Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...early draft of Stone's script (co-written with Zachary Sklar, who edited Garrison's book), we learn that Oswald was just a pawn in an elaborate plot that ranged from seedy gay bars in the French Quarter to the corridors of power in Washington. We meet bizarre characters like David Ferrie, a homosexual ex-airline pilot with a homemade wig and greasepaint eyebrows who claimed involvement in the conspiracy but died before he could testify. We witness shadowy meetings between Oswald and Jack Ruby before the assassination. We are told that as many as seven shots may have been...
David Belin, former counsel to the Warren Commission and author of two books on the assassination, calls the script "a bunch of hokum." By ignoring key pieces of evidence and misrepresenting others, Belin says, Stone casts doubt even on issues that are relatively clear-cut, like Oswald's murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. (Oswald was identified as the gunman at the scene by at least six eyewitnesses.) "It is a shame that a man as talented as Stone has had to go to such lengths to deceive the American public," says Belin...
...article for the Post, George Lardner Jr., who covered the Shaw trial and now specializes in national-security issues, called Garrison's investigation "a fraud" and attacked the script for such dubious scenes as one in which Ferrie is murdered by two mysterious figures who force medicine down his throat. (The New Orleans coroner ruled that Ferrie died of natural causes, though two apparent suicide notes were found.) Lardner also ridiculed the film's attempt to explain away Garrison's botched prosecution of Shaw by inventing a Garrison aide who turns out to be a mole for the Feds aiming...
Even critics of the Warren Commission find fault with Stone's version of events. Harold Weisberg, author of Whitewash, one of the earliest attacks on the Warren Report, calls Stone's script "a travesty" that dredges up bogus theories and unfounded speculation. Among them: the suggestion that three hobos arrested near the assassination site were involved (they were vagrants who had nothing to do with the assassination, says Weisberg), and Garrison's "discovery" that the route of Kennedy's motorcade had been changed at the last minute (a phony charge, says Weisberg, that was based on conflicting descriptions...
Stone, with some justification, has objected to his film's being dissected even before it is finished. The criticisms, he says, are based on the first draft of a script that has been substantially revised. (The Ferrie murder scene, for example, has been eliminated.) Stone compares the Post's attack on his film to the Hearst newspapers' efforts to suppress Citizen Kane five decades ago. "This is a repeat performance," says Stone. "But nothing is | going to stop me from finishing this movie." The director insists, moreover, on his right to make a movie that expresses his view...