Stone Goes for Direct Hit at UCI : Lecture: Filmmaker tells an overflow crowd Monday night that ‘a revolution’ is needed to release the government’s John F. Kennedy assassination files.

Call it life yielding to art.

Self-proclaimed “guerrilla historian” Oliver Stone, whose film “JFK” excoriates the Warren Commission explanation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the governmental keepers of still-secret files on the slaying, is invited to persuade members of Congress to release those records.

Stone argued passionately Tuesday before a congressional subcommittee in Washington for full disclosure of all government files connected to the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. Yet Monday night at UC Irvine, he told an overflow crowd that even if those files are made public, he doesn’t expect to find a “smoking gun” to prove his belief that a government conspiracy existed.

“I don’t think they were stupid enough to have left anything in the files,” Stone told 1,200 students, faculty and community members who jammed a campus meeting hall for the 45-year-old director’s talk on foreign policy and the media.

“Nothing was ever on paper ordering people to kill the President; that’s not how it worked,” said Stone, whose film suggests that government officials, particularly those within the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, conspired in the murder. “If someone today on his deathbed in Irvine confessed that he helped kill Kennedy, nobody would believe him because there’s nothing on paper.”

So why was the director hot-footing it from an adulating mob at UCI to catch a “red-eye” flight to Washington at the request of Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and the House subcommittee on legislation and national security?

It’s the principle, said Stone, whose 1991 political thriller triggered a national debate on Kennedy’s killing.

“What we need is a revolution (to liberate) the files, like they had in . . . Romania,” Stone told students. “We’ve just got to go in and take them,” he added to loud applause.

Since its release in theaters last December, “JFK” has been targeted by many critics--both in and out of the film industry--for changes Stone made in the historical record for dramatic effect. But the printed message at the end of the three-hour film--noting that material uncovered by the special House Assassinations Committee in the 1970s is sealed until 2029--has renewed public cries for disclosure.

On Jan. 30, a dozen lawyers who worked for the Warren Commission called for immediate release of CIA files and any other government records on the Kennedy assassination. Former President Gerald Ford made a similar request that month.

Both Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), who chaired a special House subcommittee on the killing, have called for releasing the files with only a few privacy constraints. Even CIA Director Robert M. Gates has promised to open more of the agency’s classified documents.

With Tuesday’s congressional hearing and resolutions calling for release of the documents wending their way through Congress, Stone is feeling vindicated.

“Do you think they’d be having these hearings on the assassination without this film?” he asked with a challenging gap-toothed smile. Later he added: “I feel like I’m absolutely right, at least I got much closer to the truth than the Warren Commission did or ever would.”

Winning full disclosure of secret documents wasn’t his first purpose in making the film. But Stone, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, now hopes the film will be a wedge to help break open the top-secret files surrounding other controversial events in history.

“I see no reason why we can’t broaden this to include releasing the files on Martin Luther King’s assassination, on Watergate and on the origins of the Vietnam War,” he said. He also hopes Congress will enact an oversight process that would prevent the legislative body or any other government entity from withholding information.

Some of his most ardent student fans weren’t convinced that “JFK” has wrought changes in the hearts and minds in the highest echelons of government.

“Making movies is a good way of manipulating people,” observed Susan Corben, a junior majoring in studio art from the San Fernando Valley. “But I really don’t think Congress cares what he (Stone) thinks.”

A tall man dressed in a fashionably rumpled black linen jacket, salmon-colored shirt, black trousers and black deck shoes, Stone hardly seemed the image of an expert on foreign policy or the media, the focus of the UCI class that brought him to campus.

Yet the brash director who won critical acclaim and Academy Awards for directing “Platoon” in 1986 and “Born on the Fourth of July” in 1989 asserted in catchy sound bites that the same journalists and experts who vilified him and “JFK” were co-conspirators for failing to adequately investigate the Kennedy murder or a host of other watershed events of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

“The New York Times is Pravda, the Washington Post is Izvestia,” charged Stone, who still seemed stung by the venomous reviews and stories about his film. “They call me a McCarthy-like witch hunter, a Nazi, to confuse things.”

If Stone had one message for students questioning him Monday, it seemed to sum up his personal mission as a filmmaker: “Rock the boat. . . . Educate yourself and hopefully try to change things.”