HISTORY IN THE MAKING

Plenty of historians have taken director Oliver Stone to task for mixing history with fiction. They scoffed at Kevin Costner’s accent in JFK and wrote off his depiction of Nixon as “a foulmouthed, pill-popping drunk guilty of trying to have Fidel Castro assassinated. None of these details are confirmed by the historical record.” Stone declares he is a filmmaker, not a historian. But where do you draw the line between accuracy and entertainment, evidence and imagination? “What do they want – footnotes? Do they want a closed caption that says ‘This is dubious’ or ‘Please see endnotes for that’?” – Lingua Franca 04/00