Screenwriters' quest to learn more about Sen. Ted Kennedy led to Chappaquiddick film

Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan thought that they were well-informed on all things Kennedy. Their upbringing in Dallas was an immersion in the Kennedy family allure and Camelot myth.

When they found out about the Chappaquiddick tragedy that shaped Sen. Edward Kennedy’s career and changed the course of history, their mission to learn more resulted in a screenplay for a major motion picture, the screenwriters said at a May 31 National Press Club Headliners event.

“Nobody asked for it, nobody paid an advance for it, but we believed in it and wanted to tell this story,” Allen said at the Club screening of the film. “I felt like it was something I needed… to ask questions about – why this story hadn’t been codified and made part of our understanding of the Kennedy legacy.”

The screenwriters’ naiveté proved to be a valuable asset, according to Logan.

“We didn’t know what questions not to ask,” he said.

While straw polling friends and family, they realized their lack of knowledge was shared.

“Anybody under fifty had never heard of this incident, and everybody over fifty was familiar with it, but, had a lot of questions,” Allen said.

The writers recalled growing up in Dallas “with a fascination with the Kennedys,” Logan said.

“We had participated in the construction of the Kennedy family allure, the Camelot myth,” Allen added.

Neither was aware of Chappaquiddick until Bill Maher said on his HBO show Real Time that but for the incident, Kennedy would have been president in 1972.

“For two guys from Texas who know nothing about Martha’s Vineyard, we were like, what’s a Chappaquiddick and what’s he talking about,” Allen said.

Living together in Los Angeles at the time, they “hopped on the Google machine, typed in Chappaquiddick, probably misspelled it, and went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole,” Logan said.

A significant portion of the film is dedicated toward exploring those factors that impeded adequate coverage of the tragedy. The writers cited the moon landing as the primary factor.

“There were at least a dozen other really interesting stories that summer… but at the end of the day all of them were enveloped by the moon landing,” Allen said.

The moon landing marked “[t]he highest point of JFK’s legacy being achieved at the same time that Ted Kennedy’s lowest point was happening,” Logan added.

The screenwriters also discussed the misleading nature of some press coverage, specifically citing the public’s misunderstanding of Kopechne due to the media’s “unforgivable mistakes in the coverage” of the victim.

Newspapers featured “dehumanizing” headlines such as “blonde drowns,” Allen said. “Her name had been dragged in the mud,” he added, noting the public still has “a complete distortion of reality of who Mary Jo Kopechne was.”

In developing the screenplay, Allen and Logan relied heavily on the one thousand pages of court transcripts from the January 1970 inquest into the death of Kopechne.

"[T]he inspiration in terms of how we approached it was… really driven by how conflicting that testimony so often was,” Allen said.

Throughout the process, the writers steered clear from conspiracies and unsupported evidence.

“If we couldn’t prove it then it wasn’t gonna be in the movie,” Logan said. "[O]ur North Star for writing this was the truth.”