How the ‘JFK’ conspiracy almost ruined Oliver Stone’s career: “There’s no evidence, there’s no trial”
Admittedly, there’s a sense of irony in suggesting that a director’s entire career went south on the back of peddling a conspiracy on a mainstream scale, which sounds a touch conspiratorial itself. However, based on nothing on the facts, it’s inarguable that Oliver Stone has been sliding downhill ever since JFK.
In the 13 years up to and including the release of his alternate history biographical drama, Stone had deservedly earned his stripes as one of his generation’s foremost auteurs. Whether he was writing, directing, or pulling double duty, his name quickly became synonymous with box office success and critical acclaim.
He had a hand in Midnight Express, Conan the Barbarian, Scarface, Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, and Born on the Fourth of July, among others, winning Academy Awards for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ for the former and a pair of ‘Best Director’ prizes for his Vietnam war epic and Ron Kovic biopic, respectively.
However, after JFK earned three nods for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, Stone has rarely troubled the Oscars again. At the same time, a case can rightfully be made that he hasn’t made any pictures worthy of major awards season consideration since that’s kind of the point. The decline has been critical and commercial, and the filmmaker has continued banging the drum that the version of events revealed to the public wasn’t a genuine reflection of what happened to John F Kennedy.
It’s remained the highest-grossing entry in his filmography ever since, as well as his best-reviewed. In short, ever since he went public with his beliefs that the then-president wasn’t assassinated in the way history remembers, he’s never made a more lucrative or well-received feature. A coincidence? Perhaps, but taking his eye off the filmic ball and placing it so brazenly on his political beliefs hasn’t exactly worked wonders for his standing in Hollywood.
Stone’s last Oscar nomination was a ‘Best Original Screenplay’ nod for Nixon, another politicised biopic. When he returned to that well again with W and Snowden, the results were rampantly mediocre. Instead, outside of the occasional minor victory like Natural Born Killers or Any Given Sunday, his output has been a slew of forgettable flops, with Alexander the most egregious offender in that regard.
“The autopsy at Bethesda is a farce,” he railed to UPI. “This is a very complicated murder case with shots from every side, seven wounds, two different victims. They screwed up everything. A guy shoots the president out of an impossible perch on a window that no marksman has ever matched. He dies, so there’s no evidence. There’s no trial. Then, the assassin of Oswald is bumped off in a strange cancer case a month before he’s supposed to testify. Initially, some 26 witnesses that are of interest die violently in the next period of time.”
These comments came three decades after the release of JFK, when Stone was supporting the documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass which he, of course, directed himself to along with his other docs covering such hotly debated and highly charged subjects as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.
That doesn’t even include his four-part docuseries JFK: Destiny Betrayed, which once more allowed him to return to his favourite subject. It might seem unfair to say that becoming too obsessed with the assassination for his own good ruined Stone’s career, but on the other hand, there’s a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’ in his fortunes that places the 1991 movie squarely in the centre.
