Hacker Cinema
In Cold Blood
1967 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Richard Brooks
After a botched robbery results in the brutal murder of a rural family, two drifters elude police, in the end coming to terms with their own mortality and the repercussions of their vile atrocity.
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1968 interview: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/books/truman-capote-playboy-interview/
Playboy: How do you react to those critics who deride the form of documentary crime writing employed in In Cold Blood as inferior to the novel?
Capote: What can I say, except that I think they’re ignorant? If they can’t comprehend that journalism is really the most avant-garde form of writing existent today, then their heads are in the sand. These critics seem unable to realize, or accept, that creative fiction writing has gone as far as it can experimentally. It reached its peak in the Twenties and hasn’t budged since. Of course, we have writers like William Burroughs, whose brand of verbal surface trivia is amusing and occasionally fascinating, but there’s no base for moving forward in that area—whereas journalism is actually the last great unexplored literary frontier.
…
Playboy: The gulf between someone of your background and two such brutal criminals would seem impossible to bridge. But you’ve said, “Hickock and Smith became very, very good friends of mine—perhaps the closest friends I’ve ever had in my life.” How did you establish rapport with them?
Capote: I treated them as men, not as murderers. To most people, a man loses his humanity the minute they learn he’s a murderer; they could be talking with him one moment and then the next someone would whisper, “Do you know he killed five people?” and from that moment on, the man would become unreal to them, an uncomfortable abstraction. But I find it relatively easy to establish rapport with murderers; in the past few years, I’ve interviewed more than 30 of them in all parts of the country. Before I began In Cold Blood, I knew nothing about crime and wasn’t interested in it; but once the book was under way, I began interviewing murderers—or homicidal minds, as I call them—in order to have a basis of comparison for Smith and Hickock; and I met many more recently while doing a television documentary on capital punishment. The second we begin talking, I find that they are ordinary men with extraordinary problems, set apart only by their ability to kill; in some it’s a total lack of conscience, in others a passionate destructive drive. But I have found a certain pattern. One common denominator, for example, is their fetish for tattoos. I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes. I’ve met few killers who didn’t start laughing when I finally managed to force them to discuss the murder—which isn’t easy. When Perry Smith started to tell me about the murder of the Clutter family, for example, he said, “I know this isn’t funny, but I can’t help laughing about it.” Just a while ago, I interviewed a 21-year-old boy named Bassett in the San Quentin death house who is extremely intelligent. He’s a slight, thin boy, with a delicate face and figure, a college student, and he writes poetry and short stories. He murdered his mother and father when he was 18; he’d been planning to do it since he was 10 years old. And when he started telling me about how he killed his parents, he began laughing and cracking little jokes, just as though he was telling me the most humorous story. They’re mostly like that; they’ll tell you how they cut someone’s throat and it’s as if they were watching a clown slip on a banana peel.
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Playboy: You don’t agree, then, with the adage that it’s better for a dozen guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be unjustly convicted?
Capote: It’s a charming sentiment, but more apropos in the halcyon days of yore, when our cities had not yet been turned into jungles and a citizen could still stroll the streets in safety. I’m afraid that today, for the very self-protection of our society, it’s better that one innocent man be punished than that a dozen guilty men go free. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the harsh reality we face.
If you’re interested in the history of stuff like this be sure to look into Beaver and Krause (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_%26_Krause). If you recognize the THX sound then you’ll also probably recognize the last 30 seconds of Spaced (https://youtu.be/2xKO3KAtDZ0). They started off as early Moog salesmen showing off equipment and ended up introducing many famous musicians like George Harrison, the Doors, and the Byrds to electronic music. They also scored for movies such as The Graduate, In Cold Blood, Point Blank and Rosemary's Baby. True pioneers in the space and good music to boot.
My favorite movies, but for no particuliar reason:
Platoon
Wall street
Three days of the condor
Chinatown
Sunset Boulevard
The Stranger(actually all of Orson Wells movies)
Any Andy Griffith episode
Bicycle thieves 1948
Niagara
Double indemnity (actually most billy wilder films)
The Misfits (last film for Marilyn and Rhett Butler--forgot his name.)
Giant
Rebal without a cause
Leaving Las Vegas
Blow out (all three)
Saturday night fever
Yes, even Urban Cowboy
One flew over the cocos nest
Deliverance
Hanna and her sisters
East of Eden
Dr. Strange love
Back to the future
Jaws
In cold blood(with Robert Blake)
In cold blood (with Eric Roberts, and forget his name)
The asphalt jungle 1948?
All about eve
The hot rock
Little Haus Big Halsey (Redford said it was his worst movie. Yes, it's masagonistic. Yes, he plays a jerk. But the movie captures the 70's I recall as a kid. The filming is great. His side kick in the movie did a great job playing a sweet, innocent, country teen.)
A lot of foreign films I have yet to see.