iran, it was believed that Air Force One was vulnerable, so after boarding that plane, Trump was removed from it with the use of a catering van, which brought him to another plane. We're seeing this more and more in concerts and comic-cons, because crazy fans have been known to stand around and wait for a glimpse of their favorite actor or singer, because just seeing them on stage or from a distance is not enough. They could bring Taylor Swift, say, into an arena, or to the stage in a large box, we can assume it's probably cushioned in there and there are air holes, but for safety's sake, she needs to be protected from crazy fans. I once saw a bunch of people standing by a door at a Comic-Con because they were told that Natalie Portman would be entering that way, but I knew they just did that to keep the crazy fans there while she entered another way, and sure enough, they used the same box trick because she popped up inside the booth, as if by magic. So this recent revelation about Trump comes as no surprise, this could just be standard practice, and if so, we don't know how many assassination attempts it has foiled. They no longer bring the President down a busy city street with a lot of tall buildings in a slow-moving open-top car and print the motorcade route in the newspaper the day before, that's for sure. Lesson learned.
The "Shovel Method" is used again near the end of this film, because the doc chooses to focus on other scandalous U.S. government behavior, such as the Iran-Contra scandal, with Oliver North testifying, and Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. Well, logically if politicians are always lying and there have been many other scandals SINCE 1963, then that would seem to justify the conspiracy theories regarding the assassination - EXCEPT for the fact that those are all separate incidents, and the existence of one does not prove (or disprove) the other.
Directed by Barbara Kopple (director of "ReMastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black") & Danny Schechter
Also starring Edward Asner (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Numa V. Bertel Jr., Madeleine Brown, Kevin Costner (last seen in "John Candy: I Like Me"), Walter Cronkite (also carrying over from "Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan"), John Davis, James DiEugenio, David Duke, Mary Ferrell, Jim Garrison, Richard N. Goodwin, Robert J. Groden, Edward A. Haggerty, Jean Hill, Ed Hoffman, Larry N. Howard, Lou Ivon, Rosemary James, Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Package"), Stanley Karnow, Jonathan Kwitny, Mark Lane, Jack Lemmon (last seen in "The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes"), Jim Lesar, Ron Lewis, David Lifton, David MacMichael, Robert MacNeil, Jim Marrs, Walter Matthau (last seen in "Film Geek"), Wallace Milam, Dan Moldea, John M. Newman, Carl Oglesby, Gary Oldman (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Beverly Oliver, Tip O'Neill, Marina Oswald, Ike Pappas, Jerry Policoff, L. Fletcher Prouty, Earl Ruby, Perry R. Russo, Zachary Sklar, Sissy Spacek (last seen in "The Luckiest Man in America"), Oliver Stone (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Malcolm Summers, William Turner, Cyril H. Wecht, Tom Wicker,
with archive footage of Dean Andrews, Kevin Bacon (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins"), Fidel Castro (also last seen in "The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes"), Jimmy Hoffa (ditto), Robert F. Kennedy (ditto), Nikita Khrushchev (ditto), John Connally, John Dean, Allen Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower, Jodie Farber, Gerald Ford (last seen in "The Apprentice"), Will Fritz, Sam Giancana, Anita Hill, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Caroline Kennedy, John Kennedy Jr., Ted Kennedy (last seen in "John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls"), Wayne Knight (last seen in "Spielberg"), Ted Koppel, Russell Long, Marita Lorenz, Carlos Marcello, Richard Nixon (also carrying over from "Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan"), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (ditto), Oliver North, Lee Harvey Oswald (last seen in "Rather"), Jack Ruby (ditto), Joe Pesci (also last seen in "Film Geek"), Jerry Stiller (ditto), Donald Sutherland (ditto), Michael Rooker (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Johnny Roselli, Jay O. Sanders (last heard in "The Assistant"), Clay Shaw, Arlen Specter, Santo Trafficante Jr., Henry M. Wade, Earl Warren,
RATING: 4 out of 10 displays in the Sixth Floor Museum
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