Robert Blake and Final Thoughts

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone maybe one of the most realistic true crime films ever made. We are talking about in cold blood today, both Truman Capotody's groundbreaking nineteen sixty five novel and the nineteen sixty seven film of the same name And we're doing this because we're covering breakfast at Tiffany's on Monday, which was, of course, based on the novella of the same nameame by Truman Capoti Now, since we're covering that film, which as we'll discuss, was an extremely unfaithful adaptation of Capote's work, I thought it would only be fair to give his most famous work in cold bllood its own episode, especially since the film is a very faithful adaptation, perhaps in some ways, more faithful even than Capote's own account of the Clutter Family murders And it goes to some pretty extreme lengths in pursuit of its realism Now this is an episode in our out of frame series where we focus a little more on what happens just out of frame, off the movie sets and in real life than we do in our main feed episodes. And in this case, that means that we will be discussing the murders of the Clutter family on which in cold blood is based. And there is some explicit details, so please be warned. If you're not someone who wants to hear about that, you may want to exit here All right, I'm here, as always with Chris Winterbauer and Chris, what was your experience with in cold bllood, both the book and the movie before today I thought I had seen this. Me too. And maybe I had seen portions of it I don't think I'd ever sat and watched the whole thing all the way through. So I will just say, It felt like a fresh first time viewing And this movie is at least from a technical perspective Absolutely phenomenal. Yes. So just a couple shoutouts. I think that the bllack and white cinematography by Conrad Hall, who's one of the greatest cinematographers of all time is just a true standout. some of it's some of the greatest stark contrasty imagery, you know, you'll ever see. Roger Deakins agrees, by the way. He has multiple times called this out as the best black and white cinematography ever. It really may be the great. I mean, it's and it's, you know, there were Fewer and fewer. this is sixty seven. Black and white is you know out of the picture at this point. And yet it evokes crime scene photography, I think so well from the time I did take a look at some of the Clutter familyamily imagery online. The music by Quincy Jones, I initially found a little jarring and then you realize what they're doing and it's so effective at first it feels almost like it's Mickey mousing with the Jaunty walking basassline, with the criminals and the almost like you know with the clutters. And then the decision towards the end of Act two to play The murders entirely without score Yeah is very noticeable and I think extremely effective. and it's a stark contrast to Capote, the which we might talk about a little bit today as well And I'll just mention the writing and the editing. So Richard Brooks both wrote and directed. And the editor, Peter Zinner, great editor, who also edited to the Godfather and the Godfather part too. Yeah, it's remarkable. The transitions in particular are incredible. Yes, which have to be written into it. So there are innumerable match cuts, either matches on action or matches on theme or tone. And so the movie just feels like it ping pongs between the clutters and our killers, Dick and Perry or then the police, the KBI and our killers. And the last thing I'll say, so the casting, I think is impecable. And then Robert Blake and Scott Wilson are, you know, absolutely perfectly cast to the point where it's kind of difficult to watch Pote even and I love Cliffson Collins Jr. I think he's a fantastic actor and And obviously Robert Blake we'll talk about his history. Yes. following this film later. I think for me The big difference between the book and the movie is obviously the focus, write the book. much more focuses on the clutters or the six victims, as Capoti describes it, Whas the movie feels like it really from the beginning says we're exploring the killers in this movie. To me, it's why they feel almost so slightly different genres in that the movie feels like a crime movie more than anything else, Whas the book feels more like a horror book in some ways, because the book establishes us in the perspective of the world that will be violated, which is Holcbe And the movie establishes us first in the world of the Violators, which is Perry and Dick Hickcock. Anyway, I loved it. I thought it was an incredible movie. This is a really complicated story. very ethically and morally complex area that we're entering into with Kapote. And then the movie's decision to omit Kapote entirely is fascinating, especially considering that his name is in the title. It is called Truman Capote's in cold blood.. And yet Kapodi is missing and there is a composite journalist character instead. So Anyway, I'll leave it at that I wonder about, I mean, that's obviously intentional I wonder if part of that was that Richard Brooks recognized some of the I don't wantan to say manipulation. Yes. Yeah. I mean, manipulation is accurate, I think, of Truman Capotody in terms of this story. and that actually inserting him in the part that he really truly played in this into the movie would have made it a very different movie. It would have made it Capote, which I also rewatched Bennett Miller's two thousand five. It's either two thousand five or two thousand six. It's that an infamous came out back to back. Yes. bothoth are very good. by the way, I prefer Kapoti. It is excellent. That's a fun rewatch as well if you have a little bit of time. Well, maybe not fun, but very interesting. So Similar to you, I thought I had seen this as well. I remember my mom talking about it. I also read In coldblood in high school and really loved it. I'm about halfway through a reread of it myself. I don't know that I agree that it completely centers the clutters. It does center Holcom, for sure and the community. there is an awful lot of focus on Perry and Dick in cold bllood as well. And as we know, Capodi's own fascination was very much with Perry Smith. Sure Let me rephrase for the first third of the book The focus is the clutters. Absolutely. And then they're out, obviously. But then for the first third of the movie The focus is really Perry and Dick and their approach to Holcombe. There's almost none of the clutters in the movie. Exactly. likeike on paper, I don't love that. and yet I actually think it works very well in the context of the film because they don't spread themselves too thin at all. I think Rks is very aware of how much he can cover in the time that he has. and what he achieves, I think, also by removing Capote is potentially a more accurate portrait of Dick and Perry I think so, certainly more than the movie Kapoti. Yes, I think so too As you said, cinematography is stunning. I also really enjoyed the score. We'll talk about it a little bit. It's very disconcerting. It is a lot