Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

Guys and Molls

Check out Sherry Coben's latest Movie Smackdown! between "Public Enemies" and "Bonnie and Clyde." Guns, women, fast cars and cool sunglasses. Beatty versus Depp. Did we mention the cool sunglasses?

The Godfather (1972) -vs- The Godfather, Part II (1974)

Vote in the Great Godfather Smackdown: An Offer You Can't Refuse...

The Smackdown.  By now it's all become a part of our collective cultural memory -- the horse's head showing up in the bed, making an "offer he can't refuse" and that haunting score by Nino Rota.  Imagine being in the theaters though, almost four decades ago when the original "The Godfather" was in release back in 1972. For years new viewers of the Godfather Trilogy were exposed to either increasingly degraded theatrical prints or VHS or DVD copies that were, in many cases, even worse.  For the past two years, though, Francis Ford Coppola and a small army of digital restoration experts have been at work reclaiming the golden glory for high-definition Blu-ray, standard DVD and even a few more theatrical prints out in some major cities.  It's not the purpose of this Smackdown to lay out that process but if you want to know more about "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration," there have been some excellent articles including The New York Times and Slate Magazine.

What is most astonishing about "The Godfather" which won the 1972 Oscar for "Best Picture" is that two years later "The Godfather, Part II" also won the Oscar for "Best Picture."  This pretty much qualifies the second film as the unquestioned best sequel of all-time.  And, of course, it triggers a Smackdown to find out which of these two extraordinary films is the best.  We'll give them our usual treatment but, unusually, we'll let a number of our critics weigh in with their own analysis and then, at the end of this review, you can put in your own two cents by voting in our Smack-Poll.  Also, if you're up for it, we'd love for you to leave a comment that describes the circumstances where you first saw "The Godfather."

The Defending Champion.  If you think about it now, the "Godfather" films are the modern world's version of those Shakespeare plays about kings and princes.  This is the film where Vito Corleone, the aging Don of a powerful Mafia family hands off the power, reluctantly, to his youngest son Michael, delivering one of the saddest lines in cinema, "Michael, I never wanted this for you."  Al Pacino's Michael Corleone is one of the greatest acting performances on screen ever and his transformation from shy son to ruthless criminal makes you forgive any of the actor's excesses over the years.  The film opens on a wedding where Michael has returned from World War II just in time to see his sister Connie get married. All of the men in Michael's family are involved with the Mafia and it's assumed that the older brothers will handle the criminal duties while Michael lives a legit and decent life. It's truly the story of the family but the engine that drives the action is about a drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo who wants Don Corleone (Marlon Brandon) to go into the drug trade with him.  Corleone refuses, gets shot by hit men, barely survives.  This opens the door for his son to begin a violent mob war against Sollozzo that changes him and his family forever.  It's the story of the old ways surrendering, violently, to the new ways.  You probably know all this.  Beautifully photographed, scored, directed, written.  Most people have it on their Top Ten lists and more than a few place it as #1. 

Movie Smackdown Comix presents... BURN AFTER READING

To read the full review, go to Burn After Reading -vs- Raising Arizona. 

MOVIE SMACKDOWN! - Two Reviews... One Film... No Holds Barred!

Review by Mark Sanchez.  Comix by Bryce Zabel.

Sex, Lie & Politics: Thomas v. Hill Redux

Just this month, the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather's Son, was published and set off a new round of "He Said, She Said" in the media. In the book, Thomas gives his side of the nomination hearings of 1991 which, of course, led to a rebuttal by Anita Hill in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times ("The Smear This Time") and on and on.

Discriminating readers and historians have ample evidence on both sides of the story to decide who they want to believe. In that respect, nothing at all has changed in the 16 years since October of 1991 when America had a normally not-so-compelling Supreme Court nomination hearing process hijacked into something that felt like it came out of the tabloids.

If you think the current nomination and confirmation process surrounding Supreme Court nominees was rough during the last few years, just remember that it's almost impossible for it to get as awful as the Clarence Thomas hearings. We will probably never see anything quite like this again.

Although it's more on the level of the O.J. Verdict and not JFK's murder or 9/11, for those who lived through it, the Thomas Hearings still have a "where were you?" quality to them. Where were you when Anita Hill went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and publicly claimed that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had compared the length of his penis to an actor in a pornographic film by the name of Long Dong Silver? I was in a hotel room in Hawaii -- there to research an NBC pilot I was writing -- and even though I was surrounded by paradise I spent two days glued to a TV set.

