The property was bought by a Texan who farms the land, and who has a son who occasionally stays there. Certainly it has not gone to ruin; nevertheless it seems abandoned, a scarecrow without crows to frighten. The present owner gave Brooks permission to film there; a considerable amount of the original furniture was still on hand, and Brooks’s chief assistant, Tom Shaw, has done an extraordinary job of tracking down and retrieving the departed pieces. The rooms looked precisely the same as they had when I examined them in December, 1959—that is, soon after the crime was discovered. Mr. Clutter’s Stetson hanging on a wall hat rack. Nancy’s sheet music open at the piano. Her brother’s spectacles resting on a bureau, the lenses shimmering in sunlight.
“But it was the Venetian blinds that I noticed—that I, as it were, ‘framed.’ The blinds cover the windows of Mr. Clutter’s office, the room by which the murderers entered the house. Upon entering, Dick had parted the Venetian slats and peered through them to see if any witnesses were lurking in the moonlit night; again, on departing, and after the immense noise of the shootings, Dick’s eyes had explored the landscape through the slats, his heart pounding for fear that the crash of four shotgun blasts might have roused the countryside.
And now the actor who is impersonating Dick, and who is so uncannily like Dick, is on the verge of repeating these actions. Yet eight years have passed, the Clutter family are gone and Dick is dead, but the Venetian blinds still exist, still hang at the same windows. Thus reality, via an object, extends itself into art; and that is what is original and disturbing about this film: reality and art are intertwined to the point that there is no identifiable area of demarcation.
“Almost the whole of the murder sequence is being photographed in total darkness—except for the use of flashlights. This has never been done before, because ordinarily a flashlight is incapable of producing light sufficiently powerful to register a scene without the aid of extra illumination. In the present case, however, the production’s technicians have invented flashlights fixed with special batteries that generate solid shafts of white blaze—extremely effective as the beams wander in the darkness, crossing and crisscrossing.
“Brooks’s attention to detail can occasionally be comic. Today he noticed that between takes inside the Clutter house several of the crew were smoking cigarettes. Suddenly he clapped his hands and shouted, ‘All right! Cut that out! Mr. Clutter never allowed anyone to smoke in this house, so I’m not going to allow it either.’ ”
Presently undermined by flu and the strain of reliving painful events, I left Brooks and his company to get on with their work free of my critical surveillance. No director can abide an author staring over his shoulder; and, agreeable as our relationship was, I sensed that Brooks felt my presence made everyone edgy, himself included. He was not unhappy to see me go.
Returning to New York, I was surprised to find that few people asked me how the film was progressing. Rather, they were curious to know what the reaction of the townspeople was to the fact of the film’s being made in their midst: Was the atmosphere antagonistic? Cooperative? What? To answer the question, I have to refer to my own experiences during the years I spent roaming around Finney County, accumulating material.
When I arrived there in 1959 I knew no one, and no one, except the local librarian and several schoolteachers, had ever heard of me. As it happened, the first person I interviewed turned out to be the only genuine enemy I made there—at least the only one both openly and covertly hostile (a contradiction in terms, but nevertheless accurate). This fellow was, and is, the editor of the local daily paper, the Garden City Telegram, and therefore in a position to constantly publicize his belligerent attitude toward me and the work I was attempting to do. His columns are signed Bill Brown, and he is as plain as his name: a thin, rumpled man with mud-colored eyes and a beige complexion.
Of course, I understood his resentment, and at first sympathized with it: here was this “New York” writer, as he often drawlingly described me, invading his terrain and presuming to write a book about a “sordid” subject that was best swept away and forgotten. His continuous theme was: “We want to forget our tragedy, but this New York writer isn’t going to let us.” Therefore, it came as no surprise when Brown started a campaign to prevent Brooks from filming the Kansas scenes in Garden City and Holcomb.
Now his theme was that the advent of these “Hollywood people” would attract “undesirable elements,” and everything in Finney County would go to hell. Huffed and puffed, did Mr. Brown, but his efforts failed. For the simple reason that most of the people I met in western Kansas are reasonable and helpful; I couldn’t have survived if it hadn’t been for their consistent kindness, and I made friends among them that will last a lifetime.
That was in March of last year. In September, I traveled to California to see a rough cut of the finished film. On arrival, I had a meeting with Brooks, who was screening the picture for me the following day. Brooks is a very secretive man; he hoards his scripts, locks them up at night and never lets anyone read a complete version. Shooting on In Cold Blood had ended in June, and since that time Brooks had worked only with a cutter and a projectionist, not allowing anyone else to view a foot of the film. As we talked he seemed under the kind of whitened strain one does not associate with so assertive and vigorous a man. “Of course I’m nervous,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I be? It’s your book—and suppose you don’t like it?”
And suppose you don’t like it? Excellent question; and, strangely, one I’d never asked myself, principally because I had chosen the ingredients, and I always have faith in my own judgment.
The next day, when I arrived at Columbia studios around noon, Brooks was even more nervous. My God, he was glum! He said, “I’ve had some rough moments with this picture. But today’s the roughest.” On that note we walked into the screening room, and the sensation was not unlike entering a death cell.
Brooks picked up a telephone connected with the projectionist’s booth. “All right. Let’s go.”
The lights dimmed. The white screen turned into a highway at twilight: Route 50 winding under draining skies through a countryside empty as a cornhusk, woebegone as wet leaves. In the far horizon a silvery Greyhound bus appears, enlarges as it hummingly approaches, streaks by. Music: solitary guitar. Now the credits start as the image changes, dissolves into the Greyhound’s interior. Slumber hangs heavily. Only a weary little girl roams the aisle, gradually wandering toward the darkened rear, lured there by the lonely, disconnected plunk-plunk-plunk of a guitar. She finds the player, but we do not see him; she says something to him, but we cannot quite hear what it is.
The guitarist strikes a match to light a cigarette, and the flame partially illuminates his face—Perry’s face, Perry’s eyes, sleepy, remote. Dissolve to Dick, then to Dick and Perry in Kansas City, then to Holcomb, and Herbert Clutter breakfasting on the final day of his life, then back to his future executioners: the contrapuntal technique I used in writing the book.
The scenes move with striking fluidity, but I am increasingly gripped by a sense of loss; and a ring forms around my heart, like the frosty haze around a harvest moon. Not because of what is on the screen, which is fine, but because of what isn’t. Why has such-and-such been omitted? Where is Bobby Rupp? Susan Kidwell? The postmistress and her mother?
In the midst of my dilemma of not being able to concentrate appreciatively on what was there because of what wasn’t, the film caught fire—literally. One could see the tiny fire burning on the screen, a zipper of flame that separated the images and crisped them. In the silence following the abrupt halt, Brooks said, “Nothing serious. Just an accident. It’s happened before. We’ll have it fixed in a minute.”
A lucky accident, for during the time it took the projectionist to repair the damage and resume the screening, I managed to resolve the quarrel I was having with myself. Look, an inner voice said, you’re being unrealistic, unfair. This picture is two hours long, and that is as long as it can reasonably be. If Brooks included everything you would like to have shown, every nuance you’re grieving over, it would last nine hours! So stop worrying. Watch it for what it is: judge from that.
I did, and it was like swimming into a familiar sea only to be surprised by a muscular wave of sinister height, trapped in a hurtling current that carried me downward to ocean-floor depths, escorted me, pummeled raw and groggy, onto a beach uniquely desolate—not, unfortunately, the victim of a bad dream, or of “just a movie,” but of reality.
The screen returned to its pristine
