The Hollywood 7

[William Kelly]

Yea, see, that's all you're misunderstanding of the event and your spin.

It wasn't Horne who took the first call from Ben Hunter's wife, or Horne alone who made the first phone contact with McMahon, it was another member of the ARRB staff.

So, how do you spin that?

BK

Who CARES who called first Bill,, but lets just look at HORNES words and you SPIN it however it fits your needs...

but hey YOU have an agenda too....

DH: Okay. We spoke previously on the telephone on June 9, Mr. Dave Montahue and I called you. You mentioned to us during that telephone call that you were involved in analysis and other events with a home movie of the assassination. Can you tell us how you first head about this and who told you to come into work?

Yea,

My Agenda is to find out what really happened, and what's yours?

BK

[Craig Lamson]

Yea,

My Agenda is to find out what really happened, and what's yours?

BK

Mine?

Have a good time....

Sharpen my skills....

Not to pretend I'm saving the world....

Edited January 31, 2010 by Craig Lamson

[Barb Junkkarinen]

There seems to be two types of forum members - those who advocate a position and enjoy debating it - like Fetzer, Healey, Tink Thompson, Barb J., Lameson, et al.....and those who take what we know and research angles and try to take it FURTHER - extending what we know about for sure by asking questions and answering them.

Rather than the adverse argument approach, I prefer the questioning approach, and try to ask questions that can be reasonably answered.

I like to answer questions and have new questions and answers to consider, especially on new ground. But it is also important to ask questions ... challenging questions ... about claims some make that don't add up, don't hold up, and then when you ask for documentation/evidence all you get is hostility, diversion, derision and jibber-jabber.

That sets off an uh-oh alarm. Should for everyone, imo. I like my ducks in a row. I like to know the factual basis for a claim. Even a well reasoned basis. I like to know the claimants bothered to do their ABC homework and even establish a factual basis before just heaping more and more ever expansive and speculative claims on top and then referring to other unproven claims they have made to support it. That is simply ludicrous in research. Healy said something a day or so ago about how if you hype something enough, people will believe it. Sadly, I think that is true. And sometimes, the hype has to be wallowed through and broken down to see what, if anything, is really there. And if that means making a stand, taking an adversarial position at times, and arguing for whatever is factual. So be it.

But it is an impediment to progress in new and undiscovered and unscrutinized territory. I have always looked at the assassination/coverup as a jigsaw puzzle. Let's say it is a 1000 piece puzzle. But what is this clutter all over the floor? We have 5000 or 10000 pieces jumbled up all over the place. We can't even begin to put the 1000 pieces of puzzle that belong together until we can clear away some of the irrelevant or misleading ... or pure crap ... clutter.

We need inquiry ... to break new ground, and to clear up old ground. If no one's agenda is anything but factual truth, as close as we can get it, it shouldn't be a bloody or pulling teeth pursuit.

I'd be interested in what information you have on Dillard and Powell photos. Are you going to start a thread on that?

Bests,

Barb :-)

[William Kelly]

Yea,

My Agenda is to find out what really happened, and what's yours?

BK

Mine?

Have a good time....

Sharpen my skills....

Not to pretend I'm saving the world....

Thanks for being so honest,

so we won't count on you for anything serious.

BK

[Craig Lamson]

Thanks for being so honest,

so we won't count on you for anything serious.

BK

Oh, I'm quite serious.

I just don't really care about who killed JKF

And quite frankly I don't think a good percentage of the people chasing this thing really care about who killed JFK. They care about thier PERSONAL theory far more...IMO.

Not that you would ever get an honest answer to that question, if you asked.

Edited February 1, 2010 by Craig Lamson

[Barb Junkkarinen]

Hi Barb,

Thanks for taking the time to read and reflect on this.

Indeed Homer McMahon says a lot and some of it is good and true and some of it is a bit hazy and some could be total bull crap, as I think he realizes that he spilled some beans, but doesn't know exactly what it is or why its important, and so he intentionally tries to discredit himself.

I will post the entire transcript separately, including all the Beef, but right here I want to focus on his photographic expertise, and to see if there are any real photo experts out there who know the history of photography, the history of the CIA photo analysis branch, the NPIC, and what the Zapruder film was doing there.

Yes, there were questions as to whether McMahon was actually dealing with the Z-film or another film, and it is the Z-film and not another one.

And so far you are the only one who has mentioned anything about anything being faked at a secret lab. You'll have to wait before you can start to discredit the secret lab.

So far we are only working on the Z-film at NPIC, making color print enlargments for briefing boards.

You're not interested in helping to try to answer any of my questions?

Bill Smith - yes, Secret Service. So who was the Secret Service agent who took the copie(s) of the Z-film from Zapruder?

If there is an unblemished chain of custody then we should be able to follow the film from Dallas to the NPIC, from the agent who took it from Zapruder to "Smith," and identify Smith. All of the agents who handled the film should have written official reports, and if they didn't, what were they up to?

Instead of arguing with those who erroniously claim the anamolies in the Z-film are proof of anything, why not establish the chain of custody from Zapruder to the NPIC and show that there were no shennigans with the film?

Of course its more fun to argue.

BK

Hi Bill,

I will look forward to the rest of the interview, thanks.

I am always interested in trying to establish whatever facts we can ... through questions

and through answers. :-)

Forrest Sorrels was the Dallas SS agent who dealt with Zapruder and received the 2 copies

from Mr. Z. I believe the Z film has been tracked from Z to NPIC, at least according to officialdom,

which of course, some will protest.

I believe it was Paul Hoch who uncovered something from the Archives in the late 70s ... Item 450, from memory ...

that detailed the Z film's handling, going to NPIC and what was done at NPIC. It includes memos between Rowley and

Sorrels, worksheets/memos of what was done at NPIC, etc. (again from memory what all it includes).

I know Martin Shackelford and Josiah Thompson both wrote and presented information on the chain/history of the Z film,

but I *think* that as far as the govt people is concerned, that ends with NPIC and the enlargements for analysis being made.

Secret lab ... better put, would have been secret project to alter the film(s)/photos.

That govt/agency film labs exist is not a secret ... in fact, it would be a surprise if they didn't have them. :-) That the FBI, SS, CIA were perhaps

involved with the film in some way, is also no surprise given the assassination of our president and the possibility of a foreign

or domestic plot. It seems to be the knee jerk reaction from there that anything that involved the CIA/FBI/SS/govt

takes on new and speculative life.

Those are questions I have, those are questions I would like definitive answers to. This has not been an area I have

followed for years,. Some have. They should have sought to establish a factual base. Did they?

Arguing is not necessarily fun, as I noted elsewhere, it is sometimes necessary. Shouldn't be ... at least not the kind of arguing that

goes on about whether or not the z ...and most other films and photos have been faked.

Bests to you,

Barb :-)

[Len Colby]

I follow the film restoration scene fairly closely and if Price is supervising the work they do at Warner, he'd be among the very top people to have a knowledge about film restoration/film formats/grain/chemical restoration and retouching, period. The Warner restoration team does deep, comprehensive work that involves the broadest spectrum of film and chemical restoration and analysis before they even get to the mastering stage, simply as there isn't a 'one size fits all' method for the varied restorations they tackle - films shot in different gauges, with different film stocks, from the 1920's onwards, and each existing at different levels of deterioration and generation-from-the-neg printing - and each project has its own issues and restoration requirements, all of which usually involve going through the movie frame by frame and seeing which low tech to high tech methods they need to apply. A number of the HD transfers involve scrutiny of the photochemical opticals - transitions, mattes, special effects and titles, etc - and they frequently need to break these down to reassess if any need to be redone or retouched pre the digital transfer or left alone. Dig into any of the George Feltenstein interviews over at The Digital Bits and you'll see the work they do is pretty much industry defining in its comprehensiveness and not restricted to the final scanning and transferring to disc, which is the last 2% of the puzzle with some of the restorations they've overseen. They use plenty of low tech methods before they reach the scanning stage and frequently have to spend long, extended periods working with all the various low tech methods before the final product is ready for remastering. Again, this isn't attributing anything to Price's comment on the Zapruder film as I can think of a couple of scenarios where he might be off target, but based on the reading I've done on the subject over the past 13 years, I'd be wary of attributing a lack of relevant technical knowhow to Price at Warner. I've seen long interviews with DVD company heads who get their hands dirty in the same sort of work - Don May Jr. at Synapse, the various Criterion Collection restoration gurus - and all of them admit they're eclipsed by the Warner team, with Price noted as being involved in some of the most arduous restoration projects noted in those aforementioned interviews over at Digital Bits. I view the Cinema Audio Society award given to Price's involvement with the audio on the Kubrick films as being indicative of their specific focus and interest in audio work, not his, and haven't seen anything to indicate that his work is restricted to the non-visual. If pressed I could offer a number of reasons suggesting how Price might have been mislead / misguided / goaded along with a crowd / falling for an optical illusion / whatever in respect to the validity or otherwise of his pronouncement on the Zapruder film, but I've endured enough long, microscopically detailed Warner specific threads over at Home Theater Forum (frequently moderated by Hitchcock/Lean restoration guru Robert Harris) to know that the Warner restoration professionals are about as knowledgeable as you can get. I woudn't be arguing that various pre or post-production film processes are beyond their ken due to a before or after filmschool timeframe simply as the varied and often ad hoc work they do to achieve the final products results in them needing to keep all the historical methods of film treatment and manipulation in play, not abandoning older ones for newer digital work, as they'll frequently encounter issues on new projects that require revisiting older methods that the current restoration software wasn't designed for. I can't speak for Price's knowledge of what he was screened, where it came from, how far it was from the source, or any other criticisms that I've yet to read Horne's comments about (or even the rebuttals of Horne's work in other threads here) but suggesting that Price might be technically illiterate concerning photochemical film manipulation, restoration and or adjustment - after seeing him spearhead the most comprehensive restoration program of any of the major studios, for the company with the broadest archival holdings by far of the bunch, and watching them delay numerous titles for years because they need continuous, intensive work to bring them up to standard pre the final mastering - would get a big laugh on the film forums I visit that discuss these issues 24/7.

I'm surprised, as some one with some video and photo experience but a lay person regarding restoration, I doubted hand retouching films would still be done at a major studio. Is this done commonly, doing such work digitally seems so much easier. How much of an overlap do you think there is between retouching for restoration and painting negs for special effects?

Do you agree its imperative that we see the images Price and the others based their judgments on because what they interpreted as alteration could in fact be generational degradation artifacts?

DAVID WROTE:

Now if only YOU could find similarly qualified post-production folks to counter their findings we might give you protestation(s) a bit of credibility....

Price and the others (apparently) aren't really "post-production folks" in that their work doesn't involve producing special effects. Most of it seems fair routine technical transferring celluloid images to DVD/Blu-Rays and in the past to other formats. In some cases it may involve hand retouching films but in Prices case at least and perhaps that of the others this would be done by people working under them.

Edited February 1, 2010 by Len Colby

[William Kelly]

Is the Extant Zapruder Film A ‘Complete Fabrication,’ or Simply an Altered Film?

Researchers David Healy and John Costella (both of whom I respect immensely and who made significant contributions to our understanding of the subject of Zapruder film alteration at Jim Fetzer’s conference in May of 2003) have suggested that the alteration—or rather, the ‘creation’—of the Zapruder film as we know it today could have proceeded for a considerable period of time after the assassination. Healy suggested that alteration could have taken up to two weeks to accomplish, and John Costella stated that the film was a ‘complete fabrication’ whose ‘creation’ likely continued for many, many months, or even years. Costella said during his presentation that although theZapruder film was based on reality—probably several films taken from a similar vantage point near the pergola, both prior to, and during the assassination—that those disparate film images had been deconstructed and then assembled together, using optical effects techniques standard in 1963 involving the use of optical printers—namely, alternate frame removal and traveling mattes—and that this process may have continued for several months, or even three or four years. There are several obvious problems with the leisurely timeline proposed by John Costella, and I believe great caution is warranted here. Costella and Healy are correct that the first frames published by LIFE in its November 29th edition were of very poor quality (showing little or no detail in each image frame) and did not include frame 313 (the head shot), and that for many months—indeed years—the public saw only the still frames LIFE chose to publish (such as in its undated Memorial Edition from mid-December 1963; its ‘Warren Commission’ issue of October 2, 1964; and its famous ‘A Matter of Reasonable Doubt’ issue of November 25, 1966). They are also correct that no members of the ‘general public’ saw the film projected as a motion picture until 1969 when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed it from LIFE magazine for use in the Clay Shaw trial, after which 100 grainy, poor resolution copies were subsequently bootlegged and then widely distributed. But I believe the conclusion Costella has drawn from these facts—that the U.S. government had plenty of time to manipulate the film as a motion picture, while only releasing selected still frames as they were ‘ready’ for distribution—is demonstrably incorrect. I say this because members of the Warren Commission staff began viewing one of the FBI’s second generation copies of the film on January 27, 1964—projected as a motion picture—and this continued on and off for several days. Furthermore, the extant (so-called ‘original’) Zapruder film was projected for members of the Warren Commission staff, FBI, and Secret Service on February 25, 1964. This tells me that any and all changes to the film must have been completed prior to January 27, 1964—at the very latest. No conspirator in his right mind would have shown one version of an altered Zapruder film to members of the Commission on January 27th, and then shown them a different version on Hollywood ‘visual effects’ experts experienced in 27 early 1960s optical effects need to examine the extant Zapruder film for evidence of possible frame excision, traveling mattes,and aerial imaging. Based upon their findings, we will then have a much better idea of how much minimum time was required to alter the images of the head wound prior to NPIC’s production of prints of these frames on Sunday night, November 24th, 1963. The printing by NPIC on Sunday night (and the subsequent publication by LIFE two days later) of frames showing the large anterior head wound indicate that at least this one critical alteration was

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February 25th. On the day Herbert Orth of LIFE magazine projected the extant film to Commission staff members, he promised to have 35 mm slides of ‘pertinent frames’ made and provided to the Commission. LIFE subsequently made three sets of 35 mm slides (169 slides in each set) of Zapruder frames and delivered them to the FBI on March 25, 1964. On April 21, 1964 the FBI delivered one set of slides to the Warren Commission, and the second set to the Secret Service—keeping one of the three sets for itself. [These slides are purported to be the same ones which can now be viewed at the National Archives, and I believe that they are.] Once LIFE magazine duplicated the three sets of slides for the U.S. government, future changes would have created a logistic (and coverup) problem of such immense proportions, that I am comfortable in saying that “it didn’t happen.”

