New JFK Jr. documentary looks back at 'America’s prince'

BOSTON (AP) -- “America’s prince” is getting a new documentary.

“I Am JFK Jr. -- A Tribute to a Good Man,” which hits select theaters on July 22, captures the fascination with John F. Kennedy Jr., from his early days toddling around the White House to his death in a plane crash in 1999.

Network Entertainment’s Derik Murray made the film in the mold of his other “I Am” movies, including “I Am Bruce Lee,” “I Am Chris Farley” and “I Am Evel Knievel.” It also airs on Spike TV at 9 p.m. EDT on Aug. 1, and a DVD release is set for Aug. 16.

The film captures JFK Jr. as “John John,” the tousle-haired toddler of the late President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, saluting his father’s casket after the 1963 assassination.

Highlights include his time as an assistant district attorney in New York City, his 1988 People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” cover, and his 1995 debut as publisher of the splashy but short-lived magazine George.

Interspersed are snippets of interviews with celebrities and politicians who knew him well. They include supermodel Cindy Crawford, who famously posed as a midriff-baring George Washington -- complete with powdered wig -- for the inaugural issue of George; actor Robert De Niro; boxer Mike Tyson; journalist Christiane Amanpour; Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt; former Brown University roommate Chris Oberbeck; Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow; and others.

In this Oct. 10, 1996 file photo, John F. Kennedy Jr., and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy leave a party in New York.(AP-Yonhap)

Not surprisingly, the film focuses on JFK Jr.’s death at age 38 on July 16, 1999, when the single-engine private plane he was piloting from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard en route to a family wedding on Cape Cod crashed into the Atlantic. Killed with Kennedy were his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bessette.

Friends, acquaintances and pundits reflect on a life cut short and speculate what he might have become.

President, for instance?

A clip of an interview that JFK Jr. gave to Oprah Winfrey is telling. She insists he surely must have thought about running for office, and he responds, somewhat coyly, “There is this great weight of expectation and anticipation.”

But maybe not.

“John was smart enough to know, ‘I’m junior. I’m not my father,’” another presidential son, Michael Reagan, says in the film.

“I believe that he had greatness in him,” CNN journalist Chris Cuomo tells the producers. “And I don’t give a damn if that meant anything about politics.”