JFK, Oswald, and the Texas

The scene at the Texas Theatre on 11/22/63.

Let’s start with conspiracy theories. No, not the 1997 Mel Gibson vehicle Conspiracy Theory. I mean COVID anti-vaxxers, Flat-Earthers, Birtherism, Trutherism, etc., ad infinitum. I, like (I think) most people who have been following it, have been left increasingly more dumbfounded and troubled by the mutating properties of the QAnon conspiracy cult.

The tortured logic of believers in QAnon holds that the Democratic party leadership– along with costal elite celebrities – worships Satan, sex-traffics children, and drinks the blood of babies. I wish I were being hyperbolic. They believe that Donald Trump is the only one – he alone can fix it – who can smash this evil cabal into pieces, destroy the deep state, and execute the offending godless liberals on the front lawn of the White House.

Or some other such nonsense.

It’s hard to keep up. It seems that in the sped-up world the internet has created, along with bullshit-accelerant social media services like Facebook and Instagram, conspiracy theories must be ever changing in order to keep people engaged.

To wit, the newest, most bananas offshoot of QAnon brought people from across the country to my own back yard. The guy heading it up believes that assassinated US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. – who died in a plane crash in 1999 – will reveal to the world that they both faked their deaths. They are coming back to aide Donald Trump in 2024 to retake the White House and restore balance to the Force. (John-John will be Trump’s running mate!)

The date of their triumphant arrival has been somewhat in flux. First it was going to be the July 4th weekend. When that didn’t happen, the goalpost was moved to November 22nd, the anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Believers gathered in downtown Dallas at Dealey Plaza, the site adjacent to the office building where Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly carried out his assassination of President Kennedy. It’s about seven miles from my house.

Did you notice my use of that tricky little adverb “supposedly” in the penultimate sentence of the last paragraph? I used it because, growing up, I was a bona fide believer in the JFK assassination conspiracy theory. I’ve always been a history buff, like my dad. In my adolescence, my 13-year-old brain took a massive hit of the gateway drug known as The X-Files to begin making connections in a dark web of shadowy figures shaping world events in their own image.

The JFK assassination was the urtext of conspiracy theories for me. (I was lucky enough to have avoided the much older, disgusting and anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion nonsense until I had a foundation and understanding of conspiracy theories as a way to scapegoat a stigmatized class in society.) If the events of November 22nd, 1963 were the original language of conspiracy theories for me, Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK was my Rosetta Stone.

All of the above serves as a preamble to say that history, film history, and movies swirled for me into an intoxicating and irresistible event on November 22nd, 2021 at the Texas Theatre. That’s the movie house located on Jefferson Ave. where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested shortly after Kennedy was assassinated.

Barak Epstein, the cofounder of Aviation Cinemas, the organization that owns and runs the Texas, runs the same program every year on the 22nd of November. Epstein re-creates the most consequential day in the theater’s history by screening, at the exact time, the film that was playing when Oswald was arrested. He fills out the day’s programming with other related screenings, the pinnacle of which is an evening showing of Stone’s Oscar winning JFK.

This year was the first that I was able to attend, and I was there for every screening.

The day started with the 1:10 P.M. showing of War is Hell, directed by Burt Topper. Set during the Korean War, War is Hell is a B-picture – I mean that quite literally, as United Artists ran War is Hell as the bottom half of a double bill in 1964 with the Bond picture From Russia with Love. Topper directed other war B-movies with titles like Hell Squad (1958) and Tank Commandos (1959) alongside other movies with colorful titles like 1959’s Diary of a High School Bride, and 1973’s Soul Hustler (AKA The Day the Lord Got Busted, which, in my opinion, is an infinitely more kick-ass title).

War is Hell is considered a lost film, as no complete version (that we know of) still exists. What is screened at the Texas every year is a partial version of the film reconstructed from several existing elements with some added music by Aviation Cinemas member Jason Reimer.

The condition of War is Hell made it a little hard to follow. The plot involves an unscrupulous American sergeant in the Korean War who neglects telling his platoon that a cease-fire has been announced. His plan is to attack unsuspecting enemy forces so he can win medals and adulation. Honestly, I only know that because of the plot summaries I read after the fact.

The movie is slow and not terribly engaging, despite all the (not particularly breathtaking) action sequences. It played to me like one of those movies you might see featured in an episode of MST3K, but one that’s so boring (Red Zone Cuba, for instance) that even the jokes coming from the Satellite of Love crew can’t keep you from falling asleep.

It was perfect for the event, because I wasn’t there for the movie. Like the time I sat through the atrocious Doom in order to watch a movie at the famous Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles – a story for another time – I was happy that I didn’t need to pay much attention to what was happening on the screen.

For much of the 50 minutes-or-so of War is Hell that played, I was looking around the theater. My history-buff brain was trying to imagine what it was like to have been in the theater in 1963 on that day. Theater management shut off the movie and brought the house lights up at the direction of DPD officers at around 30 minutes into the screening of War is Hell in order to arrest Oswald. I kept trying to imagine cops coming from behind the curtain next to the screen in order to find their man.

The actual seat Oswald sat in has been removed – the website for the Texas has an FAQ item specifically addressing this – but I was in the room where a major part of history occurred. Watching the film that was playing, at the exact time it was playing when Oswald was arrested, was an eerie feeling.

After the War is Hell screening, at 2:45 p.m., the Texas Theatre screened Cry of Battle. That movie, a WWII picture starring Van Heflin as a racist, sexist pig and Rita Moreno – cast as a Filipino native; it was the early ‘60s, after all – probably didn’t actually play on 11/22/63 since things must have been a little hectic after Oswald’s arrest. Still, iconic pictures taken of the theater’s façade after the arrest show Cry of Battle on the marquee, alongside War is Hell.

Epstein and the Texas Theatre crew re-create the sign every year as it was in 1963, a bit of living history:

The Texas’s marquee sign as seen on 11/22/2021. Picture taken by the author.

The Texas Theatre’s marquee sign as it appeared on that historic day is also featured in several moments of Oliver Stone’s masterpiece about the assassination, JFK. I attended the 7:00 p.m. screening of the 3+ hour epic with a good friend – shoutout to Tim! – who had never seen it before. Surrounded by all this history, in such a vivid way, for the better part of a day made watching JFK – probably the dozenth or so time for me – an electric experience. I’m a great admirer of what Stone and his creative team, especially cinematographer Robert Richardson and the herculean efforts of editors Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia, accomplished.

Barak Epstein and the crew at the Texas Theatre are keeping a unique bit of American (and film) history alive year after year. I feel lucky that I was able to experience it with the dozen or so people who turned out for the screenings. (Seriously, if you want to toddle down here next year for the event, you won’t have trouble getting in. The vibe throughout the whole day was very low key, which adds to its appeal.)

But is the grand conspiracy that Stone lays out through his main character, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison – his book On the Trail of the Assassins was one of the source materials for Stone and Zachary Sklar’s screenplay – fact or fiction? The grotesqueries surrounding QAnon, Birtherism, and other wackadoodle conspiracy theories – which, more often than not, promote tribalism by positioning what they consider dangerous and evil Others as the enemy – make me want to turn and run from ideas like the grassy knoll and the military-industrial complex getting rid of Kennedy in order to milk the Vietnam War for fun and profit.

And yet.

Watergate was an actual, proven conspiracy. It’s been proven over and over again that people will do almost anything to ensure the accumulation of money and power. So, do I still believe in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories? I’ll gladly tell you all about it over a pizza sometime.

Please don’t forget to bring a couple freshly made tinfoil hats.