The Film Swaps

So in conclusion, I disagree with John Costella’s opinion that alterations to the Zapruder film might have proceeded well beyond mid-January, 1964. In fact, it is just barely possible that no changes were made to the Zapruder film after Sunday night, November 24, 1963. In support of this possibility is the fact that frame 313 (the head explosion), and five subsequent frames depicting a very dark-looking back of the head and the large, anterior head wound were printed by Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter on Sunday night, November 24th, and can be viewed today on Panel IV of the surviving NPIC briefing board set in the Archives. (Poor quality frames showing the large anterior head wound were also printed in the November 29th issue of LIFE.) In my view, if no traditional traveling mattes were employed, and if the principal changes made were optical frame excisions of the exit debris leaving the head (using a step printer), and aerial imaging artwork altering the head wound(s), it just might have been possible to accomplish the necessary minimal changes to the film in one working day, providing sufficient skilled labor was available. Once the ‘sanitized’ briefing boards were made at NPIC Sunday night from the new unslit 16 mm, double 8 mm‘original,’ it would have been necessary to cease alteration work on any of the 28 frames printed by NPIC for its ‘sanitized’ briefing boards, for any additional changes to these frames would inevitably have resulted in someone, somewhere, noticing discrepancies between the NPIC briefing boards made Sunday night (and the initial frames published in LIFE) and any later versions of the film, such as frames published by the Warren Commission in Volume XVIII. Furthermore, after the initial switch-outs for the three Jamieson lab duplicates were likely made on Sunday night or Monday morning—substituting the three new ‘first generation’ copies (made from the altered ‘original’) for the three bonafide ‘first day copies’ (that had been in the possession of the Secret Service, the FBI, and Zapruder)—additional, second generation copies proliferated, and this fact alone would have made any subsequent switch-outs much more difficult to manage, logistically.27 accomplished at Rochester on Sunday. If a car stop was later removed through frame excision, and the backgrounds behind the limousine in numerous frames (i.e., the grass in Dealey Plaza and the position of bystanders), and the Stemmons Freeway sign, were altered using traveling mattes, then a considerable amount of time—likely several weeks—would have been required to complete this work, and alterations of this magnitude could certainly not have been conducted in one working day, regardless of the facilities available. We simply do not yet know enough about which aspects of the film have been altered—or how they were altered—to assess exactly what was done at “Hawkeyeworks” on Sunday, November 24th, 1963. All we can say for sure is that some alterations were conducted at that highly classified facility in Rochester, and that the revised product was delivered to the CIA’s NPIC Sunday night for the production of briefing boards from selected frames—from frames selected by the film’s courier, not by photo analysts at NPIC. There can be little doubt that if the alterations of the film were not complete by Sunday night, “Bill Smith” of the ‘Secret Service’ was extremely careful, and selective, about which frames he identified for reproduction at NPIC. He would only have selected those frames that were considered fit for public consumption.

Since NPIC did not retain the film as a motion picture, Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter would not have known whether additional alterations continued after Sunday night.

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But engineering the switch-outs of the first two of the three new (i.e., altered) ‘first generation’ copies late Sunday night or early Monday morning would have been eminently manageable: the FBI and Secret Service would have been willingly complicit. Hoover hated JFK and his brother, the Attorney General, and history has shown he assisted in the coverup of the assassination in a number of ways, so authorizing a quiet film swap would have been no problem for him. The FBI’s own copies were duplicated on Monday, after the new ‘first generation’ copy was received from “Hawkeyeworks,” in time to return the newly minted copy to the Secret Service in Dallas on Tuesday, November 26th. Furthermore, the assassination conspiracy and coverup did involve ‘dirty’ Secret Service agents (as previously discussed and as will be further discussed in the next chapter about the Dallas motorcade planning), so it would have been no problem to get the Secret Service to switch-out its ‘first day copy’ in Washington for a new (altered) ‘first generation’ copy. The switch-out of the third ‘first day copy’ that Zapruder exhibited to various people throughout the weekend (including Dan Rather on Monday) would have presented no problem at all, for it was sent to LIFE after the resale of the film on Monday afternoon; the substitution of an alteredcopy for Zapruder’s authentic ‘first day copy’ would therefore likely have occurred quietly within the offices of LIFE magazine, under the auspices of C. D. Jackson. The new ‘original’ (today’s extant film) would have been given to LIFE after Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter were finished magnifying its frames for briefing board material early Monday morning, November 25th. I believe the unslit B & W 16 mm negative (and positives) discovered at the Sixth Floor Museum in the year 2000 were either struck at “Hawkeyeworks” early Sunday evening before the film was sent to NPIC, or were duplicated by LIFE after receiving its new ‘original’ film from the government early Monday morning. I think it is more likely that these black and white dupes were run off at “Hawkeyeworks” Sunday evening, as a favor to C. D. Jackson, so that his Chicago printing plant could begin working on printing its lousy, low resolution black and white frames in the November 29th issue (which was sold beginning on Tuesday, November 26th). In fact, I have always wondered why the first frames published by LIFE were only small, B & W frames—why weren’t they in glorious color, if profit and

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the pursuit of the almighty dollar are the forces that rule America? I believe the answer to that question is now known: color frames were not available in time for printing the week after the assassination because the camera original film was still being altered all day on Sunday, and was then sent to NPIC Sunday night for the making of ‘sanitized’ briefing boards! By the time the U.S. government was finished with the altered film on Monday morning in Washington, D.C., it was too late to get color frames into the November 29th issue of LIFE, so the magazine had to settle for substandard, low resolution black and white frames in its first post-assassination issue, in spite of spending all of that money to get the film. The U.S. government’s alteration of the film likely got in the way of LIFE’s profit motive the first week after the assassination—as shocking as that may be to David Wrone.

The real dangers for the conspirators would have been the two sets of McCone briefing boards (made from the unaltered original film), and the true camera original, and the three authentic ‘first day copies.’ Seemingly, not destroying them and allowing someone to retain them would have been potentially foolhardy, but the cachet this kind of ‘forbidden knowledge’ would have possessed—its importance as a trophy or as a fetish to people who had hated JFK—cannot be overstated. There are numerous persons who have claimed over the past several decades that they have seen versions of the Zapruder film that are inconsistent with the film publicly known today. (French intelligence is rumored to have one such version.) Perhaps the most widely known claim indicating that a Kennedy hater had a trophy of the assassination comes from Dick Russell’s 1992 book The Man Who Knew Too Much. On page 584, Russell wrote that Paul Rothermel, Jr., a high level aide to Texas oil billionaire and right-wing activist H. L. Hunt (who called himself ‘the richest man in the world’), was dispatched with a considerable amount of money on the day of the assassination, with orders to purchase the original Zapruder film. (This early attempt to purchase the film was possible, since Zapruder went on television that afternoon and described shooting his home movie.) Rothermel told Dick Russell in 1992 that he purchased a copy. The direct quote of Rothermel was: “I got the first copy, as far as I know.” While there is indeed an unaccounted-for punched identification number—0184—missing from the affidavit trail on Friday, November 22nd, the problem with speculating that Rothermel got “copy 0184” is that Dick Blair at Kodak says he gave only three rolls of film (not four) to Zapruder to take to the Jamieson lab, and is also inconsistent with Bruce Jamieson’s firm recollection that only 3 rolls of Kodachrome IIA film were printed by his lab. (Zapruder could have lied about only making 3 copies if he had been paid enough to keep his mouth shut, but presumably Dick Blair and Bruce Jamieson were telling the truth.) I believe it is much more likely that rather than getting a copy of the Zapruder film the day of the assassination in Dallas, that Rothermel paid for and obtained one of the true ‘first day copies’ on Monday after the film swap took place, or perhaps even the original Zapruder film, whose whereabouts are unknown today. If H. L. Hunt helped to bankroll the assassination, as many believed for years, then others may have owed him a big favor, and may have consented to let him have his grisly ‘hunting trophy.’ So there may be some truth in the Paul Rothermel story, but it may not be exactly as he portrayed the details.

If he obtained one of the true ‘first day copies’ after the great film swap took place, then neither he nor Hunt need even have been in Dallas on the day of the assassination in order to arrange for that.

As a way of hiding the fact that the film had been altered, he may have been required to lie about how he really obtained such a film, as part of the price for its sale. Needless to say, the discoveryof any of these four unaltered films—the true original or any one of the true ‘first day copy' —would be a seminal event in American history.

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Wrone Dismantled

In his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination, author David Wrone went too far in criticizing the alterationist viewpoint, based even upon what he knew at the time—for his own text and one key footnote revealed that he was fully aware of the content of the Homer McMahon/Ben Hunter interviews; he also surely knew from his own interview of Dino that Brugioni had created briefing boards from what he believed was the 8 mm original Zapruder film the weekend of the assassination; and he also knew that McMahon had worked with an unslit 16 mm double 8 mm ‘original’ film that same weekend (before the funeral), and that McMahon’s ‘original’ had come from Rochester, New York, and not from Dallas. He willfully ignored the implications inherent in these two contrasting NPIC activities, which both occurred the weekend of the assassination. Let us examine one final time how badly he erred in his attempt to discredit theories that the film was altered, and how his conclusions have now been dismantled by the findings in this chapter.

On page 133, after taking on the wound alteration hypothesis of David Lifton published in Best Evidence, Wrone wrote: Lifton tries to argue that this apparent discrepancy—between what the doctors saw in the hospital [Parkland] and what he claims to see in the Zapruder film...is...the result of the CIA’s having tampered with the film...but...he provides no frame numbers or any other identifying feature for the reader to examine...In fact, there is no ‘suspicious’ spot, much less a blowout wound on the back side of JFK’s head, but there is indeed (contrary to Lifton’s doctors) a large wound at the right front of the head...all the available evidence seems to suggest that the Agency [the CIA] never attempted, much less accomplished, an alteration of the film.

Wrone was conveniently attacking a few brief statements made by Lifton about the Zapruder film on only two pages in a 1981 book of well over 700 pages that was primarily about the medical evidence, and ignoring the much more robust alterationist arguments known to him in 2003. Let’s deconstruct the egregious errors and indefensible conclusions in the statements quoted above, based upon what we have learned in this chapter:

• Frames 335 and 337 depict one of the two exit wounds in the posterior skull (which is consistent with the external beveling in autopsy photos 17, 18, 44, and 45), and I have listed numerous places where high quality versions of these frames can be found in published works.

• The large ‘wound’ in the right front of JFK’s head seen in the Zapruder film is a painting, in the opinion of experienced film editor David Healy and award-winning Hollywood film expert Dr. Roderick Ryan, most likely superimposed over the real image by an aerial imaging visual effects process.

• The Parkland treatment staff are not ‘Lifton’s doctors;’ they are America’s doctors, truthtellers who by-and-large, as a group, collectively deserve the highest respect of all patriotic Americans for reporting what they saw without shading the truth, and form not changing their minds later. (Dr. Jenkins is the one notable exception, who caved

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under pressure and did change his mind after he saw the autopsy photographs.) Four of them (Dr. Peters, Dr. Jones, Dr. Crenshaw, and nurse Bell) have specifically stated that they did not see the head wounds depicted in either the Zapruder film, or on the autopsy photographs, during JFK’s treatment at Parkland hospital. Furthermore, the vast majority (19 out of 21) of the Parkland hospital witnesses described an exit wound in the exact location where the back of JFK’s head looks suspiciously dark in the extant Zapruder film, and unaccountably intact in the autopsy photographs.

