An Unlikely Weapon - Film Review

An unlikely weapon exploded in Brooklyn on March 5, 2009. At about 6 o'clock that evening, the doors opened at the Umbrage Gallery, on riverside Front Street in an area with a Disney-like acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. There through April 30, weapons of mass dissemination adorned the walls, under the title "Eddie Adams: Vietnam" – both commemorating and cross-platform promoting the gallery's same-name publication, the first book solely devoted to the late photographer who gave us one of the last century's most iconic images.

Two photographs of the Vietnam War are etched in our collective memory. One, by Associated Press photographer Huỳnh Công Út, known professionally as Nick Ut, shows a terrified, naked little girl named Phan Thị Kim Phúc running screaming from a napalm attack on June 8, 1972. The other, by the AP's Eddie Adams, is of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the National Police chief of South Vietnam, performing a summary street-execution of a plainclothes Viet Cong officer on February 1, 1968.

Each won its photographer the Pulitzer Prize. Yet while the Ut image crystallized the Apocalypse Now horror of the war, it was Adams' picture, four years earlier, that first helped to focus Americans' attention on what was rapidly becoming a morally murky morass.

"I don't understand to this day why it was important," Adams, who died in 2004 at age 71, claims beyond the grave, in the documentary feature An Unlikely Weapon, which opened at New York City's Quad Theatre in Greenwich Village. In one of the interviews that appear in this balanced and anything-but-hagiographic biography directed and co-produced by Susan Morgan Cooper – whose previous feature, Mirjana: One Girl's Journey (1997), chronicled a refugee Croatian girl trying to adjust to life with a California foster family – the legendary Adams is as ever the curmudgeonly contrarian: The light wasn't right, the composition was terrible, etc., etc. And then he adds just this little aside, this delightfully passive-aggressive little throwaway line: "Because I've heard so many different versions of what this picture did, like, 'It helped end the war in Vietnam.'

Welllll, maybe not – it was another seven years and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties before the fall of Saigon, after all. But there's no denying the power of the image – the last moment of a man's life, captured in one forever-frozen expression. Not even the color news footage of the same event, by NBC cameraman Vo Suu, had the same impact. The late ABC anchor Peter Jennings, interviewed in An Unlikely Weapon before his own death in 2005, says it was Adams' black-and-white still photograph that introduced the nation to "the absolute cruelty of that war."

Adams, born in New Kensington, Penn., 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, on June 12, 1933, had covered his fill of war by then. He'd served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War as a combat photographer, then mustered out to work at a 13,000-circulation newspaper back in the States. He graduated to a 50,000-circulation paper and then to a Philadelphia paper four times that size before winding up at what was then the cream of the crop for photojournalists: the Associated Press. All told, Adams in his long career would cover a baker's-dozen wars.

But it was that That Picture that propelled his career and made him famous, no matter how ambivalent about it he remained. "He had mixed feelings," his widow, Alyssa Adams, a photo editor at TV Guide, recalls today. It wasn't unusual for guns to be waved at prisoners' heads to threaten them. But a summary execution with no trial and perhaps the wrong person being executed? "When Eddie took the picture, he didn't know that the guy was shooting [the prisoner], because when [Eddie] clicked was when the [prisoner] was shot," Alyssa said. Eddie, in the documentary, says forensic evidence later indicated that in the 1/500th of a second in which the picture was shot, the bullet still had not yet traveled through the prisoner's skull.

"I think he was glad he got the picture, but I don't think he was happy that he was the one who took it," Alyssa muses. "It's a horrific picture and a big responsibility." It certainly impacted Eddie's career. "How could anybody have had the same career after that?" she concurs. "He won the Pulitzer, there was a lot of attention. His career would have been different [otherwise].. Maybe it would have gone in a different direction."

Ironically, Eddie Adams took his career in a myriad of different directions all by himself "At one point he got tired of covering wars and started dong the celebrity stuff," Alyssa says. And he did that stuff extraordinary well. His scores of celebrity portraits, mostly for the cover of Parade magazine, include such famous images as soon-to-be-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a bathtub close-up – with a rubber duckie. A photo Adams took of Clint Eastwood, during a Parade shoot, wound up being used as the poster image for Eastwood's Academy Award-winning movie Unforgiven (1992). Adams also shot scantily clad scads of Penthouse models for centerfolds and other pictorials; the documentary even includes his secret for getting models to put out – photographically speaking – through carefully ignoring them for the first day or two of a shoot until they're finally thinking, "He doesn't think I'm hot stuff? Well! I'm just gonna show him!"

