Is there anything left to be said—or seen—when it comes to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Just you wait. JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America, a two-part, four-hour special airing on History [Sunday, October 11, 9/8c and Monday, October 12, 9/8c] takes viewers back to November 22, 1963 and tells the story via a timeline using only archival news footage, much of which will be new even to assassination buffs. There is no narration (sorry, Peter Coyote). There are no talking heads. The project’s exec producers Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick used a similar technique in last year’s 9/11-themed special 102 Minutes That Changed America on History, which went on to win three Emmys. TV Guide Magazine spoke with Rittenmeyer about her so-retro-its-radical approach to the JFK tragedy.

JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America unfolds like a gripping, interactive thriller—all the more amazing considering we all know how things turned out. Watching it, you can’t help but feel that today’s documentary makers take the easy way out by relying too much on narration and experts to do the storytelling.
It’s hard for me to watch documentaries with voiceover now, for that very reason. There’s a relief in not being told what to think by a narrator. When the audience is busy listening to what’s being said, and processing what they’re being told, a documentary can become like wallpaper. Without narration, there’s a whole different level of appreciation.

But much tougher to pull off, right?
Listen, there were a couple of times when we were like, “God, if we could just write a couple of sentences to help us [bridge the missing material]. It would be soo much easier!” But when you don’t rely on a script to fill in the blanks, it forces you to beat the bushes and find more interesting footage. The JFK assassination was not like 9/11 where we have a video record of almost every second. But we did the best we could.

Your project really captures America trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Now we live in such a shocking world, we’re always waiting for the next catastrophe. In 1963, the murder of the President was a very hard thing to grasp.
It’s such a cliché to say it was a more naïve or innocent time, but the commonality of the experience is fascinating. The entire world stopped, and that just doesn’t happen anymore, except in the case of 9/11.

You’ve found some surprisingly obscure video and audio material that helps bring a fresh perspective to an overtold story. How’d you score that stuff?
The material is there and available at the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Also CBS is a goldmine of footage. The thing is, when traditional documentaries on the assassination are done they focus on finding video that matches the script they’ve written. They don’t need or want the material we used, like the Dallas talk show that was airing a fashion segment when news of the assassination broke locally. They don’t want the As the World Turns scene and the Nescafe commercial that was airing when CBS reported the news. For our timeline, that material is incredible. It reveals what life was like in America back then.

You rely on TV reports by a slew of anonymous Dallas newsmen, as well as the nationally known Dan Rather, Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner and Eric Sevareid to reveal the events of that weekend. What are your thoughts on the evolution of media coverage since JFK’s death?
The assassination was the moment that changed TV news coverage forever. What’s interesting is how unbelievably professional and together the reporters were, given what was happening around them. Most of those guys were on air for 48 hours. Only a couple of times do they break down—and of course we include that—but there’s such a consummate professionalism about those old time news guys. I wonder if we’re that good anymore.

Is there a Holy Grail of JFK assassination footage—material you believe is out there somewhere that could change the story as we know it?
There may be for 9/11. There is surveillance footage that the CIA and FBI and others swept in and took for their investigations and haven’t released yet. But in 1963, that sort of thing didn’t happen. Still, when you see shots of the crowds at Dealey Plaza there are a lot of people with cameras capable of shooting the assassination from a million different angles. You just know there’s more footage out there. There has to be. Hopefully, it’ll turn up before it disintegrates. Is there footage on the level of the Zapruder film? I don’t know. Perhaps. To this day, new Hitler footage is still turning up.

There are some eerie, prophetic moments early in your film, such as the video of JFK’s last speech given at a Fort Worth breakfast on the morning of the assassination in which he says “This is a very dangerous and uncertain world…”
You come across footage like that and the hairs on your arms stand up. And when the boys choir at the breakfast sings “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” it freaks me out no matter how many times I watch it. And you can’t help but get in the action. Every time the guy walks through the Dallas jail holding Oswald’s rifle in his hand you’re like, “Get your fingerprints off that!”

You purposely avoid using some commonly seen material, like footage of the presidential motorcade riding into Dealey Plaza and Walter Cronkite confirming the death of JFK on CBS. What’s up with that?
I think that when you start seeing that motorcade, or you see Cronkite take off his glasses and look at the clock, you literally stop engaging because you’ve seen it so often. You kind of shut down. You watch it and go, “I know what this is. I don’t need to participate in it.” Our collaborators at History said, “Everybody wants the Cronkite shot.” But we said “Let’s be cooler than that. Let’s defy that expectation.”