creepier than I expected, and I thought that the choice to hold the actual night in question, the murder until almost the very end of the movie was very smart. And you know, I wondered when it started, I was like, oh my God, are they just gonna to skip the murders completely because they really just like zip right past it. Which the book does as well. Yeah, but I think to do it on film is a little bit different and I thought it worked very, very well. And I was also surprised by like This felt very modern in terms of the things that they were showing and saying, like It's pretty graphic. Yeah to do extremely effective perspective work to put you into the mind of Perry Smith in particular. I loved the fantasy sequences with his mother and father Yeah, his dad pointing the shotgun at him at the end, the way they did that. And it really, I think what Brooks does really well Is he really sets up a question of Even though I knew Perry Smith was the trigger man going into it. Right. He very effectively makes you wonder which one of these guys didid the killing because there's one you know, we know they have one shotgun. and I think that he very effectively sets up a question of Could it really be Smith because Hiccook seems like the psychopath when the two of them are together? Right And then he, of course, he turns around in the same way that I think something like the Sopranos is so effective, he gets you to root for Tony and then shows him to be the monster that we all deep down know he is. the same thing is achieved in this movie All right, well, we're going walk through the real case and how perception of it and, of course, the murderers was forever altered by Truman Capote's novel, and then I would say again by this film This is really a story about adaptation and what gets lost in the pursuit of a great story and how a real life horror became a work of art for better and for worse M. So let's start with the people who, as you mentioned, get almost zero screen time in the film, the Clutter family themselves Now, Herb Clutter was an extremely well respected member of the community. This is the father He was a successful wheat farmer in Holcombe, Kansas to the point where he was actually appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower to the Federal Farm Credit Board. This guy was a seriously important person in Holcombe. He was not the richest man in town, that was actually his neighbor He could always be counted on to lend a hand, but one interesting thing about him is he had a zero tolerance policy for alcohol and he would actually require his workers to like sign a document saying that they would not drink while working for him, and he would fire anybody that he caught doing it M Nancy Clutter, the daughter was sixteen years old, daughter of hererb and Bonnie, and more on Bonnie in a minute She baked incredible pies. She was a straight A student. She rode her old farm horse babe. She helped the family out immensely. you see snippets of this in the film, but it seems like She was one of those teenagers who was somehow able to sort of balance the weight of the world on their shoulders Kenon Clutter was fifteen. This is her brother. He was an avid hunter and woodworker. You do see this in the film at the very end when he references the hope chest that he's building for his older sister, Beverly, which she really was building at the time of his murder Herban Bonn had two other children who were not in the home at the time of the murders. That's Beverly and Evanna or Eviana, I think Ivanna, who were twenty one and twenty three respectively. But it was Bonnie Clutter who probably suffered the most from Capoti's portrayal of the family. In the book, she is painted as mentally and physically very fragile. And this is something that Capotody said, you know, oh, was no secret in the town of Holcombe It says she sleeps in a separate bedroom and she's basically a bedridden invalid who had been in and out of psychiatric inpatient care for six years However, in the Sundance TV Dcu series, living relatives of the Clutters pointed out forty five inaccuracies just in Capote's account of the family. And they said that his portrayal of Bonnie was the most inaccurate of all Now it does seem true that she may have pushed through mental health and physical struggles. There's a lot of speculation that she may have had postpartum depression She was absolutely not bedridden. She ran the cllutter household. She was an active mother and wife This really hurt the two remaining daughters the way that he spoke about their mother, because it does seem like it was really not true Herb and Bonnie had built the house themselves just eleven years before the murders in nineteen forty eight And the nearest and only real neighbor was Alfred Stocklen, who had worked for the Clutters Farm He, his wife and their three kids lived in a house less than a hundred yards from the Clutter's house. Now, according to friends of the Clutters, quote, An any family that was least likely to be murdered should have been the Clutter family On november fifteenth, nineteen fifty nine, as you see in the film, Nancy's friend, also named Nancy, came to pick her up for church but was surprised when no one came to the door So she and her father went to their other friend, Susan's house to see if she knew where Nancy was. She didn't And so they all went back to the Clutter home together They entered through an unlocked back door, and it was Nancy who found her friend murdered in her bed. and her father who had been waiting outside in the car, watched as his daughter ran screaming out of the house, yelling, She's dead Now he came inside to try and call police immediately, but he discovered that all the phone lines had been cut. Nothing like this had ever happened in Hulkcbe, Kansas. No one locked their doors. It was a town of just under three hundred people. Everyone knew everyone. And in order to get there, you have to drive down a single lane route fifty six past many other small isolated towns. This is not even a place that you like happen to pass by on the highway And in fact, when the sheriff first received word that something had happened at the Clutter farm, it came over the radio as, quote, an accident It was unfathomable to everyone that it could be a quadruple homicide. Also, after news of the murders broke, the hardware store is sold out of locks Now, when the local Garden City pololice chief arrived on the scene at nine thirty AM, herb, Nancy, Bonnie, and Kenon were found pretty much exactly as you see them in the film. The attention to detail in terms of the crime scene photos and the film is pretty remarkable Herb was in the furnace room His throat was cut Kenyan was in a nearby room in the basement, Nancy in her room and Bonnie and another all had been bound and shot in the head Now Bonnie still had two rings on And Nancy was found with a gold wristwatch hidden in the toe of her boot. The theory there is that she had heard the intruders and had time to hide it before they found her. You actually see a little bit of this in the movie