![]() Sitting for the likes of Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Capote more than held his own. ![]() Anyone who doubts that should look at his author photos. How had a flamboyantly gay ornament of New York society managed to earn the trust of Kansas law-enforcement officials, not to mention the murderers themselves? That's where Capote the performer came in.Ĭapote's knack for performance was there from the beginning. Finally, there was the fact of it being Capote, the high-living author of ''Breakfast at Tiffany's," who had written such a book. The result was a founding text of the New Journalism. He wrote the book as a ''true-life novel," combining factual content with fictional techniques. But so, too, was Capote's unprecedented approach. The material itself was shocking enough: the murder of a Kansas farm family by two drifters in 1959. It's hard to imagine today the sensation ''In Cold Blood" caused in 1965 when it was serialized in The New Yorker, then published as a book in 1966. It also firmly places him within a long Hollywood tradition of journalists who play fast and loose with their sources. What ''Capote" emphasizes, with a vengeance, is the performance that enabled the book. ![]() It might more accurately be called ''In Cold Truman." Other than the occasional shot of Capote pounding away at his typewriter, the movie can't show the actual writing of ''In Cold Blood," nor do Miller and Futterman want it to. The making of that book is what concerns director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman in ''Capote," which opens Friday and stars Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role.Īlthough derived from Gerald Clarke's 1988 biography, ''Capote" is less biopic than morality play. His best-known book, ''In Cold Blood," lies (note the ambiguity of the verb) at the intersection of those two activities. He was also a great, if not talented, performer, whose performing kept him famous. Truman Capote was a talented, if not great, writer, whose writing made him famous.
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