Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  Instead, he did his best to develop a policy that reflected respect for both the public interest and his father’s wishes. He sought to treat the film in a way that reflected our family’s values but also served the public by making it available and seeing to the safe stewardship of the original. So when he felt that the request reflected the public good, he granted access and did not charge for its use. Those were the easy decisions. But when it came to commercial use, it was far more difficult. Here, it was clear that prohibiting its use altogether would not be fair to the public. On the other hand, to let anyone and everyone have permission would have meant, as he once said to me, that there would be hats and T-shirts with images of the Zapruder film for sale down by the National Mall. There were many hundreds of decisions that fell somewhere between those two poles, and someone had to make them. My father was uniquely suited to the task—much as he disliked it—because he intuitively understood better than anyone what his father would have wanted, but he also lived in the modern world in a way that allowed him to understand that those wishes could not be absolute. They needed to be adapted and changed over time. This required judgment.

  Any human mechanism is imperfect. A well-known violinist repeatedly requested permission to use the film in a performance piece, sending letters, articles, information about her work, and a list of distinguished venues where she had performed. She used video and photo images as a backdrop on huge screens to accompany her music and wanted to include a clip of the film. Henry said no. Why? Maybe he didn’t fully understand or feel comfortable with the appearance of the film in this kind of venue. Maybe he felt that it cut too close to an unnecessary or gratuitous screening of it, or that its use in the context of entertainment or even art felt wrong. Someone else almost surely would have made a different decision. I can certainly see why the artist would have been frustrated or unhappy about this, and I am sympathetic to her feelings. After all, as the film became more and more embedded in America’s cultural heritage, more and more people felt a sense of entitlement to it. Slowly but surely, it was becoming not just ours but also America’s.

  By contrast, in June 1989, Henry granted permission to a Los Angeles–based filmmaker to use the film, though there are no specific details about his project in the files. In October, Anita wrote a furious note to Henry, having learned that he had acquiesced to the use of the film in a movie that was going to be distributed on home video. This was a medium that they had strictly and repeatedly prohibited prior to that time. “I told [him] NO VIDEO RIGHTS! Why did you say Okay? I told him I would tell yes or no by tomorrow! I told him I thought NO—I told him I have had several other requests for video rights and all NOs! So it is not really fair to say yes to him. Also, impossible to control!” On her note, he circled the word “Okay” and wrote this: “Why not? I don’t think we should stop video now—too much pressure.” In this case, he was very much aware of the difficulty in holding on to restrictions that made sense in the seventies and early eighties but that had to change given advances in technology and the increase in the use of home video nationwide. Policy regarding the film was not a static set of rules that could be established once and then routinely applied to every situation. To the contrary, they existed against the backdrop of changing times, which meant that decisions had to be revisited in light of shifting cultural and social mores, technological advances, public pressure, and a host of other factors.

  I seriously doubt that the Selby/Weisberg matter raised these issues in any explicit way in my father’s mind. He barely had time to deal with Selby and Weisberg, let alone to agonize over what their lawsuit was really about. What it did illustrate for him was that it was increasingly difficult for Anita and him to handle licensing and permissions for the film by themselves. Things were falling through the cracks, and LMH did not always effectively manage the film and serve the public. To Anita’s immense relief, and my father’s as well, Jamie Silverberg agreed to take over management of the film. And just in time, too, because in 1991, things were going to change again.

  CHAPTER 11

  JFK: THE MOVIE AND THE ASSASSINATION RECORDS ACT

  There is no telling what might have happened to the Zapruder film if it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone. In fact, it was the release of his 1991 movie JFK that triggered a series of events that dramatically changed the course of the film’s life and our family’s relationship to it for the last time.

  There was nothing about the first inquiry, written on innocuous-looking letterhead from Camelot Productions, to distinguish it from the hundreds of requests like it that LMH had received over the previous fifteen years. Certainly, there was no hint that the letter represented Oliver Stone, a famous and controversial Hollywood director, or that the film would be featured in a multi-million-dollar movie about a conspiracy to kill JFK. Instead, a researcher wrote to Anita requesting information and explaining that she wasn’t sure how the film would be used in their project but that the production company was interested in finding out the terms of licensing. She must have subsequently spoken on the phone with Anita, because another letter followed a few weeks later. The film, she wrote, was a biographical one about John F. Kennedy, and the producers were hoping to use “actual news footage” of the president and the assassination if possible. “To ease any concerns about exploitation or misrepresentation, I can assure you that the film, although fiction, is based on fact, not conjecture.” It took a few rounds of correspondence to sort out the details of the license agreement. The fee was eventually set at $50,000 (not the $80,000 that was later and repeatedly quoted in the media and elsewhere).

