Is November 1963 a true story? The JFK movie was written by a relative of Chicago mob boss

November 1963 is Roland Joffé's crime drama about the 48 hours before President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, told from inside the Chicago Outfit. Ketchup Entertainment releases it in select theaters on November 20, 2026. The cast plays real people:

• John Travolta — Johnny Roselli, the Outfit's man in Las Vegas and Hollywood
• Thomas Fiscella — Sam Giancana, boss of the Chicago Outfit
• Mandy Patinkin — Tony Accardo, Giancana's predecessor and mentor
• Dermot Mulroney — Charles Nicoletti, Outfit hitman
• Robert Carlyle — Jack Ruby
• Jefferson White — Lee Harvey Oswald

Who wrote November 1963

The screenplay is by Nicholas Celozzi, Sam Giancana's nephew. The story came from another uncle, Joseph "Pepe" Giancana, Sam's brother, who sometimes drove for him and was with him during those two days in November 1963. Pepe told the story to his nephew and asked him to share it someday. Celozzi told Variety he wasn't adding anything:

"I'm staying with his story, as opposed to adding my own interpretation."

He wrote it with family on board. Sam Giancana's daughter Bonnie, Celozzi's cousin, worked on the script with him through years of rewrites and is an executive producer. Celozzi had covered his uncle before, in the documentary Momo: The Sam Giancana Story. He told The Canadian Press why the family wanted its own version on screen: "My family, my cousins, really got tired of people using our name, monetizing our name and telling a fake story."

The script took a long road. Under the title 2 Days/1963, it once had David Mamet set to direct and Al Pacino and John Travolta attached, and Barry Levinson later took over before that version fell apart too. Of all those names, Travolta is the only one who made it into the final film.

Is November 1963 a true story?

The people are real. "These aren't fictional people … they're real people," Celozzi said. The plot is Pepe Giancana's version of history: the Outfit behind the assassination, Oswald as a patsy, a second shooter, and an alleged deal between Joe Kennedy and the Chicago mob that helped put his son in the White House.

That's not the official record. In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that Kennedy was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy, and said organized crime as a group wasn't involved, though individual members couldn't be ruled out.

Some of the connections are on the record, though. The Church Committee confirmed in 1975 that the CIA had recruited Roselli and Giancana in plots to kill Fidel Castro. Judith Campbell Exner was involved with both Kennedy and Giancana at the same time. And Jack Ruby, the man who shot Oswald on live TV two days after the assassination, had ties to organized crime figures.

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Producer Kevin DeWalt said the family knew what it was putting out there:

"I don't think the family's proud of what happened … it was important for them to tell the truth before they die."

To shoot it, the production chose Winnipeg to stand in for 1960s Chicago and rebuilt Dallas's Dealey Plaza from scratch at Birds Hill Provincial Park, with 1,500 extras and more than 75 period cars.

What happened to the real men

The Outfit men in the movie didn't live long after investigators started asking about the CIA plots. Sam Giancana was shot dead in the basement kitchen of his Oak Park home in June 1975, days before he was due to testify before the Church Committee. Johnny Roselli did testify, and in August 1976 his body turned up in an oil drum floating in a bay near Miami. Charles Nicoletti was shot in his car in March 1977, as the House committee was looking to question him. Jack Ruby died of cancer in January 1967 while awaiting a new trial.

Tony Accardo, the old boss Patinkin plays, died of natural causes in 1992 at 86, the only one of the Outfit men in the film to die of old age.

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