Time devoted a great deal of space to this controversy in its October 21, 1991 issue, starting with an opening essay titled, "An Ugly Circus" and moving into the main article, "She Said, He Said."

It was clear that the differences in the Hill and Thomas versions on what transpired a decade ago were not a simple matter of differing sensibilities -- oversqueamishness on her part vs. bad taste on his. If Hill's description of Thomas' words and actions was truthful, then the Supreme Court nominee was guilty of sexual harassment in the past and perjury in the present. If Hill's account was a flight of fantasy, then she was delusional and a candidate for medical attention.

Notice on the cover that Time sub-titled the issue: "America's watershed debate on sexual harassment." That's my main nitpick on this issue. If both parties had agreed on what was said and done but disagreed on whether or not it was sexual harassment, well, then we could have had a watershed debate. This wasn't a debate on the issue of sexual harassment. It was a public spectacle where two incredibly bright, articulate and seemingly honest people told starkly different stories. One of them was a complete liar of epic proportion and the other wasn't. Today, 14 years later, we still do not definitively know the answer.

Cool and unflappable, Hill looked the Senators in the eye and handled every question without hesitation...No less poignant, searing or believable, however, were Thomas' anguished statements and adamant denials.

The hearings gave up lots of memorable moments. One of the "oddest episodes", according to Hill, involved an exchange in Thomas' office when he reached for a can of Coke and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" After Hill's testimony about this and numerous other incidents which included descriptions of Thomas discussing porno with women with large breasts engaged in a variety of sex acts with animals, Thomas came out swinging, calling the hearing "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." The article concluded:

...everyone who had witnessed Hill's and Thomas' dramatic testimony knew for certain only what they had known at the start: one was telling the truth, and the other was lying. There was no way to imagine a happy ending to this very sad confrontation. For both Hill and Thomas, it was the hardest ordeal of their lives. But one of them was shouldering the burden unfairly -- and it may never be known which one. While both had been sullied and injured by the proceedings, only one had been dragged through the mud on the strength of a very convincing lie.

So, who was telling the truth? Thomas had more to gain by lying -- a Supreme Court seat. But he also had excellent witnesses from his previous staffs who had worked with both of them saying that such behavior was never seen by them and would have been totally out of character. And it did appear that Hill initially thought her testimony to the FBI would be sufficient to derail his nomination without her having to speak to the committee. No one has definitively answered this question.

What do I think? First and foremost, I think that if Thomas did those things to Anita Hill then he's an asshole of extreme proportions (and I'm not talking about his Long Dong Silver either). And I also think that if it could be proved, even today, then he should be impeached and thrown off the court. But as I've pointed out earlier, this case isn't about sexual harassment, at least not until you can tell who's telling the truth.

I watched all the testimony on TV and whenever either Hill or Thomas was speaking, I believed them and knew the other was lying. It was maddening then, and it's maddening now. They were both brilliant witnesses. If I absolutely had to choose, I would take Thomas' denial to be the truth, but only by a very, very slim margin. Here's why. A tiny voice tells me that -- knowing know how high the stakes are over these nominations and how Democratic activists believe now (and believed then) that a woman's right to choose is literally at stake -- well, that voice tells me that it's possible Anita Hill was recruited to derail Clarence Thomas, things got out of hand, and she was basically told by a lawyer that she could either stick by her story or go to jail for perjury. But I wish I knew with more certainty...

State your own opinion in the comments. Who's the scummy liar and who's the victim? Tell it the way you feel it. And please visit Instant History by clicking on the logo below to go to www.instanthistory.net. Thanks!

Here's At Least One Verdict on Phil Spector

So the Phil Spector jury has deadlocked and couldn't reach a verdict. This is depressing news for people who think he killed actress Lana Clarkson and would like him to go to jail for the rest of his life to pay for the crime. Granted, I haven't heard the evidence presented as these jurors have but I can't deny that I am emotionally in the camp that wants him locked up anyway. Apparently, so were 10 of the jurors and all six alternates, leaving just two people who apparently needed to see a DVD slo-mo of Spector committing the act in order to convict.

Maybe knowing what happened that night is beyond our ability to know. So, in the interest of providing at least some verdict on Phil Spector, this morning on a long walk I listened to both the original "Let It Be" album which was produced by him and the recent "Let It Be... Naked" album which was de-Spectored by the surviving Beatles, mainly Paul McCartney.

