Photography & Film

This article  was orginally posted on Oct. 17 2015. It has been in part re-written, re-edited and updated in Sept. 2024.

In March 2015, Gary Mack sent a few members of the Education Forum a PM which contained some info on the Darnell & Wiegman films, I quote from the PM Darren Hastings received (third post from the top), and I quote from his post: NBC owns the original Wiegman film but when producers of JFK: Death in Dealey Plaza asked them for it 12 years ago (at my request), NBC could only locate a 1960s-era video tape of it. We wound up using, I think, a 1963/1964 theatrical newsreel version held by UCLA.

NBC took the original Wiegman and Darnell films from the Dallas NBC affiliate to New York following the assassination weekend. Whether the network still has the original Darnell film is unknown, but as a former employee I know the affiliate does not have it or a copy. Nor does Jimmy Darnell.

Fortunately, a first-generation 16mm copy print was made in Dallas over that weekend and it is in the Museum’s collection; however, the Museum cannot do anything with it until copyright issues are resolved. It’ll happen, and sooner rather than later.

Then in Sep 2015 I happen to see this NBC5 news segment from roughly two years prior, I speculate that it was because of the 50th anniversary. In this video Gary Mack, at that time the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, visited the archives of NBC5 in East Fort Worth. Mack had a close relationship with the channel. He used to work for KXAS (as the network was named before it became NBC5), starting in 1981, according to the NYT, where part of his job was to manage and preserve the station’s film archives and its coverage of the assassination and its aftermath.

The video shows Mack of the 6th Floor Museum going into a room in a basement of NBC 5, where various boxes are standing on shelves which contain WBAP (later to become KXAS) film spools of the JFK Assassination and above all its aftermath, looking at this makes me think about all the excuses TV corporations and disinfo agents spread about the films being hard to find or ‘locked away’ when the video clearly shows that the films are just placed in a box without any serious form of preservation and identification present.

My and a handful of others’ quest has always been to find the best possible versions of the Dave Wiegman and Jimmy Darnell films. It has been challenging to say the least.

Then UNT Libraries posts a press release, which now has been removed from their website, and replaced with this page where they state that they will house the complete news archive from NBC5/KXAS (formely WBAP)  from 1950 – 2012 and that the UNT Library will digitise all this material.

Following this I contacted the UNT Library on Sept 7 2015 and conversed  with Morgan Gieringer, I asked her about the films and if there was an inventory list of them.

I quote from her reply: KXAS made a prior agreement with the 6^th Floor Museum in Dallas to donate all JFK related news footage to the museum.  You will need to contact them with this inquiry.

After getting this message the first thing I did was to contact the 6th Floor Museum through Twitter and asked them if they had these films. To which I got the following reply.

I contacted MG again and asked: another email from me, just when I thought and you probably as well the matter was closed, but the funny thing is that when I asked the 6th floor museum whether they had the KXAS film collection and they denied they had any of it.

I contacted NBC 5 as well and Sharla Alford  assistant to the News Director/Custodian of Records got back to me promptly telling me that the University Of North Texas or the 6th Floor Museum has got all the JFK Assassination related film material from KXAS.

I replied and asked her if she could provide an inventory of the films, to which I got a reply from Brain Hocker, who is the VP of programming, research and digital media at NBC5.

He forwarded me to their online archive instead containing all the video screeners that were beamed across the nation that weekend and just after. Video, exactly the low resolution is not worth the bother, as the HD documentaries that have shown snippets of these films are in a larger resolution than what was offered to me. Furthermore the Darnell film was nowhere to be seen and the Weigman film was shown 3 times, and only once did it show the front of the TSBD.

I replied asking them (Brian Hocker at NBC5 and Megan Bryant at the 6th Floor Museum) several questions:

1/The film reels are clearly shown in the NBC5 news item, as shown above, just dormant in some boxes on a shelve in the basement at NBC5 archives, so where are they now?

2/Why are they not being digitised at ENT since everything else from that period of KXAS is?

3/Where are the original Darnell and Weigman films?

4/Can we get some high resolution still scans of the 1st gen. Darnell film that is at the 6th Floor Museum?

Then in August 2024 the Sixth Floor Museum issues a press release about the Darnell film. Furthermore the museum shares the film for public viewing.

Dennis Morrisette posts at the education forum (5 posts from the bottom) that Stephen Fagin has replied to his email:  Thanks for your e-mail. We know there has been some interest in the Museum’s recent YouTube upload, and we are so pleased to be able to finally share the Darnell film online considering the researcher interest over the years. To clarify, the Museum does not have the camera original Darnell film. To our knowledge, if that film still exists, it is with NBC in New York. What we have is a print of the film that originally came to the Museum as part of the G. William Jones Collection back in 2006. Since the Museum did not have the rights from the local NBC affiliate (NBC 5 / KXAS-TV) to use the WBAP-TV footage in the Jones Collection, we were not able to do anything with the films without KXAS’s permission for specific projects. This changed only recently when NBC 5 / KXAS-TV generously donated their assassination-related footage to the Museum—and included rights to the WBAP-TV footage already in the Museum’s Jones Collection, which includes our print of the Darnell film. The late Gary Mack speculated that our copy of the Darnell film was a first-generation print of the film and shared this belief with researchers many years ago. I was twice asked about this same print of the Darnell film at JFK Lancer conferences, and I noted at that time that we could not be certain that it was a first-generation print. That is still the case. So, again, this is the same print that has been in the Museum’s possession since 2006. We simply now have the rights to share it publicly. What we put online is an excerpt from the digitization of the film, so the quality is as it appears. It is the same transfer that researchers were previously able to view by appointment in the Museum’s Reading Room.​

Ok so what can we ‘discover’ in that film that wasn’t in view before in earlier versions?

I managed to see Otis Wiliams still being on the steps. Something I could not see In previous Darnell versions, it was nothing more than a highlighted blurry blob. Now you can see Williams, wearing his white shirt and tie has at the time Darnell filmed the Marrion Baker run remained in the same position as he has been in the Altgens 6 photo

and the Dave Wiegman film.