At War Over A Tragic Film

IT WAS NOV. 22, 1963. HENRY ZAPRUDER had just heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot and wounded. Zapruder's father, Abraham, called and said, ""The president is dead.'' The younger Zapruder protested that he had heard on the radio that Kennedy was on his way to the hospital. ""No,'' said his father. ""He's dead.'' Zapruder senior explained that he had seen JFK's head explode through the lens of his home movie camera. Standing near a grassy knoll, Zapruder had been filming the president's motorcade for his grandchildren. ""What should I do?'' a distraught Zapruder asked Henry. Both father, a Dallas dressmaker, and son, a 26-year-old government lawyer, decided Abraham should call the FBI.

Word quickly leaked, and reporters waving checkbooks tracked Zapruder down. The next morning, after he had shown the film to the Feds, Zapruder sold his 26-second film to Dick Stolley, a Life magazine reporter, for $50,000. According to his son Henry, Abraham Zapruder figured Time-Life would treat the film in a dignified way. Zapruder could not know, but his decision was the beginning of a dilemma over blood money that would haunt his family 35 years later.

Today the film sits in cold storage in the National Archives. On Aug. 1, under a congressional law aimed at opening up all records relating to JFK's assassination, the film becomes the property of the U.S. government. The Feds, who by law must pay the Zapruders a ""just'' price, have offered $3 million. The Zapruders have asked for $18 million. Henry Zapruder, now a Washington tax lawyer, knows he may look greedy and says he feels ""terrible'' about haggling over the price. In a rare interview, he painstakingly told NEWSWEEK about his family's fraught relationship with the most famous home movie in history.

Zapruder senior did want to make some money, but was reluctant to reveal how much he was paid in the early days. His ambivalence was on display when he testified before the Warren Commission in 1964. Asked how much Time-Life paid for the film, Zapruder said, ""$25,000,'' and that he had given all of it to a policemen's fund in honor of Patrolman J. D. Tippit, who was also slain by Lee Harvey Oswald. Zapruder neglected to say that under a deal he had worked out with Time-Life for all the rights to the film, he was being paid $25,000 annually for six years.

Time-Life published a few stills but never permitted the entire film to be shown because top editors deemed it too shocking. In 1975, after Geraldo Rivera aired a bootleg copy, Time-Life gave the film and all rights back to the Zapruders rather than have to worry about policing its use. Because Abraham Zapruder had died in 1970, it fell to his son Henry and his daughter Myrna to figure out what to do. ""We weren't real thrilled about any use,'' says Henry. A balance was struck: the family gave the film, free of charge, to legitimate scholars and historians. To help pay the costs (about $75 a copy), the Zapruders licensed the film to CBS for a documentary for $10,000 and then to Oliver Stone for his movie ""JFK'' for an additional $40,000. (""I hated the movie,'' says Zapruder.) The family turned down offers from the National Enquirer and a company that wanted to make trading cards of famous assassinations through the ages. The Zapruders also said no to a $350,000 offer from a South African company that wanted to use the footage to peddle life insurance.

The Zapruders never had to place a value on the film until the government decided to take ownership a year ago. The family hired appraisers who said the film could fetch upwards of $70 million at a public auction. Zapruder considers his $18 million offer to be, in effect, a donation to the government. When the Feds didn't quite see it that way--their first offer was $750,000--the Zapruders hired Washington superlawyer Bob Bennett. Today the two sides remain far apart, though neither wants to go to court.