  In fact, the final film was not a biography of JFK at all; if it was anyone’s story, it was that of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and his crusade to convict Clay Shaw for conspiracy to murder the president. Stone had optioned Garrison’s memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins, in 1988, and another book on the subject, titled Crossfire, by Jim Marrs a year later. The screenplay, cowritten by Stone and Zachary Sklar, used Garrison’s story as a frame to open up bigger questions about the dark forces at work behind the seemingly benign facade of the early sixties and to create, as Stone later described it, a counter-myth to the Warren Commission. This took the form of an alternative story line in which the president was ambushed by three teams of assassins who fired six shots at his motorcade as he passed through Dealey Plaza.

  In Stone’s telling, the assassination was anything but the work of a single lunatic; to the contrary, he employed district attorney Jim Garrison, portrayed by Kevin Costner, to argue that officials at the highest level of the US government—namely, the FBI, the CIA, the military, and possibly Lyndon Johnson—in concert with Cuban exiles and the Mafia collaborated in a conspiracy to carry out and then cover up the murder of President Kennedy. According to this scenario, killing Kennedy was necessary to prevent his gaining a second term and being able to pull out of Vietnam, which would in turn have hurt profits for the military-industrial complex in the United States.

  Given the premise of the movie, it’s not surprising that the producers took a low-key approach when they wrote to LMH. No doubt they did not want to call attention to their famous director, their high-budget film, and their controversial plotline. It was probably a smart move, since Henry almost certainly would have balked at letting them use the film if he’d had any idea of the troubling implications of the movie. In fact, Jamie says that Anita was tricked into granting the license. Either way, Camelot Productions’ request—which came in while Anita was still handling some of the licensing and Jamie was gradually taking over—definitely flew under the radar.

  The movie was released in December 1991 to a mixture of critical acclaim and fierce criticism, none of which had anything to do with the use of the Zapruder film. Those who saw the movie as a creative endeavor, who watched it for the experience of being told a story in film, praised it for its compelling story line, the technical complexity of flashbacks within flashbacks, the pacing, the editing, and the way the
various story lines layer upon each other and come together in the end. Many of them considered it wildly creative, incredibly daring and provocative. It won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing, and Oliver Stone won a Golden Globe for Best Director. On the other hand, many of those who saw it through the lens of historical experience or study—journalists, scholars, certain assassination researchers, and especially those who were alive at the time but who had children who were not—reacted with anger and disgust. Stone said, and surely believed, that these reactions stemmed from the fact that he had touched “a raw nerve” and that he had dared to tamper with the official history.

  In fact, there had been plenty of movies and best-selling books on conspiracy theories by 1991, and the Warren Commission was anything but sacred. The controversy was about something else. For one thing, many resented Stone’s revisionist portrayal of Jim Garrison as a lone hero when, in fact, he was widely considered to be a corrupt egocentric who at best was wildly misguided in his attempt to prosecute Clay Shaw and at worst used an innocent man as a vehicle to attack the Warren Commission findings and challenge the federal government’s conclusions on the assassination. Others felt that the jumble of unsubstantiated assertions, accusations, and speculations was historically dishonest. But what really drove the critics mad was Stone’s combination of real and invented facts and events, not to mention actual and re-created still photographs, newsreels, and film footage (including the Zapruder film) that were nearly indistinguishable from one another to create a seamless story that, if you believed it, had devastating emotional consequences and political implications.

  I was not much interested in the movie when it came out, though of course I was aware of the controversy swirling around it. I recall that my parents saw it in the theater and that my mother, in particular, agreed with those who criticized the mixture of real and re-created visual and documentary evidence. The original footage of the Zapruder film appears periodically throughout the film, and when it does, it is often juxtaposed with re-created footage that looks like the original, a distinction that the average viewer certainly could not make amid the jump cuts, flashbacks, and fast-paced scene changes. In addition, there are two courtroom scenes in which the Zapruder film is prominently featured. The first one is when Costner, as Garrison, shows the film for the first time in public (only partly re-creating the actual events of that day, which included Abe’s testimony) and then analyzes the trajectory of the so-called magic bullet. His voice dripping with sarcasm, Costner, as DA Jim Garrison, describes the bullet’s path and the seven wounds it inflicted as follows:

  The magic bullet enters the president’s back, headed downward at an angle of seventeen degrees. It then moves upwards in order to leave Kennedy’s body from the front of his neck—wound number two—where it waits 1.6 seconds, presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left, right, then left, and continues into Connally’s body at the rear of his right armpit—wound number three. The bullet then heads downward at an angle of twenty-seven degrees, shattering Connally’s fifth rib and exiting from the right side of his chest—wound number four. The bullet then turns right and reenters Connally’s body at his right wrist—wound number five. Shattering the radius bone, the bullet then exits Connally’s wrist—wound number six—makes a dramatic U-turn and buries itself into Connally’s left thigh—wound number seven—from which it later falls out and is found in almost pristine condition on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital.

  That’s some bullet.

