Today, less than two weeks after the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of JFK, I serendipitously came across the 10th anniversary edition of a newspaper that contained an article announcing the 1973 debut of EXECUTIVE ACTION, the movie I recommend people watch for the who, what, when, where, how and why of the JFK assassination.

I'm sharing the article, pictured above, with Orwell Today readers because it fits a few more pieces into the JFK ASSASSINATION PUZZLE. ~ Jackie Jura

Kennedy film--thoughtful or gimmick
by Bob Thomas, The Leader Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, November 22, 1973

Los Angeles (AP) - Is it a thoughtful challenge to the Warren Report on President Kennedy's assassination? Or is it simply a make-money gimmick? That is the film world's puzzlement over a new film, Executive Action, which is billed as "probably the most controversial film of our time".

Although it was made on a modest budget, Executive Action is no shoestring film. It stars Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Will Geer and was created by three topflight film makers - producer Edward Lewis, Director David Miller and writer Dalton Trumbo. The cost was held down because all worked for minimum salaries except Lewis, who was paid nothing. Lewis told how he becomes involved in the project.

"Donald Sutherland (the actor) originally developed the property with Mark Lane - author of Rush to Judgement - and Donald Freed. Sutherland got turned down by every company in town, and I bought it from him. My interest in the project had nothing to do with the death of President Kennedy; I am not an assassination buff. It seemed to me that this story offered a terrific chance to put across the idea that we need to be reported to on official matters. I feel that we have not been told the whole truth about the Kennedy assassination; the officials have only handed out self-serving statements."

The premise of Executive Action is that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have pulled off the assassination alone, hence there was a conspiracy. But the film does not attempt to document the conspiracy; it offers a fictional hypothesis on how it could have happened.

"The picture is really a strange animal, a mixture of fact and fiction that has never been attempted before," said the producer. "The story we tell is entirely fictional, but many of the characters are real-life figures shown in news footage, which occupies 30 per cent of the picture. "The only real-life figures who are portrayed by actors are Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby."

Lewis took the story to Trumbo, who had written such films as Spartacus and Lonely Are the Brave. Lewis gave the writer a small library of books on the Kennedy assassination and showed him the eight-millimetre home movie taken when the shots hit the Dallas motorcade. "That convinced me utterly that the shots came from two directions," said Trumbo.

Trumbo conceived the idea of combining newsreels with a fictional story. Its thesis: that powerful men in the industrial-defence establishment planned and carried out the assassination because of their opposition to such Kennedy policies as the test-ban treaty, removal of troops from Southeast Asia and cutting the oil depletion allowance.

Lewis ran into a roadblock in his attempts to finance the film. He finally enlisted a private investor who had never before backed a movie.

Lancaster liked the script but told Lewis, "I won't do the picture unless I'm convinced that the plot could have happened." After several months of thinking about it, he said, "I'm convinced."

Ryan also expressed doubt about the conspiracy theory but after reading the script, he agreed to do the film. In one of the last interviews before his death, the actor remarked that Executive Action was "the most important film I ever made."

Reader asks "Who killed JFK?"