Quick refresher: When the Beatles broke up in 1970, the group had one final album in the can, ready for release, "Let It Be." It gets tricky because this wasn't the last official Beatles album. That was "Abbey Road," which had been released the previous fall. "Let It Be," however, was a collection of songs which had been performed "live in the studio" over a year earlier. When the Beatles broke up, they pretty much all wanted to walk away, and those "Let It Be" tapes got given over to the legendary (and later reclusive) Phil Spector. He then proceeded to add his "wall of sound" style of orchestra, chorus and overdubs.

In 2003, EMI stripped away the strings, the chorus, and most of the overdubs and released "Let It Be... Naked."  Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

The album is presented in a form which is purported to be closer to The Beatles' original artistic vision to get back to the "rock & roll" sound of their early years... McCartney in particular was always dissatisfied with the "Wall of Sound" production techniques that had been employed on the Phil spector remixes, especially his song "The Long and Winding Road" which he believed was ruined by the process. George Harrison gave his approval to the project before he died.

The songs "Maggie Mae" and "Dig It" were both dropped as they were thought to be too weak for inclusion, and Lennon's "Don't Let Me Down" was added in their place. Even the running order is different. So is the photograph of George Harrison. Here's what Rolling Stone had to say in its review:

It's difficult to review "Let It Be . . . Naked" without drowning in the welter of vexed issues that shattered the Beatles. For a start, Naked is being hyped (in a musical nod to the "director's cut") as the "band's take" -- that is, the stripped-down version of the album the Beatles intended to make as they embarked on what was then thought of as "Get Back" in 1969. This notion, of course, is ridiculous. The unfortunate truth is that John Lennon and George Harrison are dead, and, whatever its merits, "Naked" exists essentially as an excuse for Paul McCartney, after decades of complaining, to finally remove Phil Spector's production effects from "The Long and Winding Road." As a result, the song -- a technologically souped-up version of the take in the "Let It Be" film -- now sounds like a vaguely interesting demo, rather than the lavish (and frankly emotional) epitaph for the Beatles that Spector turned it into.

So we know that Paul's verdict on Phil Spector was guilty. John Lennon held out for the other side and voted innocent.

"He was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever, and he made something out of it. He did a great job."

Both of the deceased Beatles -- Lennon and Harrison -- went on to work closely with Spector, who produced "Plastic Ono Band," "Imagine" and "All Things Must Pass" -- arguably the three best albums of the Beatles' solo years.

I don't pretend to be a music critic (well, actually, by virtue of this blog, I have once or twice pretended to be one) so all I can discuss is what I felt listening to both versions back-to-back this morning.

First, there is no doubt that the new mix is simply a better sound quality all the way around. The vocals are more vibrant and present. In the original, they now sound receded and half-lost. The sparer renditions do allow you to hear the songs as if they're new, and they are damn good songs. The people who sniff that "Let It Be" was somehow one of the Beatles' worst albums are just plain, flat-out wrong. Hearing them one after another, I do think that Spector did a less than great job with them.

So, that's my verdict today on Phil Spector, he was guilty of messing with a great Beatles album. Not quite up there with murder, but a crime nonetheless.

As for whatever happened between Phil Spector and Lana Clarkson, maybe we'll never know. He may not be "guilty" there, but he sure wasn't "innocent."

O.J. Simpson's First Jury Verdict (but probably not his last)

Now that O.J. Simpson has been arrested and facing jail time yet again, it seems like a good time to think back the moment when that first verdict came down in the O.J. Simpson double-murder case here in Los Angeles. As far as newsmagazine coverage of this case is concerned, it began with controversy, prompting the only pulled-back cover in Time's history, probably created more cover-stories than any other single news story short of 9/11 related coverage.

Time led its October 16, 1995 "O.J. Simpson Verdict: Special Report" with an extended essay from Roger Rosenblatt that was titled, perhaps way too optimistically, "A Nation of Pained Hearts: Americans, black and white, may be able to use the O.J. verdict as a chance to embark on a pilgrimage toward and candor and charity."

"At least there was one moment of visible black-and-white unity last week. It occurred on Tuesday, shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific time, when crowds of citizens, gathered together in the streets like extras in a War of the Worlds movie of the 1950s, stood staring up at outdoor television screens, waiting for the word. They were united, briefly, in an anxious silence of the heart. As soon as the verdict was read, however, they split apart; they could watch themselves do it on the split screens. On one side jubilation, on the other dismay. Afterward it was said that America should have seen it coming, that the division of the races cut so deep, it ought to have been obvious that two nations had always been hiding in one."

