ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 25, 1997 TAG: 9704250044
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
The John F. Kennedy assassination film has been in cold storage in the National Archives for years.
A government board declared the famous Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy the permanent possession of the people of the United States, taking ultimate ownership of it from the heirs of the Dallas clothesmaker who made the film.
Thursday's action of the Assassination Records Review Board left it up to Congress and possibly the courts to determine how much the Abraham Zapruder family will be compensated for what some experts call the single most important piece of evidence concerning Kennedy's murder.
James Silverberg, the family's lawyer, said that the Zapruders already have offered to accept ``very, very, very substantially less'' than the appraised value of the 26-second film.
He would not say what value appraisers have put on the film, and neither would the board.
Review Board Chairman John Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota, said there has never been a historical artifact like it, so its monetary value could be hard to agree upon.
The original piece of film has been in the custody of the National Archives, storehouse of the nation's records for years, under an agreement with the Zapruders. It is stored at 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
The board's action, on a 5-0 vote, constituted a step toward a legal ``taking'' of the film - a step that requires compensating the Zapruders.
The board's action is effective Aug.1, 1998.
Over the years, the film has shrunk and deteriorated to the point that it cannot be shown through a projector. But Tunheim said it retains enormous ``symbolic value.''
James Lesar, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, a private collection of Kennedy assassination documents, said it is important that the government retain possession of the original.
Lesar told the board this month that technology someday could be developed that would yield new information about the assassination from images between the sprocket holes on the film - 20 percent of the exposed surface of the film's 486 frames.
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