The establishment media’s efforts to support the Warren Commision continue, once again using the services of documentary filmmaker and corporate commercial director Errol Morris. There’s an interview with Morris in the new Smithsonian magazine and its online variant, in which the author learns from Morris What The Zapruder Film Really Tells Us — namely that it is a pristine, unchallengeable evidentiary document, from a “more innocent time”, and engages in an ad hominem attack on me.
Among my sins, apparently, I am “disheveled”, “like an aging pedant”, and “shuffling around a cluttered office.” My real crime, however, seems to have been a little home-made video in which I disagreed with Errol Morris’ piece of work for the New York Times, The Umbrella Man.
Guys, I am really sorry. I didn’t realize there was a dress code to be a filmmaker, or to have an opinion about the Kennedy assassination! My little film was made in a hut in Oregon. We dress like that in Oregon, and there is no hairdresser or makeup artist in our rural valley, or the forests which surround it. I’m also Volunteer Firefighter Cox, expected to don my boots and turnouts and race to the station when there’s a call. So I don’t usually wear a suit and tie around the property. Aging? I am aging. Isn’t the author? A pedant? No need to be rude. Shuffling? Yassuh! Yassuh! Cluttered? My hut is 196 square feet and contains books, videotapes, computers, desks, a drawing board two chairs and a wood stove. Yes, it is full of stuff. So what?
Surely the intention could not be to contrast Morris – who is presumably an urbane urbanite, with a spacious, tidy office, who walks with a decisive, John Galtian stride, who will never grow old, and who believes what the New York Times/Warren Commission tell him – with shuffling, cluttered, disheveled, aging moi? Never in a million years! Because then The Simthsonian is deliberately introducing a red herring – setting up a straw man or a patsy – to distract the reader from what the article should really be about — the authenticity or otherwise of the Zapruder film.
I’ve made a video about this, too, and find it strange that Errol and his interlocutor ignore it, since – unlike the Umbrella Man piece – it’s about the subject of the article. I’ll turn to that next, but I just want to remind the reader/viewer that in my film I took no position about what the so-called Umbrella Man was doing (most likely he was signalling to the multiple gunmen, but who knows?); I just pointed out that CIA director William Colby told House Committee investigators that a bizarre dart-firing gun-within-an-umbrella did exist, having been developed at US taxpayers’ expense, by CIA.
Now let’s recap three actual facts about the Zapruder film. First, it could never have been used as evidence in Oswald’s trial since its chain of possession was so clearly broken. Only Oswald’s murder, in police custody, allowed the film to be treated as “evidence”, by the establishment media. It would have been thrown out of court if the accused had been allowed a trial and had the services of a decent lawyer, such as Mark Lane.
Second, in the possession of Life magazine, and possibly the Secret Service, the Zapruder film was damaged and frames were lost. There has been no explanation for its shabby treatment by these authorities. Third, much of the fusillade is obscured by the Stemmons Freeway sign. John Costella and other photographic experts have insisted that the film contains obvious faked elements, and that the Stemmons sign is one of these – since it lacks the “pincushion distortion” which the rest of Zapruder’s film displays.
Morris, the NYT and The Simithsonian all neatly sidestep the fact that Morris’ original interview subject, Josiah Thompson, is also a fully-fledged conspiracy theorist, who believes that President Kennedy was killed by a crossfire of riflemen in Dealey Plaza. By interviewing Thompson only about the Umbrella Man, Morris gets him to call another researcher, Robert Cutler, “some wingnut”, and makes both men look bad in the process.
There’s an easy way to address the misrepresentation of Thompson and Cutler, and insults to rural Oregonian attire. It’s a little harder to address the matter of the extrajudicial killings of President Kennedy, Officer Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald one weekend almost 50 years ago. But to solve the problem of the Zapruder film, why doesn’t Errol Morris commission an independent group of photographic experts to analyze this allegedly “authentic” document? The group should investigate Costella’s claim that the Stemmons sign is fake, and all other instances of alleged fakery. The copyright to the original film has been given to a private company in Dallas — after the taxpayers paid Zapruder’s family 16 million dollars to acquire it! It’s possible that said company will try to prevent such an analysis — and that Errol’s board of experts will have to study 8mm dupes or stabilized video copies instead. Probably it’s a good idea to study multiple copies – as many as possible – since the provenance and authenticity of the original is so uncertain.
Such a group, operating completely in the open, cannot begin to address the question of American “innocence” or otherwise. It may confirm Errol Morris’ belief that the film is authentic. Or it may not.
Come on Errol! You’ve made a gazzillion commercials – for Citibank, AIG, Cisco, Miller, NIKE, Southern Comfort – fine, ethical companies who do such good in the world – that you can surely afford to shell out forty or fifty grand and settle this matter! Bob Cutler, who your documentary brands a “wingnut”, spent $400,000 of his own cash to found a museum in Dallas. Or, if you’re short of dosh, let’s both go to the Smithsonian or the New York Times and ask them to pay for it. I’ll get a suit and a haircut, special for the meeting!
the president and the provocateur 