Custody

Where the original film is today

The 8mm camera-original Zapruder film — the physical reel that ran through Abraham Zapruder's Bell & Howell Zoomatic on Elm Street on November 22, 1963 — is stored in a cold vault at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

The physical original

The camera-original reel is held at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park (Archives II) as part of the JFK Assassination Records Collection. It is stored at approximately 25°F and 30% relative humidity to slow the natural degradation of Kodachrome II dyes (NARA — Zapruder film records).

How it got there

On August 1, 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board formally took the camera-original into federal custody as an "assassination record" under the JFK Records Act of 1992. The Zapruder family — the LMH Company — contested the taking and, in 1999, an arbitration panel awarded the family $16 million in just compensation for the physical film (ARRB Final Report, ch. 6).

In December 1999 the family donated the copyright and all in-camera copies to The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, separating physical custody (NARA) from intellectual property rights (the Museum) — the arrangement that stands today.

What NARA actually holds

Camera-original — the reel that ran through Zapruder's camera. Never publicly screened; used only for preservation reference.
Three first-generation copies made at the Jamieson Film Company in Dallas on November 22, 1963 within hours of the assassination.
The Secret Service copies — two of the three Jamieson prints were turned over to the Secret Service the same evening; one went to Life magazine.
High-resolution 4K digital scans made by MPI Media Group in 1997–98 under ARRB oversight; these are the reference images every subsequent analysis has used.

Where you can view it

You cannot view the physical reel — NARA does not permit public handling of the original. What is available:

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza displays a high-resolution digital reference and licenses the film for editorial and scholarly use.
The full film has been in wide online circulation since the 1975 Geraldo Rivera broadcast; it is embedded in most JFK documentaries and readily found on major video platforms.
NARA's online catalog links to frame-by-frame scans at archives.gov/research/jfk/zapruder-film.