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Under its breath, the movie says as much. It prefixes some scenes with a "For all we know, it could have been . . ." or a "Let's just for a moment speculate, shall we?" Stone embraces contradictions, or maybe he just trucks over them. What Garrison tells his staff, Stone tells his viewers: "Now we're through the looking glass here, people. White is black, and black is white." But the film's true epigraph might be the counsel that "X" gives Garrison: "Don't take my word. Do your own work -- your own thinkin'."
"Nobody is claiming that the movie is the truth," says Sklar, the editor of Garrison's book, On the Trail of the Assassins. "But Oliver wanted to find out as much as he could about the assassination and get close to the full truth, which he, like many people, thinks has never been told."
Stone hired Sklar to work on the script, which was also based on Jim Marrs' study, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. He boiled Sklar's 550-page first draft down to 160 pages and interpolated extensive flashbacks, in the style of Rashomon and Z. By April 1991, when filming began, Stone, Sklar and co-producer A. Kitman Ho had interviewed more than 200 people.
The actors became detectives too. "It's like being a journalist," Oldman said of his research into Oswald's character. "We all became assassination buffs. Marina ((Oswald's Russian-born widow)) had a tape that she let me see. It had a section leading up to the line, 'I'm just a patsy.' Oliver saw it, and he said, 'Let's restage that scene.' " Spacek spent time with Garrison's ex-wife Liz. "The sense I got from her," the actress says, "is of a woman living the life she wanted to live until her husband's obsession came through. She was proud of Jim, but his obsession went so far."
On location in Dealey Plaza, actors and crew filmed the motorcade re- enactment with super-8 movie cameras. "The idea," says co-film editor Pietro Scalia, "was to create a point of view so that this section has an amateurish look." After much wrangling, the JFK company secured use of the Texas School Book Depository, from which shots were fired on Nov. 22. The sixth floor had become a museum, so the moviemakers used the seventh floor there and, for appropriate perspective of the motorcade, the sixth floor of an adjacent building. Stone also filmed at the Dallas police headquarters, where Jack Ruby killed Oswald. "The police were very cooperative," says production designer Victor Kempster. "They let us strip out computers in the offices and put in 1960s furniture. That included changing doorways to fit the film footage."