Ghosts of Iron Mountain by Phil Tinline

Author:Phil Tinline
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2025-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

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Finally, one March night in 1992, this debate came to a head, in a raucous public forum at Town Hall, a Broadway theater. Chairing the event, naturally, was Victor Navasky. The speakers onstage were Norman Mailer; screenwriter and Monocle alumna Nora Ephron; JFK conspiracy researcher Edward Jay Epstein; and Oliver Stone himself, who won “thunderous applause.”71 For good measure, they were joined on stage by three “questioners,” among them the English writer Christopher Hitchens, a contributing editor on Navasky’s Nation. “Our goal tonight,” Navasky began, “is not to determine who killed Kennedy” but “to explore the relationship… of movies… to history, of fiction to fact; of image to truth.”72

Mailer had been dancing back and forth across this line since The Armies of the Night, and he’d just published a novel about the CIA and its fantasy world, titled Harlot’s Ghost. He duly argued that while Stone had taken “considerable liberties” with the facts, “it truly does not matter.” The director had dared to venture into “the echoing halls of the largest paranoid myth of our time: the undeclared national belief that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by the concentrated forces of malign power in the land.”73 Ephron, who’d encountered criticism a decade earlier for her carefully researched, fact-based film Silkwood, also leapt to Stone’s defense. She quoted a novelist who’d argued that “there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction. There is only narrative.” It fell to the JFK conspiracy researcher Edward Jay Epstein to hold the line between fact and fiction. Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, he argued, came “much closer to the truth than most of the nonfiction books on Vietnam”; he was not making a value judgment. Nevertheless, he said: “I believe there is a difference between nonfiction and fiction.”

Much of the rest of the evening went in the direction you might expect. Stone said the Zapruder film showed the lone gunman theory was impossible. Christopher Hitchens scorned the notion that America in 1963 was remotely “innocent.” Norman Mailer had a furious argument with a member of the audience.

But one of Stone’s responses to an audience question stood out. The director was challenged by a man, who said he was from “an organization called New Jewish Agenda,” about Stone’s decision to work with Fletcher Prouty, given the colonel’s links to Liberty Lobby: an organization, the questioner objected, “that peddles the theory that the Holocaust is a Jewish hoax.” How could Stone have done such a thing? The director shot back:

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