because you see Perry walk by the staircase Nancy walks by sort of almost imperceptibly at the top of the stairs, and it's clear that she's heard them. Kerb was laying on a cardboard box, Kenyan's restraints had been loosened and a pillow placed under his head. Nancy had been tucked in. someomeone had clearly tried to provide some comfort to the clutters and a bloody footprint was found on the mattress box next to Herb, some tire tracks outside Everything was meticulously photographed Now this was way outside the scope of the local police. So the Kansas Bureau of Investigation was called in and this is Alvin Dewey, played by John Forsythe in Cld Blood and also by Chris Cooper in Capote. and he is really wonderful in that. Alvin Dewey was set to lead the case and it was very personal for him. He knew the clutters and heard from church Now they questioned the stock liens those of the neighbors next door who hadn't heard anything except for the sound of Nancy's boyfriend, Bobby Rus's car driving away at about ten forty five PM And poor Bobby Rpp was pretty much immediately a suspect This is because Herb Clutter really didn't like him Rp was Catholic, The cllutters were Methodist and never the Tain shall meet and Herb had encouraged Nancy to end things with Bobby repeatedly Nancy had also been shot with her face turned away from the killer. That raised even more suspicion towards Bobby as we know, and as the police soon figured out, he had nothing to do with it, but that didn't stop people from whispering about him. And this is really sad. He actually had to transfer schools at a certain point because people kept talking about him So then suspicion briefly turned to the Clutter's remaining two daughters who stood to benefit from a life insurance policy that Herb had taken out. But Alvin Dewy shut that one down pretty quickly too. He was like, I do not think it's these kids Dewy was smart, and he started to favor a theory that there had been two killers. After all, Herb and Kenyon were both really Big And it seemed kind of unbelievable that one person could overpower all four of them, especially with those two guys in the house But as Dewey put it, he struggled to understand, quote, how two individuals could reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to commit such a crime Sventy two hours later, they still didn't have a suspect, which was a huge disadvantage, but they did have photographs that came back from the crime scene and sure enough Not visible to the naked eye, but very much visible on film was a distinct second bootprint next to Herb Clutter in the basement. So Alvin Dewey was right. There were two killers But he still clung to a theory that it must have been some locals with a grudge. and that does end up hurting them a little bit in this investigation. Now a one thousand dollars reward was issued for information leading to an arrest and the tips came flooding in. most of them absolutely useless except for one that came from inside Lanscing, the Kansas State Penitentiary Now Chris, how reliable? are prison tips in this scenario You would want to take them with, an enormous grain of salt, but in this instance, Floyd Wells, I believe, is the gentleman's name you it actually confirms Dewey's hunch, which is that there must have been some connectiones to cllutter. His reasoning for thinking it must be someone local is How and why would an outsider target such a random person in the middle of nowhere and Floyd Welles, as we learn, had done work. or Qarter. Yes, he had He arranged to be called into the warden's office under false pretenses so he wouldn't look like a snitch, but he was absolutely about to snitch on his former cellmate, twenty eight year old Dick Hickcock. So one important difference right away in Capoti's telling versus reality is that the KBI did not send an investigator to Dick's house as soon as they got his name. They actually waited fiveays days because they were suspicious of this tip and do we still thought that it was a local? So to your point, yes, he does think it must be someone connected But he also, I think, can't understand the motivation of someone doing this who doesn't know them And this is a big deal because had they gone that night when they got the tip, they actually may have nabbed Dick because he had gone back to his family's home But he didn't, and he and Perry went to Florida where it's suspected, although I will note deffinitely not confirmed. they may have committed another family annihilation in Florida, another family of four We're never going to know, basically, they did actually dig up the bodies and do DNA analysis on it and it was inconclusive, but it also meant that they couldn't rule them out. There just wasn't it had degraded too much to the point where they couldn't test it. Floyd did not just name Dick. He actually gave the investigators two names when he explained what he had told his cellmate He said, quote, I spent considerable time with him, meaning herb cllutter in his office, where he had a desk and I believe a safe This was the old house where the cllutters lived in nineteen forty nine, just about the time their new house was completed I distinctly remember Mr. Clutter paying a large lumber bill and I thought he paid it in cash from the safe. The reason I remember is because mister Clutter made the remark to me that evening when we left his den that he'd paid out more than ten thousand dollars that day After entering Kansas State Penitentiary, I selled with Dick Hickcock. Haycoock said he liked Western Kansas and maybe would try to get a job with the Clutters. I described the location of the house. I suspect I talked too much about the money Mr. Clutter had. Hiccock talked a lot about Perry Smith, said after they got out of the joint, they could pull some jobs to get enough money for a down payment on a boat. I tried to talk him out of it, said he would get caught but he said he had a plan, and after the robbery would kill everyone there and leave no witnesses Now Floyd is painting a rather rosy picture of himself here because it sounds like What is a lot more likely is he told Dick, there's a safe in here. There's over ten thousand dollars in it. And he was supposedly going to get a kickback of two thousand five hundred dollars from the robbery after they had done it But he did settle for a clean conscience instead in this scenario, when he realized that he had actually done it Of course, the important things there are one, he's describing their old house, not their new house, and he's referencing a safe that I think we'll never know whether or not that was actually there. It could have been there. This was ten years before the murders actually happened Later we learn They did not have any cash in the house and that Herb Clutter explicitly paid for almost everything with checks. M Now Dick and Perry, do you know how long they roomed together, Chris in prison Oh, no, I don't know. I always assumed it must have been a long time because of the connection that these two seem to have built. It was two weeks. Yeah, you know, I