Surprisingly, it was a strain to find an actor to play JFK. The conditions the Kennedy family placed on their cooperation for the book also applied to the movie: Approval over the way the President was portrayed, according to historian Timothy Naftali, who is writing a book on Kennedy to be published by W.W. Kennedy in World War II,” even before the tome was published later in 1961. Under pressure to gain cooperation from the White House and PT 109 survivors, the studio soon snapped up the rights to the authorized book on which the movie was to be based, Robert Donovan’s “PT 109: John F. It didn’t help that the production process was erratic.Īpparently without first consulting with Kennedy, the studio had announced a PT 109 project just weeks after the young President’s inauguration. Jack Warner, personally supervising the project, wrote in his autobiography that they “worked so diligently to keep everything in good taste and avoid exploitation of the man in his high office.”īut the $6.5 million project, in Warner’s word, ultimately “missed.” With Cliff Robertson in the lead, the result was an entertaining picture that failed for a number of reasons to make the mark the studio thought it would.
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