You’ve probably heard a lot of stories recently about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Last Friday was the 50th anniversary of the tragic event. But you have not hear this story: Just two years after President Kennedy was gunned down, Marina Oswald, the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald, auditioned for a part in a film about the assassination.
Footage of her screen test turned up recently in Colorado, at a company in Englewood called CinemaLab. The lab is restoring the film. CPR’s film critic Howie Movshovitz, who got to see it for himself, says, "As far as anyone knows, there is no other copy of this screen test."
The planned feature film that Marina Oswald was trying out for never got made, but it was to star about 60 to 80 people playing themselves in docudrama about Kennedy's assassination and about Lee Harvey Oswald's own killing.
The then-district attorney in Dallas, Henry Wade (of Rowe v. Wade fame), is said to have been the mastermind of the project. But after it got cancelled -- presumably when everyone realized it was in bad taste -- Wade denied being involved. The film's director was Robert Larsen, from Colorado Springs, which is likely why the screen test was made there in 1965.
To hear more of the story, which gets more absurd as it goes on, listen to Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner talk with CinemaLab's Robert David at the link above.
