In Licence to Kill, Q displays a custom-built sniper rifle disguised as a camera, capable of firing high-velocity .220 caliber shells. Check out the clip above.
Of the films and filmmakers introduced to me in film school — Werner Herzog, All That Jazz by Bob Fosse, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show to name a memorable few — none had more long-term influence than filmmaker Abraham Zapruder’s short film of his own name: The Zapruder Film.
But Zapruder’s 26-second clip chronicling the assassination of President John Kennedy was not part of the curriculum. Nor was Zapruder a real filmmaker. It was only glimpsed outside class, during multiple viewings of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Back then I knew nothing about Dallas, Oswald, or the Banister operation in New Orleans except how all of it was portrayed in Stone’s film. And Zapruder’s cinematography gets the full Hollywood treatment in blown-up exposure during the film’s climactic courtroom sequence. “Let’s speculate, shall we?” Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) begins.
Over time, as my understanding of November 22, 1963 deepened, the Zapruder film remained an invaluable piece of material in analyzing the moment of the kill. But it raises more questions than answers, its mysteries as incomplete as grasping its authentic chain of custody. It has been perhaps over-relied on as a time clock reference to the timing and number of shots. It was the basis, for instance, of leading researcher Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas (1967) and its sequel, Last Second in Dallas (2021).
Some ideas went far beyond the film as the result of a mere enthusiast filming the presidential motorcade for family and friends to view; that it served, for instance, as a “trophy” for H.L Hunt — a kind of 8mm deer head wall mount for the Texas oilman, who was said to immediately obtain a copy of it within 72 hours (per his security guard, Paul Rothermel).
Earlier this year I reviewed Ryder Lee and Jay Weidner’s documentary JFK X: Solving the Crime of the Century (see my article JFK: Was It Faked?). Employing a pristine resolution of the Zapruder film, they posit JFK faked his own death, utilizing a squib visible in Frame 313 of Zapruder, the key frame that shows the result of the fatal shot to the president’s head. “Back and to the left,” Costner’s Garrison drones on over and over as Frame 313 is replayed endlessly for the nauseated jury in JFK.
Others have put forth that the film was altered. The Great Zapruder Film Hoax edited by James Fetzer argues the intentional doctoring of Zapruder film was carried out in order to reflect the coverup narrative that the murderer was Lee Harvey Oswald shooting from behind JFK on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Indeed, the impact to the president’s head, with only one-frame length cloud of bloodburst followed by the flesh that flaps open above the president’s forehead is in striking contrast to the consistency of the Parkland Hospital doctors describing JFK’s head wound as being a blown out portion of his skull in the back of JFK’s head, not the front.
In the Zapruder film, however, the back of JFK’s head where this wound should be is underexposed — or purposefully blacked out.
But how logical or reasonable is the idea of alteration? How possible could such doctoring be on a tiny strip of 8mm film?
Let’s review the film’s murky chain of custody:
Abraham Zapruder (1905–1970) had been living in Dallas since 1941. He arrived from New York as a pattern-maker for the garment company Nardis. He co-founded the women’s apparel company Jennifer Juniors, the offices of which were located directly across from the Texas School Book Depository at the Dal-Tex Building, 501 Elm St. It’s interesting to note that only in 1963 did the Texas School Book Depository move into the now-famous building at 411 Elm. Before that, it was located on the first floor of the same Dal-Tex Building.
Ostensibly by sheer happenstance, Zapruder’s co-worker at Nardis was the wife of George de Mohrenschildt, the petroleum geologist who befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in 1962–1963. Also at Nardis was Olga Fehmer, whose daughter became LBJ’s personal secretary, Marie Fehmer, and was on Air Force One when LBJ took the oath of office. Small world, Dallas.
Zapruder reportedly at first did not bring his Bell & Howell spring-wound camera and 8mm Kodachrome II film with him to work on November 22 because of the early morning rain. He was persuaded to retrieve it by co-workers. In Dealey Plaza, he chose a suitable location for filming the motorcade atop a concrete abutement, and had a female co-worker steady him for fear of falling.
Zapruder later admitted he knew the president was fatally shot when looking through his tiny viewfinder he saw JFK’s head “explode like a firecracker.”
