Eddie Adams will always be remembered for the iconic image at the top of this page. But he also was a perfect Penthouse girl photographer. A new movie tries to capture all aspects of a complicated man.
The Eddie Adams I knew would have loved the idea of being the star of his own movie, but he might not have loved everything about An Unlikely Weapon, the new film about his life, directed by Susan Morgan Cooper and narrated by Kiefer Sutherland. For one thing, Eddie hated the idea of hype. Being hailed as a “legend” who changed history would have made him laugh with derision.
But more important, I think he would have resented the film’s focus on his Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of a 1968 Saigon street execution. He knew the photo’s lurid fame would follow him, but he bitterly regretted the fact that the execu tioner, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, was vilified until the end of his life. As he wrote in Time magazine after Loan’s death in 1998, “What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two, or three American soldiers?”
Eddie was much, much more than the man who happened to snap that photo in Saigon in 1968, and the film really comes to life when it leaves Vietnam behind and gives us glimpses of the feisty lensman whose iconic celebrity photos for Parade gave that newspaper supplement a world-class reputation. Eddie knew the worth of fame, but he never lost sight of his own worth as well. When Fidel Castro kept him waiting too long for a photo shoot, Eddie told the dictator’s minions he was going home. Quickly, Fidel apologized and invited Eddie duck hunting. The resulting photographs are classics.
Eddie really enjoyed shooting celebrities. He knew he was good at it and he was happy to earn the inflated fees he could charge because they enabled him to help dozens of younger photographers at the free workshop he ran. He also loved photographing girls for Penthouse, and one of the highlights of the movie is his monologue on how his erotic pictorials were the result of driving the models into a frenzy of sexual frustration.
“Maybe one day, if I take the perfect picture, I’ll be happy,” Eddie said. The truth is, he took hundreds, and people will always be enthralled by his wonderful, funny, terrifying, beau tiful, scary, and always very human photos. An Unlikely Weapon, despite its flaws, is indispensable because it captures, forever, the unforgettable man behind the camera.