• Actually, the weight of all available evidence today is that the CIA not only attempted, but succeeded in altering the Zapruder film at the “Hawkeye Plant” in Rochester, New York. The car stop associated with the head shot(s), and the exit debris seen leaving the rear of President Kennedy’s head in Dealey Plaza, were both removed; the large blowout in the right-rear of the posterior skull was blacked out; and a false wound was crudely painted on the right-front side of the head, as seen in the altered film. The three ‘first generation’ copies today do not exhibit the internal characteristics they should, based upon what the film technicians in Dallas originally told Rollie Zavada. Furthermore, the recollections of Dino Brugioni and Homer McMahon jointly reveal that the 8 mm original film was used to make unsanitized briefing boards at NPIC on Saturday night, November 23rd; and an altered, 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 mm ‘original’ was produced the very next night, on Sunday, November 24th, to make ‘sanitized’ briefing boards in what was clearly an off-thebooks, compartmentalized covert operation. The altered 16 mm wide, unslit film masquerading as an ‘original’ on Sunday night was created at the CIA’s highly classified film lab at Kodak’s headquarters and main industrial facility in Rochester, New York, which according to Dino Brugioni, “could do anything.”

In my opinion David Wrone intentionally withheld information from his readers, and knowingly presented a skewed, one-sided argument to his audience in support of the Zapruder film’s supposed authenticity. Whether he was simply engaging in psychological denial in support of a longstanding belief system, or whether he had other motivations, only he and his maker truly know.

Prior Speculations By ‘Alterationists’ That We Now Know Cannot Be True

I have been rather stern with David Wrone about what I have characterized as his rather overzealous and one-sided defense of the Zapruder film’s supposed authenticity, so it is only fair for me to now identify mistakes (or unsupported claims) made by others in the research community who believe the Zapruder film is an altered motion picture, and not a camera original film. We simply know much more about the film’s chain-of-custody now than we did in the late 1970s, in the early and mid 1980s, or even in 1996. In the interests of a more precise and exacting future debate about the Zapruder film’s provenance, I believe that some of the more egregious errors (and leaps of faith) of the ‘alterationist’ research community should be corrected here as well.

First, one minor correction: JFK researchers almost universally refer to “CIA Document 450” (the NPIC notes related to the Zapruder film) as having been obtained by Paul Hoch from the Rockefeller Commission files in 1976 through a FOIA suit—and yet the date of “FOIA Review” stamped on the 28See pages 556-557 of Best Evidence (cloth and trade paperback editions).

29See Melanson’s article “Hidden Exposure: Cover-Up and Intrigue in the CIA’s Secret Possession of the Zapruder Film,” published in the November 1984 edition of the researcher journal The Third Decade. 30See pages 339-340 of Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK.

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NPIC notes is actually February of 1978. Second, in the early 1980s, some researchers who wrote about the NPIC notes, notably David Lifton28 and professor Paul Melanson,29 assumed that the notes meant the CIA (at NPIC) may have had the original film in Washington D.C. the night of the assassination, on Friday evening, November 22,1963. We definitively know now that this was not the case, since during his interviews with Peter Janney, Dino Brugioni convincingly established the time of the film’s arrival at NPIC as about 10-11 PM on Saturday, November 23rd. (Furthermore, Brugioni told author Gus Russo, in an interview on January 27, 1998, just as he was to tell researcher Peter Janney eleven years later, that his work in creating the McCone briefing boards at NPIC commenced on the evening of Saturday, November 23, 1963.30) So new information, gained through continued research and oral history interviews, has revealed this speculation by Lifton and Melanson to be incorrect. Both Melanson (in The Third Decade in 1984) and Lifton (in Best Evidence in 1981, and in his article “Pig On A Leash” in Fetzer’s 2003 anthology The Great Zapruder Film Hoax) speculated that Zapruder may have relinquished the original film to the Secret Service late on Friday night and that alteration commenced soon thereafter, but I am not persuaded by their speculation since the ‘evidence’ they offered to support it was extremely tenuous—almost nonexistent. Lifton and Melanson also interpreted the NPIC notes to mean that the Zapruder film was likely altered and reproduced as a motion picture at NPIC, citing the words “shoot internegs” and “make three prints” in CIA Document 450 as supporting evidence. This was a common interpretation of what the NPIC notes meant back in the 1980s, and at one time I subscribed to this interpretation myself. But my own interviews of Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter in 1997, and Peter Janney’s exhaustive interviews of Dino Brugioni in 2009, reveal that this did not happen. NPIC did not have the capability to alter or reproduce motion picture films; furthermore, the activity conducted at NPIC on both Saturday and Sunday night was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, simply the enlargement of individual Zapruder frames to make medium-sized prints which were then mounted on briefing boards. Most of us learn as our evidence base expands, and we progress and ‘move on.’

Third, at least one JFK researcher (Noel Twyman) was persuaded that the FBI altered the Zapruder film primarily because of a report that it possessed “the film” early in the morning hours of Saturday, November 23, 1963. Although the third-ranking official at the FBI—Cartha DeLoach—did state in his 1995 memoir, Hoover’s FBI, that he watched the Zapruder film at FBI headquarters at 3 AM on November 23, 1963, this cannot be true—in actuality, he almost certainly saw a ‘first day copy’ of the film 24 hours later, at about 3 AM on Sunday, November 24, 1963. Richard Trask clarified this for us on pages 120-122 of National Nightmare On Six Feet of Film, by explaining that the ‘first day

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copy’ of the Zapruder film loaned to the FBI in Dallas by Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service was not put on an airplane headed for Washington, D.C. until Saturday evening, and that subject flight left Dallas (bound for Baltimore) at 5:20 PM the evening of November 23rd. Trask wrote that FBI agents met the airplane at Friendship Airport in Baltimore and drove the film to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. I therefore conclude that DeLoach, in his 1995 memoir 32 years later, made a minor error in his recollection of when he first watched the film, and was off by one day. He almost certainly watched the Zapruder film at about 3 AM on Sunday morning, after Bureau agents brought him one of the three ‘first day copies’ of the camera original film (duplicated at the Jamieson lab in Dallas) from the Baltimore airport.

In conclusion, author Noel Twyman’s conclusion that the FBI altered the Zapruder film, found on pages 165-166 of Bloody Treason, is clearly incorrect. Not only did Cartha DeLoach not view the film early Saturday morning in Washington, but when he did view the film early on Sunday, the FBI was only in possession of a ‘first day copy,’ and not the original. But this timing issue of when

DeLoach saw a copy of the Zapruder film is not the primary reason for disbelieving Twyman’s conclusion that the film was altered while in the possession of the FBI. The primary reason for rejecting Twyman’s conclusion is the crucial information provided to the ARRB by the head of the NPIC color lab, Homer McMahon. McMahon, the reader will recall, stated that the Secret Service (not the FBI) brought him an unslit 16 mm wide, double 8 movie of the assassination (i.e., a newly created, altered ‘original’) from the CIA’s classified photo lab at the Kodak industrial facility in Rochester, New York. Clearly, the Secret Service and the CIA worked together cooperatively in altering and sanitizing the film, and the FBI had no part in it. Twyman could cite no evidence that the FBI (in Washington or anywhere else) had the capability to alter motion picture films; in fact, Trask points out on page 122 of his book that the FBI had to “sub out” the reproduction of its ‘first generation’ copy to a local commercial lab on Monday, November 25, 1963. The implication here, and the correct one, I believe, is that the FBI had no “in house” capability to copy 8 mm motion picture films. Hoover was no doubt made aware that the film had been altered, and that the version on loan to the FBI had been switched-out on Monday morning before the FBI had its own copies made, but his agency did not initiate or perform that feat of alteration—the CIA did, with the help of Kodak, at “Hawkeyeworks.”

Noel Twyman published his conclusion that the Zapruder film was altered while in the possession of the FBI in 1997, before the National Archives made public my interview reports with Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter in November of 1998. (Surely, in light of the McMahon/Hunter interviews, Twyman has now changed his opinion about where the film was altered.) This is yet one more example of how the work of the ‘non-investigative’ ARRB staff contributed to our knowledge of the assassination by placing into the official record new evidence garnered through interviews and depositions.

Dealing With Uncertainty About the Events in Chicago

In 1986 Loudon Wainwright of LIFE magazine published a memoir titled: The Great America Magazine—An Inside History of LIFE. Wainwright’s book included an account (primarily on pages 311-318) of how the first black and white images of the Zapruder film came to be published in the November 29, 1963 issue of LIFE, which began to hit the newsstands on Tuesday, November 26th.

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Wainwright wrote on page 315 about a special team sent to Chicago by LIFE editor George P. Hunt to prepare the photo spread and accompanying text for the November 29th issue:

In the team were Assistant Managing Editor Roy Rowan, writer John Dilles, Associate ArtDirector David Stech and layout artist John Geist. New pictures coming from Dallas and Washington after the first day would be sent directly to Chicago, where the film would be processed (with duplicate contact sheets flown back to New York). Rowan’s team would make initial picture selections, produce layouts and write some of the captions. All this, of course, would be done in consultation (by phone, teletype and wirephoto) with Hunt and the main edit group in New York.

Wainwright continued, explaining how Rowan and his crew had examined the film in Chicago on Saturday using a hand-cranked Movieola projector, running the film through it several times, fast and slow, and jotting down the frame numbers of the frames they wanted to have converted into black and white prints. [How did they get these? The frames on a home movie are certainly not numbered.] Wainwright wrote that the magazine’s photo lab in Chicago had made “scores” of eightby- ten inch prints from the Zapruder film, and that Rowan and Stech laid them all out in sequenceon the floor of an office in the R. R. Donnelly printing plant. Wainwright wrote that Rowan finally selected 31 of the enlargements for use in creating a sequential layout for the November 29th issue.

My analysis of Wainwright’s account follows:

• If Wainwright was correct that “scores” of black and white prints were enlarged from Zapruder frames on Saturday, this could account for why the original film did not arrive at NPIC until 10 or 11 PM Saturday night. If Wainwright (who was not present in Chicago and who reconstructed his published account from the oral accounts of others years later) was correct that LIFE printed its black and white enlargements of selected Zapruder frames on Saturday, this activity would simply explain why the Zapruder film arrived at NPIC in Washington D.C. so late at night, at 10 or 11 PM, instead of 3 hours earlier. If the printing of the black and white frames in Chicago really occurred late Saturday afternoon, then my speculation earlier in this chapter that the film may have been intercepted by government agents at the airport in Chicago, or at the LIFE printing plant before work was done on the film, would be incorrect. That the film did go to NPIC at the nation’s capital on Saturday is unquestioned—the only uncertainty is whether it went there directly from the airport at Chicago, or possibly from the LIFE printing plant offices prior to copying for photographic purposes; or whether it was loaned to the Federal government only after LIFE printed its black and white stills.

• The most significant implication of this ‘Saturday scenario’ is that LIFE would have printed its stills from the camera original, unaltered Zapruder film. If so, then the individual frames printed would have been from a film that likely showed a ‘car stop,’ and would certainly have depicted the true nature of the head wound. However, anyone who examines the November 29th issue can readily see that the enormous

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right-anterior head wound seen in the Zapruder film we know today (and not seen at Parkland hospital) is clearly present, even in the small, indistinct black and white frames reproduced in this issue; nor is there any posterior head wound visible in any of the frames, due to the extremely small image size and high degree of contrast and poor detail in the ‘muddy’ images. The presence of the large head wound that was not seen at Parkland hospital in the November 29th issue’s black and white Zapruder frames rules out the possibility that LIFE copied frames from the unaltered Zapruder film on Saturday, prior to the film’s doctoring in Rochester. This image content clearly indicates to me that LIFE reproduced frames from an altered Zapruder film, created at “Hawkeyeworks” in Rochester on Sunday, November 24th.

• It seems apparent that Wainwright was simply incorrect—off by one day—in regard to when the activity at the Chicago printing plant took place. (If Cartha DeLoach can be off by one day in his memoirs, so can Loudon Wainwright, who after all, was writing about events related to him by others—events he did not even participate in himself.) I say this for the following reasons: -First, Richard Trask wrote on page 118 in his 2005 book, National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film, that the black and white copies of the unslit Zapruder film found at the Sixth Floor Museum in 2000 “...do have what appear to be markings used to determine selected images for inclusion in LIFE magazine.” This point is crucial, for if true, it indicates to me that the selections about which frames to publish were made by marking up a 16 mm wide unslit black and white negative, or 16 mm wide unslit black and white positive, or both. The key word here is UNSLIT. We know beyond doubt from the recollections of the Kodak lab personnel in Dallas, and from the recollections of Dino Brugioni) that the camera original film was slit andreassembled as an 8 mm film before Zapruder left the Dallas Kodak lab at about 9 PM the evening of the assassination. Therefore, if the selections about which frames to print in LIFE magazine were made on a 16 mm unslit product, then that product had to derive from the new 16 mm unslit ‘original’ created at “Hawkeyeworks” in Rochester on Sunday. In other words, Trask’s observation about the direct source used to create the LIFE magazine stills means that the stills could not possibly have been enlarged from the original film, which was slit to 8mm before it left Dallas!

