What would Truman think of "Capote" - The film?
In the frame
Truman Capote loved movies - watching them and writing them, if not acting in them. What would he have made of the new film depicting the writing of In Cold Blood, asks his biographer Gerald Clarke
Gerald Clarke
Saturday February 25, 2006
Guardian
Like all American writers, Truman Capote loved the movies. But Capote's relationship with films was, from an early age, unusually intimate. It began in the years just before the second world war when he led his teenage friends on weekend expeditions to the Pickwick Theater in Greenwich, Connecticut. Emboldened - and perhaps inspired - by hidden bottles of sweet brandy, they took vigorous part in the on-screen drama, laughing when they were supposed to cry, crying when they were supposed to laugh, and, until they were kicked out by angry ushers, substituting their own dialogue for the words coming out of the actors' mouths.
A little over a decade later, in the early 1950s, Capote was the one putting the words into those mouths. Living in Italy with his companion, Jack Dunphy, he was recruited by David O Selznick, the producer of Gone With the Wind, to write some new lines for Montgomery Clift and Selznick's wife, Jennifer Jones, to speak in Indiscretion of an American Wife, a film Selznick was making in Rome with Vittorio De Sica, one of the masters of Italian neo-realism.
Capote's contribution to that awkwardly titled film was small, but Selznick was so impressed by his innovative dialogue that he recommended him to John Huston, who was about to direct his own movie in Italy. "His is, in my opinion, one of the freshest and most original and most exciting writing talents of our time," Selznick wrote to Huston. "And what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion picture theatre's sound box as to also give you something completely fresh - or so at least I think."
The making of Beat the Devil could make a movie itself - and someday probably will. The backdrop of the Amalfi coast in chilly February. A cast that includes Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida and Robert Morley. And Capote, wearing an overcoat that fell almost to his ankles, with a long lavender scarf flapping behind it, rushing down to the set every morning with dialogue he had spent the night writing. But Selznick was right. Capote did provide the movie's characters with words that were completely fresh. For me, and for many others, Beat the Devil is a small comic masterpiece, as original now as it was in 1953.
In the years that followed, Capote wrote other screenplays, most notably The Innocents (1961), which was an adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. By the mid-1970s, Capote and his idiosyncrasies - his childlike voice and his flamboyant personality - were so famous that Neil Simon modelled a comic villain after him in his mystery farce, Murder by Death (1976). When the time came to cast the film, one of Simon's colleagues had an inspiration. Instead of getting someone like Truman Capote to play the villain, he asked, why not get Truman Capote himself?
Capote was thrilled. All American writers may love the movies, but how many of them are given a chance to star in one? The excitement soon evaporated, and, when I visited him on the set in Burbank, California, Capote was miserable - anxious and exhausted. Acting, as he should have known, requires unseemly early hours, hard work and a talent he did not possess. When the cameras rolled, Truman Capote was not a very good Truman Capote.
After Capote's death in 1984, a few more Capote-like characters wafted across the screen. He is an irresistible subject for scriptwriters, but few of them have looked beyond his peculiarities; until now they have turned him into a parody of the man I wrote about. The Truman Capote I knew was more than a collection of witticisms and effeminate gestures. He was, in fact, the most complicated and contradictory person I've ever met.
"I won't respect you unless you tell the whole truth," Capote told me when I began my biography, and I followed his directive as best I could, giving a full account of his faults as well as his virtues. The whole truth is what I wanted in any movie made of his life. And that was my chief concern when Danny Futterman first approached me with a draft of his script and introduced me to the team who were to create a movie based on my biography.
Futterman and Bennett Miller, Capote's director, have known each other since they were boys of 12 in the northern suburbs of New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Capote, became their friend a few years later at a summer drama camp. Until I met them I didn't know such institutions existed. When other boys were batting balls or shooting baskets, Futterman, Miller and Hoffman were learning how to be actors, directors, and scriptwriters - the Hardy Boys in search of adventure in Hollywood and on Broadway.
