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For the first four seasons of NBC’s “Quantum Leap,” Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) jumped into a pretty crazy cast of characters. Of course, those characters were all fictional and written specifically for the show. That all changed with the two-episode premiere of Season 5 when Beckett ended up in the body of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Creator Donald Bellisario said he chose the infamous alleged killer because years earlier he had a run-in with Oswald and wanted to set the record straight about him. In 1991, Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” posited Oswald didn’t act alone when he assassinated President John F. Kennedy. In an interview with Book and Film Globe, Bellisario said the Oswald he knew never would have worked with others.
According to Bellisario, “…when ‘JFK’ came out, my son saw it and he was about 14 years old, and he started telling me all this stuff that was in the movie, how there was a conspiracy, and there was more than one shooter. He was absolutely convinced that there were multiple shooters. And I was convinced just the opposite. And it got me so upset that my son was taken in by the film that I decided to make my own film.”
Bellisario says Oswald wasn’t a team player
Several years before Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he was a Marine stationed in California. That’s when Donald Bellisario, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, claimed he walked into a supply shed and saw Oswald reading Pravda, a Russian Communist magazine. According to Bellisario, the conversation escalated into a heated argument. “He was so adamant about his position, and he was by himself on that,” he said. “His attitude had me convinced that he was the kind of guy that would act alone.”
Bellisario included that incident in the “Quantum Leap” episode, as well as other moments from Oswald’s past to show audiences the kind of person he thought Oswald was. In the same interview, Bellisario said he did plenty of research before writing the episode, including looking out the Dallas book depository window where Oswald fired his gun from. In Bellisario’s opinion, a Marine with rifle training would have been able to make that shot fairly easily, which further cemented his stance that Oswald didn’t need any help. In the end for Bellisario, there was only one conclusion: “…it seemed very obvious to me that he was acting alone; his personality as much as anything. He was — well, he was just crazy.”