  Needless to say, the more dramatic elements of this description do not match the theory put forth by the Warren Commission, since no person in their right mind would theorize that a bullet could behave in such a way. But Stone chose not just to voice an alternative theory from the one proposed by the Warren Commission but to ridicule its supporters by exaggerating their theory past the point of recognition. Because of this, even some sympathetic viewers became suspicious of Stone’s premise: If he could invent the content of this scene for effect, what else in the film’s exposition might be skewed, or inflated, or flat-out untrue?

  The second major use of the Zapruder film in JFK came in the climactic scene in which Garrison delivers his summation of the case. Stone uses the footage showing the fatal shot to the president’s head as the damning, incontrovertible evidence that there had to be a second shooter because the president so clearly appears to have been shot from the front. Again, there is nothing new here—it is the same argument made during countless showings of pirated copies of the film over the decades and, by this time, plenty of legal viewings, as well. Unlike those muddy versions, Stone’s movie presents the footage repeatedly, in full zoom and slow motion, to horrific, graphic effect. It is impossible that the president was shot from the back, Garrison explains, because his head goes back and to the left. The few seconds of the president’s death flash on the screen over and over again. Back and to the left. Back and to the left. I am sure my father winced more than a few times when he sat through that.

  As an adult, I have seen the movie many times and read much of the newspaper and magazine coverage from the time, as well as the critical literature about the film written in retrospect. The film raised provocative questions about the role of cinema, the use of documentary elements in a feature film, and the mixture of fact and invention in the search for truth. It presented a radical alternative scenario and planted seeds of doubt as to whether we think diabolically enough when we wonder what our government is doing behind our backs. But ultimately, the most concrete result of the movie was not to change the hearts and minds of the American public about what happened to President Kennedy. It was to mobilize the public to demand the release of previously closed records about the president’s assassination in order to learn, once and for all, what did happen—if such a thing were possible. At the end of the movie, against a black screen, the viewer reads that government files related to the Kennedy assassination that were part of the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation had been sequestered in 1979 for fifty years—until 2029. In interviews and written pieces, Oliver Stone demanded to know why this stricture was in place. He urged people to write to their elected members of Congress to demand the release of the files. And that is exactly what they did.

  As the public conversation about JFK rippled through newspapers, magazines, editorials, and television programming, Seinfeld, then in its third season, aired a two-part episode called “The Boyfriend.” The larger story concerned Jerry’s man-crush on former New York Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez and the awkwardness of two grown men forming a new friendship. When Kramer (Michael Richards) and Newman (Wayne Knight) become aware of this budding relationship, they are horrified. They hate Keith Hernandez. Why? Because, they explain, on June 14, 1987, he ruined their day by making a “crucial error” in a game against the Phillies, causing the Mets to lose. As Kramer recounts what happened next, the scene cuts to a sequence that runs over his narration. It is a Zapruder-film version of their encounter with Hernandez, complete with the faded, nostalgic color of an old home movie, the shaky handheld camera technique, the quiet clicking sound of a movie projector in the background, and their own renditions of the most iconic moments of the film. “We’re coming down the ramp,” Kramer says, as a man in the foreground opens an umbrella (a nod to the mysterious “umbrella man” in the Zapruder film around whom there has been so much speculation and who figures prominently in JFK). “Newman was in front of me. Hernandez was coming toward us. As he passes us, Newman turns and sneers, ‘Nice game, pretty boy.’” We see Newman’s exaggerated, slow-motion mouthing of the words, the turn of his head and motion of his body perfectly mimicking the Zapruder film’s footage of the limousine riding down Elm Street. “A second later,” Newman goes on, “something happened that changed us in a very deep and profound way from that day forward.”

  “What was it?” Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) asks, breathless.

  Kramer answers, “He spit on us.” We see
Kramer in the film, flailing backward, snapping his head sideways, imitating the movement of the president’s head after the fatal shot. There is a brief flash of a man standing on a ledge holding a film camera. “And I screamed out, ‘I’m hit!’” Newman goes on: “Then I turned”—the scene cuts back to the film, showing Newman falling forward as the spit bounces off Kramer and strikes him in the back—“and the spit ricocheted off him and it hit me.”

  Jerry, meanwhile, has been scowling through the whole story. Determined to defend his new friend Hernandez against this accusation, he steps in, formally re-creating the scene in order to show how Kramer and Newman’s account of the events could never have happened. In a long, perfectly delivered speech—one that Jerry Seinfeld described as among his favorite moments in the entire series—he parodies Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison contemptuously describing the implausibility of the magic bullet.

  Unfortunately, the immutable laws of physics contradict the whole premise of your account. Allow me to reconstruct this, if I may, for Miss Benes, as I’ve heard this story a number of times.

  … According to your story, Hernandez passes you and starts walking up the ramp. Then—you say—you were struck on the right temple. The spit then proceeds to ricochet off the temple, striking Newman between the third and the fourth rib. The spit then came off the rib, made a right turn, hitting Newman in the right wrist, causing him to drop his baseball cap. The spit then splashed off the wrist, pauses—in midair, mind you—makes a left turn, and lands on Newman’s left thigh.