Zapruders donate JFK film rights

Gift may secure future of Sixth Floor Museum<br><br>The Zapruder family, longtime caretaker of the famous home movies of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, has given its last original duplicate

Wednesday, January 26th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Gift may secure future of Sixth Floor Museum

The Zapruder family, longtime caretaker of the famous home movies of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, has given its last original duplicate of the film and the copyright to its coveted images to the Sixth Floor Museum. The donation represents a potential windfall in licensing income and prestige for the 11-year-old Dallas museum. For the museum, whose main attraction is its location including Lee Harvey Oswald's crow's nest, the acquisition of the Zapruder print and related materials solidifies its stature as a destination for researchers, as well as its financial future, officials said.

For the survivors of Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas dressmaker who took his 8mm camera when he walked up a grassy rise in Dealey Plaza and stepped into history on Nov. 22, 1963, the donation ends decades as keepers of America's best-known sequence of amateur movie-making. And for the copy of the 26-second film clip itself - as well as the other film copies, frame-by-frame slides and stills contained in what the museum has dubbed the "Zapruder Collection" - the gift represents a homecoming, right next to the spot where it was created and where a nation was altered. "This is a coup," said Jeff West, the museum's executive director, who planned an official announcement Wednesday. "It's truly transformational for us, and it secures our future, not just financially but historically."

Mr. Zapruder's heirs, including son Henry of Washington, D.C., and daughter Myrna Ries of Dallas, announced their intention to transfer the copyright's ownership to a public institution in August, after an arbitration panel ordered the U.S. government to pay the family $16 million, plus interest, for the original film. The original has been stored at the National Archives since 1975, when Time Inc. returned the film and the copyright to the family. Time Inc. had bought the rights in 1963.

Mr. Zapruder ordered three so-called first-generation copies of the film when it was processed the day of the assassination. The two he gave to the Secret Service also now rest at the archives. After months of discussion, the third copy, the only one still privately owned, became the Sixth Floor's property when an agreement was signed Dec. 30, capping four months of discussions.

Mr. West and an associate carried the film in an archival box on a flight to Dallas nine days ago, along with other materials. He said the negotiations began after he heard the copyright needed a new home and he found Henry Zapruder's office number. "I told him, 'We think we're the guys who should take this on,' " Mr. West said. "It was not a subtle conversation."

A federal board created by Congress to collect and make public all assassination-related films and records took ownership of the original Zapruder film in 1997. But the government let the heirs retain the copyright, which brings fees for public uses of the film's images in documentaries or publications. Licensing fees earned about $879,000 for the family from 1976 to 1997, according to estimates made for the arbitration panel.

In a written statement about the museum gift, the heirs again emphasized their efforts to keep the film from being used in ways they considered exploitive. Exploitation fears "The guiding principle for the use of the film, established by our father and grandfather at the outset in 1963, was the balance of respect for the sensitive nature of the images with appropriate access by the public," the statement read.

The family said it chose the Sixth Floor because of confidence that its administrators "share our values." Mr. West pledged that his institution will meet the high standards set by the filmmaker and his heirs. "His fear was that his film would end up on a T-shirt or a coffee mug, all the exploitive things that we're concerned about," Mr. West said. An independent appraiser is estimating the value of the gift. Mr. West wouldn't estimate how much the film's licensing might continue to generate.

Jamie Silverberg, the Zapruders' attorney for 12 years, has been hired by the Sixth Floor partly to help with the licensing and indicated the film will continue to be a moneymaker. "There seems to be an unyielding historical and public interest in the film," he said. He said the Zapruder heirs considered options other than the Sixth Floor and again demonstrated what he called their "immense sense of civic responsibility. "Critic of decision Richard Stolley, now a senior editorial adviser for Time Inc., disagreed with the heirs' decision to license a high-tech examination of the Zapruder film in a $15 home video in 1998.

As an editor for Life Magazine in 1963, Mr. Stolley bought the original film from Abe Zapruder. "When I first talked to him, it was his fervent and emotional desire that the film not be exploited in any way," Mr. Stolley said. "I think the Zapruder family has finally done the right thing and honored the man who took the film. "The museum is where it belongs. In a strange way, for it to wind up in a building about 200 feet from where this garment-maker stood and took the pictures is a kind of historical irony and completeness that doesn't often happen."

Part of the 1,900-item donation may be exhibited later this year, but the material must first be cataloged. Gary Mack, the museum's archivist, was all but whistling Tuesday as he examined what may be the gem of the bunch - oversized transparencies of each Zapruder frame believed to have been made in 1963 or '64. "These may be in better condition than the original film is today," he said. "We may have something that is better or sharper. Who knows?"