They will not, most likely, think about Parkland.

“Most people don’t even know what Parkland is,” says Peter Landesman, who has directed a film on the very topic: Dallas’s Parkland Hospital.

“Parkland,” which stars Zac Efron, Paul Giamatti and Billy Bob Thornton, and opened in movie theaters over the weekend, focuses on the hospital where Kennedy was taken following the shooting on Dealey Plaza. He would later be pronounced dead there, but that wasn’t the end of the hospital’s involvement with the Kennedy story: Oswald was taken to Parkland two days later after being shot by Jack Ruby. And Ruby himself died there four years after that.

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“We’ve all been obsessed for 50 years with the murder mystery and the conspiracy constellation,” Landesman told POLITICO. “We’ve never thought about the actual ground truth of what actually happened, the power of that, and Parkland is the center of that, it is the epicenter, it is the ground zero.”

Parkland Hospital and its doctors and nurses take center stage in “Parkland” in the same way that the Kennedy assassination’s principal figures — Kennedy, Oswald, etc. — typically dominate films focused on that tragic day. Landesman intentionally set out to focus on an area not typically emphasized.

Landesman said Kennedy is dead within the first six minutes of the film and that he wanted to focus on “what is real and what is full of pathos, which is this story — who’s the doctor who got the body? Who are the nurses who helped the doctor, covered in the president’s blood?”

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The trauma room scenes in “Parkland” provide an intense and grisly look at Kennedy’s final moments, something Landesman did deliberately.

“It was to take it out of the realm of mythology and politics and create a raw, human, visceral, this-is-happening-now experience,” Landesman said. “This isn’t a piece of history. This isn’t 50 years ago. This is now. I shot it as if it was now. I shot it in a very contemporary, visceral style. … Head wounds are enormously bloody. The only way for me to give the audience a sense of being there was to put them there, as it was then, which was an incredibly graphic scene. Look, that trauma room, the floor was made of rubber for a reason — it’s to be hosed down.”

Landesman said that while graphic, the film does not exploit the tragedy.

“The blood is felt, the graphicness is felt, the gravity of the wound is felt more than it is actually seen. But I did want to give the audience the same kind of visceral experience of being in the room itself.”

The movie also looks at how unprepared presidential aides and even the Secret Service were for such an event, something Landesman said has since been righted.

“In those days, they were prepared for nothing,” Landesman said. “It would be like President Obama driving down Fifth Avenue in an open car. It would never happen today.”