Like JFK's death, the moon landing and 9/11, many of us have a memory of how we heard the news and what it meant. I was in pre-production on the pilot for what would become an NBC TV series, Dark Skies, and we had offices at the Lantana business park in Santa Monica. When the word went out that they were about to read the verdict, people pored out of their offices into the building lobby where there was a big-screen television. I'm talking something like fifty people, probably a dozen of them African-American. When the words "not guilty" were read, I think everybody in the room was shocked and surprised. Without exception every white person recoiled and, simultaneously, every single African-American began to applaud and cheer. Keep in mind that we were all co-workers and that everybody was well-educated and employed. The difference between everybody in the room was race and nothing else.

Back to that issue of Time. The actual coverage began after the essay, and showed us that famous photo of O.J. with the very strange smile on his face being hugged by Johnnie Cochran as Kardashian and Bailey, his other (white) attorneys, continued to listen to the verdict.

"A mug shot, two gravestones, a smile. The trial can be reduced to these emblems. Or to entries in a specialized gazetteer: Rockingham, Bundy, Brentwood. A bestiary: barking dog, white Bronco, blond Kato. Names on a list: Marcia and Johnnie, Darden and Shapiro, Fung, Lee, Scheck, Ito, Fuhrman. A weird alphabet: DNA, O.J., A.C., LAPD, the N word. All were signposts to a greater geography, one uneasily contained on the premises of the California Superior Court. Television viewers saw the proceedings and were captured by the legal dramatics; and yet there were always hints of unseen details and untold tales."

One of the things I found most interesting in this coverage is how the defense felt about Judge Lance Ito. Apparently, they disliked him about as much as the prosecution did.

"Says defense attorney Peter Neufeld: 'I was very disappointed with Judge Ito, the fact that he was so concerned with his status as a celebrity, his willingness to entertain personalities in chambers, to show the lawyers little videotapes of skits on television.' One day, says Neufeld, Ito brought all the lawyers into chambers to show them a clip of the 'Dancing Itos' from Jay Leno's Tonight Show. 'You may find that amusing on a personal level, but I can assure that on a professional level it is so unacceptable, for a judge who is presiding over a murder where two people lost their lives in the most gruesome and horrible fashion, and where a third person has his life on the line, to bring the lawyers into chambers to show them comic revues.' Ito even told the lawyers Simpson jokes he had heard. Says Neufeld: 'As someone who has tried cases for twenty years, I found it deplorable and I was shocked.'"

So now O.J.is arrested again, this time on charges related to him using a gun trying to get back some sports memorabilia he says belonged to him. Were those buyers looking to own a souvenir from a sports hero or the murderer who got away? Maybe that depends on race, too. It's sad if it does because no race should have to bear the burden of defending a murderer. But that's America these days.

O.J., of course, has had over a decade to continue searching for "the real killer" as he so famously promised and, so far, has not turned anyone up. Maybe his break with reality has been so complete that he doesn't realize he's looking right at him every day he shaves.

Conspiracy? JFK's Got Nothin' on Jim Morrison

Oliver Stone has made one movie about a conspiracy, "JFK," that probably isn't true at all, and another supposedly true story, "The Doors," which isn't about a conspiracy but should have been because that, in fact, is what really happened.

Ah, the irony...

Regular readers know I'm something of a conspiracy buff. I once called the Warren Commission Report "the greatest work of fiction that American literature has ever produced." Then I proceded to create a TV series, "Dark Skies," that had, as its basis, that President Kennedy was assassinated because he knew the truth about Roswell and was going to come clean with the American people in his second term (and, no, I never actually believed that -- it was a TV series!). We even did an episode of that series, by the way, where Jim Morrison was a character.

Now we have two news stories that are upending what people believe about JFK's assassination and about Jim Morrison's death.

Former LA prosecutor Vincent Buglioisi has a new book out, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."  It's over 16-hundred pages and I'm not done but it make a very persuasive case that Lee Harvey Oswald was, indeed, a lone nut-case who acted alone. Just like the Warren Commission said.