Nancy Drew joined the trio some years later in the form of Caroline Baron, Capote's producer. If I wanted the movie to tell the truth about Capote, so, I soon discovered, did they. By truth I don't mean a literal retelling of my biography, which covers Capote's entire life of nearly 60 years. Capote the film, by contrast, centres on only a few chapters of my book, those that tell the story of the five years he spent researching and writing In Cold Blood. But Futterman's instinct to concentrate on the In Cold Blood years was right and necessary.
Though the frame was thus reduced to only a few years of Capote's life, many elements, people and events still had to be left out, and time had to be compressed. In real life, for example, Capote and Harper Lee, who helped with his research, did not leave for Kansas until a few weeks after he read the report of the Clutter killings. In the movie, they board a train just a few hours after he puts down the newspaper. Complications were simplified, and dialogue, such as the interchange between Capote and Lee aboard the train, was invented.
All that was fine by me. A movie - a good movie, anyway - is a drama, not a documentary, and dramas are works of art that must be contained and shaped. The reality I wanted to convey was not a list of petty details. It was the real truth about Truman Capote: that beneath his sometimes frivolous exterior, he was an artist - one of the best writers of his generation.
My role, then, was to help this quartet of talented film-makers find the essence of Truman Capote. They had questions, and I had answers. I had questions, and they had answers. Futterman dubbed me the Consigliere. Miller called me the Enforcer. I like both titles, but I prefer to think of myself as the Guide, the man who led them through a tangled life and a time (the early 1960s) before they were born. One of my corrections was to inform them that in those days, profanity was less common than it is now. Back then, most people had a wider command of useful adjectives than they do today, and certain four-letter words, now heard on every street corner, were confined to army barracks.
What would Truman - Truman the movie-goer, Truman the movie scriptwriter, and Truman the movie actor - have thought about this movie that bears his name? I wonder myself. I do know, however, that those who made it have followed his instructions to me. They have done their very best to tell the truth.
· Capote: The Shooting Script, based on the book by Gerald Clarke, is published by Nick Hern Books at £9.99.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Truman Capote loved movies - watching them and writing them, if not acting in them. What would he have made of the new film depicting the writing of In Cold Blood, asks his biographer Gerald Clarke
Gerald Clarke
Saturday February 25, 2006
Guardian
Like all American writers, Truman Capote loved the movies. But Capote's relationship with films was, from an early age, unusually intimate. It began in the years just before the second world war when he led his teenage friends on weekend expeditions to the Pickwick Theater in Greenwich, Connecticut. Emboldened - and perhaps inspired - by hidden bottles of sweet brandy, they took vigorous part in the on-screen drama, laughing when they were supposed to cry, crying when they were supposed to laugh, and, until they were kicked out by angry ushers, substituting their own dialogue for the words coming out of the actors' mouths.
A little over a decade later, in the early 1950s, Capote was the one putting the words into those mouths. Living in Italy with his companion, Jack Dunphy, he was recruited by David O Selznick, the producer of Gone With the Wind, to write some new lines for Montgomery Clift and Selznick's wife, Jennifer Jones, to speak in Indiscretion of an American Wife, a film Selznick was making in Rome with Vittorio De Sica, one of the masters of Italian neo-realism.
Capote's contribution to that awkwardly titled film was small, but Selznick was so impressed by his innovative dialogue that he recommended him to John Huston, who was about to direct his own movie in Italy. "His is, in my opinion, one of the freshest and most original and most exciting writing talents of our time," Selznick wrote to Huston. "And what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion picture theatre's sound box as to also give you something completely fresh - or so at least I think."
The making of Beat the Devil could make a movie itself - and someday probably will. The backdrop of the Amalfi coast in chilly February. A cast that includes Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida and Robert Morley. And Capote, wearing an overcoat that fell almost to his ankles, with a long lavender scarf flapping behind it, rushing down to the set every morning with dialogue he had spent the night writing. But Selznick was right. Capote did provide the movie's characters with words that were completely fresh. For me, and for many others, Beat the Devil is a small comic masterpiece, as original now as it was in 1953.
