Confusing Fact and Fiction : It’s totally absurd for Warner Bros. to fund a ‘JFK’ study guide

Warner Bros. has funded a study guide to Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” for distribution to 13,000 teachers not of film but of high school social studies and college history. The guide, which identifies the historical figures in the film first by the names of the actors who portray them, advises: “Students may think of looking for witnesses, calling in experts on bullet trajectories, examining autopsy reports, and checking the background of all parties involved in the event.”

Frankly, we are appalled.

Law and journalism have their own exacting standards. So does art. But you cannot run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. You cannot excuse yourself from meeting the standards of the courtroom by invoking the privileges of the studio, as Stone has, and then offer your art as step one in a legal investigation. That’s what this ultra-pretentious, educationally noxious pamphlet does.

Had Stone wished to enter the national debate about the Kennedy murder, he could have done so with a documentary--like Debra Chasnoff’s “Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment,” a film promoting a boycott that, like it or not, is political hardball beyond Stone’s imagining. Stone, who unblushingly compares his film to the masterpiece “Rashomon,” deserves comparison rather to the makers of TV infotainment. “JFK” will be remembered as the film that set the murder to music: docufakery dancing to an MTV score with technothriller sound effects.

We have long since endorsed Rep. Louis Stokes’ call for an opening of all the relevant files. And we do not object to historical drama. Shakespeare’s “Richard III” may be inaccurate history, but the world is the richer for its high art. Shakespeare, however, did not end his immortal play with a summons to the young people of England “in Whose Spirit the Search for Truth Marches On.” Nor did the Globe Theatre urge that Elizabethan boys and girls use the play to investigate the death of Edward V.

If the Globe had stooped to hyping schoolchildren, we would rightly infer that it had no faith in “Richard III” as art. We are forced to the parallel inference about Warner Bros. and “JFK.”