The documentary was about a half-dozen years in gestation, says Alyssa Adams' sister, Cindy Lou Adkins, an actress (Disturbia, 2007) and the co-producer of An Unlikely Weapon. She had served as associate producer on the documentary Blues by the Beach (2004), about an Israeli beach bar facing military attack, she says, and also worked in an unspecified capacity on the documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X (1994). Much of the most compelling footage in An Unlikely Weapon is simply of Eddie walking and talking is on the streets of New York City's East Village and Lower East Side, where Adkins accompanied him with a handheld camera.

"In the beginning, he was kind of uncomfortable and clammed up," Adkins says. " Then it got to the point where he was starting to talk. He'd say, 'Aren't you gonna turn the camera on? I'm speaking!'"

Soldiering on, Adkins shot "hours and hours of footage" with only vague notions of how it might be used, and didn't know what to do with it because “I wasn't quite sure what the next step would be in terms of finishing the film. Then I met Susan Cooper, and she had an editing bay and some money and experience, so she came in" – as did, at various points, a parade of notables, all happy to talk about their iconoclastic friend and colleague: newsmen Jennings, Peter Arnett, Tom Brokaw ("Eddie Adams was like a coach/mentor to your journalists"), Morley Safer ("Eddie was not your sedate, thoughtful photographer. He was a grunt; he went out and did his job and looked for trouble both on and off the job") and Bob Schieffer; photographers Ut, David Hume Kennerly ("Soldiers couldn't believe that anybody who didn't have to be there would be there. 'If you're takin' the same chances that we are, then welcome to the club'"), Bill Eppridge and Gordon Parks; and Robert F. Kennedy's daughter Kerry Kennedy, a human-rights activist with whom Adams collaborated on a portrait book, Speak Truth to Power (2003), depicting largely unsung rights activists around the world.

In true Adams form, he disagreed with Kennedy about the title and wouldn't speak to her for years until he'd become stricken with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's Disease, after which he welcomed her with open arms. Alyssa chuckles at the memory. "He did love people, but he had a shit list, and if you were on his s*** list, he didn't love you. Everything was black and white with him, and no shades of gray – you could do something wrong and not know it, and wind up on the shit list." Adds Cindy, "You could be on his s*** list for years."

Grudges are the mark of an unhappy soul, and as Adams walks by Tompkins Square Park on his peripatetic wanderings with Cindy in the documentary, he says plainly, "I get happy, but it doesn't last long." His son August, now 19, is the first thing Adams mentions when he talk about what made him happy – "the light of his life," Cindy says. "They would take trips together just the two of them." (August, now 19 and in culinary school, has inherited some of his father's talent, with a couple of his images of abandoned subway stations appearing here on TakeGreatPictures.com.)

It was the unyielding perfectionist in Adams that both made him as great as he was and tortured him as much as it did. "Who really gives a shit, y'know?" he asks in one particularly reflective moment on the documentary. "Why put yourself through all this pressure and agony or wanting to compete or wanting to be the best at what you do?"

In his later years, Adams converted an old Lower East Side bathhouse into what became a celebrated photo studio/salon on East 11th Street between Avenues A and B. Ironically, says Alyssa, "We're actually doing better now than when Eddie was alive! He had a habit," she recalls with loving ruefulness, "of hiring leggy, 22-year-old girls who didn't know what they were dong. Well," she amends, "there were one or two who knew a little bit. But they were always very nice girls. They're part of the extended family now."

"His photo assistants were all very attractive women," Cindy confirms, "but also capable of lugging hundreds of pounds of equipment. They're all very much still in touch. Eddie," she says, "was in his moment when he had a margarita in his hand and lots of people around. He didn't like to be alone. He was never happy with his work, except for moments. And he never talked about his [past] work – he talked about the next project he was gonna do." This has included, with a generosity belying the curmudgeonly exterior, his founding of Barnstorm, a free, annual four-day workshop for young photographers, held each October in upstate New York.

"Eddie was Eddie was Eddie," says his widow, Alyssa. "I think that was part of his appeal: Eddie was basically the same person to everybody." Parade editor/CEO Walter Anderson probably described the man best: "one of the biggest pains in the asses in journalism … demanding, selfish … egomaniacal" – and, he adds, "a genius."