Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, & the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood

425 Pages·2016·2.18 MB·English

by  DiEugenio

RECLAIMING
PARKLAND
RECLAIMING
PARKLAND
Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi,
and the JFK Assassination
in the New Hollywood
JAMES DIEUGENIO
WITH A PREFACE BY LISA PEASE
AND A FOREWORD BY WILLIAM DAVY
Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 2013 by James DiEugenio All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62636-533-9
Printed in the United States of America
To my aunt and uncle, Louis
and Ernesta Spong, who raised me
Contents
Preface
Foreword
Introduction
Part 1: How a Calamity Befell Us
1. The Prosecutor
2. The Producers
3. You Call This a Trial?
Part 2: Exposing Reclaiming History
4. On First Encountering Reclaiming History
5. Oswald’s Defense
6. Bugliosi on the Zapruder Film and the Autopsy
7. Bugliosi vs. Garrison and Stone
8. Bugliosi on the First Forty-Eight Hours
9. Bugliosi and the FBI
10. Bugliosi Hearts the Warren Commission
11. The DA Acquits Everyone
Part 3: From Reclaiming History to Parkland, and Beyond
12. Hanks as Historian: A Case Study
13. Where Washington Meets Hollywood
14. Playtone and Parkland
15. My Dinner with Giorgio
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
With Reclaiming Parkland, Jim DiEugenio has performed a valuable service.
Fifty years after the assassination of President Kennedy, with so many of the
facts now available, it’s truly hard to understand how so many figures in the
media continue to get the basic facts of the assassination so wrong.
Jim approaches this subject from a new angle: by examining the built-in
biases of these authors and filmmakers based on past projects and decisions. His
revelations go a long way toward explaining how people as bright as Vincent
Bugliosi or as lovable as Tom Hanks nonetheless fail to understand and correctly
present this history.
In this book, Jim exams the recent books and scripts that Hollywood has
made (and is making) into films and challenges their core theses. I, too, received
a copy of the script of Parkland while it was still in development and was
stunned at how overtly dishonest, in terms of the actual facts, it was. I’ve written
screenplays. I understand the necessity of reshaping history in small ways to fit a
dramatic narrative. I’m one of the first to say, and did say about Charlie
Wilson’s War, hey, it’s just a film.
But I’m also a student of propaganda methods and techniques, and I know
well how fictional presentations of history can inform or mislead an entire
generation. I enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War because I’m an Aaron Sorkin dialog
addict, and I wasn’t expecting that any of the so-called history presented would
be true. But I support the argument of others. Many people think they critically
consume a film, only to refer to events from them later as if they were fact. Most
people assume that if a film is purportedly based on a true event, it will be
largely true in the important details. This is not always the case.
Ironically, that was the case with Oliver Stone’s overly maligned film JFK.
Sure, he combined several characters into new ones, compressed timelines, and
changed what people had said. You have to do that to tell a more-than-three-hour
story in three hours. But as someone who has studied the Kennedy assassinations
—plural—for twenty years, I was amazed at how much director Stone and
screenwriter Zach Sklar got right. I recognized dialog that came word for word
from transcripts of Warren Commission testimony. I knew who the characters
were meant to represent, even when the names had been changed or two or more
people combined into a fictional character. But the essence of every scene was
based on the facts as they were known at the time. So beyond being a fantastic
moviegoing experience, which is all anyone should ever expect from a fictional
story, it was also, remarkably, quite true to its subject.
The same cannot be said for Parkland, Charlie Wilson’s War, and an
upcoming film based on books by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. These
presentations don’t just distort history. They misrepresent it in ways so serious
one can only call them propaganda.
That this is also true of Vincent Bugliosi’s book Reclaiming History,
however, is vastly more disturbing. It’s not a film; it’s a book. It is supposed to
be a nonfiction presentation. Yet it is so rife, as Jim aptly demonstrates, with
errors and distortion that it, too, can only properly be labeled propaganda.
In this presentation, Jim ranges far afield, giving us details of the Manson
murders as reported in Bugliosi’s most famous book, Helter Skelter, and
examining in some detail a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in which Bugliosi
participated. Knowing how much Bugliosi had gotten wrong in Reclaiming
History, Jim looked into those earlier cases to understand Bugliosi’s biases.
Similarly, one can’t really understand why Tom Hanks would produce a
movie like Parkland without understanding who Tom Hanks is, what motivates
him, and why he gravitates to certain types of projects.
Jim also considers the powerful and sometimes sinister relationship
between the Pentagon, the CIA, and Hollywood. It may be harder than ever to
get honest films made in the future if we don’t confront this growing alliance.
A filmmaker in Hollywood shared a story with me that is relevant here. He
had made a documentary about the JFK assassination. Before he went to the
meeting where the studio executives were to vet his project, Oliver Stone had
handed him a copy of the now-famous CIA memo that dictated instructions to its
media assets as to how to refute notions that Kennedy was killed by a
conspiracy. The filmmaker entered the room, and the atmosphere was jovial. He
distributed the memo, ran to the restroom, and returned. Suddenly, the
atmosphere in the room had turned stone cold. He soon found out why. The
author of that CIA memo was one of the people at the vetting table, and the
memo had just outed him to the other participants. It’s a bit chilling to consider
that the CIA is so deeply embedded in Hollywood that it has the ability to put the
kibosh on projects it might feel threatened by. Perhaps that, more than anything,
explains the trouble, as Jim discusses, that Salon founder and author David
Talbot had when he tried to get a documentary made based on his book
Brothers.
This book should initiate a discussion of the role that Hollywood
increasingly plays in shaping, and often distorting, our history. Because once
history is polluted, like the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Prince William
Sound, Alaska, it can take decades to clean up.
That’s why this book is important. This is a book that seeks to dredge that
sludge up and return a clearer history to us. I’m grateful to Jim for dedicating a
significant portion of his life to this monumental task.
Jim did not embark on this journey alone. The book is laden with
acknowledged contributions from many lesser-known researchers who have
toiled for decades for the same reason Jim has: history actually matters. Our
understanding of history determines our future course. If we figure out what
happened, then we know what we need to do next. Perhaps the biggest reason
some people prefer to read the false history is that it requires nothing of us. If
Oswald alone killed Kennedy, there’s no reason to change anything about one’s
life. But if the government lied to us, if the media is still lying to us, that tells us
just how much was and is still at stake and that we need to take action if we wish
to change course. Not everyone wants to confront that reality. Heck, my life
would have been simpler had I never picked up Jim Garrison’s fine book on the
Kennedy assassination, On the Trail of the Assassins. The truth really is like the
red pill in the film The Matrix: once you consume it, you can never go back to
your previous mental state again.
If you, like most people, long to “fit in,” you need what’s in this book. This
book will arm you with the means to defend whatever notion you had that
caused you to read this far in the first place. If you tell people you don’t believe
Oswald acted alone, you will soon be labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” (I correct
those who mislabel me by noting I am actually a “conspiracy realist.”) Be
assured you are on the right path. Jim will give you the facts to refute the
arguments your well-meaning but ill-informed friends may make. You are in
good hands. And if you have a sense of humor at all, you will laugh. If you
don’t, schedule an appointment to get your funny bone checked.
—Lisa Pease, coeditor of The Assassinations, August 2013