Jeff Richmond, Fey’s husband who attended Kent State, is also producing. And Jay Roach, a producer on Fey’s Sisters, was nabbed to helm the project.
Based on the non-fiction Howard Means book, 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence, the film will take a look at what led to the shooting of four student protesters by the Ohio National Guard.
Roach called the upcoming film a cautionary tale, in a recent interview with Deadline.
“There was a prevailing movement in the country – they measured it with polls – where the vast majority of Americans blamed the students for what happened,” Roach said. “We have footage of the people on the streets saying, ‘I wish they’d shot them all.’”
No word yet if the movie will actually be filmed at Kent State.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2017.
Listening to the Strubbe audio tape recording of what transpired that fatal day (May 4, 1970), one can fairly easily trace the sequence of events.
What prompted the guardsmen to fire appears to be their hearing of pistol shots coming from the crowd of protesters. Now given the hostile environment (they got themselves surrounded) any type of nearby gunfire would certainly invite such a retaliatory response. Someone in a officer capacity ordered the Guard to shoot because they believed their troop was in harm’s way. What a bizarre series of events.
All this time, because of a deliberately botched investigation by the FBI (as with JFK, MLK and RFK), we the American people have been duped into thinking the deaths and injuries of 13 students was the result of some rogue element within the Ohio National Guard where in fact it turns out that an undercover spy sent in by the law-enforcement establishment inadvertently (or perhaps purposely) set off this chain of events when he was discovered by a angry few (who also helped set off the tragedy by their actions).
The Strubbe tape is the Zapruder film (film of the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy while his motorcade traveled through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas) of this historic event; something the “authorities” didn’t count on. One has to wonder if there were other audio or even video tapes that recorded this event only to be confiscated by “officials” as they were in Dealey Plaza. All four events have the same common denominator: Do not mess with America’s war machine because the consequences can be deadly.
Perhaps one day other students (or faculty) will have the courage to come forward to tell what they know or perhaps tell what they were told not to say. Maybe Kent State will have its own “Deep Throat” hero emerge shortly before his or her death so he or she can reveal what truly happened.
Boy, would this make for a great Oliver Stone film; a movie director who is rewarded financially by taking advantage of the lack of accountability by the United States government. As Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in “A Few Good Men” shouts “You can’t handle the truth,” the response by the American people must always be “let us decide what truth we can and cannot handle” otherwise what is the point of the United States Constitution? We must get to the bottom of this tragedy before it is too late. Citizens of this great country: It’s up to you.
Joe – as a 32-year employee of Kent State…witness to interviews with the wounded students, guardsmen, politicians from that era, professors who witnessed the shootings, Kent State Trustee meetings, journalism forums, etc…I must politely inform you that the gunfire from the students theory has been debunked 100 times over. Sorry.
Sorry Joe….you’re wrong. No mythical student shooter. I was there…. walking out of Taylor Hall into the line of gunfire. It was lunchtime….students were walking in all directions out of classes, on to their next test, to get lunch…..and in those days the Taylor Hall parking lot was a main artery in getting from one side of campus to another. The guard were stupid….they had positioned themselves in a location where kids were coming at them from all directions and the guard was backed up against a chain link fence with no where to go by the football practice field ( it’s not there anymore) so when classes let out, kids came out of every building from all directions which was a normal daily occurrence at noon. You want reasons for agitated students that morning….it was mid-term test week, students didn’t get much sleep due to the national guard helicopters flying all night long over the entire city with search lights, the entire city was under Marshall law which put guardsman at every street corner with guns in the entire city beside on campus, an idiot Governor James Rhodes that was running for a US Senate seat in the primary on May 5th who made a political speech on Sunday May 3rd and had terrible things to say about Kent students (you can look up what he said at the KSU memorial) national guardsman who were tired of being on duty after weeks protecting Akron tire companies during a strike (where they were fired upon) now being faced with upstart “college” kids…..toss in some professional non student malcontents (it wasn’t all KSU students protesting) and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. The KSU shootings were murder….not just a tragedy…..murder. Incompetent leadership by the National Guard is the reason why innocent students were killed. The “General” of the national guard was playing war games with his troops on a college campus and he screwed up by pushing too hard on a day that most kids were more concerned about the exams they had to take that week. The national guard had parked a tank at the ceremonial archway walk in entrance to the KSU campus…right over the university seal…..to send a message no doubt….a little overkill turned into killing.