The killing of a president

Manawatu Standard

One day in 2005, three friends were shooting the breeze about the last moments of United States president John F Kennedy.

Then one of them said, "Why don't we make a documentary?"

"Who? Us? How can people in Palmerston North make a documentary about the assassination of an American president?"

But they did - or rather their company Limb-Brick Productions did, and on March 16, they've invited the city to two free screenings of their 88-minute documentary, Imagining The Kennedys.

Limb-Brick is Matthew Keenan, Agnieska Witkowski, and Seamus Coogan. Matt and Seamus are school friends who still hang out together and Agnieska wandered into their lives from Nova Scotia, Canada.

Their collective skills are what made the project possible - that, and a whole lot of work.

"The assassination of JFK was one of those events that changed America and the way it is seen by the rest of the world," says Seamus. "The Big Three are JFK, Pearl Harbour and 9/11."

In the years immediately following World War II America was everyone's friend and unquestionably The Good Guy, he says. Now, this has eroded to distrust and events such as the assassination and 9/11 have become wreathed in conspiracy theories.

The result has been the birth of a conspiracy industry and the dehumanising of the victims, he says. Imagining The Kennedys seeks to offer a more humane alternative.

The trio are quick to point out that their documentary doesn't set out to solve the "mysteries" proposed by the conspiracy theorists. Rather, it looks at the impact of the event on people like Seamus half a world away from the infamous Grassy Knoll.

After being grounded in Palmerston North, "Imagining" takes Seamus to the United States where he visits arenas in which the Kennedys of the JFK era played out their lives.

In Palmerston North, the impact of the assassination is recorded in street names such as John F Kennedy Drive, Connally Place and Langley Avenue.

John Connally was a passenger in President Kennedy's car and was seriously injured by a bullet some say was fired 4.9 seconds after the president received his fatal head wound. At the time Connally was governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navy and the Treasury.

Langley, Virginia, is where the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency is situated and the agency has continued to be linked with the conspiracy theories.

The three filmmakers started off with a grant of $5000 from the Creative Communities New Zealand/Palmerston North City Council arts and culture funding scheme, but, it took another $25,000 of their own money, raised in a series of day jobs, to complete the documentary.

Seamus Coogan admits to having had a fascination with that fateful day in the Dallas of 1963 since he was about eight. He can't explain where the interest came from, but it has endured and it led to the discussion that prompted the making of the documentary.

"Matt and I have known each other since we were five or six," he says. "This is really just a nice story about old friends getting together, doing something quite unusual, and sharing the experience.

"It's a personal story where we get to see things we have heard about and read about for years. It's not about solving the mystery of what happened. The mystery has been solved for me for quite some time."

For the record he believes Oswald was set up to be caught as a cover for another shooter.

The assassination was talked about in his own family in a time when the simple picture presented to the world was "Oswald shot Kennedy and Ruby shot Oswald".

"My mother always said there was something more to it and the moment I saw the Zapruda film I said 'Holy guacamole, there's no way that shot came from behind'," he says.

By his mid-teens, he had scoured the Palmerston North City Library for Kennedy books and found the pickings slim. He began taking jobs to earn money so he could send away for books of his own.

Despite this intense interest, he avoided aligning himself with one conspiracy theory or the other.

In Matt's family, interest and feelings also ran high about Kennedy's assassination.

"My Mum and Dad were Irish Catholic," says Matt. "They put him on a pedestal. In the documentary, we seek to answer the question 'Is his life and death still relevant today'."

The Palmerston North City Council's project and policy officer, Jo Sutton, liked the group's application for funding, which included a short demonstration film, and approved the grant.

In the Manawatu Standard of June 24, 2006, she was quoted as saying: "They are really passionate about what they are doing and really believe in what they are doing. But it is ratepayers' money, so the public has to get the opportunity for a free viewing when the film is finished."

On March 16, there will be not one, but two free screenings at Downtown Cinemas. A trailer for the documentary has also been posted on You Tube. The planning for their travels took about four months and saw them first heading for Los Angeles, where they managed to score an interview with Lisa Pease and Jim DiEugenio, authors of the book The Assassinations, which covers the grim events of the 1960s in which a series of high profile Americans fell to bullets.

From Los Angeles they travelled to New York, Washington, Boston and Dallas, with Seamus going front of camera and speaking to people in the streets.

Matt did the bulk of the camera work and Agnieszka did sound - she also made all the travel arrangements and shared much of the question-asking with Matt.

During their two weeks in Dallas during the lead-up to the anniversary of the assassination, there were two conferences presenting some of the newer elements in the on-going speculations.

They are also fairly certain that among those they questioned in Dallas was at least one CIA agent. Whoever he was, he was extremely skilled at sliding away from direct answers.

With the field work done, Seamus returned to New Zealand and Matt and Agnieszka headed north to Canada for a break with about 50 hours of footage to catalogue in spare moments - some 20 hours of it shot in New Zealand.

Now, with the documentary completed, apart from some fine tuning likely to follow the free screenings, attention is turning to future projects.

"We have a lot of ideas," says Matt, "and hopefully we will find one that will make us some money."

In the meantime, Imagining The Kennedys will find its way on to the film festival circuit. The original plan was to have post-production work completed in time to show the documentary last November on the anniversary of the assassination, but that didn't work out.

However, with the first showing being to family and friends on March 15 another anniversary will be observed - that of the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44BC.

 Free screenings:
There will be two free screenings of Imagining The Kennedys at Downtown Cinemas on March 16.

The 88-minute documentary concentrates on the impact the assassination of Kennedy had in New Zealand and the United States,

Also on the programme will be two short films by another Palmerston North film-maker, Mark Kawana.

Although the screenings are free, tickets are required for the sessions in Cinema 7 at 6pm and 8.30pm.

They can be obtained from Downtown Cinemas or The Portal Video Store on the corner of Main and Princess streets.