-Second, Wainwright wrote about the LIFE personnel in Chicago using a Movieola machine with a hand crank to view the Zapruder film and select frames of interest for printing in the magazine. It’s my understanding that Movieola machines were built to accommodate both 16 mm and 35 mm films, but NOT to accommodate 8 mm home movies. Therefore, the use of a Movieola machine to view the Zapruder film in Chicago implies that a 16 mm wide product created at “Hawkeyeworks” was being viewed—not the camera original film, which was slit to 8 mm in Dallas.

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In conclusion, Wainwright was surely correct about the names of the key participants in LIFE’s special editing team that went to Chicago, and even about details such as “scores” of prints being run off, and about the use of a Movieola machine to view the film. But he was surely incorrect about which day LIFE printed its black and white prints for inclusion in the November 29th issue; the weight of the evidence is that this must have occurred on Sunday evening rather than Saturday evening, because: (1) the altered image content (specifically, the enormous head wound) in the November 29th issue appears the same as in today’s film; and (2) primarily because the format of the s ource for the magazine’s black and white images was a 16 mm wide unslit double 8 film—not an 8 mm film.

It makes perfect sense for the government to have intercepted the film somewhere in Chicago before LIFE copied any of the images for publication. Allowing LIFE to reproduce images from an unaltered film that clearly proved there was not only crossfire and conspiracy, but Secret Service malfeasance, would have been foolhardy. The Secret Service had all morning on Saturday in Washington, D.C. to view the unaltered ‘first day copy’ that Max Phillips had placed on an airplane in Dallas on Friday night. By late Saturday morning those in charge of the coverup at the Secret Service and the CIA knew that the original film (in Zapruder’s hands) had to be obtained, and altered at all costs. Undoubtedly C. D. Jackson’s influence at LIFE was sought and obtained by the CIA to ensure the film’s interception and brief loan to the government for purposes of ‘sanitization,’ with national security’ used as a justification. That the Federal government (most likely Secret Service officials in Chicago) intercepted the original 8 mm film in Chicago after Richard Stolley sent it there (following its sale), and diverted it to NPIC at Washington, D.C., is beyond doubt, based upon the consistent recollections of Dino Brugioni. The Secret Service and the CIA used the camera original film that arrived at NPIC late on Saturday night to create two sets of briefing boards that depicted the real story of the assassination (for limited consumption), and then sent the camera original film onto “Hawkeyeworks” at Rochester early Sunday morning. Following the creation of a new purportedly ‘original’ film at the CIA’s lab at Rochester, three new ‘first generation’ copies and three black and white work products for LIFE were quickly duplicated, before the ‘original’ film was rushed back to NPIC by ‘Bill Smith’ for the creation of ‘sanitized’ briefing boards for much wider, ‘public’ distribution within the government. The three black and white 16 mm ‘copies’ referred to by Trask (apparently one negative and two positives) could have arrived in Chicago Sunday night about the same time the new ‘original’ arrived at NPIC to be processed by Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter. In my estimation, this would have given LIFE enough time to get its first issues of the November 29th edition on the street by Tuesday.

In summary, there is nothing in Wainwright’s account—except for the timing of the Chicago events—that is inconsistent with the film’s alteration. The 16 mm unslit format of the source material used for LIFE’s images—revealed by the Sixth Floor Museum discoveries in the year 2000—confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that this material originated at “Hawkeyeworks,” and not from the true camera original, which we know with certainty was slit to 8 mm. Furthermore, the image content in LIFE’s November 29th issue—specifically, the enormous head wound—is consistent with the magazine being presented with an altered version of the film the weekend of the assassination. Based upon the content of the McMahon interviews, we know that the 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 mm ‘original’ came from “Hawkeyeworks” at Rochester, and by deduction we know that this product was delivered Sunday night at NPIC. [brugioni’s NPIC event was on Saturday

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night, and the McMahon/Hunter NPIC event, as recalled by both men, occurred a ‘couple of days’ after the assassination and before the funeral, which means that it had to be Sunday night when “Bill Smith” delivered the film to them.] Therefore, I conclude that Wainwright (who after all was not present in Chicago at the events he was writing about) was simply one day off in his description of when LIFE created its photo spread from the Zapruder film. Wainwright may even have believed that all of the Chicago events he described took place on Saturday simply because of Stolley’s certainty that he put the film on a plane for Chicago on Saturday afternoon. The events at NPIC on Saturday night, as recounted exhaustively by Dino Brugioni, and the subsequent events at NPIC on Sunday night, as recalled by Homer McMahon, prove that the film whose frames were reproduced in LIFE was not the 8 mm camera original processed by Brugioni, but rather a black-and-white copy (of poor resolution) made from an altered ‘original’ created at “Hawkeyeworks.” The cause of the poor quality of the images in LIFE’s November 29th issue can finally be explained: they come not from a camera original film, but from a black and white copy several generations removed from the true camera original film—from a 16 mm copy which was itself duplicated from an altered film masquerading as the ‘original’ home movie. No wonder there is a lack of detail, and high contrast buildup, in the black and white images first published in LIFE. They are made from prints, which were themselves rephotographed following the graphic design layout for each page, from what at best could only have been a fourth generation, 16 mm black and white copy of each camera original image frame.

Patterns of Deception

Patterns of fraud and forgery—the destruction or disappearance of original evidence, followed by the substitution of tainted evidence—appear consistently throughout this case. We have seen it in the case of the ‘magic bullet,’ CE 399; in the case of the alleged murder weapon; in the case of the autopsy photos and x-rays; in the case of the President’s brain; in the case of the evolving autopsy report; and now we see it again in the case of the Zapruder film, ‘the’ pre-eminent assassination record. Why should it surprise us that it has happened to the Zapruder film as well? It shouldn’t surprise anyone who is not sticking his head in the sand and ignoring what is wrong with the film.

Josiah Thompson reiterated, in 2003 at his lecture given at Cyril Wecht’s assassination conference in Pittsburgh, that while in many murder cases we often do not know why a crime was committed or even who committed the crime, we always know what happened. He reminded his 2003 audience of what he had said 10 years previously in Chicago: that only in the Kennedy assassination are we unsure about what actually happened. I submit to the reader that this astute observation of Thompson’s, made twice, ten years apart, is extremely significant and supports my contention that the biggest problem in coming to grips with the Kennedy assassination is fraud in the evidence.

The second biggest problem we face right now in the JFK research community are the legions of ‘old guard’ researchers who refuse to face this fact, and who stubbornly cling to some piece of ‘bedrock evidence,’ which in their minds will lead them out of the wilderness if only they study it long enough and can divine its true meaning. For Thompson, Wrone, Weisberg, Groden, and many others, the Zapruder film has been this piece of bedrock evidence for over four decades. I say to the old guard who have continued to insist that the Zapruder film is an authentic and unaltered film in spite of the mounting evidence of its alteration, “Come on over, and see the light.” You will feel better for having done so—in fact, it will liberate you. Once you accept the fact that the Zapruder film is a

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clever (but imperfect) forgery, you are free to suddenly believe the Dealey Plaza car stop witnesses (which include several Dallas motorcycle policemen and Bill Newman); Marilyn Sitzman; the Kodak laboratory personnel (who all say the original film was slit the evening of the assassination); Marilyn Willis; Erwin Schwartz; Cartha DeLoach; Dan Rather; and the Parkland doctors and nurses. For if

you believe the Zapruder film is authentic, you must, of necessity, believe that all of these people are either liars, or incompetent and unreliable witnesses.

And that’s no fun, is it? I reiterate to the old guard: admit you have been wrong for decades, and you will feel better because it will truly liberate you. There is plenty of evidence of crossfire and conspiracy in Dealey Plaza that exists independent of the Zapruder film; acknowledging that the Zapruder film is an altered film, which can only tell us a very limited amount about the assassination, does not mean that you cannot still conclude that there was a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy! Most significantly, for me, the robust evidence that the film has been altered confirms my faith in the reliability of the Parkland medical staff’s observations on the day of the assassination, and leads me irrevocably to the conclusion that the sketch made of JFK’s skull by Dr. Boswell at the autopsy, and the autopsy photos themselves, are clear evidence that the President’s wounds were altered by post mortem surgery to change the geometry of the shooting. Since I believe that there was already undeniable, independent evidence from the Bethesda morgue that JFK’s head wounds were altered by surgery immediately prior to the autopsy, it was not difficult for me to accept that the head wounds I see in the Zapruder film are painted-on artwork created by an aerial imaging process using an optical printer. What ‘liberated’ me to finally believe that the Zapruder film was a forgery were the undeniable breaks in the chain of custody represented by the Dino Brugioni/Homer McMahon events on successive nights at NPIC. The unassailable implications of those two events, when viewed in tandem, allowed what was a possibility in my mind to become a fact. The Zapruder film is an altered film; its alteration by the U.S. government at a classified government lab, with the assistance of the world’s foremost photographic company, is the strongest indicator we have, along with the evolving autopsy report and the creation of a tainted autopsy photo and x-ray collection, of how powerful and relentless the coverup of this assassination was in 1963. And the government’s direct involvement in heavy-handed manipulation of key physical evidence in this case is the surest indication that President Kennedy’s death was an ‘inside job,’ that he was eliminated by the national security state because he was viewed as a dangerous ‘change agent’ who was ‘rocking the boat’ too much at the height of the Cold War. For those of you who may not yet be convinced that this is the case, I have assiduously prepared for you, in Part III of this book, the final two chapters in our journey, about the Texas trip and Dallas motorcade planning (Chapter 15); and the deep politics of the America of 1963 (Chapter 16), which details the establishment’s fear of a truly independent foreign policy being enacted by a man dedicated to avoiding war—a national security establishment vehemently opposed to peace, and dominated by those with an apocalyptic mindset dedicated to military confrontation and victory over America’s Cold War adversaries—the Soviet Union and its proxy states

[David G. Healy]

I follow the film restoration scene fairly closely and if Price is supervising the work they do at Warner, he'd be among the very top people to have a knowledge about film restoration/film formats/grain/chemical restoration and retouching, period. The Warner restoration team does deep, comprehensive work that involves the broadest spectrum of film and chemical restoration and analysis before they even get to the mastering stage, simply as there isn't a 'one size fits all' method for the varied restorations they tackle - films shot in different gauges, with different film stocks, from the 1920's onwards, and each existing at different levels of deterioration and generation-from-the-neg printing - and each project has its own issues and restoration requirements, all of which usually involve going through the movie frame by frame and seeing which low tech to high tech methods they need to apply. A number of the HD transfers involve scrutiny of the photochemical opticals - transitions, mattes, special effects and titles, etc - and they frequently need to break these down to reassess if any need to be redone or retouched pre the digital transfer or left alone. Dig into any of the George Feltenstein interviews over at The Digital Bits and you'll see the work they do is pretty much industry defining in its comprehensiveness and not restricted to the final scanning and transferring to disc, which is the last 2% of the puzzle with some of the restorations they've overseen. They use plenty of low tech methods before they reach the scanning stage and frequently have to spend long, extended periods working with all the various low tech methods before the final product is ready for remastering. Again, this isn't attributing anything to Price's comment on the Zapruder film as I can think of a couple of scenarios where he might be off target, but based on the reading I've done on the subject over the past 13 years, I'd be wary of attributing a lack of relevant technical knowhow to Price at Warner. I've seen long interviews with DVD company heads who get their hands dirty in the same sort of work - Don May Jr. at Synapse, the various Criterion Collection restoration gurus - and all of them admit they're eclipsed by the Warner team, with Price noted as being involved in some of the most arduous restoration projects noted in those aforementioned interviews over at Digital Bits. I view the Cinema Audio Society award given to Price's involvement with the audio on the Kubrick films as being indicative of their specific focus and interest in audio work, not his, and haven't seen anything to indicate that his work is restricted to the non-visual. If pressed I could offer a number of reasons suggesting how Price might have been mislead / misguided / goaded along with a crowd / falling for an optical illusion / whatever in respect to the validity or otherwise of his pronouncement on the Zapruder film, but I've endured enough long, microscopically detailed Warner specific threads over at Home Theater Forum (frequently moderated by Hitchcock/Lean restoration guru Robert Harris) to know that the Warner restoration professionals are about as knowledgeable as you can get. I woudn't be arguing that various pre or post-production film processes are beyond their ken due to a before or after filmschool timeframe simply as the varied and often ad hoc work they do to achieve the final products results in them needing to keep all the historical methods of film treatment and manipulation in play, not abandoning older ones for newer digital work, as they'll frequently encounter issues on new projects that require revisiting older methods that the current restoration software wasn't designed for. I can't speak for Price's knowledge of what he was screened, where it came from, how far it was from the source, or any other criticisms that I've yet to read Horne's comments about (or even the rebuttals of Horne's work in other threads here) but suggesting that Price might be technically illiterate concerning photochemical film manipulation, restoration and or adjustment - after seeing him spearhead the most comprehensive restoration program of any of the major studios, for the company with the broadest archival holdings by far of the bunch, and watching them delay numerous titles for years because they need continuous, intensive work to bring them up to standard pre the final mastering - would get a big laugh on the film forums I visit that discuss these issues 24/7.

