Assassination of John F. Kennedy in Popular Culture - Television and Film Portrayals

Television and Film Portrayals

The assassination and the subsequent conspiracy theories surrounding his death have been the topic for many films, including:

• the 1966 Emile de Antonio documentary Rush to Judgment, based on Mark Lane's book;
• David Miller's 1973 Executive Action;
• Nigel Turner's 1988, 1991, 1995 and 2003 continuing documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy.
• Oliver Stone's 1991 JFK, based in part upon the book On the Trail of the Assassins by former Orleans Parish (Louisiana) District Attorney Jim Garrison.
• The Rat Pack, a 1998 HBO TV film about the group of entertainers giving their contribution to Kennedy's election in 1960. He was portrayed by William Petersen.

Other filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the assassination, rather than portraying it directly:

• The 1974 film The Parallax View is about a senator who is assassinated, with the assassin himself dying violently quickly thereafter. The protagonist, an investigative reporter played by Warren Beatty, is on the verge of solving the mystery when another senator is murdered. This time, he gets blamed for the murder, also posthumously.
• The 1979 French film I comme Icare takes place in a fictional Western country, and tells the story of a presidential assassination from the viewpoint of one of the dissenting members of a Presidential committee similar to the real-world Warren Commission. He then starts his own investigation. The title is from the Greek myth about Icarus, who flies too close to the sun. The investigator himself is killed when he comes too close to the truth.
• In the 1979 film Winter Kills, U.S. President Timothy Kegan is shot at Hunt Plaza in Philadelphia. The ensuing Presidential commission condemns a lone gunman as the killer. The film starts years later, when Kegan's half-brother, Nick, witnesses the death-bed confession of a man claiming to have been part of the "hit squad".

In 1975, a San Francisco-based group of artists called Ant Farm reenacted the Kennedy assassination in Dealey Plaza, and documented it in a video called The Eternal Frame. Two years later, the assassination was re-enacted again as part of the ABC television movie The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, looking at what might have happened had Jack Ruby not prevented Oswald from going to court. The 1983 NBC TV mini series Kennedy showed the assassination from Jackie Kennedy's perspective.