Tom Hanks will pay for another JFK movie.
I love that Tom Hanks loves history. I’m glad he gave us not one, but two miniseries about World War II. I appreciate his wonder at the ambitious space program of the 1960s. I’m happy he took an adventurous trip through baby boomer-dom in “Forrest Gump” (though I guess I should admit that I still haven’t seen that). After reading in Variety that he’s producing a movie about JFK’s assassination, though, I wish he’d hit on a few less obvious touchstones of 20th century American history. Then again, he has an Oscar and can buy and sell me a thousand times, so my opinion isn’t really that big of a deal here.
To the details–the movie is “Parkland,” referring to the Dallas hospital where both Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald died (for those of you whose lives have not been supersaturated by JFK assassination info, Oswald was shot two days after Kennedy by Jack Ruby while being transported to the county jail). It will be one of those “disparate groups of people drawn together by an event kind of movie,” somewhat like Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby,” about people on the outskirts of the events around Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Characters will include Abraham Zapruder, as in “Zapruder film,” Oswald’s brother, an FBI agent, a young doctor, a reporter, several Secret Service agents, and Kennedy’s staff.
Peter Landesman wrote the script and will make his directorial debut. They don’t give any dates for production, but I would guess they’ll try to have it ready for November 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
