Trailer
Plot summary
A writer for The New Yorker, Truman Capote learns in 1959 that four members of a Kansas family have been killed on their farm and calls his editor, William Shawn, to propose writing about it. He travels to Holcomb with Nelle Harper Lee, a friend from his childhood. Alvin Dewey, the detective leading the inquiry for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, wants nothing to do with him. Marie Dewey, his wife, admires Capote's writing and persuades her husband to invite him and Lee to dinner. Dewey warms to him and lets him see photographs of the victims. When the suspects, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, are caught, Capote gets permission to visit the prison, and he becomes attached to Smith. He tells Shawn that the article will grow into a full-length book.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Capote (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sony Pictures Classics released the film on September 30, 2005, a date that coincided with what would have been Capote's 81st birthday.
- Fact checkers note that Warden Sherman Crouse first denied Capote access under prison rules limiting contact to immediate family and legal counsel, so Capote retained the firm of Saffels & Hope, who approached the governor of the state and worked out a deal.
- No non-fiction source asserts that Capote tried to secure legal representation for Smith and Hickock as the film shows; the initial appeal was handled by public defenders and later appeals by the Kansas Legal Aid Society after Hickock contacted them.
- Capote mainly corresponded with Hickock and Smith through letters and visited them in person fewer than half a dozen times, so the film's extended stays at the prison are fictionalized, although some confrontations are based on real letters.
- Made for a production budget of $7 million, Capote grossed $28.8 million in the United States and Canada and $21.2 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $50 million, with DVD and Blu-ray sales adding $17 million by 2018.
SPOILER
An epilogue notes that In Cold Blood made Capote the most famous writer in America, that he never finished another book and died in 1984 from complications due to alcoholism, and that he chose a line from Saint Teresa of Ávila as the epigraph for his unfinished final novel.
