WHAT WENT WRONG - Out of Frame: In Cold Blood | Movie vs. Book

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

When the town of Holcomb, Kansas opened its doors to renowned author Truman Capote in 1959, they had no idea their story would change the way True Crime was written forever. Join Chris and Lizzie as they explore the real case behind the novel ‘In Cold Blood’ and its 1967 film adaptation, plus find out where Capote may have twisted the truth, and the shocking lengths film director Richard Brooks took to recreate the murders of the Clutter Family. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Capote's groundbreaking 1965 novel and the 1967 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 name by Truman Capote. 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 Blood 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 detail, 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 Blood, 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 of shoutouts. I think that the black and white cinematography by Conrad Hall, who's one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, is just a true standout. It's some of the greatest stark, contrasty imagery, you know, you'll ever see. Roger Deacons 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, you know, there were fewer and fewer. This is 67. 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 family 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 Mouseing with the jaunty walking baseline with the criminals, and they're almost like, do-do-do-do-do, you know, with the clutters. And then the decision towards the end of Act 2 to play the murders entirely without score is very noticeable and I think extremely effective. And it's a stark contrast to Capote, the film, 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 the Godfather and the Godfather Part 2. 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 clatters 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 impeccable. And then Robert Blake and Scott Wilson are, you know, absolutely perfectly cast. To the point where it's kind of difficult to watch Capote even. And I love Clifton Collins, Jr. I think he's a fantastic actor.

And obviously, Robert Blake, we'll talk about his history following this film later. I think for me, the big difference between the book and the movie is obviously the focus, right? the book much more focuses on the clutters or the six victims, as Capote describes it, whereas the movie feels like it really from the beginning says, we're exploring the killers in this movie. And to me, it's why they feel almost of slightly different genres and that the movie feels like a crime movie more than anything else, whereas 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 Holcomb. And the movie establishes us first in the world of the violators, which is Perry and Dick Hickok. Anyway, I loved it. I thought it was an incredible movie. This is a really complicated story. It's a very ethically and morally complex area that we're entering into with Capote.

And then the movie's decision to omit Capote entirely is fascinating, especially considering that his name is in the title. It is called Truman Capote's in Cold Blood. And yet Capote 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 want to say manipulation. Yes. Yeah, I mean, manipulation is accurate, I think, of Truman Capote 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. Is it 2005? It's either 2005 or 2006. It's that and infamous came out back to back. Yes. Both are very good. By the way, I prefer Capote. 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 Cold Blood 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 Holcomb, for sure, and the community. There is an awful lot of focus on Perry and Dick in Cold Blood as well. And as we know, Capote'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, right? 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 Holcomb. There's almost none of the clutters in the movie.

Exactly. Which, like, 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 Brooks 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 Capote.

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 said, started, I was like, oh, my God, are they just going 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, they do extremely effective perspective work to put you in to the mind of Perry Smith in particular. Mm-hmm. 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 did the killing. Because there's one, we know they have one shotgun. And I think that he very effectively sets up a question of, could it really be Smith? Because Hickok 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, you know, 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. Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to 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. 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 Holcomb, 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 Holcomb. 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 sign a document saying that they would not drink while working for him, and he would fire anybody that he caught doing it. Nancy Clutter, the daughter, was 16 years old, daughter of Herb 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 know, 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. Kenyon Clutter was 15. 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 he really was building at the time of his murder. Herb and Bonnie had two other children who were not in the home at the time of the murders. That's Beverly and Evana, I think Evana, who were 21 and 23, respectively. But it was Bonnie Clutter who probably suffered the most from Capote's portrayal of the family. In the book, she is painted as mentally and physically very fragile. And this is something that Capote said, you know, oh, was no secret in the town of Holcomb.

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 docu series, living relatives of the clutters pointed out 45 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 clutter 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 11 years before the murders in 1948, and the nearest and only real neighbor was Alfred Stocklein, who had worked for the Clutter's farm. He, his wife, and their three kids lived in a house less than 100 yards from the Clutter's house. Now, according to Friends of the Clutters, quote, any family that was least likely to be murdered should have been the Clutter family. On November 15, 1959, 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 Holcomb, Kansas. No one locked their doors. It was a town of just under 300 people. Everyone knew everyone. In order to get there, you have to drive down a single lane Route 56 past many other small isolated towns. This is not even a place that you like happened 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 stores sold out of locks. Now, when the local Garden City Police Chief arrived on the scene at 9.30 a.m., Herb, Nancy, Bonnie, and Kenyon 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, Kenyon was in a nearby room in the basement, Nancy and 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. Herb was laying on a cardboard box, Kenyon's restraints had been loosened and a pillow placed under his head. Nancy had been tucked in. Someone 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 Forsyce in Cold 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 Herb from church. Now, they questioned the stockleens. Those are the neighbors next door who hadn't heard anything except for the sound of Nancy's boyfriend, Bobby Rupp's car driving away at about 10.45 p.m. And poor Bobby Rup was pretty much immediately a suspect. This is because