think in some ways, it actually makes sense that it was last time because it wasn't enough time for them to want to kill each other That's true or to really learn enough about each other to understand. Exactly. It's just enough that they have an impression of one another and they come up with a very, you know, half cocked plan. Yeah That's a good point. And it was during this time that Perry did tell Dick about the time he supposedly murdered a man with a bicycle chain in Las Vegas just for the hell of it This is almost certainly not true, but Dick believed it hookline and Sinker. Now in the movie, I think they give Perry a little bit more credit for this and they set it up almost as though it was like breadcrumb he left for Dick to see if Dick was telling on him when they were captured I don't think that's I don't think he thought that far ahead. I think Perry was extremely prone to fantasy and this was one of them Dick had grown up relatively normal, although he was always getting into trouble. He was smart, but a pretty bad student. and definitely had a away with the ladies However, he really started to change after a massive car wreck at age nineteen when he lost control of his car on the highway and was thrown from the vehicle landing face down in a ditch He had a dislocated jaw and severe head injuries that actually changed the shape of one of his eyes. Have you seen pictures of him? You can see this pretty clearly Yeah, he's as mangled as Perry's legs are and they go to great pains to show that in the movie. It looks like his face has been knocked out of alignment, you know, is the way that's that's how Capoti describes him as such. and Capote's an amazing writer and he's aligned you know, when he smiles, it kind of pulls his face back into its all American boy position, you know, Yeah, even in the pictures, you can tell that this guy was quite handsome. Like Scott Wilson, who plays him. Yes, who is great. I really love Scott Wilson in this. But there is something when you see him at certain angles, especially straight on, you can see that one eye is like an entirely different shape and size than the other one And of course Listen, this is not an excuse. We do know that severe brain trauma can absolutely change people's personality and also their ability to regulate themselves His first wife, Carol, who was a sixteen year old that he married at nineteen, said that he was a different person after the wreck. Now it should also be noted It does seem that Dick had a thing for underage girls. seems he certainly knew that Nancy Clutter was going to be in the house and that may have been part of his motivation as well Perry Smith was half Native American, half Irish. She was born into an extremely dysfunctional family with two alcoholics for parents He did have an enormous amount of death and tragedy in his family But I'm not going to dwell on it quite as much as Tim Mapoti does Now he did serve in the Korean War. He suffered a life altering motorcycle accident that disfigured his legs and caused chronic pain. This is what you referenced with the scars that they show in the movie And he was also a known dreamer who bought mail order treasure maps in prison and constantly talked about finding sunken treasure in Mexico. This was right up Dick's Ally too, who was sure if he could just make the perfect score, his life would turn around Also mail order treasure maps. Ties Why would Why would they sell them Why not? U Perry and Dick had both been jailed for burglary and smaller crimes, and it was Perry who got out first on the condition that he never set foot in Kansas again When Dick got out, he wrote Perry several times about what Floyd had told him and finally got a hold of Perry who immediately broke the terms of his parole and headed straight back to Kansas On december fifteenth, nineteen fifty nine, one month after the murders, Truman Capotody and Nell Harper Lee arrived in Holcombe, Kansas, much to the shock of the locals. Capoti had read the New York Times headline,Qote We wealthy Fmer three of Family Slain. And he decided this is what he wanted to write about next because quote, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time Now we'll give more background on Capote in Monday's episode on Breakfast at Tiffany's, but here's kind of what you need to know today His childhood had not been easy. he had never really known his father and was eventually raised by his mother's extended family in Monroeville, Alabama. This is where he met, Nell Harperleee. And of course, Chris, who is the character in Harperleee's eventual novel T Kill a mockingbird that's based Triman Gapote? Wow, what's his name? the imaginative Yeah, like little guy Y Dill. Dill. Yeah. thank you. Yeah. they were I always forget they were childhood friends. They wrote stories together and performed them. He called them apart people, I think. He said that they recognized an apartness in each other. Right. That's what it me.. Yeah. and Harever Lee was if I'm remembering She was a real tomboy and got into a and Sout is very much it feels like her And it's so interesting. It's such both of their books. this book and then Harper Lee's wrriting to Kill a Mockingbird or I guess it gets published around the same time. but such different approaches to stories of murder injustice or injustice and Rribution anyh veryer, very interesting perspectives I agree. She comes across to me as someone who was a lot more sympathetic in the way that she treated her own characters, I think According to Charles Ray Skinner, a childhood friend of Lee's brother Edwin, quote, Nell was too rough for the girls and Truman was scared of the boys, so he just tagged on to her and she was his protector At eleven years old, Kapote started writing short stories and he just never stopped. He was a perfectionist. He would apparently spend an entire day just looking for the one right word that he needed to include. He's incredible. Yeah, and he has some of the greatest some of the greatest sentence construction of you know any writer. I wanted to read One sentence if I could from Yeah There were a couple. Well, first of all, when you described Clutter, one of my favorite descriptions of him This is in the first part of the book. desescribing Mr Clutter comommenting upon a generally recognized quality of Mr. Clutters, a fearless self assurance that set him apart and while it created respect also limited the affection of others a little whichich I think is like a perfect description, especially when we think of people who are you know revered in the community being a little bit set apart. And then the other one I wanted to read because he could also be so Bch Yes, big time. And you know, I don't like Twitter, but I wish that we had gotten Koi on Twitter. He would have crushed. This is his description of the interior of the home. You know, he's describing people who are we know are about to die As for the interior, there were spongy displays of liver colored carpet intermittently abolishing the glare of varnished resounding floors, an immense modernistic living