Here in our rented villa in Lanzarote it has been hugely relaxing. I did plan to do a lot of writing but instead I’ve been doing a lot of reading, swimming and drinking a lot of wine. To be fair I have done some writing. I’ve started two new short stories, one of which I have the story fully in my head and another that I’m not sure where it will end up. I’ve also worked on a couple of unfinished stories and blog posts. What has been interesting is that one of the books I’ve been reading by author John Grisham was actually John’s first novel and he says in the introduction that he was proud of his first book and also in particular, proud of finishing it as like me, he starts a lot of things but rarely sees them through to the end. Clearly, he’s sorted that problem out because he’s written a number of best selling books and all the ones that I have read, with one exception, have all been riveting page turners.
Grisham’s first book, A Time To Kill was based on his time when he was what he calls a ‘street lawyer’, someone hustling for cases. He explains in the introduction how the book was very autobiographical and inspired partly by dealing with similar cases and situations to the one he based the book on.
One of my unfinished stories was based on a radio play I wrote. I was hoping to get the BBC interested in it but sadly they declined. Pity, because I thought it was rather good and also it would have given me such a lot of pleasure to hear my work on Radio 4.
It was inspired by two things, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and a film starring James Stewart. The film was called Call Northside 777. In the film Stewart plays a cynical newspaper reporter who is asked by his editor to investigate a small ad in the newspaper. The ad asks for someone to come forward who has information about a murder to call the eponymous phone number. Stewart finds the person running the ad is an old lady whose son is in prison for a murder she claims he didn’t commit. She works as a cleaner and is saving up to put together a reward for anyone having any information. Ultimately James Stewart proves that the woman’s son was innocent in part by having a newspaper photo enlarged. A key witness, and I’m going from memory here, had claimed she was somewhere on a particular date but a photo in the paper’s archive showed the woman with a paperboy in the background holding a newspaper and the photo was enlarged to show the date, which in turn somehow proved that part of her testimony was wrong.
The funny thing is that today a photo like that would have been taken by a digital camera and its quite possible the picture when enlarged wouldn’t show such detail yet with a film camera it’s a different story. Take something like the original Star Trek for instance, shot on 35mm film in the late sixties and still looking clear and sharp today. The following series, The Next Generation, shot on video in the 1980s is not remotely as sharp and it’s the older series which looks better on today’s HD TV sets.
Photography has played a big part in theories surrounding the shooting of US President Kennedy in 1963. One lady, Mary Ann Moorman, took a polaroid shot of him being struck by a bullet. The photographer was on the left of the President’s limousine and many have conjectured that in the background to the President’s right, the figure of the assassin can just be seen. I’m personally not so certain but the picture does show the grassy knoll where a second shooter may have been lurking. The other shooter, the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald was over in the Texas School Book Depository. Was he shooting at the President or having a coke in the second floor lunch room?
Polaroid by Mary Ann Moorman
Next to Mary was another lady known only as the Babushka Lady. This lady has never been identified but she also filmed the assassination and her film, if ever found, would also have great footage of the grassy knoll area. The other day I saw a very clear picture of her on a JFK site I follow. The picture had been cleaned up by new AI technology which uses computer programs to clean up blurred pictures.
Going from fact to fiction, in my story it was a UK MP who gets murdered and the accused assassin’s mother who places the newspaper advertisement. In the real murder of Bobby Kennedy, the assassin Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy from a few feet away and various people grabbed him just as he fired his first shot. According to the autopsy, the fatal shot was fired from point blank range, possibly actually touching Kennedy’s head so how could Sirhan’s bullet, fired from a few feet away have been the fatal shot?
The JFK assassination has inspired quite a few conspiracy films. The most famous is the Oliver Stone film JFK which dramatises the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his probe into the murder. Stone uses the Garrison investigation to take the audience through the various stages and theories of the assassination, the number of shots, the direction of the shots, the Oswald look alikes, the murder of police officer JD Tippet, the mafia connection, the intelligence connection, the background to Lee Oswald and so on. In the film Garrison played by Kevin Costner meets an informant known only as X. I’m not sure if this ever really happened but X was based on L Fletcher Prouty, an air force officer who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy. He gives the audience a view of the assassination from a covert intelligence CIA background.
Another film based on the assassination was Executive Action, a phrase coined by the CIA itself and referring to their capability of assassination. The film was written by three screenwriters including Mark Lane who was the author of Rush to Judgement, one of the first books to criticise the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination. Lane also made a film version in which he interviewed many assassination witnesses.
In the film, a group of men discuss the Kennedy presidency and agree that Kennedy must be removed for various reasons, his civil rights stance, his nuclear test ban treaty and his decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Then they set out to obtain funding from various Texas oil magnates who are also not happy with President Kennedy.
Mark Lane was actually a lawyer and he defended a magazine which was sued by E Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars, because the magazine claimed that Hunt was part of a JFK assassination plot. In the following trial, Mark Lane won his case and the jurors demanded action by the government to investigate further. Nothing of course happened but that’s hardly surprising according to another book I have just read called Mary’s Mosaic. It’s about a lady who was murdered by the CIA or so the author claims, because she knew too much about the JFK assassination. The book goes on to show how the CIA was able to manipulate the media into not delving too deeply or even not reporting at all, stories like these. I’ll be reviewing the book in more detail in an upcoming Book Bag post.
Anyway, that’s enough about conspiracy theories for now. Is it worth digging out that radio play for some more work or is it time for another dip in the pool? I know this is not good for my street cred as a writer but, you guessed it, time for another dip in the pool!
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