JFK Filmography "Dead Again and Again"

By this time, Spanish bad boy Pedro Almodovar was the rage and the JFK project appealed to him as a good choice for his first English language film. One draft consisted of the title page only, Bay of Pigs; there is no clue as to what plot line Almodovar was after, except the note scrawled in Spanish, "Love the title, but hate Castro's uniform." The only completed draft, Pillbox, toyed with the fascinating possibility that Halston ("Sam Shepard?" Pedro penciled in) was behind the conspiracy. Once he assures himself that Jackie (Demi Moore, in the starring role) has finished redecorating the White House, the black-clad fashion maven has the President murdered for forcing his wife to switch to Oleg Cassini (the versatile Gary Oldman), who took credit for the pillbox hat Halston claims he invented especially to camouflage Jackie's large head. Memos indicate that Bergdorf's had agreed to let Almodovar shoot on the premises, and all of Halston's unused Jackie designs were due to be made up for the picture.

Almodovar and his costume designer/ballistics expert had the Dealey Plaza scene completely orchestrated. They posited that six shots were fired by two gunmen who knew each other, though we don't know if their relationship was a physical one. Oswald (Patrick Dempsey, in a cameo) is an innocent, immersed in his job of erasing doodles from margins at the Texas School Book Depository when the shooting starts. Perhaps the most inspired Almodovar touch was to have the ghost of Marilyn Monroe smoking a cigarette behind the fence on the Grassy Knoll.

Ultimately, Pillbox faltered when the studio's marketing study indicated that most people would think a film of that title was about drug abuse. Almodovar considered another title, Dealey Plaza Suite, but finally resolved to give the whole thing up if he couldn't call it Pillbox.

Jim Cameron came aboard briefly at this point. In his script Canaveral, Oswald is a cyborg sent from the future to kill Kennedy in order to stop space exploration. The studio, however, was unwilling to agree to a $200 million budget for a period piece.

David Lynch was apparently involved for a few weeks after the studio's falling out with Cameron. Correctly noting that when all known information on Oswald is taken into consideration, the young man simply doesn't add up, Lynch chose to focus his movie on the relationship between Oswald (Crispin Glover) and his Russian wife, Marina (Nastassia Kinski).

In cleverly juxtaposed scenes, Lynch first shows Oswald oiling his gun late at night with no clothes on while bewildered Dallas neighbors watch through the open blinds, and then switches intermittently to Marina staring at the cockroach swimming in her borscht in an overlit kitchen as she writes "Tippet" over and over on a used paper plate. In the brief section of Heart of Texas that deals with the assassination, Lynch plays out the interesting idea that Kennedy was merely grazed by bullets in Dealey Plaza; he actually died at the hands of drug-addicted doctors (Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn) who screwed up an unnecessary tracheotomy at Parkland Hospital. Later, the back of Kennedy's head is accidentally removed by the coroner (Jack Nance) at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Roman Polanski worked on a version in Paris that had Kennedy very much alive at the end and capable of taking liquids in seclusion. Merchant and Ivory took a stab, but the results were too boring to report here. Thrilled by the conceit of doing a French language film set in America, Jean-Luc Godard planned to do the black and white Grassy Knoll, which consisted of two parallel monologues by Marseilles assassins waiting for the motorcade.

Hollywood had given up on doing the JFK assassination by the time Oliver Stone got hold of the idea. Nobody wanted to hear about Oswald, Dallas, Cuba, the CIA or anything remotely connected to 1963. But for now Hollywood still has to listen to Oliver Stone, so the producers who owned the rights to the material agreed to take a meeting with him. Politely, they asked for his pitch. "Fade in. We see Kevin Costner get out of a car." "You got a deal."

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