92.7

“What Debt Does Hollywood Owe to Truth.” Article by William Grimes. New York Times, 5 March, Sec. C (“Arts”), pp. 15, 22. Report of a 3 March panel debate at Town Hall in New York, convened under the auspices of several educational and cultural organizations, to discuss “the duty of art to history, fiction to fact.” Victor Navasky moderated the panel consisting of Mailer, Nora Ephron, Edward Jay Epstein and Oliver Stone, whose film, J.F.K., was the centerpiece. Mailer, “who embraced, perhaps embodied, the historical complexities and ambiguities heaped up throughout the evening,” spoke both of J.F.K.’s assassination (“the mind-stultifying myth of the lone assassin”), and Stone’s film (“should be seen not as history but myth,” the story of “a huge and hideous event in which the gods warred, and a god fell”). See 92.4.