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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, October 9th, 2006 - Comments Off on INFAMOUS 'In Cold Blood' With Hot Prison Sex
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INFAMOUS 'In Cold Blood' With Hot Prison Sex

INFAMOUS-the second movie in two years about the genesis of Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD-arrives in theatres a year after the critically acclaimed CAPOTE. This film, too, boasts a career-making performance from its leading man. In place of a physically transformed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Infamous is carried by a less well known lookalike, the highly regarded stage actor Toby Jones, and his best pal Harper Lee is portrayed this time, with warmth and appealing shyness, by Sandra Bullock.
The key scene, for me, is when Jones’ Capote is on the phone to his society and literary friends, revising and sweetening one of the most indelible lines in his true crime novel, Perry Smith’s remark that he had admired Mr. Clutter “right up until the moment I slit his throat.”
I really enjoyed speaking with Jones for the New York Daily News. The actor’s well known as a playwright and monologist (he’s a great admirer of the late Spalding Gray).


What the Daily News piece couldn’t include was Jones’ insight into the way writers-especially memoirists-transform their lives and the lives of those of those around them into art. “In Cold Blood was quite different from everything Capote had written before, and everything he wrote afterward,” said Jones. “It was groundbreaking, not just as a genre, but for him personally.”
“And yes, I did wonder, after reading Doug McGrath’s script and working on this film: How much can we trust writers in general, when they write about themselves? How much can we believe? Not just Capote, who was such much about creating a persona, all his life. But all the writers we love and admire. Their gift is all about transforming experience, what did happen, into literature.”

Enough of the highbrow stuff.

I’d also like to thank Jones for enduring all my obligatory questionsn about his cellblock sex scene with Daniel Craig, who plays convicted killer Perry Smith. (Questions like, “So, you’re the first actor to have a crack at the new James Bond. Tell me all about it.”
)

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon