JFK (movie)

JFK is a 1991 film which purports to tell the story of the assassination of President of the United States John F. Kennedy. It stars Kevin Costner, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Sissy Spacek, Brian Doyle-Murray, Gary Grubbs, Wayne Knight, Vincent D'Onofrio and Pruitt Taylor Vince.

The movie was adapted by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar from the books On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. It was directed by Stone.

It won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Tommy Lee Jones), Best Director, Best Music, Original Score, Best Picture, Best Sound and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

The real Jim Garrison, who was District Attorney for New Orleans, Louisiana, plays Earl Warren in the film.

Table of contents

1 Historical inaccuracies
2 See also
3 External links

Historical inaccuracies

Historians dismiss the claims in the film as fiction, with fundamental inaccuracies and complete fiction added in to fact. Among the major errors in the film are:

claims about the location of Governor Connolly in relation to President John F. Kennedy in the car;
myths about the trajectory of the so-called magic bullet theory (based on wrongly locating Governor Connolly in relation to Kennedy at the time of the assassination);
misleading claims as to the impact the shot to the head had on Kennedy, to suggest that Kennedy had been shot from the front, when the movements and nature of the wound suggest it could only have come from behind;
a suggestion that Garrison's theories were demonstrated in court, when in reality Garrison's case collapsed well before that point.

The scale of the inaccuracies, and what some critics have called the deceptions, in the movie have made JFK Stone's most controversial work. However the storyline and interpretations placed on facts fueled further conspiracies about what really happened on 22 November 1963.