What Price History? - Zapruder film of JFK's assassination

Art in America, Oct, 1999 by Mary Panzer

To establish a market value for the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, a government panel weighed esthetics and emotion as well as historical significance.

After a discreet delay to mark the public mourning for John F. Kennedy, Jr., who died in a plane crash in mid-July, it was announced in early August that the U.S. government will pay $16 million to the family of Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder for the original 8mm film that was in his camera on Nov. 22, 1963, when he went downtown to see President John F. Kennedy's passing motorcade. The 6-foot-long strip of celluloid that records Kennedy's assassination is now the most expensive photographic artifact ever sold. Its 494 frames last all of 26 seconds when projected.

The purchase was mandated by a 1992 federal law that declared all documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination the property of the U.S. National Archives, where they are to be preserved and made available to researchers. In 1998 the government finally turned its attention to the status of the Zapruder film. Zapruder himself had died in 1970, and the film had been stored at the National Archives since 1978, with the understanding that the family retained all reproduction rights. When the family offered to hand over an exact copy of the footage, the government declined, insisting that it would settle for nothing less than ownership of the actual film--perhaps to fend off the unceasing accusations by conspiracy theorists that the film was altered to conceal crucial evidence. The ensuing negotiations over a fair reimbursement price stalled after the government reportedly offered $3 million in compensation (some sources say $10 million) and the Zapruders countered with a demand for $18.5 million. At length the two parties agreed to binding arbitration. In late May, after filing numerous affidavits, the lawyers for each side. presented witnesses before a three-member arbitration panel in a Washington, D.C., courtroom.

This is not the first time that the government has paid what seems a king's ransom for historic photographic records. In 1875, Congress awarded the aging Civil War photographer Mathew Brady $25,000 ($4.5 million in today's dollars) for about 5,000 glass negatives, several hundred prints and publication rights. Brady's work has since illustrated countless books and documentary films, and the public can consult prints stored in open files at the National Archives. The Zapruder film, by contrast, cannot be projected or reproduced without the consent of the family. Moreover, if it is to physically survive, it must remain more or less permanently in a cold, dry, dark vault. Indeed, the members of the arbitration panel never set eyes on the strip of film whose value they set out to ascertain.

Just how was it determined that the Zapruder film was worth $16 million? Experience tells us that the market value of historical objects is largely determined by supply and demand. Given the modest resources of most museums, libraries and archives and the limited number of bidders, prices for historic material have remained relatively low, as evidenced by the 1991 Sotheby's sale of a 1776 broadsheet version of the Declaration of Independence (one of two still in private hands) for $2.42 million. Collectors of sports memorabilia, on the other hand, many of whom are extremely wealthy, have grown ever more avid to possess items of great rarity. Their bidding contests often set record auction prices, such as the $3 million recently paid for Mark McGwire's 70th home-run baseball. Of course, no one says that even a very famous baseball possesses more historic significance than a Declaration of Independence. There's just more competition for the baseball.

But who would compete to own the Zapruder film? Collectors of film? Collectors of films of assassinations? Or of home movies of the presidents? Even collectors who prize home movies of the Kennedy family recently bid only $34,000 for a film made in Hyannisport in the 1950s. More generally, the original film that was in the camera when an important event was recorded is virtually never saved or collected as such. In many ways it seemed that the Zapruder hearing concerned an object for which no easily identifiable market exists.

John Staszyn, a professional private appraiser of photographic materials who testified on behalf of the government, contended that the Zapruder film should be assessed within the market for significant historical artifacts, such as the Declaration of Independence or the handwritten draft of Abraham Lincoln's antislavery "House Divided" speech that sold in 1992 for $1.5 million. Arguing that the event recorded by Zapruder has far less national importance than our struggle for independence from Britain or the Civil War, Staszyn appraised the film at $1 million.

A second government witness, archival film expert Cameron Macaulay, tried to use the history of the film itself to establish its current commercial value. Just days after the assassination, Life magazine paid $150,000 for the original film and its publication fights. After the magazine closed in 1972, Zapruder's family bought back the film and the principal rights for one dollar; since then, they have made about $1 million from the sale of reproduction rights to books and movies, and from royalties on the film's recent home-video release. With allowance for inflation, Macaulay calculated the fee that purchase of the rights to the film would likely fetch today, declaring them to be worth approximately $780,000.