photo by Ben Glass / New Line Cinema

Steven Culp, left, plays Robert Kennedy, Kevin Costner is Kenneth O'Donnell and Bruce Greenwood is John F. Kennedy in a film about the Cuban missile crisis.

Excerpts from the article:
- color photos appear online only -

LOS ANGELES -- It was a fortnight so fraught as to seem surreal, a standoff scholars have come to call the most dangerous moment in recorded history. Thirty-eight years ago this autumn, as the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear conflict over missiles in Cuba, John F. Kennedy and his men groped for a way to avoid the end of the world as they knew it.

Those two weeks in October 1962 are among the most analyzed hours in American diplomatic and political history, the subject of reams of scholarly books and articles, memoirs, oral histories and a television docudrama, "The Missiles of October" (1974). Many of the deliberations among the president and his advisers were recorded verbatim. So recapturing the taste and feel and rhythms of that time in a way that seems both faithful and fresh is no easy effort. But that is the task that "Thirteen Days," a big-budget Hollywood film opening Dec. 20, sets for itself.

Indeed, the film does its bit to return some luster to the legend of Camelot, which has been so diminished by a generation of tell-all books, tawdry mini-series and tabloid surmise. In this treatment, Jack Kennedy (played by Bruce Greenwood) is palpably human, wincing in pain from his bad back, worrying privately that he will be seen as either weak or a warmonger. But he is the clear hero of the piece, along with his brother Bobby (played by Steven Culp), whose 1967 memoir gives the film its title.

In fact, this device removed one of the moviemakers' biggest quandaries: how to tell the story without having to find a bankable star willing to play J. F. K., one of the most familiar faces and voices of the 20th century.

-Todd S. Purdum / NY Times 11/5/00

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When Hollywood Puts Its Spin on the Oval Office

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For a decade, filmmakers have been
infatuated with the White House. But
Abe Lincoln doesn't live there any more.

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Excerpts from the article:
- color photos appear online only -

WHEN I was in grade school, in the late 50's and early 60's, one of the most popular arguments for the greatness of the United States vis-à-vis the other, stinkier world powers was that in this country any boy could grow up to become the president. (Any girl could by implication be the first lady, if she played her cards right.) You don't hear that bromide much anymore, perhaps because the idea of the presidency as the pinnacle of American aspiration has been discredited by the behavior and/or "character" of the White House's post-Camelot occupants.

These days, the measure of our nation's greatness is that anyone can play a president. Just in the past decade, movie audiences have seen fictional chief executives - before, during or after their terms - portrayed by Kevin Kline ("Dave"), Michael Douglas ("The American President"), Bill Pullman ("Independence Day"), Jack Nicholson ("Mars Attacks!"), Jack Lemmon and James Garner ("My Fellow Americans"), Harrison Ford ("Air Force One"), Gene Hackman ("Absolute Power"), Ronny Cox ("Murder at 1600"), John Travolta ("Primary Colors"), Kevin Pollak ("Deterrence") and Jeff Bridges ("The Contender"). Real presidents have been played by Anthony Hopkins (Nixon in "Nixon" and John Quincy Adams in "Amistad"), Nick Nolte (Thomas Jefferson in "Jefferson in Paris"), Dan Hedaya in "Dick"), Nigel Hawthorne (Martin van Buren in "Amistad") and now Bruce Greenwood (John F. Kennedy in "Thirteen Days," which opens next month).

The image of president-as-product gives the young, upscale movie viewer something to aspire to, though it's not the presidency. The target audience for this new style of Oval Office drama is not those who want to be Bill Clinton, but those who dream of being George Stephanopoulos. (This is undoubtedly the larger and the more lucrative demographic.) For older viewers, Hollywood occasionally trots out the western-based, rugged-individualist concept of the presidency, which requires the filmmakers either to return to the bygone days of the cold war (as in "Thirteen Days") or simply to invent some semiplausible global crisis that will allow the commander in chief to furrow his brow, get that faraway a-man's-gotta-do- what-a-man's-gotta-do look in his eyes and save the free world, or whatever we're calling it nowadays.

--Terrence Rafferty