Herb Clutter really didn't like him. Rup was Catholic. The clutters were Methodist and never the twain 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. But 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 Dewey shut that one down pretty quickly too. He was like,

I do not think it's these kids. Doey was smart, and he started to favor a theory that there had been two killers. After all, Herb and Kenyon were both really quite 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. 72 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 $1,000 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 Lansing, the Kansas State Penitentiary. Now, Chris, how reliable are prison tips in this scenario? You would want to take them with, you know, an enormous grain of salt. But in this instance, Floyd Wells, I believe is the gentleman's name, it actually confirms Dewey's hunch, which is that there must have been some connection to clutter.

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 Wells, as we learned, had done work for herb clutter. 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, 28-year-old Dick Hickok. So one important difference right away in Capote'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 five days because they were suspicious of this tip, and Dewey 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 definitely not confirmed, they may have committed another family annihilation in Florida, another family of. before. 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. But 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 clutter, in his office where he had a desk and

I believe a safe. This was the old house where the clatters lived in 1949, 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 Mr. Clutter made the remark to me that evening when we left his den that he'd paid out more than $10,000 that day. After entering Kansas State Penitentiary, I sold with Dick Hickok. Hickok 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.

Hickok 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 $10,000 in it. And he was supposedly going to get a kickback of $2,500 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 10 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.

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 seemed to have built. It was two weeks. Yeah, you know, I think in some ways it actually makes sense that it was less 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 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 a 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 away with the ladies. However, he really started to change after a massive car wreck at age 19 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? Mm-hmm. 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 Capote describes him as such. And Capote's an amazing writer, and he's a line about how, 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 16-year-old that he married at 19, 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. It 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. He 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 Truman Capote 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 alley, too, who was sure if he could just make the perfect score, his life would turn around. Also, mail-order treasure maps? Guys, why would... Why would they sell them? Why not?

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. Now, on December 15, 1959, one month after the murders, Truman Capote and

Nell Harper-Lee arrived in Holcomb, Kansas, much to the shock of the locals. Capote had read the New York Times headline, quote, wealthy farmer, 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. True. Now, we'll give more background on Capote and 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 Harper Lee. And of course, Chris, who is the character in Harperley's eventual novel To Kill a Mockingbird that's based on her. trim and Capote. Oh, what's his name? Deal.

It's like the imaginative, yeah, like a little guy. Yes, 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 was, yeah.

And Harper Lee was, if I'm remembering, she was a real tomboy and got into a scout is very much, it feels like. Her. her and it's so interesting. It's such a both of their books, this book and then Harper Lee's writing to Kill a Mockingbird, or I guess it gets published around the same time, but such different approaches to stories of murder and justice or injustice and retribution. Anywho, very, 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 11 years old, Capote 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 sentence construction of 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, describing Mr. Clutter, commenting upon a generally recognized quality of Mr. Clutter's, a fearless self-assurance that set him apart. And while it created respect, also limited the affection of others a little.

Which I think is like a perfect description, especially when we think of people who are revered in the community Yeah. A little bit set apart. And then the other one I wanted to read, because he could also be so bitchy. Yes, big time. And I, you know, I don't like Twitter, but I wish that we had gotten Cacote on Twitter. He would have crushed.

This is his description of the interior of the home. You know, he's describing people who 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, and he's also a deeply empathetic writer, as we learn, almost to 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's 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 1948. And Breakfast to Tiffany's had just been published in 1950. 58, I think a little over a year before these murders actually happened. Capote was nervous about trying to get people in Holcomb, Kansas, to talk to him, which, I mean, if you've never heard Truman Capote talk, go listen to a recording of Truman Capote, 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 in to, Kansas, he absolutely needed Harper Lee because she did not have that at all. She had just turned in her manuscript for Ticilla Mockingbird, but it had not been published at the time that they went to Holcomb. 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 Capote'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. Well, 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 Dewey, 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 Capote 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 Capote when people were reluctant to talk to him, including poor Bobby Rupp, 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 Capote.

