As sure as day follows night and night follows day, if there’s a project developing in Hollywood, you can bet that there’s a project elsewhere being developed based on similar subject material. For a few months now we’ve known about the Tom Hanks produced JFK assassination drama, “Parkland,” which already boasts a cast including Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver, Marcia Gay Harden and Zac Efron. That film will dramatize the events that occurred at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital on the day President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963. Maybe it’s because the 50th anniversary of that event is fast approaching, but now there’s another film based around the assassination on its way from “Queens of Country” writer-director Ryan Page.
Page will write (alongside Adam Parfrey) and direct a conspiracy thriller going by the name of “Dallas In Wonderland," which will center around a documentary filmmaker and his producer who are hired by a TV network to do a puff piece for their planned motorcade reenactment that will take place during a televised memorial ceremony. Finding themselves “wrapped up in the network’s plot” to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, the pair close in on the central narrative surrounding JFK’s assassination, leading to the climax of the event playing out once more on the nation’s television screens.
Page believes that he and Parfrey have come up with “an altogether new kind of thriller, featuring the very latest research done in the JFK assassination case.” That might be the case, but from the above synopsis we think it already sounds kind of dumb, and its title doesn’t do it any favors on that front either. We guess there’s a gap in the market for this after Jonathan Demme let his option on Stephen King’s JFK thriller “11/22/63” expire, but of the two JFK projects in development, we’re definitely more excited about Hanks’ “Parkland “ at present. For some reason this is making us think of “Vantage Point,” and that’s really not the best touchstone to have if you’re going to get excited about a new movie. [Variety]