I'm surprised, as some one with some video and photo experience but a lay person regarding restoration, I doubted hand retouching films would still be done at a major studio. Is this done commonly, doing such work digitally seems so much easier. How much of an overlap do you think there is between retouching for restoration and painting negs for special effects?

Do you agree its imperative that we see the images Price and the others based their judgments on because what they interpreted as alteration could in fact be generational degradation artifacts?

DAVID WROTE:

Now if only YOU could find similarly qualified post-production folks to counter their findings we might give you protestation(s) a bit of credibility....

Price and the others (apparently) aren't really "post-production folks" in that their work doesn't involve producing special effects. Most of it seems fair routine technical transferring celluloid images to DVD/Blu-Rays and in the past to other formats. In some cases it may involve hand retouching films but in Prices case at least and perhaps that of the others this would be done by people working under them.

Keep your day job, Len.

[Jack White]

I follow the film restoration scene fairly closely and if Price is supervising the work they do at Warner, he'd be among the very top people to have a knowledge about film restoration/film formats/grain/chemical restoration and retouching, period. The Warner restoration team does deep, comprehensive work that involves the broadest spectrum of film and chemical restoration and analysis before they even get to the mastering stage, simply as there isn't a 'one size fits all' method for the varied restorations they tackle - films shot in different gauges, with different film stocks, from the 1920's onwards, and each existing at different levels of deterioration and generation-from-the-neg printing - and each project has its own issues and restoration requirements, all of which usually involve going through the movie frame by frame and seeing which low tech to high tech methods they need to apply. A number of the HD transfers involve scrutiny of the photochemical opticals - transitions, mattes, special effects and titles, etc - and they frequently need to break these down to reassess if any need to be redone or retouched pre the digital transfer or left alone. Dig into any of the George Feltenstein interviews over at The Digital Bits and you'll see the work they do is pretty much industry defining in its comprehensiveness and not restricted to the final scanning and transferring to disc, which is the last 2% of the puzzle with some of the restorations they've overseen. They use plenty of low tech methods before they reach the scanning stage and frequently have to spend long, extended periods working with all the various low tech methods before the final product is ready for remastering. Again, this isn't attributing anything to Price's comment on the Zapruder film as I can think of a couple of scenarios where he might be off target, but based on the reading I've done on the subject over the past 13 years, I'd be wary of attributing a lack of relevant technical knowhow to Price at Warner. I've seen long interviews with DVD company heads who get their hands dirty in the same sort of work - Don May Jr. at Synapse, the various Criterion Collection restoration gurus - and all of them admit they're eclipsed by the Warner team, with Price noted as being involved in some of the most arduous restoration projects noted in those aforementioned interviews over at Digital Bits. I view the Cinema Audio Society award given to Price's involvement with the audio on the Kubrick films as being indicative of their specific focus and interest in audio work, not his, and haven't seen anything to indicate that his work is restricted to the non-visual. If pressed I could offer a number of reasons suggesting how Price might have been mislead / misguided / goaded along with a crowd / falling for an optical illusion / whatever in respect to the validity or otherwise of his pronouncement on the Zapruder film, but I've endured enough long, microscopically detailed Warner specific threads over at Home Theater Forum (frequently moderated by Hitchcock/Lean restoration guru Robert Harris) to know that the Warner restoration professionals are about as knowledgeable as you can get. I woudn't be arguing that various pre or post-production film processes are beyond their ken due to a before or after filmschool timeframe simply as the varied and often ad hoc work they do to achieve the final products results in them needing to keep all the historical methods of film treatment and manipulation in play, not abandoning older ones for newer digital work, as they'll frequently encounter issues on new projects that require revisiting older methods that the current restoration software wasn't designed for. I can't speak for Price's knowledge of what he was screened, where it came from, how far it was from the source, or any other criticisms that I've yet to read Horne's comments about (or even the rebuttals of Horne's work in other threads here) but suggesting that Price might be technically illiterate concerning photochemical film manipulation, restoration and or adjustment - after seeing him spearhead the most comprehensive restoration program of any of the major studios, for the company with the broadest archival holdings by far of the bunch, and watching them delay numerous titles for years because they need continuous, intensive work to bring them up to standard pre the final mastering - would get a big laugh on the film forums I visit that discuss these issues 24/7.

I'm surprised, as some one with some video and photo experience but a lay person regarding restoration, I doubted hand retouching films would still be done at a major studio. Is this done commonly, doing such work digitally seems so much easier. How much of an overlap do you think there is between retouching for restoration and painting negs for special effects?

Do you agree its imperative that we see the images Price and the others based their judgments on because what they interpreted as alteration could in fact be generational degradation artifacts?

DAVID WROTE:

Now if only YOU could find similarly qualified post-production folks to counter their findings we might give you protestation(s) a bit of credibility....

Price and the others (apparently) aren't really "post-production folks" in that their work doesn't involve producing special effects. Most of it seems fair routine technical transferring celluloid images to DVD/Blu-Rays and in the past to other formats. In some cases it may involve hand retouching films but in Prices case at least and perhaps that of the others this would be done by people working under them.

Keep your day job, Len.

This IS his DAY JOB...and NIGHT JOB too. Any time you log onto the forum, look at the

bottom and nearly always you will see logged on at that moment...BURTON, COLBY,

LAMSON and MACK.

Jack

[William Kelly]

Is the Extant Zapruder Film A 'Complete Fabrication,' or Simply an Altered Film?

Researchers David Healy and John Costella (both of whom I respect immensely and who made significant contributions to our understanding of the subject of Zapruder film alteration at Jim Fetzer's conference in May of 2003) have suggested that the alteration—or rather, the 'creation'—of the Zapruder film as we know it today could have proceeded for a considerable period of time after the assassination. Healy suggested that alteration could have taken up to two weeks to accomplish, and John Costella stated that the film was a 'complete fabrication' whose 'creation' likely continued for many, many months, or even years. Costella said during his presentation that although theZapruder film was based on reality—probably several films taken from a similar vantage point near the pergola, both prior to, and during the assassination—that those disparate film images had been deconstructed and then assembled together, using optical effects techniques standard in 1963 involving the use of optical printers—namely, alternate frame removal and traveling mattes—and that this process may have continued for several months, or even three or four years. There are several obvious problems with the leisurely timeline proposed by John Costella, and I believe great caution is warranted here. Costella and Healy are correct that the first frames published by LIFE in its November 29th edition were of very poor quality (showing little or no detail in each image frame) and did not include frame 313 (the head shot), and that for many months—indeed years—the public saw only the still frames LIFE chose to publish (such as in its undated Memorial Edition from mid-December 1963; its 'Warren Commission' issue of October 2, 1964; and its famous 'A Matter of Reasonable Doubt' issue of November 25, 1966). They are also correct that no members of the 'general public' saw the film projected as a motion picture until 1969 when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed it from LIFE magazine for use in the Clay Shaw trial, after which 100 grainy, poor resolution copies were subsequently bootlegged and then widely distributed. But I believe the conclusion Costella has drawn from these facts—that the U.S. government had plenty of time to manipulate the film as a motion picture, while only releasing selected still frames as they were 'ready' for distribution—is demonstrably incorrect. I say this because members of the Warren Commission staff began viewing one of the FBI's second generation copies of the film on January 27, 1964—projected as a motion picture—and this continued on and off for several days. Furthermore, the extant (so-called 'original') Zapruder film was projected for members of the Warren Commission staff, FBI, and Secret Service on February 25, 1964. This tells me that any and all changes to the film must have been completed prior to January 27, 1964—at the very latest. No conspirator in his right mind would have shown one version of an altered Zapruder film to members of the Commission on January 27th, and then shown them a different version on Hollywood 'visual effects' experts experienced in 27 early 1960s optical effects need to examine the extant Zapruder film for evidence of possible frame excision, traveling mattes,and aerial imaging. Based upon their findings, we will then have a much better idea of how much minimum time was required to alter the images of the head wound prior to NPIC's production of prints of these frames on Sunday night, November 24th, 1963. The printing by NPIC on Sunday night (and the subsequent publication by LIFE two days later) of frames showing the large anterior head wound indicate that at least this one critical alteration was

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February 25th. On the day Herbert Orth of LIFE magazine projected the extant film to Commission staff members, he promised to have 35 mm slides of 'pertinent frames' made and provided to the Commission. LIFE subsequently made three sets of 35 mm slides (169 slides in each set) of Zapruder frames and delivered them to the FBI on March 25, 1964. On April 21, 1964 the FBI delivered one set of slides to the Warren Commission, and the second set to the Secret Service—keeping one of the three sets for itself. [These slides are purported to be the same ones which can now be viewed at the National Archives, and I believe that they are.] Once LIFE magazine duplicated the three sets of slides for the U.S. government, future changes would have created a logistic (and coverup) problem of such immense proportions, that I am comfortable in saying that "it didn't happen."

The Film Swaps

So in conclusion, I disagree with John Costella's opinion that alterations to the Zapruder film might have proceeded well beyond mid-January, 1964. In fact, it is just barely possible that no changes were made to the Zapruder film after Sunday night, November 24, 1963. In support of this possibility is the fact that frame 313 (the head explosion), and five subsequent frames depicting a very dark-looking back of the head and the large, anterior head wound were printed by Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter on Sunday night, November 24th, and can be viewed today on Panel IV of the surviving NPIC briefing board set in the Archives. (Poor quality frames showing the large anterior head wound were also printed in the November 29th issue of LIFE.) In my view, if no traditional traveling mattes were employed, and if the principal changes made were optical frame excisions of the exit debris leaving the head (using a step printer), and aerial imaging artwork altering the head wound(s), it just might have been possible to accomplish the necessary minimal changes to the film in one working day, providing sufficient skilled labor was available. Once the 'sanitized' briefing boards were made at NPIC Sunday night from the new unslit 16 mm, double 8 mm'original,' it would have been necessary to cease alteration work on any of the 28 frames printed by NPIC for its 'sanitized' briefing boards, for any additional changes to these frames would inevitably have resulted in someone, somewhere, noticing discrepancies between the NPIC briefing boards made Sunday night (and the initial frames published in LIFE) and any later versions of the film, such as frames published by the Warren Commission in Volume XVIII. Furthermore, after the initial switch-outs for the three Jamieson lab duplicates were likely made on Sunday night or Monday morning—substituting the three new 'first generation' copies (made from the altered 'original') for the three bonafide 'first day copies' (that had been in the possession of the Secret Service, the FBI, and Zapruder)—additional, second generation copies proliferated, and this fact alone would have made any subsequent switch-outs much more difficult to manage, logistically.27 accomplished at Rochester on Sunday. If a car stop was later removed through frame excision, and the backgrounds behind the limousine in numerous frames (i.e., the grass in Dealey Plaza and the position of bystanders), and the Stemmons Freeway sign, were altered using traveling mattes, then a considerable amount of time—likely several weeks—would have been required to complete this work, and alterations of this magnitude could certainly not have been conducted in one working day, regardless of the facilities available. We simply do not yet know enough about which aspects of the film have been altered—or how they were altered—to assess exactly what was done at "Hawkeyeworks" on Sunday, November 24th, 1963. All we can say for sure is that some alterations were conducted at that highly classified facility in Rochester, and that the revised product was delivered to the CIA's NPIC Sunday night for the production of briefing boards from selected frames—from frames selected by the film's courier, not by photo analysts at NPIC. There can be little doubt that if the alterations of the film were not complete by Sunday night, "Bill Smith" of the 'Secret Service' was extremely careful, and selective, about which frames he identified for reproduction at NPIC. He would only have selected those frames that were considered fit for public consumption.

Since NPIC did not retain the film as a motion picture, Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter would not have known whether additional alterations continued after Sunday night.

