RIP Donald Sutherland

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

He worked with Kristy Swanson

She was the original Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

[Benjamin Frank 2.0]

I'm pretty sure why Donald Sutherland is the reason why the film JFK is the way it was, and, in turn, I'm pretty sure this is why Oliver Stone gave this part to Donald Sutherland.

In the early 1970s, Donald Sutherland tried to get a film made about the JFK assassination conspiracy on the basis of Mark Lane's book 'Rush to Judgement'  (a comment on the Warren Commission.) I don't know if Sutherland was going to be in the film, but he wanted to produce it. However, all the Hollywood money people thought the idea for the film was tacky, even with all the other (fictional?) conspiracy films being made at the time.

So, Sutherland gave up and moved on to acting in another film, but not before he had contacted some people who did get a very cheap and bad movie made called 'Executive Action.' Mark Lane wanted his name removed from the film.

The film, as brief as it was (I think around 85 minutes), was even briefer than it seemed in terms of the narrative, since it was padded with scenes of paramilitary types training in the desert and with stock footage of speeches delivered by President Kennedy and others.

They cut the film back with one of the conspirators saying something like "getting the three letter government agencies to do what you want without asking questions isn't a problem. If you can't get one of them to do it, it's easy to find another that will."

They then showed one example of the conspirators getting one three letter agency to agree to do something.

The only really good part of the film is that the folksy actor Will Geer got to play an oil company executive who was in charge of the conspiracy. Geer had previously been blacklisted and no doubt loved playing a far right wing Bond type villain. As the guy in charge, he is reluctant to have Kennedy killed, but then sees on television one of the stock footage clips of a speech of Martin Luther King Jr and then says something like "What a speech! We can't have this, Kennedy must die."

My point in all this though, is that in Hollywood there is the general phrase of 'show me, don't tell me.' Meaning, films are visual, so don't use exposition. And, JFK is nearly all exposition. 3 hours and 25 minutes of nearly endless exposition.

So, I'm pretty positive that Executive Action is the reason for this. Had Oliver Stone tried to make a film that showed how he thought the Kennedy assassination was done, he knew he'd face charges from critics that he was remaking the horrible film Executive Action.

However, for his initial attempt to make a film showing how the Kennedy assassination was done, I'm pretty sure that Oliver Stone honored Donald Sutherland with this part.