"There was a serious awareness on our part of not speculating too far afield, or interpreting too widely these events," Almond says. He also listened to hours of interviews with O'Donnell, conducted by NBC White House correspondent Sander Vanocur. Screenwriter David Self drew on numerous historical sources, including White House tapes, memoirs, oral histories, CIA documents and personal interviews. "We can't hide under the shield of artistic freedom if we're going to play hard and fast with important events," he says.Īlthough it was dramatically necessary to compress principal characters and put the words of others into their mouths, they made sure the essential truth was preserved. However, that is not a freedom they took lightly, he says.
#13 DAYS LEFT FREE#
Which gave the filmmakers a fair amount of free license. "We do know from memoir accounts, that expressly asked O'Donnell to be at all the meetings where the president was in attendance and offer candid comments in private afterwards." "While there is a taped record of a number of the ExComm meetings, there were also plenty of discussions in small groupings - a floating discussion in and out of the more formal sessions. "The thing is, no one knows" everything that was said, or who said it, Almond says. But O'Donnell did have an adjoining office to the Oval Office, was a member of JFK's ExComm and did attend meetings at the president's request. I remain convinced that O'Donnell had no purpose whatsoever."Ĭounters "Thirteen Days" producer Peter Almond: "There's no doubt portfolio did not include foreign policy or national security affairs. He probably knew something important was going on. He was not one of advisers, was not that close to him.
#13 DAYS LEFT MOVIE#
"If you see the movie as a step in the direction of history," says journalist Marvin Kalb, a Moscow political correspondent during the crisis, "then it is jarring for those who know Kenny O'Donnell played no role whatsoever. Many people remember about historical events that they played a bigger role than they did." "This is an invention, encouraged a little by O'Donnell's own recollections. "There's no evidence that he played any such role," says Graham Allison, a professor of international affairs at Harvard and author of "Essence of Decision," a thoroughgoing book about the Cuban missile crisis. Although he was an adviser to President Kennedy, he did not figure as largely in the actual Cuban missile crisis as the movie implies. The most obvious example: the role played by Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) in the crisis. spy planes reported the sudden appearance of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuban soil in October 1962, that possibility loomed exceedingly large.īut the filmmakers did take some liberties. After all, what could be more riveting than the possibility of global nuclear destruction?
THEY DIDN'T HAVE to make up too much for "Thirteen Days," the movie that tells the story of the Cuban missile crisis.
0 kommentar(er)