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But engineering the switch-outs of the first two of the three new (i.e., altered) 'first generation' copies late Sunday night or early Monday morning would have been eminently manageable: the FBI and Secret Service would have been willingly complicit. Hoover hated JFK and his brother, the Attorney General, and history has shown he assisted in the coverup of the assassination in a number of ways, so authorizing a quiet film swap would have been no problem for him. The FBI's own copies were duplicated on Monday, after the new 'first generation' copy was received from "Hawkeyeworks," in time to return the newly minted copy to the Secret Service in Dallas on Tuesday, November 26th. Furthermore, the assassination conspiracy and coverup did involve 'dirty' Secret Service agents (as previously discussed and as will be further discussed in the next chapter about the Dallas motorcade planning), so it would have been no problem to get the Secret Service to switch-out its 'first day copy' in Washington for a new (altered) 'first generation' copy. The switch-out of the third 'first day copy' that Zapruder exhibited to various people throughout the weekend (including Dan Rather on Monday) would have presented no problem at all, for it was sent to LIFE after the resale of the film on Monday afternoon; the substitution of an alteredcopy for Zapruder's authentic 'first day copy' would therefore likely have occurred quietly within the offices of LIFE magazine, under the auspices of C. D. Jackson. The new 'original' (today's extant film) would have been given to LIFE after Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter were finished magnifying its frames for briefing board material early Monday morning, November 25th. I believe the unslit B & W 16 mm negative (and positives) discovered at the Sixth Floor Museum in the year 2000 were either struck at "Hawkeyeworks" early Sunday evening before the film was sent to NPIC, or were duplicated by LIFE after receiving its new 'original' film from the government early Monday morning. I think it is more likely that these black and white dupes were run off at "Hawkeyeworks" Sunday evening, as a favor to C. D. Jackson, so that his Chicago printing plant could begin working on printing its lousy, low resolution black and white frames in the November 29th issue (which was sold beginning on Tuesday, November 26th). In fact, I have always wondered why the first frames published by LIFE were only small, B & W frames—why weren't they in glorious color, if profit and

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the pursuit of the almighty dollar are the forces that rule America? I believe the answer to that question is now known: color frames were not available in time for printing the week after the assassination because the camera original film was still being altered all day on Sunday, and was then sent to NPIC Sunday night for the making of 'sanitized' briefing boards! By the time the U.S. government was finished with the altered film on Monday morning in Washington, D.C., it was too late to get color frames into the November 29th issue of LIFE, so the magazine had to settle for substandard, low resolution black and white frames in its first post-assassination issue, in spite of spending all of that money to get the film. The U.S. government's alteration of the film likely got in the way of LIFE's profit motive the first week after the assassination—as shocking as that may be to David Wrone.

The real dangers for the conspirators would have been the two sets of McCone briefing boards (made from the unaltered original film), and the true camera original, and the three authentic 'first day copies.' Seemingly, not destroying them and allowing someone to retain them would have been potentially foolhardy, but the cachet this kind of 'forbidden knowledge' would have possessed—its importance as a trophy or as a fetish to people who had hated JFK—cannot be overstated. There are numerous persons who have claimed over the past several decades that they have seen versions of the Zapruder film that are inconsistent with the film publicly known today. (French intelligence is rumored to have one such version.) Perhaps the most widely known claim indicating that a Kennedy hater had a trophy of the assassination comes from Dick Russell's 1992 book The Man Who Knew Too Much. On page 584, Russell wrote that Paul Rothermel, Jr., a high level aide to Texas oil billionaire and right-wing activist H. L. Hunt (who called himself 'the richest man in the world'), was dispatched with a considerable amount of money on the day of the assassination, with orders to purchase the original Zapruder film. (This early attempt to purchase the film was possible, since Zapruder went on television that afternoon and described shooting his home movie.) Rothermel told Dick Russell in 1992 that he purchased a copy. The direct quote of Rothermel was: "I got the first copy, as far as I know." While there is indeed an unaccounted-for punched identification number—0184—missing from the affidavit trail on Friday, November 22nd, the problem with speculating that Rothermel got "copy 0184" is that Dick Blair at Kodak says he gave only three rolls of film (not four) to Zapruder to take to the Jamieson lab, and is also inconsistent with Bruce Jamieson's firm recollection that only 3 rolls of Kodachrome IIA film were printed by his lab. (Zapruder could have lied about only making 3 copies if he had been paid enough to keep his mouth shut, but presumably Dick Blair and Bruce Jamieson were telling the truth.) I believe it is much more likely that rather than getting a copy of the Zapruder film the day of the assassination in Dallas, that Rothermel paid for and obtained one of the true 'first day copies' on Monday after the film swap took place, or perhaps even the original Zapruder film, whose whereabouts are unknown today. If H. L. Hunt helped to bankroll the assassination, as many believed for years, then others may have owed him a big favor, and may have consented to let him have his grisly 'hunting trophy.' So there may be some truth in the Paul Rothermel story, but it may not be exactly as he portrayed the details.

If he obtained one of the true 'first day copies' after the great film swap took place, then neither he nor Hunt need even have been in Dallas on the day of the assassination in order to arrange for that.

As a way of hiding the fact that the film had been altered, he may have been required to lie about how he really obtained such a film, as part of the price for its sale. Needless to say, the discoveryof any of these four unaltered films—the true original or any one of the true 'first day copy' —would be a seminal event in American history.

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Wrone Dismantled

In his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, author David Wrone went too far in criticizing the alterationist viewpoint, based even upon what he knew at the time—for his own text and one key footnote revealed that he was fully aware of the content of the Homer McMahon/Ben Hunter interviews; he also surely knew from his own interview of Dino that Brugioni had created briefing boards from what he believed was the 8 mm original Zapruder film the weekend of the assassination; and he also knew that McMahon had worked with an unslit 16 mm double 8 mm 'original' film that same weekend (before the funeral), and that McMahon's 'original' had come from Rochester, New York, and not from Dallas. He willfully ignored the implications inherent in these two contrasting NPIC activities, which both occurred the weekend of the assassination. Let us examine one final time how badly he erred in his attempt to discredit theories that the film was altered, and how his conclusions have now been dismantled by the findings in this chapter.

On page 133, after taking on the wound alteration hypothesis of David Lifton published in Best Evidence, Wrone wrote: Lifton tries to argue that this apparent discrepancy—between what the doctors saw in the hospital [Parkland] and what he claims to see in the Zapruder film...is...the result of the CIA's having tampered with the film...but...he provides no frame numbers or any other identifying feature for the reader to examine...In fact, there is no 'suspicious' spot, much less a blowout wound on the back side of JFK's head, but there is indeed (contrary to Lifton's doctors) a large wound at the right front of the head...all the available evidence seems to suggest that the Agency [the CIA] never attempted, much less accomplished, an alteration of the film.

Wrone was conveniently attacking a few brief statements made by Lifton about the Zapruder film on only two pages in a 1981 book of well over 700 pages that was primarily about the medical evidence, and ignoring the much more robust alterationist arguments known to him in 2003. Let's deconstruct the egregious errors and indefensible conclusions in the statements quoted above, based upon what we have learned in this chapter:

• Frames 335 and 337 depict one of the two exit wounds in the posterior skull (which is consistent with the external beveling in autopsy photos 17, 18, 44, and 45), and I have listed numerous places where high quality versions of these frames can be found in published works.

• The large 'wound' in the right front of JFK's head seen in the Zapruder film is a painting, in the opinion of experienced film editor David Healy and award-winning Hollywood film expert Dr. Roderick Ryan, most likely superimposed over the real image by an aerial imaging visual effects process.

• The Parkland treatment staff are not 'Lifton's doctors;' they are America's doctors, truthtellers who by-and-large, as a group, collectively deserve the highest respect of all patriotic Americans for reporting what they saw without shading the truth, and form not changing their minds later. (Dr. Jenkins is the one notable exception, who caved

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under pressure and did change his mind after he saw the autopsy photographs.) Four of them (Dr. Peters, Dr. Jones, Dr. Crenshaw, and nurse Bell) have specifically stated that they did not see the head wounds depicted in either the Zapruder film, or on the autopsy photographs, during JFK's treatment at Parkland hospital. Furthermore, the vast majority (19 out of 21) of the Parkland hospital witnesses described an exit wound in the exact location where the back of JFK's head looks suspiciously dark in the extant Zapruder film, and unaccountably intact in the autopsy photographs.

• Actually, the weight of all available evidence today is that the CIA not only attempted, but succeeded in altering the Zapruder film at the "Hawkeye Plant" in Rochester, New York. The car stop associated with the head shot(s), and the exit debris seen leaving the rear of President Kennedy's head in Dealey Plaza, were both removed; the large blowout in the right-rear of the posterior skull was blacked out; and a false wound was crudely painted on the right-front side of the head, as seen in the altered film. The three 'first generation' copies today do not exhibit the internal characteristics they should, based upon what the film technicians in Dallas originally told Rollie Zavada. Furthermore, the recollections of Dino Brugioni and Homer McMahon jointly reveal that the 8 mm original film was used to make unsanitized briefing boards at NPIC on Saturday night, November 23rd; and an altered, 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 mm 'original' was produced the very next night, on Sunday, November 24th, to make 'sanitized' briefing boards in what was clearly an off-thebooks, compartmentalized covert operation. The altered 16 mm wide, unslit film masquerading as an 'original' on Sunday night was created at the CIA's highly classified film lab at Kodak's headquarters and main industrial facility in Rochester, New York, which according to Dino Brugioni, "could do anything."

In my opinion David Wrone intentionally withheld information from his readers, and knowingly presented a skewed, one-sided argument to his audience in support of the Zapruder film's supposed authenticity. Whether he was simply engaging in psychological denial in support of a longstanding belief system, or whether he had other motivations, only he and his maker truly know.

Prior Speculations By 'Alterationists' That We Now Know Cannot Be True

I have been rather stern with David Wrone about what I have characterized as his rather overzealous and one-sided defense of the Zapruder film's supposed authenticity, so it is only fair for me to now identify mistakes (or unsupported claims) made by others in the research community who believe the Zapruder film is an altered motion picture, and not a camera original film. We simply know much more about the film's chain-of-custody now than we did in the late 1970s, in the early and mid 1980s, or even in 1996. In the interests of a more precise and exacting future debate about the Zapruder film's provenance, I believe that some of the more egregious errors (and leaps of faith) of the 'alterationist' research community should be corrected here as well.

First, one minor correction: JFK researchers almost universally refer to "CIA Document 450" (the NPIC notes related to the Zapruder film) as having been obtained by Paul Hoch from the Rockefeller Commission files in 1976 through a FOIA suit—and yet the date of "FOIA Review" stamped on the 28See pages 556-557 of Best Evidence (cloth and trade paperback editions).

29See Melanson's article "Hidden Exposure: Cover-Up and Intrigue in the CIA's Secret Possession of the Zapruder Film," published in the November 1984 edition of the researcher journal The Third Decade. 30See pages 339-340 of Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK.

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NPIC notes is actually February of 1978. Second, in the early 1980s, some researchers who wrote about the NPIC notes, notably David Lifton28 and professor Paul Melanson,29 assumed that the notes meant the CIA (at NPIC) may have had the original film in Washington D.C. the night of the assassination, on Friday evening, November 22,1963. We definitively know now that this was not the case, since during his interviews with Peter Janney, Dino Brugioni convincingly established the time of the film's arrival at NPIC as about 10-11 PM on Saturday, November 23rd. (Furthermore, Brugioni told author Gus Russo, in an interview on January 27, 1998, just as he was to tell researcher Peter Janney eleven years later, that his work in creating the McCone briefing boards at NPIC commenced on the evening of Saturday, November 23, 1963.30) So new information, gained through continued research and oral history interviews, has revealed this speculation by Lifton and Melanson to be incorrect. Both Melanson (in The Third Decade in 1984) and Lifton (in Best Evidence in 1981, and in his article "Pig On A Leash" in Fetzer's 2003 anthology The Great Zapruder Film Hoax) speculated that Zapruder may have relinquished the original film to the Secret Service late on Friday night and that alteration commenced soon thereafter, but I am not persuaded by their speculation since the 'evidence' they offered to support it was extremely tenuous—almost nonexistent. Lifton and Melanson also interpreted the NPIC notes to mean that the Zapruder film was likely altered and reproduced as a motion picture at NPIC, citing the words "shoot internegs" and "make three prints" in CIA Document 450 as supporting evidence. This was a common interpretation of what the NPIC notes meant back in the 1980s, and at one time I subscribed to this interpretation myself. But my own interviews of Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter in 1997, and Peter Janney's exhaustive interviews of Dino Brugioni in 2009, reveal that this did not happen. NPIC did not have the capability to alter or reproduce motion picture films; furthermore, the activity conducted at NPIC on both Saturday and Sunday night was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, simply the enlargement of individual Zapruder frames to make medium-sized prints which were then mounted on briefing boards. Most of us learn as our evidence base expands, and we progress and 'move on.'

Third, at least one JFK researcher (Noel Twyman) was persuaded that the FBI altered the Zapruder film primarily because of a report that it possessed "the film" early in the morning hours of Saturday, November 23, 1963. Although the third-ranking official at the FBI—Cartha DeLoach—did state in his 1995 memoir, Hoover's FBI, that he watched the Zapruder film at FBI headquarters at 3 AM on November 23, 1963, this cannot be true—in actuality, he almost certainly saw a 'first day copy' of the film 24 hours later, at about 3 AM on Sunday, November 24, 1963. Richard Trask clarified this for us on pages 120-122 of National Nightmare On Six Feet of Film, by explaining that the 'first day

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copy' of the Zapruder film loaned to the FBI in Dallas by Forrest Sorrels of the Secret Service was not put on an airplane headed for Washington, D.C. until Saturday evening, and that subject flight left Dallas (bound for Baltimore) at 5:20 PM the evening of November 23rd. Trask wrote that FBI agents met the airplane at Friendship Airport in Baltimore and drove the film to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. I therefore conclude that DeLoach, in his 1995 memoir 32 years later, made a minor error in his recollection of when he first watched the film, and was off by one day. He almost certainly watched the Zapruder film at about 3 AM on Sunday morning, after Bureau agents brought him one of the three 'first day copies' of the camera original film (duplicated at the Jamieson lab in Dallas) from the Baltimore airport.

