The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination is three and a half months away. The usual conspiracy titillations will be reconsidered, but no one will ever know anything conclusive about an alleged conspiracy because two witnesses to the murder who had cameras (Abraham Zapruder and Mary Moorman) were too cheap to buy better cameras, and a third witness (Orville Nix, who died in 1972) has two strikes against him — he shot his Dealey Plaza footage with a mildly shitty 8mm camera, and was either too dumb or too lazy to shoot the Kennedy motorcade from a reasonable distance.

If Zapruder had shot the murder with color film inside a decent 16mm camera instead of an 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD…if Moorman had used a movie camera instead of a black-and-white Polaroid Highlander 80A…if Nix had used a 16mm color movie camera with a decent zoom lens….all three had their unique motives and economic limitations and that’s understandable, but from a forensic perspective they sorta kinda blew it.

Imagine being Orville Nix at 12:28 pm on 11.22.63, standing on the grass in Dealey Plaza between 80 and 100 feet away from Elm Street, all pumped and primed with his 8mm color camera…

Interior Nix dialogue: “Okay, I can hear the motorcycles and the cheering…the Kennedy motorcade is coming down Main Street and will be cruising down Elm in a minute or two…maybe I should run over to Elm to get a decent shot of the President and his wife and Governor Connally??…naahh, it’s better to stand 80 to 100 feet away…that way my family and friends can see the grassy knoll hillside and the plaster walls and the bright blue sky…who needs to capture film of the actual faces of President Kennedy and Jackie?…the green grass and the panoramic vistas are better.”

In the meantime, what about that mysterious muzzle flash and the legend of Badge Man?

HE to JFK conspiracy pallies (including Joseph McBride and Oliver Stone): “A rifle muzzle flash is said to be barely detectable above a grassy knoll wall. Or at least, so says assassination researcher Robert Groden.

Groden’s film A Case for Conspiracy shows a flash above the small concrete wall at frame # 24 in the Nix film, which is the same instant as frame # 313 in the Zapruder film.

Last night Jett told me he recently re-watched Some Like It Hot (having seen it many times), and it suddenly hit him that (a) Tony Curtis‘s Joe character is a truly odious womanizer and (b) he doesn’t like him very much, and that Joe’s ugliness colored Jett’s basic attitude about the film.

I found this a familiar and even vaguely amusing viewpoint as this is a typical Millennial thing (moral condemnation + faint notions of cancelling directed toward a self-absorbed prick who wouldn’t fit into today’s realm).

My response: “But that’s the point of the character. Joe is ‘a liar and a phony’, as he admits to Marilyn Monroe‘s Sugar at the very end, but he gradually develops empathy and a conscience after putting on a wig and falsies and wearing a dress and thereby realizing ‘how the other half lives.’

“Joe feels so badly about lying to Sugar (i.e., pretending to be a Shell Oil heir) and then breaking her heart when he and Jack Lemmon‘s Jerry are forced to go on the lam in order to avoid Spats Columbo and his gang that he gives her the only item of value between them — a diamond bracelet that Joe E. Brown‘s Osgood Fielding had given Lemmon’s ‘Daphne’ (and which Joe has technically stolen).

“This is part of his third-act redemption,” I went on. “This plus Joe’s admitting to Sugar that he’s the same kind of thoughtless cad she’s been emotionally bruised by so often.

“Whenever a flawed movie character lets his guard down and admits to a significant moral failing, he’s taken a slight but significant step toward becoming a better human being.”

Example: The last-minute emotional breakthrough experienced by Anthony Quinn’s Zampano in Federico Fellini’s La Strada. A terrible brute throughout the whole film but at the very last minute he realizes who and what he is. His weeping on the beach symbolizes a kind of redemption. Small but noteworthy.

After 21 months of scintillating baby vibes within a passive, moody or euphoric, in-and-out dynamic, the suddenly much-more-verbal-and-assertive Sutton actually called me “papa” a few times yesterday and two or three times motioned me to sit down next to her (patting the seat to indicate where I should plant my butt) and reached out and took my hand and led me around several times.

Her moods are rather moody as she’s now in her “terrible two” phase and giving her mother attitude (it began several weeks ago), but from my humble perspective it’s quite a thing when your granddaughter suddenly addresses you by name and urges you to do this or notice that with three- or four-word sentences.

Hundreds of billions have been through this, but it was the first time for this particular horse.

The MI:7 shortfall has already been kicked around, but what in blazes is happening in this world? Aced out by Sound of Freedom, okay, but by anemic Haunted Mansion?

Shakeman, Bloomfield Ave., Verona, N.J. —3:45 pm.

…for not just the diminished returns of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Daryl F. Zanuck’s “monumental mouse” (Judith Crist’s term) but about the dwindling power of the old studio system itself.