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

In the 2000s, only a few forgotten independent productions devoted any time to questioning or reexamining the actual circumstances of President Kennedy's death

New Line Cinema’s “Thirteen Days” features Bruce Greenwood as President John F. Kennedy (right) delicately maneuvering around hawkish advisers urging all-out war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Maxwell Taylor (Bill Smitrovich) looks on at left. (Credit: Internet Movie Database)

This is the fifth 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. Part 4, The Nineties: Here.

A decade after Oliver Stone’s “JFK” achieved theatrical release, Hollywood blockbusters seemed to forget the JFK Records Act of 1992 and the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which had uncovered evidence calling into question the official version of the crime embodied in 1964’s Warren Report.

In the 2000s and beyond, Hollywood movies touching on the assassination ranged from dramatized histories with no serious dissent from the Warren Report, to low-budget conspiratorial offerings made in obscurity (where they remain today), to comic book franchise features offering otherworldly scenarios for JFK’s death. While huge budgets can’t guarantee artistic quality in cinema, marginalization of the JFK assassination conspiracy theme as a topic for narrative cinema resulted in independent feature-length productions that moved quickly to home video, at least as one norm of the 2000s.