Baron secures coin to produce 'Capote' pic
Producer hopes pic will begin lensing in winter

Variety - September. 9, 2003

By CATHY DUNKLEY

HOLLYWOOD -- Producer Caroline Baron ("Monsoon Wedding") has secured financing for indie feature "Capote" through New York-based production shingle Cyan Pictures. She is prepping the film for a winter start.

Dan Futterman adapted the screenplay, based on Gerald Clarke's "Capote, A Biography."

Pic focuses on the intense bond Capote formed with drifters Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who murdered a family of four in 1959, while he researched the book "In Cold Blood."

"Capote" marks the feature debut of documaker and commercials director Bennett Miller ("The Cruise"). Philip Seymour Hoffman is attached to play the author. Futterman, Joshua Newman and Colin Spoelman will exec produce.

Futterman said Clarke gave him access to 39 never-seen letters, mostly from Smith to Capote, but also some from Hickock, and the letters provided him with "the authentic voice of the killers." All of Capote's letters to Smith were destroyed after the latter's execution.

Futterman said, "They detail their mundane and heartbreaking life on death row and the arc of their relationship with Truman, who was so fascinated with them and so tired of them being alive and not having an ending for his book.

"The letters are heartbreaking as they reveal the desperation of Perry in particular, who had a great affection and fascination with the life that Capote led as the celebrated artists in New York.

"We're discussing incorporating a couple of them in some fashion into the narrative to give an almost documentary-style sense of who these guys were."

Pic is one of two indie projects exploring the complex relationship between Capote and the Kansas killers.

Killer Films is developing "Every Word Is True," based on George Plimpton's bio "Truman Capote," produced by Killer Films' Christine Vachon and Bradford Simpson with John Wells as exec producer. The new Warner Independent Pictures banner is poised to finance and distribute the pic (Daily Variety, Sept. 8), written and to be directed by Doug McGrath.

Capote also figures in a third feature, based on Barry Werth's nonfiction book "The Scarlet Professor," about Newton Arvin, an American lit professor at Smith College in the 1940s and '50s who was Capote's mentor and lover. That pic is being set up by Gotham-based producer Dan Cogan through his DMC Films banner.


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