Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

tbf I think there was a lot of willful misreading of this movie at the time and people *did* come away thinking Allen was the Zodiac, despite the explicit exoneration at the end

smdh

I know right

ppl are so dumb

ikr ted cruz is of course the zodiac killer

during my initial obsession with this movie (around the time the directors cut blu ray came out) i kinda bought into the arthur lee allen theory. but i also got interested in the actual case and looked into it more and realized ALA was surely a creep but probably not the Zodiac. however, this just made it easier for me to see the nuances and subtleties of the movie.

it's important to me thought that, for my
money, the movie doesn't totally exonerate ALA. i think it stays indeterminate (rightly).

easy dirty harry

the card at the end was vv different from the one at the end of JFK, for example, which says something about how Clay Shaw was lying and was involved with the CIA, using it to suggest "hey he was involved" (and is willfully misleading about his role with the CIA, which was not really a role at all. the card at the end, coming right after the scene where the survivor IDs Allen is basically all about the futility of the hunt, or at least the futility of this particular lead and the emptiness of the obsession these guys had chasing these ghosts.

the film is spookier and more spot-on for choosing to remain an open mystery at the end and not fictionally "solve" the case, there's none of that scooby doo effect of deflating the scares by unmasking the specter. (maybe that's one of the points of the scooby doo music as well?)

one of the things that i think is usually lost in true crime movies or in serial killer pics is the pervasive sense of dread accompanying the real life situations, the feeling felt by those who are experiencing it as a local phenomenon, as opposed to the usual cinematic maneuver of depicting the horror of the crimes and the blood and all that. obviously the murders are depicted here and done well, but they're pretty quick hits and not sadistic or methodical. and the gauziness of the killer, using different actors to play the role, is such a key here.

otm

rewatching with Finchers commentary today

it's cool how many scenes are his recreations of childhood memories. i think that might be what puts it over, the personal aspect of it where you just feel like he cares about so many small details

also downey suggested the bar trick with the straws... and then had to do 26 takes of it so that the coverage matched up lol doh

the amount of times that fincher says...well we did 50 takes on this shot... 20 takes on this shot

imagine how pissed off the actors & crew would have been if the movie ended up sucking lol

I remember really liking all the commentaries on the blu ray. I can't remember which one james ellroy sits in on, the actors maybe?, but it's great.

yeah hes on the actors commentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0rtR2EQliE

we're finally gonna solve this fucker

Somebody gotta get rid of this fucka!

Boo yah!

Yeah (Fincher)'s clearly contemptuous towards the film system these days. I hope he doesn't start doing shitty middlebrow cable series..

― regular speed of candy on chrome (brimstead), Saturday, July 13, 2013 4:36 PM (four years ago)

Whomp whomp.

Anyway, not really much of a Fincher guy myself, but precisely because Kate and I noted his other new series, which I see VG has started a thread on, as well as just living here now and all, I decided a couple of weeks ago I should finally get around to this and snagged a Blu-ray of the director's cut version on the cheap. We watched it last night -- as two of Kate's favorite things are old-school San Francisco and the 70s (as actually lived) in general she was all about this. Having done a massive thread reread I'm pretty much in the 'pro' camp -- absolute technical marvel, loved the ensemble pretty much front to back, stellar scenes in particular throughout. Certainly glad I saw this for the first time on, if not an actual movie screen, a 4K TV. That said the things that didn't entirely work may just be a matter of initial perceptions playing out, and those things are more based on initial assumptions than anything else (I had somehow assumed a generally slower pace, for instance, but the editing alone kept that from happening). Kate was enraptured with the cinematography right out of the gate and remarked on the crispness etc. pretty much from the first scenes in; I'm only now thinking this morning for the first time how this plays against the perception of film and memory now, how there's a '70s' film/TV stock feel which shapes thoughts back on the time -- TV procedurals in particular of course and how they react to 70s films in the field. It's an interesting forcing of immediacy -- there's not meant to be any haze, there can't be. Even the dead-ending and unravelling must by default be clear in the moment.

Something in the opening credits made me think "I know that name" and then it leapt out at me in the end credits -- David Shire on piano. I'm mildly surprised that through this whole thread while both The Conversation and Shire are each mentioned once separately, there's no mention of his piano score for said film specifically, since surely that's as much of a tip of the hat as all the other cinematic reference points throughout the film, meta or otherwise.