Then there's Time magazine which has a new article, "How Jim Morrison Died" by Vivienne Walt that says the idea he died in his bathtub in Paris is a complete fabrication. The truth, according to Walt, is that Morrison overdosed in a Paris nightclub and that about five or six people participated in taking his body back to his apartment and putting it in that bathtub and that Paris authorities just looked the other way and never did an autopsy.

Imagine how that would have energized the ending of Oliver Stone's movie. Could have happened, too. Sam Bernett who ran the Paris nightclub was described by Time this way.

Bernett says he once met Oliver Stone's mother, and told her: "Tell your son to call me and I'll tell him how his movie should end." Stone never called.

And, yet, just as I'm accepting these new facts, there's something from each story that keeps me guessing.

First, Bugliosi, also writing in an earlier issue of Time about "What We Can Learn From JFK" had this to say about the subject of the vast conspiracy it would have taken to bring down JFK:

"Three people can keep a secret but only if two of them are dead."

Bugliosi has used this line in the famous mock-trial of Oswald he participated in for the BBC, in his book and in most interviews. It's his standard-issue one-liner and it works because, well, it generally is true.

Now let's go to the article about Jim Morrison's death.

"We carried him in a blanket and got him the hell out of there," recalls Chauvel, who was a friend of Morrison. Explaining the cover-up, Chauvel says: "I guess if you have a nightclub and Jim Morrison dies in your toilet, it is not good p.r. The five or six people who knew, who were there that night, agreed to just forget about it."

So, let's see. These six people kept this secret for 36 years now and it only broke because one of them, who's getting on in years, decided to write a book and the others have confirmed it. And they joined the conspiracy because Morrison's drug dealers didn't want their product tied to the rock star in a nightclub. Bad for business.

Maybe Bugliosi's wrong. Maybe even six people can keep a secret, provided nobody thinks there is one in the first place.

Duke Out: Would You Watch?

Over the weekend a disciplinary committee disbarred disgraced prosecutor Mike Nifong for his leading role in the disastrous and dishonest prosecution of three Duke University lacrosse players who he falsely accused of rape last year. Even Nifong agreed that his punishment fit his crime.

The only thing left in Nifong's public humiliation will be the books and the movie that may come of all this. I'd love to write the movie of this slow-motion disaster. In fact, I tried as hard as I knew how to do exactly that.

First, the background: the TV movie business isn't what it used to be. The networks, for all intents and purposes aren't interested anymore, leaving the form only to the cable outlets and even that territory isn't taking up the slack.

The Duke non-rape case was a good example. Ten years ago this might have been the perfect "ripped-from-the-headlines" film. It's got it all. He said-she said. Sex (or no sex). Athletics. Class struggle. Strippers. A good villain. Ruined lives.

So, as the story was breaking last year, executive Jonathan Eskenas from the Orly Adelson Company and I said to ourselves, "Damn. There's a movie there."

As a consequence, I wrote this one-page treatment. You can read it for yourself if you want by clicking the link below to download the PDF file.

Duke Out, TV Movie Treatment

We called around. Almost everybody passed in the concept stage. We got one actual pitch, at ABC. The executive we talked to understood the idea, he liked it even, but they passed, too. They just weren't sure...

Too damn bad. I look at the date on that treatment. June 5, 2006. Almost exactly one year ago. That means, being as fast a writer as I am, that I'd have jetted off to Durham for a few weeks, nosed around, read everything, and would have had a first draft by the end of August. We could have been in pre-production in September, shooting in October or November.

If ABC had bought this pitch, they would have had a movie in their hands for this May's ratings sweeps, and they'd be re-airing it this week with the Nifong hearing. Tell me that people wouldn't watch that. We'd have tacked on an ending reflecting the current reality, but it would have been compelling television and I'd be willing to bet that such a movie would have won its time slot.

But the networks are out of the TV movie business. I'm not sure that's wise.  Sounds as clueless as Mike Nifong...

Maybe the feature people will think differently.

Sopranos Interruptus

I didn't like it. Just can't get behind this "do-it-yourself" ending that intentionally had everyone in the room wondering if the TiVO had cut out two minutes too soon. It wasn't cool, it was cruel.

"I can't decide whether to go out with the bang or the whimper."

I know others will be trying to see it as a bold creative choice. For me, it's a cop-out. I have great respect for what David Chase has accomplished, of course, but don't tell me that we can all figure out our own ending. You're the creator. We want to know what you think.

