https://variety.com/2019/tv/global/agc-television-...
OCTOBER 12, 2019 11:00PM PT
AGC Television Picks up Worldwide on Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK: Destiny Betrayed’
By JOHN HOPEWELL
John Hopewell
CANNES — AGC Television, the TV production-distribution division of Stuart Ford’s still fast expanding independent content studio AGC Studios, has landed worldwide rights to another high-profile doc-series which it describes as “probing” and “explosive”: Oliver Stone’s “JFK: Destiny Betrayed.”
The acquisition was announced early Monday by AGC Television president Lourdes Diaz.
The acquisition continues AGC Television substantial investment in non-fiction which is in high-demand in the streaming and premium cable space, allowing operators to reach diverse audience segments with high-profile original content at relatively modest cost.
Few filmmakers are as high-profile as Oliver Stone and“JFK” has proved the most controversial of his films. In the new doc-series, Stone and writer James DiEugenio, author of “Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case,” place now declassified files related to President Kennedy’s assassination in a far larger context, aiming to shine more light on what really happened in 1963.
Coming in on the assassination from the angle of Kennedy’s far-reaching policy speeches that threatened the status-quo, Stone will “reveal that Kennedy’s foreign policy actions were revolutionary in many ways and were a conscious decision he had been contemplating for a decade before taking office,” said an AGC Television statement.
It went on: “Stone will put Kennedy’s assassination in context politically, and present interviews, documents, and forensics reports that will change forever how Kennedy’s life, political career, and assassination will be considered.”
Those interviewed in the series include John Tunheim, chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board, criminologist Henry Lee, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., James Galbraith, and Salon founder David Talbot.
“It’s not an exaggeration to state that this series features the most distinguished collection of talent and knowledge on the JFK case ever assembled,” said the AGC Television press release.
Diaz added: “We have long admired Oliver Stone and his work, and the revelatory information his new documentary brings forward not only sheds a new light on JFK’s presidency and his assassination, it informs us about our contemporary world,”
“This documentary film represents an important bookend to my 1991 film. It ties up many loose threads, and hopefully repudiates much of the ignorance around the case and the movie,” Stone wrote.
“JFK: Destiny Betrayed” reunites Stone with ace cinematographer Robert Richardson (“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” “Nixon,” “The Aviator”), who won the first of his three Academy Awards for “JFK.”
Rob Wilson behind Showtime’s “The Untold History of the United States,” produces with Ingenious Media.
AGC’s Stuart Ford and Diaz, Ingenious Media’s Andrea Scarso, Amit Pandya, and Peter Touche, and Angela Ceccio and Fernando Sulichin serve as executive producers.
“JFK: Destiny Betrayed” joins an AGC non-fiction slate which already features Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9,” “Ask Dr. Ruth,” a big hit at Sundance, and the upcoming “Scandalous,” on the rise of the National Enquirer; “Good Trouble: John Lewis,” described as an inspiring look at the firebrand legislator, and “Lady Boss: the Jackie Collins story.”