Echoes of Dallas: Six Decades of JFK on the Silver Screen — The Nineties

The decade of Oliver Stone's 'JFK' moved toward big Hollywood productions that sidelined dissent from the authorized history without completely extinguishing it.

A collage of news clippings on the wall of the assassin’s apartment in Columbia Pictures’ “In the Line of Fire” (1993), a major box office success (Credit: IMDb)

This is the fourth in a six-part series exploring how Hollywood moviemakers have portrayed and distilled the JFK assassination. Part 1, the Sixties: Here. Part 2, the Seventies: Here. Part 3, the Eighties: Here.

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991) led to Congress’ unanimous passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Records Act) after a public outcry resulted from a message on screen at the end if the film cited files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-79) “locked away until the year 2029.”

In turn, the JFK Records Act created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which collected hundreds of thousands of relevant files from federal agencies and transferred them to the National Archives. But after Stone’s masterpiece revived the JFK assassination in both public consciousness and popular culture, mainstream American cinema struggled to get back on track in support of the “official history” against a political backdrop of heightened public mistrust and the government’s attempts to address it.