Filmmaker Oliver Stone, who heavily promoted the JFK assassination conspiracy theory with his 1991 Oscar-winning movie “JFK,” now claims that his four-hour documentary on the same subject is being blocked from release in America due to fact-checks.
Speaking with filmmaker Spike Lee for Variety’s “Directors on Directors” series, the Academy Award-winning director said he “can’t find a home” for his documentary in America.
“What’s the the status of JFK documentary?” Lee asked.
Later, when Spike Lee asked if perhaps Netflix would pick it up, Stone said that fact-checkers kept it from finding it a home on various platforms.
“Netflix said no?” asked Lee.
“Yeah. Today I just got the word that National Geographic said no,” replied Stone.
“They said they did their fact check. Yeah. Where are you going to find this information except in this film? If they do a fact check, according to conventional sources, of course it’ll come out like this is not true. How can you go and prove that it’s true? It’s very, it’s very tough. You have to have some imagination here,” he added.
In September of last year, Stone alleged that Hollywood censors films that are critical of U.S. foreign policy, which was a strange charge from him, considering that he made a career for himself with movies such as “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “JFK,” “Nixon,” “W,” and “Snowden.”
“In my own personal experience, I would say Hollywood tends to economically censor subjects that are critical of America’s foreign policy, and critical of the military adventures abroad that we’ve been engaged in for so many years,” Stone told Jesse Watters of Fox News. “I know also that I had a hell of a hard time getting ‘Platoon’ made, as well as several other films.”
During the same interview, Stone alleged that the U.S. intelligence complex essentially misleads the American people into armed conflict.
“The intelligence agencies mislead us in many affairs, going back—in wars, especially—to Vietnam, to Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Syria,” he said. “It’s years of misinformation, particularly in Vietnam where I experienced, where—I was a small fry there, but certainly at the bottom of the chain, we felt the devastating effect of the continual lying about the fact that we were winning the war, winning the war. It was never true.”
In that same month, Oliver Stone emphatically denounced cancel culture, arguing that his career would never have been allowed to begin if it were in place back in the 1980s.
“I mean, it’s just impossible. I would have had to step on so many sensitivities. You have to have some freedom to make a movie, unfortunately,” said Stone.
“You have to be rude, and you can be bad, and you [can] have to do these things like step on toes,” he continued. “Holy cow. Do you think I could have made any one of those films? I can tell you that if I made any of my films, I don’t think I’d last. I’d be vilified. I’d be attacked, shamed, whatever you want to call that, culture, cancel f***ing culture.”
Related: Oliver Stone: Hollywood Censors ‘Subjects That Are Critical Of America’s Foreign Policy’