In the years that followed, Capote wrote other screenplays, most notably The Innocents (1961), which was an adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. By the mid-1970s, Capote and his idiosyncrasies - his childlike voice and his flamboyant personality - were so famous that Neil Simon modelled a comic villain after him in his mystery farce, Murder by Death (1976). When the time came to cast the film, one of Simon's colleagues had an inspiration. Instead of getting someone like Truman Capote to play the villain, he asked, why not get Truman Capote himself?
Capote was thrilled. All American writers may love the movies, but how many of them are given a chance to star in one? The excitement soon evaporated, and, when I visited him on the set in Burbank, California, Capote was miserable - anxious and exhausted. Acting, as he should have known, requires unseemly early hours, hard work and a talent he did not possess. When the cameras rolled, Truman Capote was not a very good Truman Capote.
After Capote's death in 1984, a few more Capote-like characters wafted across the screen. He is an irresistible subject for scriptwriters, but few of them have looked beyond his peculiarities; until now they have turned him into a parody of the man I wrote about. The Truman Capote I knew was more than a collection of witticisms and effeminate gestures. He was, in fact, the most complicated and contradictory person I've ever met.
"I won't respect you unless you tell the whole truth," Capote told me when I began my biography, and I followed his directive as best I could, giving a full account of his faults as well as his virtues. The whole truth is what I wanted in any movie made of his life. And that was my chief concern when Danny Futterman first approached me with a draft of his script and introduced me to the team who were to create a movie based on my biography.
Futterman and Bennett Miller, Capote's director, have known each other since they were boys of 12 in the northern suburbs of New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Capote, became their friend a few years later at a summer drama camp. Until I met them I didn't know such institutions existed. When other boys were batting balls or shooting baskets, Futterman, Miller and Hoffman were learning how to be actors, directors, and scriptwriters - the Hardy Boys in search of adventure in Hollywood and on Broadway.
Nancy Drew joined the trio some years later in the form of Caroline Baron, Capote's producer. If I wanted the movie to tell the truth about Capote, so, I soon discovered, did they. By truth I don't mean a literal retelling of my biography, which covers Capote's entire life of nearly 60 years. Capote the film, by contrast, centres on only a few chapters of my book, those that tell the story of the five years he spent researching and writing In Cold Blood. But Futterman's instinct to concentrate on the In Cold Blood years was right and necessary.
Though the frame was thus reduced to only a few years of Capote's life, many elements, people and events still had to be left out, and time had to be compressed. In real life, for example, Capote and Harper Lee, who helped with his research, did not leave for Kansas until a few weeks after he read the report of the Clutter killings. In the movie, they board a train just a few hours after he puts down the newspaper. Complications were simplified, and dialogue, such as the interchange between Capote and Lee aboard the train, was invented.
All that was fine by me. A movie - a good movie, anyway - is a drama, not a documentary, and dramas are works of art that must be contained and shaped. The reality I wanted to convey was not a list of petty details. It was the real truth about Truman Capote: that beneath his sometimes frivolous exterior, he was an artist - one of the best writers of his generation.
My role, then, was to help this quartet of talented film-makers find the essence of Truman Capote. They had questions, and I had answers. I had questions, and they had answers. Futterman dubbed me the Consigliere. Miller called me the Enforcer. I like both titles, but I prefer to think of myself as the Guide, the man who led them through a tangled life and a time (the early 1960s) before they were born. One of my corrections was to inform them that in those days, profanity was less common than it is now. Back then, most people had a wider command of useful adjectives than they do today, and certain four-letter words, now heard on every street corner, were confined to army barracks.
What would Truman - Truman the movie-goer, Truman the movie scriptwriter, and Truman the movie actor - have thought about this movie that bears his name? I wonder myself. I do know, however, that those who made it have followed his instructions to me. They have done their very best to tell the truth.
· Capote: The Shooting Script, based on the book by Gerald Clarke, is published by Nick Hern Books at £9.99.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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7:24 PM