Following the shooting, Zapruder immediately encountered local newsman Harry McCormick as he stumbled back to his office. McCormick connected Zapruder with Forrest Sorrels of the Dallas Secret Service office. The three then set out to have the film developed. Local station WFAA could not process it, so it was developed at Eastman Kodak in Dallas. For copies to be made the original print was taken to Jamieson Film Company and then back to Kodak for more development; by the end of the night on November 22, four prints existed: the original and three copies. Sorrels took two copies, Zapruder kept a copy and the original.
Zapruder himself reportedly viewed the film 15 times that weekend.
According to a January 1964 affidavit from Sorrels, “Mr. Zapruder agreed to furnish me with a copy of this film with the understanding that it was strictly for official use of the Secret Service and that it would not be shown or given to any newspapers or magazines as he expected to sell the film for as high a price as he could get for it.”
Then LIFE got involved. Reporter R.B. Stolley of LIFE arrived at Zapruder’s office on Saturday morning at 8am ahead of a 9am planned viewing of the film for the press. Stolley’s boss was publisher C.D. Jackson, veteran intelligence man who worked in the Eisenhower administration, who pushed for the media company to first make an offer of $50,000 for print rights only (and for one week only). Stolley and LIFE then sent the film by airplane to its Chicago offices on Saturday afternoon, where the original supposedly was for the rest of the weekend.
Or so it seems. More on that later.
Then something interesting happened: LIFE re-approached Zapruder about the sales contract, making a second offer to buy out all motion picture rights of the film from Zapruder. They succeeded — walking away with it on the day of the president’s funeral, November 25, paying Zapruder $150,000 at $25,000 per year for six years (almost $1.5 million in today’s money). Zapruder donated the first $25,000 to the widow of Officer J.D. Tippit, who was allegedly killed by Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after the hit on JFK.
30 black-and-white still frames of the Zapruder film appeared in LIFE’s November 29 issue, only days later.
That LIFE supposedly mistakenly rearranged the sequence of frames so as to make JFK’s head appear to snap forward and not back, or that a December 1963 LIFE article by Paul Mandel mentions how JFK can be seen on the film looking back toward the Book Depository when he is shot in the throat, or that both Zapruder and assistant Marilyn Sitzman both claimed Zapruder was already filming when the motorcade turned onto Elm further raise suspicion that the cover story of LIFE’s involvement was pious fiction.
Though Jim Garrison obtained the Z film during the Clay Shaw trial, the general public was not shown the film until March 6, 1975, when Robert Groden brought a bootleg copy onto Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America on ABC. If LIFE was apparently so appalled by the violent and traumatic nature of the film they locked it away — as C.D. Jackson claimed — why did they originally pay Zapruder for universal motion picture rights only for it to be suppressed?
That same year as the Geraldo episode, LIFE sold the film rights back to the Zapruder family for $1. The U.S. government took formal ownership of the film as a key assassination record in 1998. Once again, the Zapruder family was handsomely compensated ($16 million).
But what about the weekend of the assassination when the film was supposedly sent to LIFE offices in Chicago?
An apparent second version of the film was actually handled by the CIA at its NPIC (National Photographic Interpretation Center) plant in D.C. most likely on Sunday night, November 24. NPIC was launched to focus mainly on aerial and satellite photography for reconnaissance purposes. The Zapruder film was brought to NPIC by a Secret Service courier. (All of this was determined from interviews by the Assassinations Records Review Board in 1997. Watch here.) The courier said the film was the original and was developed not in Dallas but in Rochester, New York at a place called Hawkeyeworks (code for Kodak’s research and development lab in Rochester). NPIC’s job was to enlarge certain frames forty-times the original 8mm size; three sets of 4x5 inch color prints were produced.
However, Mary’s Mosaic author Peter Janney interviewed NPIC’s photo interpreter Dino Brugioni in 2009. Brugioni, duty officer in 1963, told Janney he saw the original 8mm film developed by the Kodak plant in Dallas on Saturday, November 23 into the early hours of Sunday, November 24. Brugioni specifically recalled the film as being sharp, not fuzzy, and remembered his shock when seeing portions of the president’s skull flying in the air.
Simply, Dino Brugioni saw a different head explosion shot than what is retained in the National Archives and what we see today when watching the film. Brugioni attested to Peter Janney he saw more than one frame (Frame 313) depicting the head explosion. His job was to produce notes and briefing boards of select frames for John McCone, head of the CIA, and for the Secret Service. After McCone stepped down in 1965, Brugioni’s briefing boards were returned to him. When the President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States came up in 1975, Brugioni was told by his NPIC boss to get rid of the boards. He sent them upstairs, and never heard of them again.