It's, 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, Capote effectively inventing a new form of storytelling

through this book gives reason for law enforcement. to distrust people telling these types of stories. Good 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 15th, 1959. They both lost their nerve as they were driving

towards the farm when they saw a light flicker on in the farmhands house. And 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 Blood. As we've said, I think less so than he does in the movie. But he definitely paints Dick as the instigative

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 Herb because he was cold, the pillow under Kenyon. But 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, quote, I didn't want to harm the man referring to Herb Clutter. I thought he was a very nice gentleman, soft-spoken. I thought so right up until the moment I cut his throat. Which 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 to Alvin Dewey, John Forsyth, in the car, in cold blood. And it is played more as a kind of terrifying self-revelation as opposed to Clifton Collins, Jr., more tearful confession in Capote. 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 Capote, it feels like it's played a little bit more in that more typical prestigey kind of way with music and whatnot, et cetera.

Yes. And I believe Capote is more accurate in terms of who that is actually said to, that it is being delivered to Truman Capote. 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 $40 from the clutters that night, plus some items they stole and pawned. All together, they walked away with about $100, which is around $1,100 today. They went on the run.

Their plans in Mexico fell apart. Meanwhile, Capote and Harper Lee were treated to dinner parties and borderline unlimited access to the investigation and people of Holcomb. Once Dick and Perry were captured, Capote got also unlimited access to them as well. And by the way, in Bennett Miller's Capote, Truman is shown handing over $10,000 to the prison warden in order to get this kind of access. But the only evidence that this ever happened is an unattributed quote, apparently from Capote himself in Gerald Clark's biography. Quote, 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 $10,000 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, Capodian really didn't let facts get in the way of the best story. And given that Capote 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 Wharton. I think Bennett Miller is an exceptional, one of the best directors. I also think Bennett Miller is not going to let the truth.

who's getting the way of a good story. You know what I mean? With some of these things as well. And I love, I mean, as I've mentioned, Moneyball, one of my favorite films of all time. I loved Foxcatcher, too. Yeah. Which also there, you know,

are some questions about the way in which that, those relationships were portrayed. But. Yes. Dick and Perry were sentenced to death by hanging after the jury deliberated for only 30 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 a, arguably too close relationship with Perry Smith over the course of their interviews, but now he had a big problem. His manuscript was almost completely done, but he didn't have an ending because those stays of execution kept rolling in. And this tore Capote 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 14th, 1965, they were both executed with Truman 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 1966, the quote-unquote novel was published and shot straight to number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list where it stayed for 13 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, he is giving an interiority to characters that would be impossible to actual achieve. Right. I actually, I don't want to mischaracterize this. I actually don't think that his portrait of, for example, Bonnie clutter is unsympathetic at all. He may have mischaracterized the extents of her self-isolation,

for example. 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 unchristian or 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, 100%.

It is. I mean, he's absolutely incredible at creating characters. He's incredible at descriptions, at understanding, motivation. Even just characters that come and go for just a moment. You know what I mean? The male woman of the, you know, of the perry who, you know, again. But the problem is if that wasn't true. Of course.

And I'm not saying that there weren't kernels 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, you know, I have 94% 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 it's anywhere between 92 and 96% 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 Cairns and Phillips Tompkins to Holcomb to retrace Capote's steps, and pretty much right away, he discovered that 92 to 96 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 Capote had taken, the final scene of the book features Alvin Dewey, speaking with Susan, Nancy Clutter's best friend at the gravesite. Susan tells Dewey that she's in college now.

Bobby Rupp 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 Capote, which he did admit before his death in 1984. 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, published, Capote 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 Capote'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 Capote. 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 highball glass and faced criminal charges for it. But on June 12th, 1966, Richard Brooks and Columbia Pictures won the prize after promising to stay completely faithful to the book. Capote got somewhere around $400,000, which is $4.4 million today, and a 30% cut of the box office profits. The 30% is actually the much more noticeable number there. Yeah, that's a lot.

