[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

success of a historical film “has little to do with how the screen conveys data and
everything to do with home well films create and interpret a meaningful and useful
history, how adequately they embody its ongoing issues and insert themselves into the
ideas and debates surrounding a historical topic.” 73172 By this standard, Stone’s film was
a great success and offered a compelling version of two main ideas in the assassination
literature – Secret Agent Oswald and the “peace thesis.”
Ruby, a less successful film at the box office directed by John MacKenzie,
followed on the heels of JFK. This film also portrayed Oswald on screen but as a minor
character: the star of the film was Danny Aiello as Jack Ruby. The film outlines an
alleged plot involving a rogue intelligence agent named Maxwell and mobsters to killed
Kennedy and pin the shooting on Oswald. Oswald is seen handing the rifle to a hit man
rather than actually firing any shots. Ruby is involved with both the mob and the FBI,
but he is a portrayed as a sympathetic figure who wants to expose the plot; he vows to
“Blow this thing wide open.” His murder of Oswald is given a heroic gloss as an attempt
to bring the assassins to justice: “I done it so that one day everything’s going to have to
be brought into the open.” 73281 Unfortunately, Ruby is left to die in a Dallas jail instead of
being brought to Washington to tell his story. Whereas the screenplay for JFK
documents the assassination literature each scene is based upon, Ruby appears to take
more liberties in telling its story. But both films clearly offer a version of the
assassination at odds with the official Warren Commission report.
731
Robert A. Rosenstone, “Introduction,” Revisioning History: Film and the
Construction of a New Past, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7.
732
John MacKenzie, dir., Ruby, 111 min. (Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1992).
320