Anyway, circling back to Mindhunter a bit, in his Charlie Rose interview the other day Fincher said this re Zodiac:

As for what he learned from “Zodiac” to help him on “Mindhunter,” the director had this to say: “I learned my lesson with ‘Zodiac’…You can ask a lot of an audience, but two hours and 45 minutes and no closure is probably — ‘Yes, get a babysitter; yes, find parking; yes, wait in line; yes, sit and have people with their phones on in your peripheral vision and concentrate for two hours and forty-five minutes,’ is asking a lot.”

yeah even though the zodiac is relatively well-known among true crime folks, i think a lot of people who remembered the name or kinda know the story didnt know that it was unsolved. and there’s a good portion of people who dont want to go on a fact-finding journey just for the sake of it

i think mindhunter def brings a lot of the style developed for zodiac and if anything makes me wonder what zodiac: the series might have been like
though i adore the film

i reread Graysmith’s first Zodiac book for a true crime bookclub & i really have no patience for it now at all. first time reading that book was exciting as someone who didnt know anything at all about that case but now it’s like
“... nope dude that’s not a thing”
“um youre making that up”
“ok WHAT now?”
“would a linear narrative kill you jfc”
and in general he’s just really a terrible writer.

Fincher’s movie is infinitely more enjoyable than the book has any right to be; that might be small comfort to Fincher now but i think it’s a pretty big achievement.

(xpost) I mentioned David Shire on the Conversation thread, when I saw him speak after a screening of the film a few years ago.

Coppola's _The Conversation_

Oh it makes sense to mention him there -- I'm talking about this thread here, you see. :-D

If they want to verify the accuracy of this Roy Moore inscription, they need the same Sherwood Morrill who drinks like Paul Avery now.

^

RIP Dave Toschi

http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/SF-cop-who-hunted-Zodiac-killer-dies-Dave-Toschi-12488886.php

Wow (that he was still alive, I guess). Probably my favorite exchange in the film:

Toschi: "He wrote me, you know? 2500 suspects, the only one who ever wrote me a letter was Leigh Allen."

Graysmith: "They like to help, you know, sometimes."

Toschi: "Yes, Robert, I know."

<3 Toschi was a legend, no question

"Nothing makes sense anymore."

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/9/21/21446089/david-fincher-profile-director-set-stories

George Drakoulias, the film’s music supervisor, remembers visiting Fincher’s office when Zodiac was in preproduction. “The whole bottom floor was just research: books and evidence, transcripts, documents, photographs,” he says. “It was a little frightening, especially given the subject and how deep he had gone into the research.”

Graysmith used some pseudonyms in his book, since he implicated individuals as being possible murderers, but Fincher was determined to use only real names, which meant verifying everything with at least two sources. Vanderbilt and Fincher would travel to San Francisco and spend days talking with the cops who’d worked the case when it happened, those who had taken it up in later years, and the two survivors of the killer’s attacks. The shooting script swelled to 202 pages, the depiction of Graysmith shifted, they introduced uncertainties about Zodiac’s criminal capabilities, and Fincher encouraged Vanderbilt to abandon contrived plot conventions like Jake Gyllenhaal’s and Mark Ruffalo’s characters meeting early in the film. “I had had three movies made at this point,” says Vanderbilt. “One was about a killer tooth fairy, one was a John Travolta–Samuel L. Jackson movie that I describe as ‘the one they did together that wasn’t Pulp Fiction,’ and one was The Rundown, which I love, but is the Rock’s second action movie. Doing a serial-killer procedural with David Fincher was a very different world to be in.”

I heard Fincher got so into his research he actually started murdering people, man.

one was a John Travolta–Samuel L. Jackson movie that I describe as ‘the one they did together that wasn’t Pulp Fiction

Basic >>>>>>> Pulp Fiction

Ha! Travolta's character in that is named TOM HARDY!

hard to believe this was one year before Iron Man, the pre-Avengers times

Zodiac's 340-char cipher cracked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o

Did the cracking involve someone going to the library?

Close! An American software developer for a federal defense contractor, an Aussie Applied Maths scientist + a Belgian warehouse operator/computer programmer who devised the decryption algorithm solver these three used to solve it.

that's really cool actually

He has another video analyzing Graysmith's solution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Oh4snhF70

v cool

i love that first video walking through how they did it, codebreaking is dope imo

The fuckin' library.

(I know I'm not contributing anything here, I just love quoting the movie.)

D R I N K

M O R E

O V A L T I N E

“Sonofabitch! It’s a commercial!”

VG I immediately though of u when Sunny posted this on FB :)

:D

it def says something about this case that the message ends up (unsurprisingly) being more of the same boring braggadocio

https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/03/24/the-solution-of-the-zodiac-killers-340-character-cipher/

huh

https://www.fox13now.com/news/national-news/investigators-say-theyve-finally-identified-the-zodiac-killer

I have a slightly used vault that used to belong to Al Capone I'd be interested in selling for $1M or best offer. If interested, please contact me care of FOX NEWS.

TMZ broke it first but I can't read their article due to work filters

The investigators were commissioned by a television producer who obviously wants to hype the audience numbers, so the linked article is rather thin on details. But the guy they name is dead, so libel shouldn't be a legal worry. In other news, the case of Jack the Ripper has finally been solved... for the ninth time!