Is there any reason to think Dino Brugioni is lying? Or that the Parkland staff was somehow mistaken as to the location of the head wound? Because, clearly, the Zapruder film as it is available to the public does not show what was attested by medical professionals on the day of.
What are we to make of this?
In addition to the discrepancy with the location of the head wound, the Zapruder film does not show the presidential limousine, driven by Secret Service agent Bill Greer, slowing down considerably, after shots had already been fired, which allowed Secret Service agent Clint Hill to hop on — to put it nicely. Slowing down also enabled an assassin to lock in his target and fire the fatal shot, to put it bluntly — as evident in another amateur film captured by Orville Nix:
Witnesses also mentioned a bullet hole in the presidential car’s front shield — not visible in the Z film. There is also the convenient Stemmons Freeway sign blocking the crucial shot to JFK’s throat. Figures on the lawn like Jean Hill and Mary Moorman appear as giants dwarfing the president’s car. For some reason, Zapruder framed the moving presidential car on the lower third of the frame, dangerously close to cutting off those in the car altogether.
The Z film also inexplicably abruptly cuts from the very beginning of the motorcade approaching on Elm to the presidential limo along the grassy knoll, already past the Book Depository. And what has always stumped me personally is why Zapruder — who displayed the poise of a war photographer and never loses composure, even when shots ring out — would not continue filming the rest of the motorcade. He pans until the presidential car disappears out of frame. If gunfire didn’t bother you, why not keep filming? Did he not know the vice president was coming? Might he have been hit? What about Senator Yarborough? Anyone else under fire? But no — the sole focus was on JFK.
The proposed alterations some researchers have suggested were performed on the Zapruder film include matte effects and compositing images in order to manipulate the movement and actions of the presidential limo and its occupants. This was a long-standing motion picture technique achieved by masking out parts of the film…
…and adding an effect to make the actors appear somewhere else:
An example of this distortion is the inhuman movements of driver Greer’s head swivels — and observing the headshot (again, unless he was looking at oncoming Clint Hill) — before quickly turning forward and driving away.
Also lacking from the Zapruder film is the visible brain and blood splattered onto motorcycle policeman Bobby Hargis, per his own testimony.
There are plenty more issues that can be pointed out. I recommend Noel Twyman’s chapter on the Zapruder film in his book Bloody Treason.
Discrepancies in the film’s chain of custody, its depiction of events differing from eyewitness testimony, and its suppression from public viewing for 12 years are more than enough to question what exactly we’re seeing when we supposedly view the film online or in Stone’s JFK.
So, could the Z film as it has come down to us have been a recreation of the actual assassination and not an alteration? If staged it would certainly mesh well with Weidner’s squib notion. After all, there have been scores of recreations of the kill, from both Hollywood and the federal government:
Zapruder’s film remains in many ways the touchstone for how we view the assassination; it dominates all the other images and films taken in Dealey Plaza, including those by James Altgens.
Is the Zapruder film a recreation, shot sometime immediately after the assassination? That would be too simple, too easy an answer. More disturbing is more likely the truth: that the film was in fact altered “in post” as we say, Zapruder realized it, and was torn between whistleblowing on the discrepancies or just staying quiet. The film haunted Zapruder for the remainder of his life, so much so it eventually became a taboo subject in the Zapruder family.
And the film remains frustrating incomplete, like so much from that day. And I have to say, that in this Bizarro World called Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, where lookalikes and suspicious identities dominated the landscape — Tippit’s resemblance to the president himself; the identities of the three tramps; my own hypothesis that it was not Mac Wallace but O.B. Graham scurrying away from the scene; an Oswald lookalike scrambling down the grassy knoll into the Nash Rambler; a person who may or may not have been Klansman Joseph Milteer watching the motorcade — Abe Zapruder bears a striking resemblance to Rev. Theodore Jackman, who Milteer claimed was involved in the crossfire shooting in Dealey Plaza:
It would not be the first time one posited a camera served as a weapon in Dealey Plaza — Mary Haverstick in A Woman I Know postulated that was what the Babushka Lady was doing looking through her camera when the fatal shot struck.