room couch covered in nubby fabric, interwoven with glittery strands of silver metal. a breakfast alcove featuring a banquet upholstered in blue and white plastic. This sort of furnishing was what Mr. and Mrs. Clutter liked, as did the majority of their acquaintances, whose homes by and large, were similarly furnished. And I love how just damning by saying This is simply what they liked. I know. So cutting. and he's very pithy, but and he's also a deeply empathetic writer as we learn, almost a flaw. I would say definitely to a flaw. I think He you know, he's coming from the very cosmopolitan scene in New York as we're going to learn. And you mentioned he's an incredible writer. He iss one of the greatest writers of all time ever. He did go to some prep schools. He actually never went to college. He just kept writing. And he became a friend to really all the greatest socialites that New York had to offer. He eventually published his first novel Other Voices Other Rooms in nineteen forty eight And Breakfast at Tiffany's had just been published in nineteen fifty eight, I think a little over a year before these murders actually happened Capotody was nervous about trying to get people in Holcombe, Kansas to talk to him, which I mean If you've never heard Truman Capote talk G listen to a recording of Tue Mapoti. You will understand why he was nervous which is why he brought Harper Lee along with him. Now, you know, you're talking about the way that he described their living rooms. It is bitchy. It is a bitchy, you know, sort of New York socialite attitude coming into Kansas, he absolutely needed Harperleee because she did not have that at all She had just turned in her manuscript for Te killa Mckingbird, but it had not been published at the time that they went to Holcombe. So she was really completely unknown. And she did an enormous amount of work on in cold blood a lot more than I realized. She actually laid the groundwork for most of Capoti's interviews over the course of this book and functioned as a pretty indispensable research assistant And later when the book was published, do you know what credit she got I don't She's featured in the acknowledgements That's Truman Capote. It is Their friendship started to kind of cool after that, she was pretty hurt given how much work she put into this Somewhat surprisingly, though, Capote actually formed a real and very lasting friendship with Alvin Dewy, lead agent for the KBI on the case. And this was initially by turning up the charm on Dewey's wife, Marie and son Paul, who wanted to be a writer. And of course, they knew who Truman Capote was Now Dewey was shockingly open with Kapote about this case to agree that I don't think any law enforcement officer would ever be today. He gave him access to case files, Nancy Clutter's diary entries. He vouched for Kapotody when people were reluctant to talk to him, including poor Bobby Rp, who only agreed to be interviewed because quote, Al Dewey advised me to And by the way This is happening before they have caught the guys that did it. He is opening up the investigation to Kapoti It's u, you know Don't people lock their doors around here? they will tonight. I mean, it's the equivalent of that. He's very trusting. He doesn't believe that there's any ulterior motive. What other motive could there be? Yeah, true. You know, and as we'll learn, Kapodian effectively inventing a new form of storytelling through this book. Gives reason. Yes for law enforcement to distrust people telling these types of stories Point, yeah. Now in terms of the actual night of the murder, what you see in the movie is pretty accurate Dick and Perry arrived at the Clutter Farm around midnight on november fifteenth, nineteen fifty nine They both lost their nerve as they were driving towards the farm when they saw a light flicker on in the farm hand's house At this point they talked each other into it basically calling each other's bluff. They drank a little bit and then they continued down the road to the farm They got inside, they searched for the safe, didn't find it, woke up Herb and the rest of the family and insisted that they tell them where the safe was. But Herb insisted there was no safe And Perry in pretty much every account he ever gave seemed to believe him. Dick did not Now Perry comes across as sympathetic at many, many points in cold bllood. as we've said, I think less so than he does in the movie. But he definitely paints Dick as the instigator and the violent one all throughout After all, Perry stopped Dick from assaulting Nancy. That is true, it seems He was the one who placed the cardboard under her because he was cold the pillow under Kenyon As we know, it was Perry who cut the phone lines and herb Clutter's throat, and it was Perry who shot every single member of the Clutter family And by the way, that moment in the movie where he's going through Nancy's stuff and he drops the silver dollar, that's real He found himself, you know crawling under the bed to get this child's coin basically As is this quote from Perry Smith,Qote, I didn't want to harm the man referring to Hb cllutter. I thought he was a very nice gentleman, soft spoken. I thought so right up until the moment, I cut his throat. whichich appears both in cold blood and in Capote But I prefer the way in which it appears in cold blood personally. What is the difference? They both occur as the culminating line following the reveal of what happened that night. So we see the flashback But with Perry Smith, he's saying it to Alvin Dewey, John Forsythe in the car in cold blood. and It is played more as a kind of terrifying self revelation as opposed to Clifton Collins, junior more Tearful confession in Kapoti. And I appreciated that Brooks didn't feel like he was attempting to ring Pathos from the moment He was instead trying to show that They have wondered what unknowable evil could come into this home. And the most terrifying aspect to me is that it remains unknowable even to Perry Smith in that moment. and I thought it was really effective. Whereas in Capoti, it feels like it's played a little bit more in that more typical prestiige kind of way with music and whatnot, etcetera Yes. And I believe Capote is more accurate in terms of who that is actually said to that it is being delivered to Truman Capotody. But of course, that in and of itself calls into question the nature of that quote. Right. How it's been colored by his interpretation. Right. So all told Dick and Perry got about forty dollars from the cllutters that night plus some items they stole in poawned. Alogether they walked away with about one hundred dollars, which is around one eleven hundred dollars today They went on the run. theirir plans in Mexico fell apart Meanwhile, Capotody and Harper Lee were treated to dinner parties and borderline unlimited access to the investigation and people of Holcombe Once Dick and Perry were captured, Capoti got Also unlimited access to them as well. And by the way, in Bennet Miller's Capote, Truman is shown handing over ten thousand dollars to the prison warden in order