Trailer
Plot summary
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine whom officials suspected of defecting to the Soviet Union, is charged in the killing of police officer J. D. Tippit and in the president's murder. In New Orleans, District Attorney Jim Garrison and his staff examine possible local links to the assassination, among them David Ferrie, a pilot and activist, until the federal government publicly rebukes the inquiry and Garrison closes it. Reading the Warren Report in 1966, Garrison finds what he takes to be inaccuracies, including the single-bullet theory, and reopens the case. His team begins questioning people who knew Oswald and Ferrie.
Cast
- Anthony Ramirezas Epileptic
- E.J. Morrisas Plaza Witness #1
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about JFK (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Oliver Stone met publisher Ellen Ray by chance on an elevator in Havana, Cuba, and she gave him Jim Garrison's book on the Kennedy assassination. Stone read it and quietly bought the film rights himself for $250,000 to keep studios from hearing about the project.
- Kevin Costner initially turned down the lead role of Jim Garrison, but agent Michael Ovitz talked him into it. Two months after Costner signed on in January 1991, his film Dances with Wolves won seven Academy Awards, which made his presence in JFK far more valuable to the studio.
- To recreate the assassination in Dealey Plaza, Stone's producers paid the Dallas City Council to close streets for three weeks and paid $50,000 just to put someone in the Texas School Book Depository window where Oswald allegedly fired from.
- Jim Garrison himself appears in the film, playing Chief Justice Earl Warren in the scene in which Warren questions Jack Ruby in a Dallas jail, and in a TV appearance.
- Prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi devoted a full chapter of his book Reclaiming History to the film, listing thirty-two separate "lies and fabrications" he found in Stone's version of events.
- Stone originally wanted James Woods to play David Ferrie, but Woods turned it down, and Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich were both approached and also turned down the role.
- Marlon Brando was considered by Stone for the role of Mr. X in JFK before the part eventually went to Donald Sutherland.
