Frequently asked questions

• What is the Zapruder film?
• When was the Zapruder film released to the public?
• Where is the original Zapruder film today?
• Was the Zapruder film altered?
• Who owns the Zapruder film?
• How much was the Zapruder film worth?

The Zapruder film is a 26.6-second, 486-frame color home movie shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder on 8mm Kodachrome II film at 18.3 frames per second. It captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and is the only continuous visual record of the shooting.

Individual frames were published in Life magazine in late 1963 and 1964, but the film was not shown in motion to a national audience until March 6, 1975, when Robert Groden and Dick Gregory presented it on Geraldo Rivera's Good Night America on ABC. Life returned the film's rights to the Zapruder family in 1975 for $1. The camera-original was legally taken into public ownership by the U.S. government in 1998 under the JFK Records Act.

The camera-original is held in cold storage at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. Copyright to the images was transferred to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza by the Zapruder family in 2000. High-resolution scans are available through both institutions for research and licensed reproduction.

The mainstream forensic finding — from the HSCA Photographic Evidence Panel (1979) and the ARRB's technical review by Kodak's Roland Zavada (1998) — is that the camera-original held by NARA shows no evidence of alteration and is consistent with a single, continuous exposure through Abraham Zapruder's Bell & Howell Zoomatic. A minority position, associated primarily with Doug Horne's 2009 volume, argues that the extant original is a re-created optical composite made at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center on the weekend of November 23–24, 1963. That claim is contested by the ARRB's own technical staff and has not been accepted in the peer-reviewed literature.

Physical custody of the camera-original rests with the U.S. government via the National Archives. Copyright to the film's images is held by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The Zapruder family retained copyright until 1999 and transferred it to the museum in 2000 as a gift.

A three-member federal arbitration panel ruled in 1999 that the U.S. government owed the Zapruder family $16 million (plus interest) for the taking of the camera-original under the JFK Records Act. The panel split 2–1, with the majority accepting a valuation based on the film's status as a unique historical artifact rather than as ordinary intellectual property.

For the film's creation and camera, see Provenance. For every documented custodian from Kodak Dallas to NARA, see Chain of Custody. For the fatal frame, see Frame 313. Full citation list: Sources.

Primary references for the answers above: ARRB Final Report (1998), HSCA Final Report (1979), In re Zapruder Film arbitration award (1999).