E-Mail This Article to a Friend The Truman show, continued
	Related Links Tru enough? James Wolcott assesses the two Capote movies and speculates on the writer’s appeal and cultural importance. Tru story? Solid account of background and circumstances behind the writing of In Cold Blood. Tru friends Fascinating story about the early high-school friendship of the three filmmakers (Futterman, Miller, and Hoffman) in their local newspaper.

In this critic’s opinion, those party scenes transcend acting and verge on spiritual possession. Hoffman acknowledges that he tapped deeply into his character’s psyche and interpreted his life as a tragic love story.

"[It] deals with a classic American tragedy," Miller explains. "A protagonist with a character flaw, which is ambition and the need to be praised and loved. Once he meets Perry Smith, he identifies with him on a very basic level. There are the abandonment issues — both were abandoned as children. And both are artistically inclined. So he was very attracted to him, not only personally attracted to him, but because he was the muse for his book. And those two things didn’t live together very well.

"[Perry was] his dark side. In the film you see Capote’s silent tragedy. He has empathy for Perry, but finishing his book is his driving force. And those two things can’t coexist with each other because at the end of the day, in order to finish the book, Perry’s got to die. He had to sacrifice his muse. Writers, actors, all creative people are looking for that thing to spark their imagination. That high of feeling lucid in your creativity. I think that Perry Smith did that for Capote. And ultimately he needed to sacrifice him in order for him to finish that thing that he sparked."

A convincing interpretation, but is it the truth? Can Capote be held accountable for the deaths of Hickock and Smith, who, after all, were convicted murderers? Could a criticism made of In Cold Blood — that it shaped the facts to fit a preconception — apply also to Capote?

"This is an absolutely true story," Miller insists. "And like Capote himself, who might have changed a thing to communicate the bigger truth, I didn’t feel any hesitation doing so either. [Capote] had an intuition about this story that did not reveal itself for some time, that brought him to Kansas, kept him in Kansas. He discovered things, felt a certain thing about this guy. He watched these guys hang and it got him everything he ever wanted and destroyed him at the same time, and that’s all fact."

In one of those flukes that gives rise to competing movies about, say, volcanoes, meteors, Christopher Columbus, and Les Liaisons dangereuses, a second film about Capote and In Cold Blood is in the making: Douglas McGrath’s adaptation of George Plimpton’s 1997 oral biography Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.

Miller at first thought of dropping Capote altogether, but when the rival production, titled Have You Heard?, postponed its release until 2006, he went ahead. Besides, if two films spontaneously arise about the same story, doesn’t that mean there’s something in the air?

"That would have been the more encouraging perception," says Bennett, unconvinced.

Hoffman, on the other hand, sees the subject as very attuned to the Zeitgeist, as relevant to our culture’s current confusion of celebrity with substance.

"This story marked the beginning of an era," he says. "And now we’re at a place in the cycle where there is a collective sense that things are a fucking mess. I’m not saying that Capote and this story are what created the situation with celebrity and the media and exploitation. But he certainly was an embodiment of what was to come. He’s the first person to go in there and take as a subject a family who lived their lives out of the spotlight and had this tragedy. He kind of crossed the line for the first time and made this incredible profit off of it. Now it’s hard to imagine anybody having any hesitation the same. You know there’s somebody down in New Orleans after that hurricane crawling around and sponging what they can off of the tragedy."

Hoffman feels that together with another recent film about a real-life journalist, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote dramatizes a watershed in American media and culture, the transition from objective coverage of pressing issues to an infatuation with the sensational and trivial.

"I think that [the two films] depict the period in our country that was the beginning of these things. I think Capote’s tale and that early-’50s, early-’60s time period in general showed the first signs of something in our culture — the idea of celebrity and the exploitation of other people’s lives for entertainment — that is off-kilter and somewhat diseased."

If so, then Capote paid the price for it. After exulting in the fame and glory of his success for a decade, his life went down the drain. He never finished another book and died in 1984 at the age of 59, a helpless alcoholic. In Cold Blood was his Faustian bargain, and he paid with his soul.

Has Hoffman paid a similar price for bringing Capote back to life? Will he be able to make another movie again after finishing Capote?

"God, I hope so," he says.

In fact, he is now shooting something that is quite a change of pace, Mission Impossible 3.

"I’m playing the villain, the lead villain. I’ve never done anything like that. It’s great to do something like this after Capote."

In the meantime, have people been asking him to do Truman Capote at parties?

"A few times," he says. "And the answer is a big, fat no."

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com.