to get this kind of access. But the only evidence that this ever happened is an unattbuted quote, apparently from Kapote himself in Gerald Clark's biography, quQote, I went for broke and asked for an interview with this behind the scenes figure who was a man of great distinction and renown in that state I'll give you ten thousand dollars if you can arrange this, I said. I guess my offer was very tempting. And he just nodded his head But according to the Guardian, Codian really didn't let facts get in the way of the best story. And given that Codody engaged a local law firm to help negotiate the terms of his access to Perry and Dick An envelope full of cash almost certainly did not cross the desk of the Wharten I think Bennet Miller is an exceptional one of the I directors. I also think Bennett Miller is not going to let The truths getting in the way of a good story. I mean' so these things as well. And I love I mean, as I mentioned Moneyball, one of my favorite films of all time. I love Foxcatcher too. Yeah. Which also there, you know are some questions about the way in which that those relationships were portrayed. Yes Dick and Perry were sentenced to death by hanging after the jury deliberated for only thirty minutes. However, the case would drag on, of course, for five years through appeals and stays of execution. Something Truman Capote really did not account for. He had developed an arguably too close relationship with Perry Smith over the course of their interviews, but now he had a big problem Yeah His manuscript was almost completely done But he didn't have an ending because those stays of execution kept rolling in And this tore Kapotody apart because as a human being, he didn't want his friend Perry to die. As a writer, he really couldn't afford for him to live Finally, on april fourteenth, nineteen sixty five, they were both executed with Truman and Capote in attendance, and Capote was reportedly. crushed. He was inconsolable on the flight home and As we know from the rest of his life, he never really recovered from this From September to October of that same year, in cold Blood was published as a four part series in The New Yorker, and each part broke the magazine's sales records at the newsstands And in January of nineteen sixty six, the quote unquote novel, was published and shot straight to number one on the New York Times nonfiction best sellers list where it stayed for thirteen weeks And Chris, you referenced this, but Capote himself really promoted it as a new form of literature. It was the true crime novel And the word novel is very important because that is exactly what it was. Yeah, there's he is giving an interteriority to characters that would be impossible to actually achieve. Right. I actually, I don't w want to mischaracterize this. I actually don't think that his portrait of, for example, Bonnie Cutter is unsympathetic at all. He may have mischaracterized the extents of her self isolation, for example. Yeah. However, I actually think he does a fantastic job of exploring the nooks and crannies of Relatively undiscussed things at the time, like postpartum depression. Yeah, a feeling of isolation and a lack of purpose, for example, in her home life once her children have grown. And then it's just a brief sojourn, you know when he discusses how she actually got a job in Wichita at one point and actually enjoyed it so much that it felt Christian as if she was betraying her husband her family and so she felt the need to return. Again, I don't want to speak to the accuracy. I don't know her family would know, but I always found it sympathetic. It is one hundred percent. It is. I mean, he's absolutely incredible at creating characters. He's incredible at descriptions, at understanding motivations. Even just characters that come and go for just a moment. You know what I mean? The male womoman of the, you know of the p who you know again, But the problem is was ue Of course And I'm not saying that there weren't kerns of truth in it. There were. there were more than kernels of truth to it, but it was enough that it really impacted the living daughters because it wasn't accurate. And it's the tricky thing with this genre because he's saying it's a novel, but he's also saying it's based on this true story, it gets really murky really quickly Well, and here's something else that I actually didn't know before researching this episode, he never used a tape recorder in any of the interviews that he conducted And they point that out in Capote when I have ninety four percent perfect recall, which that's right. How could we possibly know that? You can't. So he relied on his recall, which as you said, he claimed was anywhere between ninety two percent and ninety six percent accurate. The number depended on the day and the context of the conversation And he said that he'd spent two years training himself on his near perfect recall. But as George Plimpton once said, he could recall everything, but he could never remember what percentage recall he had Almost immediately after the book was published, Esquire actually sent native Kansan Phillips Tompkins to Holcomb to retrace Capoti's steps, and pretty much right away he discovered that ninety two percent to ninety six percent may have been quite generous He found several inaccuracies, most glaringly in the portrayal of Perry Smith Capote Smith, as we have discussed, is soulful, confused, he's sympathetic, He's violent, but perhaps understandably so. In reality, it seems he was probably an awful lot more conscious, calculated and deliberate when it came to murdering the Clutter family And to give you an idea of how much creative license Capotody had taken, the final scene of the book features Alvin Dewey, speaking with Susan, Nancy Clutter's best friend at the Graves site Susan tells Dewey that she's in college now. Bobby Rp has grown up and married a beautiful girl. And it seems that the community is changing and finally moving on Except this never took place. It was a complete invention by Capoti, which he did admit before his death in nineteen eighty four This is not to belittle Capote's work, which is revolutionary and changed both the way nonfiction was written and how it was received by the general public. However He was pretty irresponsible with the way he positioned it as the truth In fact, when it was initially published, Capotody insisted that every word in it was true The New Yorker, of course, had employed a fact checker as well. But it was later discovered that this person was a close friend of Capoti's who had basically just double checked names, spellings, and dates, not the way that it was written or how any of the scenes were recreated. which calls into question so much of what Perry Smith quote unquote said because so often it was said alone in a prison cell to Truman Capoti One thing I love about my husband, David is that this man cannot pass up a good deal. As soon as he sees a yard sale, it's like a tractor beam is pulling him in and he cannot resist. And his deal hunting obsession has rubbed off on me, except I'm not