Director Oliver Stone was recently a speaker at a JFK assassination conference in Pittsburgh, and he was left wondering why the symposium wasn't getting a lot of love.
After all, it had assembled experts renowned in the field, including forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht and investigator Josiah "Tink" Thompson ("who did the original bullet work").
"I'm here in Pittsburgh with 50 experts who really have done a lifetime of free work on this," Stone told CNN. "It was in the paper here, but it should be front page news throughout the United States. I wish people would come here and cover this."
Stone, along with the rest of America, is revisiting President John F. Kennedy's assassination on the 50th anniversary, which is why he's just rereleased "JFK" on DVD and in select theaters.
Ever since the film's release in 1991, Stone says more evidence has been made available that reinforces his work, such as the report by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), "which if anything, widens some of the loopholes found by the Warren Commission," and makes him more certain of the scenario presented in "JFK."
"There's nothing in the movie that I would go back on," he said. Alternatively, he dismisses works such as Gerald Posner's "Case Closed," which he said was discredited.
Stone: We're not all conspiracy theorists
In the film "JFK," Stone tears apart the Warren Commission's report that a single shooter -- Lee Harvey Oswald -- fired three shots from the sixth floor of the nearby book depository.
This is referred to as the "magic bullet" theory because of the time frame and trajectory required for a bullet to make the path and wounds that transpired.
Instead of Oswald as a shooter acting alone, a number of direct and indirect co-conspirators at the highest levels of government are posited in "JFK." They include the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the mafia and the military-industrial complex, for a variety of combined motives.
Despite his scholarly approach, Stone feels he and like-minded others are lumped together and dismissed as "conspiracy theorists," when now, more than ever, "we've since learned as Americans that the government lies, extensively," he said, citing the lead-up to the war in Iraq, revelations of U.S. government secrets via WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden/NSA scandal. "Suddenly the trust in government has receded considerably."
Yet when it comes to the JFK assassination, he says some people "always dismiss the stuff as 'conspiracy theorizing,' without ever knowing about it. A lot of the media who criticize these films, or criticize me, they've never read anything, any of the countermaterial."