In conclusion, author Noel Twyman's conclusion that the FBI altered the Zapruder film, found on pages 165-166 of Bloody Treason, is clearly incorrect. Not only did Cartha DeLoach not view the film early Saturday morning in Washington, but when he did view the film early on Sunday, the FBI was only in possession of a 'first day copy,' and not the original. But this timing issue of when

DeLoach saw a copy of the Zapruder film is not the primary reason for disbelieving Twyman's conclusion that the film was altered while in the possession of the FBI. The primary reason for rejecting Twyman's conclusion is the crucial information provided to the ARRB by the head of the NPIC color lab, Homer McMahon. McMahon, the reader will recall, stated that the Secret Service (not the FBI) brought him an unslit 16 mm wide, double 8 movie of the assassination (i.e., a newly created, altered 'original') from the CIA's classified photo lab at the Kodak industrial facility in Rochester, New York. Clearly, the Secret Service and the CIA worked together cooperatively in altering and sanitizing the film, and the FBI had no part in it. Twyman could cite no evidence that the FBI (in Washington or anywhere else) had the capability to alter motion picture films; in fact, Trask points out on page 122 of his book that the FBI had to "sub out" the reproduction of its 'first generation' copy to a local commercial lab on Monday, November 25, 1963. The implication here, and the correct one, I believe, is that the FBI had no "in house" capability to copy 8 mm motion picture films. Hoover was no doubt made aware that the film had been altered, and that the version on loan to the FBI had been switched-out on Monday morning before the FBI had its own copies made, but his agency did not initiate or perform that feat of alteration—the CIA did, with the help of Kodak, at "Hawkeyeworks."

Noel Twyman published his conclusion that the Zapruder film was altered while in the possession of the FBI in 1997, before the National Archives made public my interview reports with Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter in November of 1998. (Surely, in light of the McMahon/Hunter interviews, Twyman has now changed his opinion about where the film was altered.) This is yet one more example of how the work of the 'non-investigative' ARRB staff contributed to our knowledge of the assassination by placing into the official record new evidence garnered through interviews and depositions.

Dealing With Uncertainty About the Events in Chicago

In 1986 Loudon Wainwright of LIFE magazine published a memoir titled: The Great America Magazine—An Inside History of LIFE. Wainwright's book included an account (primarily on pages 311-318) of how the first black and white images of the Zapruder film came to be published in the November 29, 1963 issue of LIFE, which began to hit the newsstands on Tuesday, November 26th.

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Wainwright wrote on page 315 about a special team sent to Chicago by LIFE editor George P. Hunt to prepare the photo spread and accompanying text for the November 29th issue:

In the team were Assistant Managing Editor Roy Rowan, writer John Dilles, Associate ArtDirector David Stech and layout artist John Geist. New pictures coming from Dallas and Washington after the first day would be sent directly to Chicago, where the film would be processed (with duplicate contact sheets flown back to New York). Rowan's team would make initial picture selections, produce layouts and write some of the captions. All this, of course, would be done in consultation (by phone, teletype and wirephoto) with Hunt and the main edit group in New York.

Wainwright continued, explaining how Rowan and his crew had examined the film in Chicago on Saturday using a hand-cranked Movieola projector, running the film through it several times, fast and slow, and jotting down the frame numbers of the frames they wanted to have converted into black and white prints. [How did they get these? The frames on a home movie are certainly not numbered.] Wainwright wrote that the magazine's photo lab in Chicago had made "scores" of eightby- ten inch prints from the Zapruder film, and that Rowan and Stech laid them all out in sequenceon the floor of an office in the R. R. Donnelly printing plant. Wainwright wrote that Rowan finally selected 31 of the enlargements for use in creating a sequential layout for the November 29th issue.

My analysis of Wainwright's account follows:

• If Wainwright was correct that "scores" of black and white prints were enlarged from Zapruder frames on Saturday, this could account for why the original film did not arrive at NPIC until 10 or 11 PM Saturday night. If Wainwright (who was not present in Chicago and who reconstructed his published account from the oral accounts of others years later) was correct that LIFE printed its black and white enlargements of selected Zapruder frames on Saturday, this activity would simply explain why the Zapruder film arrived at NPIC in Washington D.C. so late at night, at 10 or 11 PM, instead of 3 hours earlier. If the printing of the black and white frames in Chicago really occurred late Saturday afternoon, then my speculation earlier in this chapter that the film may have been intercepted by government agents at the airport in Chicago, or at the LIFE printing plant before work was done on the film, would be incorrect. That the film did go to NPIC at the nation's capital on Saturday is unquestioned—the only uncertainty is whether it went there directly from the airport at Chicago, or possibly from the LIFE printing plant offices prior to copying for photographic purposes; or whether it was loaned to the Federal government only after LIFE printed its black and white stills.

• The most significant implication of this 'Saturday scenario' is that LIFE would have printed its stills from the camera original, unaltered Zapruder film. If so, then the individual frames printed would have been from a film that likely showed a 'car stop,' and would certainly have depicted the true nature of the head wound. However, anyone who examines the November 29th issue can readily see that the enormous

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right-anterior head wound seen in the Zapruder film we know today (and not seen at Parkland hospital) is clearly present, even in the small, indistinct black and white frames reproduced in this issue; nor is there any posterior head wound visible in any of the frames, due to the extremely small image size and high degree of contrast and poor detail in the 'muddy' images. The presence of the large head wound that was not seen at Parkland hospital in the November 29th issue's black and white Zapruder frames rules out the possibility that LIFE copied frames from the unaltered Zapruder film on Saturday, prior to the film's doctoring in Rochester. This image content clearly indicates to me that LIFE reproduced frames from an altered Zapruder film, created at "Hawkeyeworks" in Rochester on Sunday, November 24th.

• It seems apparent that Wainwright was simply incorrect—off by one day—in regard to when the activity at the Chicago printing plant took place. (If Cartha DeLoach can be off by one day in his memoirs, so can Loudon Wainwright, who after all, was writing about events related to him by others—events he did not even participate in himself.) I say this for the following reasons: -First, Richard Trask wrote on page 118 in his 2005 book, National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film, that the black and white copies of the unslit Zapruder film found at the Sixth Floor Museum in 2000 "...do have what appear to be markings used to determine selected images for inclusion in LIFE magazine." This point is crucial, for if true, it indicates to me that the selections about which frames to publish were made by marking up a 16 mm wide unslit black and white negative, or 16 mm wide unslit black and white positive, or both. The key word here is UNSLIT. We know beyond doubt from the recollections of the Kodak lab personnel in Dallas, and from the recollections of Dino Brugioni) that the camera original film was slit andreassembled as an 8 mm film before Zapruder left the Dallas Kodak lab at about 9 PM the evening of the assassination. Therefore, if the selections about which frames to print in LIFE magazine were made on a 16 mm unslit product, then that product had to derive from the new 16 mm unslit 'original' created at "Hawkeyeworks" in Rochester on Sunday. In other words, Trask's observation about the direct source used to create the LIFE magazine stills means that the stills could not possibly have been enlarged from the original film, which was slit to 8mm before it left Dallas!

-Second, Wainwright wrote about the LIFE personnel in Chicago using a Movieola machine with a hand crank to view the Zapruder film and select frames of interest for printing in the magazine. It's my understanding that Movieola machines were built to accommodate both 16 mm and 35 mm films, but NOT to accommodate 8 mm home movies. Therefore, the use of a Movieola machine to view the Zapruder film in Chicago implies that a 16 mm wide product created at "Hawkeyeworks" was being viewed—not the camera original film, which was slit to 8 mm in Dallas.

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In conclusion, Wainwright was surely correct about the names of the key participants in LIFE's special editing team that went to Chicago, and even about details such as "scores" of prints being run off, and about the use of a Movieola machine to view the film. But he was surely incorrect about which day LIFE printed its black and white prints for inclusion in the November 29th issue; the weight of the evidence is that this must have occurred on Sunday evening rather than Saturday evening, because: (1) the altered image content (specifically, the enormous head wound) in the November 29th issue appears the same as in today's film; and (2) primarily because the format of the s ource for the magazine's black and white images was a 16 mm wide unslit double 8 film—not an 8 mm film.

It makes perfect sense for the government to have intercepted the film somewhere in Chicago before LIFE copied any of the images for publication. Allowing LIFE to reproduce images from an unaltered film that clearly proved there was not only crossfire and conspiracy, but Secret Service malfeasance, would have been foolhardy. The Secret Service had all morning on Saturday in Washington, D.C. to view the unaltered 'first day copy' that Max Phillips had placed on an airplane in Dallas on Friday night. By late Saturday morning those in charge of the coverup at the Secret Service and the CIA knew that the original film (in Zapruder's hands) had to be obtained, and altered at all costs. Undoubtedly C. D. Jackson's influence at LIFE was sought and obtained by the CIA to ensure the film's interception and brief loan to the government for purposes of 'sanitization,' with national security' used as a justification. That the Federal government (most likely Secret Service officials in Chicago) intercepted the original 8 mm film in Chicago after Richard Stolley sent it there (following its sale), and diverted it to NPIC at Washington, D.C., is beyond doubt, based upon the consistent recollections of Dino Brugioni. The Secret Service and the CIA used the camera original film that arrived at NPIC late on Saturday night to create two sets of briefing boards that depicted the real story of the assassination (for limited consumption), and then sent the camera original film onto "Hawkeyeworks" at Rochester early Sunday morning. Following the creation of a new purportedly 'original' film at the CIA's lab at Rochester, three new 'first generation' copies and three black and white work products for LIFE were quickly duplicated, before the 'original' film was rushed back to NPIC by 'Bill Smith' for the creation of 'sanitized' briefing boards for much wider, 'public' distribution within the government. The three black and white 16 mm 'copies' referred to by Trask (apparently one negative and two positives) could have arrived in Chicago Sunday night about the same time the new 'original' arrived at NPIC to be processed by Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter. In my estimation, this would have given LIFE enough time to get its first issues of the November 29th edition on the street by Tuesday.

In summary, there is nothing in Wainwright's account—except for the timing of the Chicago events—that is inconsistent with the film's alteration. The 16 mm unslit format of the source material used for LIFE's images—revealed by the Sixth Floor Museum discoveries in the year 2000—confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that this material originated at "Hawkeyeworks," and not from the true camera original, which we know with certainty was slit to 8 mm. Furthermore, the image content in LIFE's November 29th issue—specifically, the enormous head wound—is consistent with the magazine being presented with an altered version of the film the weekend of the assassination. Based upon the content of the McMahon interviews, we know that the 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 mm 'original' came from "Hawkeyeworks" at Rochester, and by deduction we know that this product was delivered Sunday night at NPIC. [brugioni's NPIC event was on Saturday

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night, and the McMahon/Hunter NPIC event, as recalled by both men, occurred a 'couple of days' after the assassination and before the funeral, which means that it had to be Sunday night when "Bill Smith" delivered the film to them.] Therefore, I conclude that Wainwright (who after all was not present in Chicago at the events he was writing about) was simply one day off in his description of when LIFE created its photo spread from the Zapruder film. Wainwright may even have believed that all of the Chicago events he described took place on Saturday simply because of Stolley's certainty that he put the film on a plane for Chicago on Saturday afternoon. The events at NPIC on Saturday night, as recounted exhaustively by Dino Brugioni, and the subsequent events at NPIC on Sunday night, as recalled by Homer McMahon, prove that the film whose frames were reproduced in LIFE was not the 8 mm camera original processed by Brugioni, but rather a black-and-white copy (of poor resolution) made from an altered 'original' created at "Hawkeyeworks." The cause of the poor quality of the images in LIFE's November 29th issue can finally be explained: they come not from a camera original film, but from a black and white copy several generations removed from the true camera original film—from a 16 mm copy which was itself duplicated from an altered film masquerading as the 'original' home movie. No wonder there is a lack of detail, and high contrast buildup, in the black and white images first published in LIFE. They are made from prints, which were themselves rephotographed following the graphic design layout for each page, from what at best could only have been a fourth generation, 16 mm black and white copy of each camera original image frame.

Patterns of Deception

Patterns of fraud and forgery—the destruction or disappearance of original evidence, followed by the substitution of tainted evidence—appear consistently throughout this case. We have seen it in the case of the 'magic bullet,' CE 399; in the case of the alleged murder weapon; in the case of the autopsy photos and x-rays; in the case of the President's brain; in the case of the evolving autopsy report; and now we see it again in the case of the Zapruder film, 'the' pre-eminent assassination record. Why should it surprise us that it has happened to the Zapruder film as well? It shouldn't surprise anyone who is not sticking his head in the sand and ignoring what is wrong with the film.

