ustxtxb_obs_1977_09_09_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

A carload of dummies rolls through a movie re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald” By Si Dunn Dallas Reality doesn’t bother Hollywood very much. Recently the movie makers came to Dealey Plaza equipped with look-alikes, extras and dummies to recreate Nov. 22, 1963, in hundred-degree July heat. The filming was the strangest sight since last January, when crews shooting Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson in “Semi-Tough” attempted during one of the deepest freezes on recordto make icy Big D look like Miami in September. The restaged trauma at the Triple Underpass, however, takes only a few seconds in ABC-TV’s four-hour, quasifactual drama, “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald,” scheduled for airing in October. The movie itself is just a small part of the new surge of interest in the Kennedy assassination, which promoters in Los Angeles, Dallas and New York are now exploiting. Late in August, another Hollywood outfit arrived in Dallas to film CBS-TV’s version of the events of 1963: “Ruby and Oswald,” a three-hour “docu-drama” drawn straight from the Warren Commission report, will be shown late this year. At about the time “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald” runs on ABC, Harper & Row will publish Priscilla McMillan Johnson’s Marina and Lee, an account of Marina Oswald’s life with the accused assassin. The ex-Mrs. Oswald, now Mrs. Kenneth Porter of Heath, Tex., is expected to break her long silence and make promotional appearances for the book. The rolling thunder of advance publicity for the Oswald commodities has been intensified lately by a spate of lawsuits brought against the movie makers. \(The ABC property has attracted plaintiffs eVer, all the promo huffing and puffing can’t conceal one thing: the new film and books have little to say about Oswald that is new. All that is left for them to do is provide some insighta la People magazineinto the dead man’s character. The director of “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald” is David Greene, who won an Emmy for “Rich Man, Poor Man” and an Emmy nomination for “Roots.” He contends, “The humanness of Oswald hasn’t been considered, because people have been so busy writing him off as just an assassin. He was a rounded person. Through interviews with Marina, he becomes very real. We’re trying to see him as he really was.” “The mystery that remains is the mystery of Lee Harvey Oswaldwho he was, what he was, and if he in fact did commit the crime,” says Lawrence Schiller, supervising producer of the film, which stars John Pleshette as Oswald, Lorne Greene as his attorney, and Ben Gazzara as a tough state prosecutor. The $2 million movie starts from the premise that Oswald survives the shots fired by Jack Ruby. It goes on to show Oswald pleading innocent, winning a change of venue from Dallas to a small Texas town, and finally being found .. . either guilty or innocent. The outcome is a secret. The movie raises questions about possible CIA, FBI and Mafia links to the assassination, but “doesn’t take one strong view,” according to actor Pleshette. “It illustrates the connections.” 16 SEPTEMBER 9. 1977