That's extremely high. Yes. If you don't know who Richard Brooks was, he had directed Catonaut. hot tin roof, Blackboard Jungle, Elmer Gantry. I mean, he was a 20-year veteran of... Brothers Karamazoff, the Yul Brynner 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 L.A. 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. Soon word got out that the script, also written by Brooks, was going to focus almost exclusively on Hickok 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 Hickok. 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, but it 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, wasn'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 forgot. Yeah. He was a little rascal. Yes. Very 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. 500 actors auditioned. Eight finalists were whittled down, reported that

including Robert Duvall, who had broken out in 1962s to kill a mockingbird, but did not really achieve stardom until the 70s 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 steadily, 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 didn'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. We know, Hickok is ultimately mostly blessed. Perry is ultimately not sympathetic and extremely disturbed. Yeah. Well, you mentioned Scott Wilson. He was a 24-year-old parking valet who had just played a small role opposite Sidney Poitier and in the heat of the night. And he, of course, got the part of Dick Hickok.

And he would later go on to play more herb clutter types in older age than anything else. Well, yeah, for one example, or Junebug, although he did play a very good villain in Scott Cooper's hostiles at the very end of that. film. He's very good in that movie, too. He's great. Scott Wilson was awesome. Now, he got this part mostly because of Sidney Poitier. Sidney Poitier 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. The way that it did. drops out at the end is so effective. It reminds me a lot of Bernard Herman'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, these criminals see themselves. Yes. You mentioned the baseline. 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 I recognize some of the artistic license taken in Capote'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 Capote 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 1967, 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 real 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 box. 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 Olathe House hotel room

where Perry and Dick had plotted the robbery. In fact, the whole film was shot completely on location in an around Holcomb, 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. But Brooks really took it to the next level when he cast the jury for the trial towards the end of the film. Chris, that is the real jury that convicted Perry Smith and Dick Hickok in the original trial.

Wow. That's insane. That's insane. Well, I mean, it's a brief moment, you know, in a movie as well. Yeah, it's so interesting because that, I will say, the only thing I didn't love, and I think this movie's incredible, Jensen's voiceover at the end that kind of takes over for the third act, makes textual what I think was already there, subtextually. 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 going to remove Truman Capote, I don't think you need this sort of composite character. Yeah. Now, the film was released on December 15, 1967 to both critical and commercial success. It was nominated for four Academy Awards. In 2008, 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 2018. 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 Beretta from 1975 to 78, and then he never really achieved the same level of success again, despite continuing to work until the Lost Highway in 1997.

But it was 2001 that defined Blake more than anything else. After a night out to dinner at Vitello's in Studio City, with his then-wife Bonnie Lee Bakely, he left her in the car briefly, and then according to him, headed back inside the rest of 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 $30 million, which bankrupted him, and then I believe they dropped

it to about 15 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 ran 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 is 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. 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 outgrew 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, you know, it should be noted that, you know, Breakfast at Tiffany's among some of Capote's other work, but in particular that book, because it had been made into a movie, is a lot of what bought him access, right, in some of these, not just in Holcomb, but generally throughout his life. And as you mentioned, he befriended so many socialites.

And then as the movie Capote really emphasizes, In Cold Blood is the last book that Capote 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 epitaph in his unpublished final work that was when he died, I think, in 1984. I'm going to get the quote wrong, but it's something around, you know, 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. What did we do? Taxi driver?

Willie Wonka. It's literally the final lines of Willie Wonka. Oh, yeah, sure, exactly. What happened to the man who got everything, you know? Yeah. He lived happily ever after. And it did, you know, much of what the movie Capote emphasizes for the back half is Capote being trapped in this Shrudinger's box of sorts where as long as Perry Smith and Dick Hickokker in Limbo, his book remains in limbo. And so he has to root for their execution. since their exoneration is exceedingly unlikely, and the execution is probably the better ending for his book.

And you realize how much he has warped himself, and he, at least in the movie, begins to realize that. Oh, 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 Capote's 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. Yeah, I will say I really liked rereading the book, watching the movie, and then watching Capote. I didn't have time to rewatch Infamous. I actually think Toby Jones's performance might be the close.

closest to actual Capote if you watch just interviews of actual property. That might be because Toby Jones looks like him. He 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 and then watch Capote, like, back to back. Yeah, it's a really good companion piece. It's so interesting to see how two different filmmakers take such different approaches to the same scenes in certain instances, to the same material.

I love Capote. I think it's an exceptional movie. and I think I preferred in cold blood. Interesting. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for joining me on this. I really enjoyed diving back into this.

I forgot how much I loved Truman Capote. He is just one of the greatest writers ever to put pen to paper. He had a sad end, which we may talk about a bit on Monday. But we will dive into Breakfast at Tiffany's, which I'm not excited to watch because of Mickey Rooney, but I will push through. All right, Lizzie. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you guys on Monday for Breakfast at Tiffany's. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by H. Conley.