pulling my way through cobweb cover yard sales, I'm on whatnot Whatnot is the number one live shopping app in the US where shopping happens in real time with real people, real conversations, and incredible deals. Seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how great the deals are. You almost never pay full price on name brand perfume, clothes, makeup, handbags, jewelry, and so much more. Plus, it's fun. You're connecting with sellers and other shoppers, It's like hanging out and shopping with friends I just got an amazing Goodfellass t shirt from Treasure Chest TX for nine dollars that I can't wait to wear and a vintage Gucci cross body bag from the Don's luxury that I picked up for like half the price of other retailers. I am obsessed with it. Everything arrived so quickly and in excellent condition. Download what Not today and get twenty dollars off and free shipping on your first purchase Search What notot W H A T N OT in the A store, sign up and start finding the best deals on the products you love with twenty dollars off and free shipping on your first purchase. Now before the New Yorker even published the series, Hollywood was already circling the project for a feature film adaptation. And in fact, people wanted it so badly that fights broke out. Physical fights, Chris. Otto Preminger got into an altercation with his agent Irving Lazar at a bar when Lazar blocked him from acquiring the rights, and Lazar actually hit him over the head with a high ball glass and faced criminal charges for it. But on june twelfth, nineteen sixty six, Richard Brooks and Columbia Pictures won the prize after promising to stay completely faithful to the book. Potody got somewhere around four hundred thousand dollars, which is four point four million dollars today and a thirty percent cut of the box office profit. The thirty percent is actually the much more noticeable number there Yeah, that's a that. extremely high. Yes. If you don't know who Richard Brooks was, he had directed Kat on a Hoton Rof, Blackboard Jungle, Elmer Gantry. I mean, he was a twenty year veteran of Brothers Karamaz off, the Yol Brenner one. Yeah And he had actually been wanting to write a true crime film for a while. And so when this one came around, he took on the role of writer, producer, and director Now, he insisted they needed to keep the budget low, and he also wanted to cast unnamed actors. He told the LA Times, quote, If the picture were to cost a great deal of money, we would have to please too many people, thereby perhaps pleasing very few He also insisted on black and white, which is cheaper, but also, as you pointed out, has that look of crime scene photos Mhm Soon word got out that the script, also written by Brooks, was going to focus almost exclusively on Hiccook and Smith And the studio pushed for Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. Wow. I mean Why? I could see either Paul Newman or Steve McQueen more Steve McQueen as HiccCk. Yes. But one of the reasons I think Robert Blake is such brilliant casting is not only was there maybe a darkness to him that was later revealed, he was a child actor Yeah. And because he was a child actor He not only fits physically the role extremely well brings with it some baggage for the audience that I think is interesting. What was he a child actor in Chris most famously Red Rider, wasasn't that the big show? Yes, but he broke out in a series of shorts I don't know. Our gang also known as the Little Rascals That's right. I forget Yeah. He was a little rascal. Yes. Ver good Well, so Brooks said No way to Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. He didn't want anyone recognizable in these roles because he wanted the audience to feel like they were watching something that blurred the line between drama and documentary just the way the book had five hundred actors auditioned, eight finalists were whittled down, reportedly including Robert Dubval, who had broken out in nineteen sixty two's to kill a mockingbird, but did not really achieve stardom until the seventies with the Godfather And he reportedly told Dustin Hoffman that he lost the role because quote, there's one thing you can't fake no matter how good an actor you are, and that's white trash. Thanks, Bob. Rude Instead, as we said, it was Robert Blake who scored the role of Perry Smith He had been an extremely famous child actor, but despite working subadily, he had not broken out as a serious adult actor until this film. and I also don't think was super recognizable as an adult because he doesn't look like what he looked like as a kid And he's small too, which is right because Perry Smith was quite small as well. He looks like him. And I think he gives an amazing performance. I really do. I think and Scott Wilson, they're both great. It's very creepy. It is. and they both they really emphasize the difference between the characters. You know, Hitcock is ultimately mostly blustered, Perry is ultimately not sympathetic and extremely disturbed Well, you mentioned Scott Wilson. He was a twenty four year old parking valet who had just played a small role opposite Siddney Poitier and in the Heat of the Night and he, of course got the part of Dick Hiccock. And he would later go on to play more herb cllutter types in older age Yeah than anything Walking dead. Well yeah, for one example or June Bug, although he did play a very good villain in Scott Cooper's hostiles at the very end of that film Yeah He's very good in that movie too. He's great. Scott Wilson was awesome. Now, he got this part Mostly because of Siddney Poitier. Sidney Pooti had really taken a liking to him on this movie and he went out of his way to talk him up to Richard Brooks. That's cool. Quincy Jones as well, who had composed the amazing score for this film had worked on in the Heat of the Night. And Jones was one of the only jazz based film composers working at this time. We talked about this. We both love this score way that it drops out at the end is so effective. It reminds me a lot of Bernard Hermann's earlier works like Psycho, particularly in the beginning, but then His work in taxi driver actually reminded me of this. and I do wonder if there's a bit of sort of co influence going on there. It really puts you in the perspective of how these killers see themselves, theseese criminals see themselves. Yes. You mentioned the basseline. that is played by extremely famous bass player Carol Kay, who's one of the most famous and prolific bass players of all time A lady, I might add. Now, despite promising to stay as true to the book as possible, Richard Brooks, I think, may have recognized some of the artistic license taken in Capoti's novel because he started retracing the murderer's steps himself And he did rearrange the story into more chronological order than it appears in the book He purposely did not consult Kapoti and encouraged the actors not to do so either, telling them not to read the book He never gave them the full script, just the pages they needed for that day and the crime scene photos. This is so smart. In early spring of