YOU may not know the name Eddie Adams, but unless you just arrived from Mars (or New Jersey) you know the photographer’s most famous image: a Vietnamese general shooting dead a Viet Cong prisoner at point-blank range on a Saigon street in 1968.
The photo won a Pulitzer Prize and helped turn US public opinion against the ill-advised war.
In the documentary “An Unlikely Weapon,” Adams and people such as Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Morley Safer talk extensively about his career as a photojournalist for The Associated Press and later for Time, Parade and even Penthouse.
His Parade editor calls the demanding Adams “one of the biggest pains in the ass in journalism.”
According to the press notes for Susan Morgan Cooper’s fawning film, Adams — who died in 2004 of Lou Gehrig’s disease — photographed 13 wars, six American presidents and every major film star of the past half-century.
But it is that one photo on a Saigon street that made Adams a star of sorts. (Woody Allen displayed it prominently in his 1980 satire “Stardust Memories.”)
Adams plays down the photo (“the composition was terrible”) and expresses regret about the general, convinced that he had destroyed the man’s life.
Years after the shot, Adams goes to Virginia to visit the general — behind the counter at the local pizzeria he bought after coming to the US. Talk about fact being stranger than fiction.
Running time: 85 minutes. Not rated (nudity, war images, profanity). At the Quad, 13th Street between Fifith and Sixth avenues.