Oliver Stone and ‘JFK’: The Debate Goes On

Regarding “Who Issues Historical Licenses Anyway?” by Jack Mathews (Film Comment, Jan. 5):

I found Mathews talking out of both sides of his mouth. No child age 10 is going to open up a history book and read about Bugsy Siegel’s apocalyptic visions of the now-thriving desert oasis Las Vegas. That selfsame child 10 years from now may see “JFK” and accept Ollie Stone’s auteurist speculations as gospel and thereby be greatly damaged by it.

In seeing “JFK,” I was reminded of Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin.” He made the “truth” fit along Communist Party lines, rather than re-enact history verbatim. Stone apparently has fallen into the same trap Ron Shelton met with in his film “Blaze”--that is, having to meet the protagonist’s face-saving agendum, in Stone’s case Jim Garrison.

If screenwriters Stone and Zachary Sklar really wanted to render an artistic service and be thought-provocative as well, all they had to do was change the character names of everyone involved, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inclusive, a la, say, “Citizen Kane.” Dallas could even have remained Dallas so that the Dealey Plaza details could have been left intact.

The point of Garrison-Sklar-Stone would have been made, albeit without the distortive elements inherent in the project to begin with; we would all have known what they were intimating, and the movie would clearly have been a work of fiction based on historical incidents.

LEONARD MACALUSO

North Hollywood