And now, 'Chappaquiddick,' the movie

The Dike Bridge, off of which Edward Kennedy drove a car, drowning his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne The bridge didn't have a guardrail at the time of the 1969 accident.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

I wonder how much interest there might still be in this infamous case:

Chappaquiddick, a new film about what happened after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy drove his car off the Dike Bridge on the eastern side of Martha Vineyard on July 1969. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned but Kennedy swam to safety. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a crash, for which he got a suspended sentence. Many people at the time thought that was outrageously light. The word “Chappaquiddick” quickly became shorthand for the scandal, which may well have deprived Kennedy of the Democratic presidential nomination.

The movie will be shown March 15 and March 17 in the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival before it opens nationally. I expect that it addresses the roles of power and privilege.

The moon landing, the rock festival called “Woodstock’’ and Chappaquiddick were the big U.S. stories of the summer of ’69, as the Vietnam War ground on. At the now long-dead Boston tabloid paper where I worked then in a summer job, Chappaquiddick was the big one, combining celebrity, power and salaciousness.

But the script, direction and acting would have to be mighty good to entice people under, say, 50 to see this movie about such a long-ago scandal.