Secrets, lies and cover-ups

Ten years ago, writer-director Neil Burger was a fledgling filmmaker making a documentary in Texas about World War II vets. One evening, he was having dinner alone at a bar and grill when “sort of an odd old guy” started up a conversation with him. Their chat was the seed for Burger’s documentary-style thriller, “Interview With the Assassin,” which opens Friday.

“He asked me what I was doing and I told him,” Burger recalls. “For some reason, he thought I was a reporter and he told me he had a story that was going to blow the lid off of everything. He was very evasive. He wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t look at me. He would talk about something and then he would come back to it. Eventually, I got out of him that he knew somebody who was involved in the Kennedy assassination, which is a pretty incredible thing to hear.”

On the one hand, says Burger, he didn’t believe the man. So he pressed him for more details. “I got next to nothing out of him. Eventually he stood up and I thought he was just going to the bathroom, but he never came back. Later the next day, I was on a plane out of there. I thought he was pulling the leg of some young kid. But on the other hand, as with anything dealing with this event, there is a shred of possibility that he was for real. He always stuck with me and haunted me in a way.”

Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy 39 years ago, filmmakers like Burger have been drawn to the questions surrounding the president’s murder in Dallas and the various conspiracy theories surrounding the event. Kennedy’s death has lead to a seemingly never-ending stream of movies dealing with conspiracies, whether it be about political assassinations -- “Executive Action,” “The Parallax View,” “JFK” -- government-covering-up-aliens-invasion -- “The X-Files” -- or law enforcement corruption -- “Copland,” “L.A. Confidential.”

Though Burger isn’t a conspiracy junkie, he has always been interested in the theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. “It is this unsolved, confounding mystery of American history,” he explains. “I think for myself and a lot of other people, you delve into it because you can’t believe that this public event has so many unanswered questions. What can drive you mad is that there isn’t any definitive conclusive evidence on anything. You follow these trails of evidence down the line. They are so tantalizing, but you never have the answer. It is enough to keep you going, looking for more. It is enough to drive you insane.”

Beyond Kennedy

In the case of “Interview With the Assassin,” Burger looks at the Kennedy assassination through the eyes of an out-of-work TV news cameraman who believes he’s fallen into the story of a lifetime. An old, enigmatic neighbor has asked the gullible cameraman to come over to his house with his camera because he has a secret he’s finally willing to reveal -- he was the “grassy knoll gunman” -- the second assassin of JFK. But is he telling the truth?

“The heart of the movie is beyond the Kennedy thing,” Burger says. “It is really about these two men and the power play between them and how they are both trying to matter in the world and feel somehow significant in the world.”

Before the Kennedy assassination, there were movies dealing with conspiracies, most notably John Frankenheimer’s chilling 1962 film, “The Manchurian Candidate.” And in 1954, Frank Sinatra gave one of his best performances as a paid killer hired to assassinate the president in “Suddenly.” Of course, during World War II there were plenty of films dealing with Nazi conspiracies in the U.S., such as “Fallen Sparrow” in 1943.

But it wasn’t until Dallas that Americans began to mistrust the government. “There were conspiracies before that time, but it was only with the Kennedy assassination that the American people began to believe that the government was capable of a conspiracy,” says film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, curator of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum.

“There have always been conspiracies of outsiders trying to overthrow the government or this or that and occasional films like ‘Manchurian Candidate’ where rogue military people [were plotting], but you have the double whammy of the Kennedy assassination and the seeming cover-up of a conspiracy.”

The Watergate break-in in 1972, says Horak, just added fuel to the conspiracy fire. “Watergate is really important as a seminal moment when the American public finally understood that the people in government were capable of forming conspiracies.”

It wasn’t until after Watergate that Hollywood began to take up the conspiracy-theory movie banner with such films as “Executive Action,” “The Parallax View,” “Chinatown,” “All The President’s Men,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “The China Syndrome,” “Blow Out” and “The Star Chamber.”

Horak also views the continued fascination with conspiracy movies as an aspect of the tabloid press’ influence on the mainstream media. “It used to be a time when people would differentiate between the National Enquirer and the L.A. Times,” he says. “Nowadays, it seems clear to me that this differentiation no longer really exists. Mainstream, especially broadcast news, will pick up stories from the tabloid press and report them in quite the same fashion as legitimate stories.

“I think it really has to do with the fact that everything is grist for the media’s mill these days. If it is real or imagined doesn’t often make a lot of difference. The Roswell-alien syndrome which has really taken off and is so embedded in our popular culture that is almost accepted as real.”