Josiah Thompson reiterated, in 2003 at his lecture given at Cyril Wecht's assassination conference in Pittsburgh, that while in many murder cases we often do not know why a crime was committed or even who committed the crime, we always know what happened. He reminded his 2003 audience of what he had said 10 years previously in Chicago: that only in the Kennedy assassination are we unsure about what actually happened. I submit to the reader that this astute observation of Thompson's, made twice, ten years apart, is extremely significant and supports my contention that the biggest problem in coming to grips with the Kennedy assassination is fraud in the evidence.

The second biggest problem we face right now in the JFK research community are the legions of 'old guard' researchers who refuse to face this fact, and who stubbornly cling to some piece of 'bedrock evidence,' which in their minds will lead them out of the wilderness if only they study it long enough and can divine its true meaning. For Thompson, Wrone, Weisberg, Groden, and many others, the Zapruder film has been this piece of bedrock evidence for over four decades. I say to the old guard who have continued to insist that the Zapruder film is an authentic and unaltered film in spite of the mounting evidence of its alteration, "Come on over, and see the light." You will feel better for having done so—in fact, it will liberate you. Once you accept the fact that the Zapruder film is a

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clever (but imperfect) forgery, you are free to suddenly believe the Dealey Plaza car stop witnesses (which include several Dallas motorcycle policemen and Bill Newman); Marilyn Sitzman; the Kodak laboratory personnel (who all say the original film was slit the evening of the assassination); Marilyn Willis; Erwin Schwartz; Cartha DeLoach; Dan Rather; and the Parkland doctors and nurses. For if

you believe the Zapruder film is authentic, you must, of necessity, believe that all of these people are either liars, or incompetent and unreliable witnesses.

And that's no fun, is it? I reiterate to the old guard: admit you have been wrong for decades, and you will feel better because it will truly liberate you. There is plenty of evidence of crossfire and conspiracy in Dealey Plaza that exists independent of the Zapruder film; acknowledging that the Zapruder film is an altered film, which can only tell us a very limited amount about the assassination, does not mean that you cannot still conclude that there was a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy! Most significantly, for me, the robust evidence that the film has been altered confirms my faith in the reliability of the Parkland medical staff's observations on the day of the assassination, and leads me irrevocably to the conclusion that the sketch made of JFK's skull by Dr. Boswell at the autopsy, and the autopsy photos themselves, are clear evidence that the President's wounds were altered by post mortem surgery to change the geometry of the shooting. Since I believe that there was already undeniable, independent evidence from the Bethesda morgue that JFK's head wounds were altered by surgery immediately prior to the autopsy, it was not difficult for me to accept that the head wounds I see in the Zapruder film are painted-on artwork created by an aerial imaging process using an optical printer. What 'liberated' me to finally believe that the Zapruder film was a forgery were the undeniable breaks in the chain of custody represented by the Dino Brugioni/Homer McMahon events on successive nights at NPIC. The unassailable implications of those two events, when viewed in tandem, allowed what was a possibility in my mind to become a fact. The Zapruder film is an altered film; its alteration by the U.S. government at a classified government lab, with the assistance of the world's foremost photographic company, is the strongest indicator we have, along with the evolving autopsy report and the creation of a tainted autopsy photo and x-ray collection, of how powerful and relentless the coverup of this assassination was in 1963. And the government's direct involvement in heavy-handed manipulation of key physical evidence in this case is the surest indication that President Kennedy's death was an 'inside job,' that he was eliminated by the national security state because he was viewed as a dangerous 'change agent' who was 'rocking the boat' too much at the height of the Cold War. For those of you who may not yet be convinced that this is the case, I have assiduously prepared for you, in Part III of this book, the final two chapters in our journey, about the Texas trip and Dallas motorcade planning (Chapter 15); and the deep politics of the America of 1963 (Chapter 16), which details the establishment's fear of a truly independent foreign policy being enacted by a man dedicated to avoiding war—a national security establishment vehemently opposed to peace, and dominated by those with an apocalyptic mindset dedicated to military confrontation and victory over America's Cold War adversaries—the Soviet Union and its proxy states

[Don Jeffries]

Exactly what does Craig Lamson do, or has he done, that qualifies him as a preeminent expert in photography? He sneers at those who have worked in this area in Hollywood for a long time. He sneers at Jack White, who was once universally considered THE assassination film expert. He sneers at anyone cited by an alterationist in one of their posts, as he has done here to Homer McMahon (and Bill isn't really an alterationist).

Craig boasts of "not caring about" the assassination. What kind of person spends the hours he does, posting prolifically about a subject that supposedly doesn't matter to him? Shockingly, all his posts are criticisms of a pro-conspiracy position. Apparently, his extremely critical personality finds nothing to criticize in the official lone assassin thesis.

Craig doesn't seem to offend the likes of Josiah Thompson, who quotes him favorably quite frequently on this forum. As I've noted before, all these alteration discussions invariably boil down to shouting matches over how someone interprets a particular photo or film frame. I was a long time agnostic on the subject of Z-film alteration, but the work of Doug Horne, especially that of the experts from Hollywood, has persuaded me that, at the very least, the Zapruder film we have come to know all too well is not completely legitimate.

I can't understand why the findings of true experts in the film business don't impress Josiah, Barb, Jerry, etc., but the predictable postings of Craig Lamson-whose expertise in this area cannot possibly be any more impressive-are lauded by the same people and quoted favorably.

[Anthony Thorne]

I'm surprised, as some one with some video and photo experience but a lay person regarding restoration, I doubted hand retouching films would still be done at a major studio. Is this done commonly, doing such work digitally seems so much easier. How much of an overlap do you think there is between retouching for restoration and painting negs for special effects?

Do you agree its imperative that we see the images Price and the others based their judgments on because what they interpreted as alteration could in fact be generational degradation artifacts?

In between writing my post about Ned Price, and now, I was email contacted by a Melbourne cinematographer who briefly noted that he agreed with my summary of the process. He's not anonymous and will come on the forum (possibly through posts under my handle) after I return to Melbourne next weekend (I'm writing these on holiday interstate). In a nutshell though he noted that large areas of the post-production process for film have remained the same for decades given that film cameras mechanically (and internally) haven't changed that much barring a few new details. Major studios, particularly those like Warner, may have different teams overseeing different areas of the process, or depending on requirements might have those high up in the chain doing surprisingly menial work because they either like it, trust their own eye, or are working within a restricted budget and want to stretch the capabilities of the restoration department as much as possible. Digital is certainly easier when digital is applicable, but there's a continual interplay between the new methods and old, and I know some restorationists are more cautious than others when using software. Some digital techniques used for earlier restorations were problematic, 'erasing' imagery (like rain falling across a background window) as the software thought it was noise or grain. Also, some old films have deteriorated to the extent that there's a long and careful engagement with the physical footage before they even think of going near a computer or a telecine scanner. (Up until very recently, some restorations also focused more on physical/chemical restoration than digital simply as they wanted a theatrical reissue for promotional reasons and weren't going to master the final 35mm or 70mm film prints from an expensive, sometimes problematic digital source. A few recent high-profile restorations have indeed gone from film, to digital 4K or 8K, then back to film for the final cinema release, but I'll stress they are recent and up to a few years ago a digital intermediate stage for old/classic films seeking a cinema re-release wasn't a given). Re the overlap between retouching for restoration and painting negs for F/X, I'd suggest you may easily have the same technicians doing both in the same room with much the same equipment (I'm aware of the engagement of software with the latter but still suggest that the same teams would be conscious of and sometimes utilise the older methods - remembering too that some post-production specialists here and there are in their 50's or even 60's, have 30 or 40 years experience under their belt and moved to digital techniques after a long period of professional use with the older methods). I'll get my cinematographer friend to elaborate in a week or more (he already has to an extent in private correspondence but I'll post his lengthy comments when they're ready). He has a few decades experience with film post-production and - like myself - is currently agnostic on the topic of the Zapruder footage being tampered with (though he's already outlined to me the logical way of how it could be done, absent issues of the timeframe available and the chain of custody). He also noted that he has some comments to make regarding technical issues in the other current threads on this subject. I'm not expecting his observations to make either side of this debate say "Ha, gotcha!" to the other, but they might be of use to keep things accurate.

I haven't read all the commentary regarding the footage that Horne evidently screened but I agree that the issue of what was shown, and whether it accurately reflects what was originally shot, is an important one. I haven't paid the required attention to what's been said or written about that, here or elsewhere, so I'm currently not drawing any conclusions over whether the Zapruder film was, or wasn't, manipulated in the methods some have outlined. Like I've said though I'll be reading Horne's essay on the matter - book 4 - at some point.

Just to keep things clear, I know that I've mentioned earlier that the work done by restorationists at Warner would ultimately lead to remastering the films for Blu-Ray and DVD. The final mastering of the film to disc (HD or otherwise) is a fairly uncomplicated process and can well be done by a couple of guys in a room with a machine, a small period of time and the digital master tape (or hard drive) that they've been presented with. Getting the film ready for that final process though, (ready for the telecine, mastering, authoring etc) is more convoluted and is where the various low-tech/chemical/analog/historical film manipulation methods may come into play. I'd suggest that Ned Price's job description entails oversight of that more complicated procedure (among other things) and they might have up to a few years work wrestling with physical film materials, using every trick in the book, before they can take the final master to the authoring folk and say "Here, it's done". (Robert Harris, who I believe does similar work, has been wrestling with damaged, faded and incomplete materials related to IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD and THE ALAMO for decades). Therefore, it's probably misleading to characterise 'restoration' as simply 'mastering for DVD' (though I may well be the source of that phrase in this thread, the mastering comes right at the end). In general, the older the film, the more preparatory work that may be required to bring it up to acceptable standards for HD mastering. Some of Price's earlier noted projects are for films that are decades old and I know the KING KONG restoration, for one, took a good deal of work over some years before Warner was happy with it.

Edited February 1, 2010 by Anthony Thorne

[Barb Junkkarinen]

I can't understand why the findings of true experts in the film business don't impress Josiah, Barb, Jerry, etc., but the predictable postings of Craig Lamson-whose expertise in this area cannot possibly be any more impressive-are lauded by the same people and quoted favorably.

I can only speak for myself, Don, but I find it impossible to be impressed by findings that, from what we

keep hearing, have not been completed or released yet by experts not yet named, whose expertise is not yet known.

All we have so far are a lot of airy claims about what they are going to find, or what Doug Horne (or Jack White or Fetzer or Healy) says they are

going to find. One cannot evaluate something that has not yet been produced for review.

Bests,

Barb :-)

[Craig Lamson]

Exactly what does Craig Lamson do, or has he done, that qualifies him as a preeminent expert in photography? He sneers at those who have worked in this area in Hollywood for a long time. He sneers at Jack White, who was once universally considered THE assassination film expert. He sneers at anyone cited by an alterationist in one of their posts, as he has done here to Homer McMahon (and Bill isn't really an alterationist).

Craig boasts of "not caring about" the assassination. What kind of person spends the hours he does, posting prolifically about a subject that supposedly doesn't matter to him? Shockingly, all his posts are criticisms of a pro-conspiracy position. Apparently, his extremely critical personality finds nothing to criticize in the official lone assassin thesis.

Craig doesn't seem to offend the likes of Josiah Thompson, who quotes him favorably quite frequently on this forum. As I've noted before, all these alteration discussions invariably boil down to shouting matches over how someone interprets a particular photo or film frame. I was a long time agnostic on the subject of Z-film alteration, but the work of Doug Horne, especially that of the experts from Hollywood, has persuaded me that, at the very least, the Zapruder film we have come to know all too well is not completely legitimate.

I can't understand why the findings of true experts in the film business don't impress Josiah, Barb, Jerry, etc., but the predictable postings of Craig Lamson-whose expertise in this area cannot possibly be any more impressive-are lauded by the same people and quoted favorably.

Don, some very basic principles of photography are at play here. Solid, long proven principles. When someone says this or that can't happen, and it goes against the very basics of the process, you can test it and see who is correct and who is not.

Thats what I do. I'm so sorry it steps on the toes of your heros. But maybe you need to vet your heros a bit better. Trusting the untrustworthy is not a good way to go through life Don.

So what is it that the Hollywood experts have done that has "persuaded' you Don? Was it them not telling Horne that his sign edge stuff was just standard motion blur? Good stuff there eh, failure at photo 101. (please note, thats not an "interpretation", I actually did and posted a proof of concept experiment)

Or is it that they LOOKED at a frame and said Yep...Painted that in. Good stuff eh...convincing too [/sacrasm]

Tell you what, when the H7 actually releases some TECHINAL data we can all judge the actual results. They had an epic fail on the sign edge stuff...and thats where I have been critical...on yea and on using a 5th generation copy simply because they wanted to use a negative....

So what "findings" have the "true experts" in the business put out there for us to be "impressed by' Don?

Don believes...lordy lordy...Don BELIEVES

Edited February 1, 2010 by Craig Lamson