I was particularly disappointed by the A.J. resolution being another inside entertainment joke that, somehow, he was going to end up working in the film biz like Christopher. He's the son of Tony Soprano at a time when the chickens were coming home to roost and this is the way they deal with him?

The no-ending ending did get Jackie and me into a lively discussion with our viewing friends Scott and Andie, mind you, but not the good kind, the frustrating kind.

Maybe it's just a ploy for a big-budget "The Sopranos" movie but, if that's the case, then I feel even more ripped off.

In any case, see ya, Tony, loved you almost to the end...

The Mother of All JFK Books: Oswald Acted... Alone?

After forty-plus years and a thousand books about John F. Kennedy and his assassination, it has become an accepted article of faith to most Americans (75% or more) that JFK was killed by the actions of a conspiracy. The debate has centered only on who was in on the murder plot: the CIA, the mob, Cubans, Castro, even LBJ. The most radical thing anybody can possibly say in this situation is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and was the only gunman who took at shot on November 22, 1963.

Vincent Bugliosi is that kind of radical. He's perhaps our country's foremost prosecutor. You know him because he's the man who put that evil bastard Charles Manson behind bars for life and, later, made the case against O.J. Simpson so convincingly in his book Outrage. He also prosecuted Lee Harvey Oswald (in absentia) during a 21-hour British television production in the mid-80s where he actually convinced a jury of Dallas citizens who had served on federal trials to return a guilty verdict. Buglioisi has the steely intellect to see through bullshit and the guts to call it the way he sees it.

Bugliosi's new book, Reclaiming History, has been nearly twenty years in the making. It's over 1600 pages (not a typo). For the past four days, I've been reading it like the obsessed Kennedy reader I am. I do not have eye-strain but I do have a strain in my right forearm from balancing this book. It is literally too big to hold comfortably.

I'm betting, also, that it is also metaphorically too big for many people to hold comfortably in their minds because it will challenge their current mind-sets. But, as Bugliosi points out, the JFK assassination is "the most consequential murder case in American history." Therefore, he argues, he has written these 1,612 pages because he wants it to be the definitive piece on the assassination. As a former investigative reporter myself, I am duly impressed by how much work has gone into this.

Personally, like a lot of Americans, I've followed quite a path on the JFK story. As a child, I mourned with everyone else when Kennedy was murdered. And, like most everyone else at the time, I hated Lee Harvey Oswald (who we all assumed did the deed). I hated the fact that my middle name was "Harvey" from that day forward.

Then, like a lot of Americans, I began to have doubts. The conspiracy books started to make their cases. As historians turned up the truth about a lot of Kennedy's personal conduct, and his relations with Castro, and the CIA, and the mob, well, it seemed like there were lots of suspects for a conspiracy. By the mid-90s, in fact, I even turned the JFK conspiracy into an NBC primetime television series, "Dark Skies," which bizarrely welded the two great conspiracies of our time together into a plot-line that had JFK being killed because he was about to tell the truth about UFOs in his second term.

Even before Bugliosi's heavyweight indictment (it's 5.3 pounds), however, I'd begun to have doubts about my doubts. Gerald Posner wrote Case Closed which, also, argued that Oswald acted alone. I wasn't completely swayed, but my mind was open. One thing I learned as an investigative reporter is that in most instances the simplest explanation, even if it is emotionally unsatisfying, is often the right one.

The thing is Bugliosi's book is excellent and he is a powerfully assured organizer and interpreter of facts, particularly in complex cases like this one. Plus, and this is what sets his book apart, he takes the various conspiracy theories to task one-by-one and literally shreds them.

I'm a nut for detail, too. I actually collect Time and Newsweek magazines from the 1960s. Reading the issues about JFK leading up to the assassination and after is so much different than reading what you can find today.

Now I have a confession to make. I am the same man who once described the Warren Commission Report as "the greatest work of fiction ever produced by Americans." And yet I am close to believing that the Warren Commission got it more or less right.

I can't believe I just wrote that.

• Sidebar: Oddly, I've been working on a JFK book for a few years now that, while it is not the centerpiece, also assumes that Oswald probably was the lone gunman after all. My book is an alt-history novel, co-written with prolific author Harry Turtledove, called Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment and Trial of John F. Kennedy. It's our contention (at least for novelistic purposes) that if Oswald had shot at JFK in Dallas and missed, the resulting investigation would have exposed JFK's secret life as collateral damage and he would have been impeached a decade before Nixon for crimes large and small.