nineteen sixty seven, they started filming and Brooks was not kidding when he said he wanted this to feel like a documentary because Chris I don't know if you know this They shot at the realal Clutter farmhouse I did know that That's crazy After I watched the movie, I looked up the crime scene photos and It's jarring. I mean, down to the placement of the bootprint on the cardboard mattress it is the fidelity to the events seems to be extremely high. I think it was in the movie. I think that Brooks really made an effort to be as close as he possibly could They also shot in the Olith House hotel room where Perry and Dick had plotted the robbery In fact, the whole film was shot completely on location in and around Holcombe, with one exception, which is the prison That is because both the outgoing and incoming Kansas governors said Absolutely not. so that is the Colorado state penitentiary that you're seeing instead Brooks really took it to the next level when he cast the jury for the trial towards the end of the film Chrress is the real jury that convicted Harry Smith and Dick Hiccock in the original trial. Wow. That's insane. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah Well, I mean, it's it's a brief moment. you sure Yeah as well Yeah, it's so interesting because that I will say the only thing I didn't love And I think this movie is incredible. Jensen's voiceover at the end that kind of takes over for the third act Mix textual, what I think was already there, subtextally. I agree. And I just don't think we needed it. I kind of think you don't need that character at all. Like I understand they needed some kind of conduit for Capote. Yeah, they need someone for Dewey to talk to, I guess. to another cop. Like if you're gonna to remove Trim and Capote, I don't think you need this composite character. Yeah Now the film was released on december fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven to both critical and commercial success. It was nominated for four Academy Aards. In two thousand eight, it was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress Scott Wilson went on to have a very long and successful career, as you pointed out. He's probably best known for playing Herschel Green on The Walking Dead, which he did right up until his own death in twenty eighteen Robert Blake, on the other hand, as we have hinted, has a bit of a different legacy He went on to star as detective Tony Beretta on the successful TV series Bereretta from nineteen seventy five to seventy eight, and then he never really achieved the same level of success again despite continuing to work until the Lost Highway in nineteen ninety seven. But it was two thousand one that defined Blake more than anything else. After a night out to dinner at Batello's in Studio City, with his then wife, Bonnie Lee Bakeley, he left her in the car briefly and then according to him, headed back inside the restaurant to retrieve his gun that he left in the restaurant. Meanwhile, Bonnie outside in the car was shot to death He insisted he had nothing to do with her murder, but prosecutors claimed he had shot her himself after initially trying to hire hitmen for the job Now it should be noted He was acquitted of the murder charges, but a civil jury did find him liable for Bonnie's death and ordered him to pay her family thirty million dollars. which bankrupted him, and then I believe they dropped it to about fifteen million It's a strange case. you know, it's not a situation. She has a very strange history as well. Yes she does. I think she had like eight husbands prior to him. She're in the kind of like a lonely heart scam, I think for a long time Obviously, none of which is any justification for a murder. No. but it it's a complex and strange history. and I believe the gun that he did have on him they confirmed was not used in It was not It was not. This is the thing is like You know, on paper, when you hear the story, it's so bizarre and you think like that doesn't make any sense. Oh, of course he did it. It's actually, it's pretty unclear. There was gun residue found on him, but it was not the gun that had been used to kill her. It was the gun that he left in the restaurant. I don't know. It's very weird. It's very sad and we don't know whether he did it or not, but he certainly He never grew that reputation And that wraps up our coverage of in cold blood as we head into lighter fare with Breakfast at Tiffany's on Monday. Well, and you know it should be noted that you know breakfast at Tiffany's among some of Kapoti's other work, but in particular that book because it had been made into a movie is a lot of what brought him access right in some of these, not just in Holcombe, but generally throughout his life. And as you mentioned, he befriended so many socialites And then as the movie Capoti really emphasizes In Cld Blood is the last book that Capoti publishes. It makes him the most famous man In America, it becomes his most famous book And He never publishes another book and then the epithathon is unpublished final work that was when he died, I think in nineteen eighty four I'm going to get the quote wrong, but it's something around more tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. Which made me think of what movie that we just covered, Chris We just covered. We just what do we do? Taxi driver? Willy Wonka It's literally the final lines of Willy Wonka. Oh yeah, sure. exactly. What happenensed to the man who got everything, you know? Yeah. he lived happily ever after and it did it, you know much of what the movie Capote emphasizes for the back half is Capote being trapped in this Schrodinger's box of sorts where As long as Perry Smith and Dick Hiccocker in limbo, his book remains in limbo. and so he has to root for their execution since their exonerations exceedingly unlikely. and the execution is probably the better ending for his book. And you realize, you know how much he has warped himself and he at least in the movie begins to realize. I think he did. Yeah, and the quote is intended to suggest He got the answer to his prayers, which was the execution of Perry Smith and more tears were shed over that than had it not happened. We don't know if that was his intention. I think Bennett Miller makes that connection. Bennett Miller compotes it himself. and why not Also Capote versus the Swans was I didn't make it all the way through because it was so depressing, but Tom Hollander's portrayal of Truman Capote was pretty great and it is worth watching. That's later towards the end of his life when he is losing so many of the socialite friends that he had made I will say I really liked rereading the book. It's so good. Watching the movie and then watching Capote. I didn't have time to rew watchatch Infamous. I actually think Toby Jones' performance might be the closest to actual Capote. If you watch just interviews of Aual Capote that might be because Toby Jones. Well he looks like him. You looks so much like him But my point is I would highly recommend to people watch Even if you don't read the book, watch in cold blood