Koji Masutani, who is now a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, spent three years working on the film with professors James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang.

Koji Masutani was born in 1981 and so wasn’t even alive during the 1,000 days of President John F. Kennedy’s administration or during the turbulent days of the Vietnam War.

Nevertheless, in researching Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, his “what if” documentary that will be screened for a week starting tonight at the Cable Car Cinema, Masutani has become immersed in the era.

Masutani, who was born in Tokyo and grew up in British-ruled Hong Kong, had made short films that were screened in 2004 and 2005 at the Cannes Film Festival. But this project, which had him poring over more then 250 hours of newsreel footage from the Kennedy White House and beyond, proved to be a monumental undertaking.

He borrowed footage from the National Archives in Washington, the John F. Kennedy Library and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library. “Sometimes you had to know what you were looking for,” he said over the phone. “With the Kennedy Library you had to be very specific, especially for his press conferences.”

But sometimes there were, what he calls “happy accidents” — when he accidentally ran across something that proved more valuable than what he had set out to look for in the first place. “This was eye opening for me,” he said, “especially to see the press conferences done in a large auditorium.” Unlike today, when press conferences seem to be less numerous and reporters rarely ask follow-up questions, Masutani said, “If [Kennedy] didn’t answer a question, then the next person would ask the same question.”

It was while he was studying at Brown University for his degree in international relations that he approached professors James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang at Brown’s Watson Institute of International Studies about the idea of a film looking at how history might have been very different had Kennedy not been assassinated in November 1963.

They had already had some experience with documentary filmmaking. Blight had worked closely with director Errol Morris on his Academy Award-winning 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, who was secretary of defense under Kennedy and afterward under Lyndon B. Johnson. Blight and Lang had published The Fog of War, a book about the film’s findings in 2005. And she had been project director for nearly two dozen international conferences on such things as the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War, all events which were going to be explored in Virtual JFK. So not only were they receptive to Masutani’s proposal (Blight also appears in the film), they co-produced it and they will publish a book about it come January.

Masutani, who is now a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, said he spent three years working on the film. “A fellowship is usually primarily for research. But in my case it was for the production of the film” which has already been shown at three film festivals and theatrically in New York City. They distributed it themselves after discovering that distribution companies were not very interested in documentaries if they didn’t revolve around penguins.

He was not surprised. “In general we do have a tough time even proposing the idea of alternative history, especially with historians who only want to explore history that has happened. Historians don’t want to get involved.”

But Masutani said the case for JFK not going to war in Vietnam had he lived “is set on the pattern of his decision making when he avoided war on several occasions. What was driving us is that the Vietnam War was a choice.” It was not a fait accompli such as the entry of the United States in World War II following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

“It shows that it does matter who is president,” he added, and that is something Americans are exploring on a very personal basis this week as they prepare to go to the polls to elect a new president.

Masutani and Blight will take questions from the audience following tonight’s 7 o’clock screening at the Cable Car. Blight and Lang will take questions following the 7 p.m. screening Monday.

mjanuson@projo.com