Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

The Truman show
The star and director of Capote on how a diminutive writer from Monroeville, Alabama, changed America
BY PETER KEOUGH

Once upon a time, a half-century or so ago, fame descended on those who deserved it. Statesmen, war heroes, athletes, movie icons, writers, artists, and astronauts electrified the public imagination, not talent-contest winners, manufactured pop stars, or Paris Hilton. More important, fame endured and had consequences. For Ernest Hemingway, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and John F. Kennedy, the price of immortality was high. It was the world as it existed before Andy Warhol’s famous 15-minutes dictum, and it was still as the Greeks had seen it: only the whim of the gods, and the unlikelihood of mortal wisdom, separated glory from hubris, Elysium from catastrophe.

Truman Capote entered this world a golden sprite, full of talent, turmoil, ambition, and joie de vivre. Whether by fate or design, PR preceded accomplishment: Capote with his gamin beauty dominated a 1947 Life-magazine photo spread on post-war writers even though he hadn’t published a single book. His first novel, the autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms, caused a stir not so much for its hothouse prose or titillating subject (one of his friends described it as "the fairy Huckleberry Finn") as for its come-hither jacket photo of the 23-year-old Capote sprawled out like a sulky, spent Ganymede.

"I knew about Truman Capote from childhood talk shows," says Philip Seymour Hoffman, who portrays the writer in Capote, a new film based on Gerald Clarke’s 1988 biography. "I knew he’d written In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and all that, but other than that I really didn’t know much about him. So I read the biography, which I liked very much, and I said okay. Then I watched this documentary of him [Albert and David Maysles’s A Visit With Truman Capote] with Bennett and I became petrified: what I saw was much more than what I remembered."

Indeed, while Capote’s celebrity grew with The Grass Harp (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), he seethed at the suggestion that he was all froth and no substance, and in 1959 followed the lead of a New York Times clipping to the dark heart of America. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, a pair of drifters, had murdered four members of a respected Midwestern family in cold blood. Originally planning to write a simple New Yorker story, Capote became immersed in the lives of the two killers on death row, especially Smith. His attachment to them was complicated by the fact that in order for his book to be finished, they would have to die. Six years later Smith and Hickock swung, In Cold Blood was published, and Truman Capote was the most famous writer in the world.

Capote, written by actor Dan Futterman and directed by Bennett Miller (The Cruise), focuses on the author’s struggle to complete In Cold Blood. For Hoffman, who appears to be en route to an Oscar nomination, portraying Capote also posed a couple of challenges. First, that voice, still unforgettable more than 20 years after his death. Second, Capote’s height, which was 5’3"; Hoffman is 5’10."

"The idea was that I didn’t need to look 5’3", but I needed to look small," says Hoffman. "I lost as much weight as I could and I wore what he wore, moved the way he moved. He kind of pushed his hips forward and kind of swayed back."

"He cut off his legs at the ankle," adds Miller. "He learned the physicality of a much shorter person, the way he holds himself and moves, and in shooting the thing there’s a lot of tricks you can do. But for me the [transformation] was a much more gradual one and a nerve-wracking one. It was a plane coming in for a very shaky landing. The thing was shaking a lot right up until the last moment. He worked on it for about five months.

"The real key for Phil to really own the thing was improvisation. We were really struggling through a scene; it just felt phony. I said, ‘Just forget about the script. You know what you want and what you got to avoid. Let’s just wing it.’ And he resisted because he said he’s ‘not that kind of actor.’ I thought the best way to have him own the character was to not have that safety net, not even the script. So all those party scenes are off the script."

 

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: October 14 - 20, 2005
Back to the News & Features table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group