“The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.”
After reading District Attorney Jim Garrison’s 1988 best-seller, On The Trail Of The Assassins, director Oliver Stone bought the rights with his own money. To collect as much information as possible on the assassination of JFK he hired Jane Rusconi, a Yale graduate to head up a team of 24 researchers. The screenplay’s first draft was 190 pages, pared down to 156 pages for filming. The huge production was shot in just 72 days. Getting permission to shoot in the Texas School Book Depository wasn’t easy– the administrators demanded $50,000. The hardest part was getting approval to transform the building back to the way it looked in 1963, which took five months of negotiation. And making Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas look the same as it did back then cost $4 million. Stone’s first choices to play the role of Jim Garrison were Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson. Initially, Kevin Costner also turned it down. Many actors including Donald Sutherland, Jack Lemmon and Ed Asner waived their usual fees to appear in this film. Ironically, the real Jim Garrison played the role of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Pat Dowell, veteran movie critic for The Washingtonian had written a 34 word positive review of the movie that was to appear in the January issue. But editor John Limpert, a known opponent to the film didn’t want to run a positive review of a film he regarded as deceptive, so he rejected it. Dowell resigned in protest. Oliver Stone showed the finished film in December 1991 to all of Congress on Capitol Hill, which led to the 1992 Assassinations Disclosure Act.
