Interview. Robert Stone.

"The central and most persuasive interview [in Oswald's Ghost] is with the late Norman Mailer, author of Oswald's Tale, who died on November 10," writes David D'Arcy, introducing his latest interview. "Although I'm a fan of Robert Stone's work, especially his hallucinatory doc, Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, I was skeptical at first, not about the notion of a film that might put conspiratorial explanations of the JFK assassination to rest, but about the idea that there was anything left to be said about the shooting of JFK and the search for a 'mastermind.' I can recommend Oswald's Ghost to skeptics like myself, and to anyone else. If you're in Dallas today, go to the free public screening and discussion with Robert Stone and some of the interviewees from the film at the Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested after he shot and killed police officer JD Tippit."

Updated through 11/23.

Updates, 11/20: "Oswald's Ghost impresses as a concise, intelligent and rigorously well-researched piece of work," writes Joe Leydon for Variety. The film "is structured so that its emotional climax unmistakably is the scene in which Norman Mailer - whose recent death makes his weary gravitas here all the more affecting - admits, with equal measures of sadness and resignation, that he reluctantly came to believe Oswald changed the course of history on his own."

"It may well be one of the best movies ever offered about the assassination, and it took on an eerie power being shown in a handsomely renovated theater that will forever be central to the darkest moment in Dallas history," writes Michael Granberry in the Dallas Morning News of last night's screening.

Update, 11/21: Conspiracy or no conspiracy, JFK did plan to have the US pull out of Vietnam. James K Galbraith has details in a letter to the New York Review of Books.

Update, 11/23: Online listening tip. Stone's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at November 19, 2007 5:25 AM