"The Package" -- The Most Important JFK Assassination-Related Film to Date

[David Lifton]

And its superficial plot has absolutely NOTHING to do with the Kennedy assassination.

The Package, released in 1989, was written by John Bishop and directed by Andrew Davis. Cast includes Gene Hackman, Tommy Lee Jones, Joanna Cassidy, John Heard, Dennis Franz, and Pam Grier.

Hackman plays a US Army sergeant assigned to bring criminal soldier Jones back to the states for incarceration. Prior to that assignment, Hackman was involved in providing security for a NATO conference at which high-ranking American and Soviet military and intelligence officers were in attendance to negotiate the terms of an upcoming summit meeting. The unnamed leaders clearly were modeled on George Herbert Walker Bush and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

Hackman gets Jones back to D.C., but before they can leave the airport Hackman is mugged. When he regains consciousness, Jones is gone.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm going to condense the plot, so if you haven't seen the film, I STRONGLY urge you to do so.

Jones's character is a world-class sniper who has been sent to Chicago to assassinate one or both of the leaders. Part of the plot -- brilliantly depicted -- will be the patsying of a young man who is led to believe that he's on an important intelligence mission to infiltrate a group of White militants hostile to detente. He is given a job on a high floor of an office building overlooking the podium on which some sort of Cold War-ending treaty will be signed.

The most important element of The Package is its depiction of the conspiracy's high-ranking Facilitators: military and intelligence offices whose masters are above Cold-War differences.

Writer John Dickson Bishop was born in Ohio in 1929 and died of cancer in December, 2006 in Bad Heilbrunn, Germany.

Bishop began his career as an actor. As a writer, his first play, The Trip Back Down, was produced on Broadway in 1977. Later he became a resident playwright at New York's Circle Repertory Company.

For a time Bishop was at Paramount Studios where he helped rework several scripts, including Beverly Hills Cop III.

Given Bishop's identification of Facilitators and his film's obvious references to the JFK assassination, I submit that The Package is -- as the title of this thread indicates -- the most important JFK assassination-related film to date.

Thanks to IMDb for background on Bishop.

FWIW: Its my understanding (from speaking with certain screenwriters and producers supposedly "in the know,") that The Package was originally much more explicitly connected to the JFK assassination. But then changes were requested, and there were rewrites to change certain particulars to fuzz it up.

But the essential linkage is still there, and rather obvious--especially to students of the JFK case.

DSL
6/23/13; 6 PM PDT
Los Angeles, California