Zodiac (2007)

 

Zodiac (2007)

 

“There is a line between facts and instinct, between what you know in your heart and what you can prove, between justice and whether closure can exist when there is no justice … that’s what “Zodiac” is about.”

n Director David Fincher

 

Most Writers creating fictional Serial Killers are inspired by actual ones, but even the most casual research demonstrates how tenuous (read “nonexistent”) the connection between truth and fiction generally is. Some films even claim to be based on truth, but then prove to be lying as shamelessly as Tucker Carlson. This one is different though, it’s not only based on a real case, it is as meticulous as one could ever expect a dramatization to be.

 

The Real-World story of the Zodiac killer is a still-unsolved string of brutal killings in California, beginning in 1969 and stretching across the next decade or more. No one really knows how many murders Zodiac was responsible for, officially five, almost certainly more, but he also claimed credit for crimes he didn’t commit, so we will never know. The Zodiac killings, along with the Altamont Concert violence and Manson Family massacres, also 1969, rudely cut-short all the optimism that started during the Summer of Love of 1967.

 

Zodiac was also an unparalleled media manipulator, almost the only Serial Killer since Jack the Ripper (first killing in 1888) to send handwritten notes to the Press and Police. In Jack’s case most Historians believe all, or most, of the letters were hoaxes. Most of Zodiac’s messages were proven legit, though there were hoaxes mixed in, and he filled them with ciphers, fake clues, taunts, and threats -- for example: because you could’ve caught me last time, but you didn’t, maybe next time I just might wipe out a busload of schoolchildren with a sniper rifle. He inspired many fictions, both prose and cinema, and other Real-World Serial Killers, like David Berkowitz and Heriberto Seda.

 

For Director David Fincher, Zodiac was the ultimate Boogeyman. Part of his childhood was spent within driving distance of the Serial Killer’s main hunting grounds. “If you grew up there, at that time, you had this childhood fear that you kind of insinuated yourself into it.  What if it was our bus?  What if he showed up in our neighborhood?  You create even more drama about it when you’re a kid because that is what kids do.  I grew up in Marin and now I know the geography of where the crimes took place, but when you’re in grade school, children don’t think about that.  They think, `He’s going to show up at our school.’” In a separate interview, “I remember the police car escorting my bus to school every morning,'' of course he was 7-years-old at the time, and looked at things differently than he did later, ''I was just a kid. I probably thought it was cool.''

 

This film focuses neither on the Killer nor his Victims, but the obsession he engendered, and how that obsession negatively impacted the lives of the Newspapermen and Detectives who devoted themselves to identify him. Producer Mike Medavoy, “It is what happens when you get so obsessed with something and you lose sight of what the objective is.  You’re bound to get lost and you’re bound to destroy everything along the way … and it happened to every single one of them.”

 

Robert Graysmith, a Real-World player in the Zodiac story, had this to say, “[I]t is a wonder any of us survived the Zodiac. The long pursuit, the irresistible lure of the case, its mystery, tragedy and loss, ruined marriages, derailed careers, demolished health of a brilliant reporter; it was a study in frustration as police were beaten back time and again.”

 

Graysmith directly attributes his second divorce to his obsession with this case and that became part of the film. But Graysmith’s not the “brilliant reporter” of the last paragraph, that was Paul Avery, I get to him later.

 

In the film Graysmith is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and is our central character. Graysmith was a Newspaper Cartoonist turned amateur Sleuth whose two books on the killer, “Zodiac” (1986) and “Zodiac Unmasked” (2002) were the basis of the script. Apparently, he never put himself in the center of either book, but Screenwriter James Vanderbilt did in the movie, and this is, by far, Vanderbilt’s best produced screenplay.

 

Director Fincher, “The one thing about the Zodiac story too is there are so many people out there who are convinced Robert is wrong about some things and that their version or interpretation is right and there are so many myths that sprang up so you have to keep all of that in mind when you are dealing with the story of Zodiac.  That is why we chose to tell the story the way we did, through Robert’s eyes.  My goal was to capture the truth of those books.”

 

And in a separate interview, “Robert Graysmith knew he was a guy on the sidelines of this story.  He wanted to be a part of it and he made himself a part of it. He was doing it on his own time because he wasn’t a reporter.  It was Robert who went after it and after everybody else had pretty much walked away.”  

 

Screenwriter Vanderbilt, “Getting to know Robert during this process was actually invaluable because the script changed as we became friends … Robert truly invited us into his life warts and all, and that’s how I think we ended up portraying him onscreen.  The great thing about Robert the artist is that he recognizes the value in that, he understands the creative process and what makes a good story.”

 

Actor Gyllenhaal, “I think what is most interesting about this story is that when something like this happens there’s mass hysteria.  And then it’s given to the experts.  And sometimes the experts don’t have the same heart that just a kind of a regular guy like Robert Graysmith would have. They also have so much red tape to go through, all the jurisdiction.  Robert, a sort of regular person off the street, doesn’t have to get a warrant for this, or permission for that.  They can just go out of pure heart and pure, in Robertʹs case, obsession.  I think that’s fascinating because we rely less and less on ourselves, you know.  We rely on expertʹs opinions, and so often they’re tinged with so many other political things and things related to their own work and where they want to go … To me, it’s an empowering thing, to know that there’s this sort of regular guy, who could just, could break open a case that people found impossible, to solve.”

 

As appealing as Gyllenhaal makes it sounds, it also brings up the film’s most irresponsible act, though one can see why it was dramatically necessary. It gives us a named suspect (in his books, Graysmith used a pseudonym for him), a man never charged and dead since 1992, so he can’t defend himself, and he was also only one of a whopping 2,500 suspects. Yes, the film was also very clear that he was never charged because the case against him was so tenuous, and that same man had previously been identified in other media, but there are even worse problems, which I’ll get back to later.

 

Making the lead Graysmith, a shy, unassuming man in the context of a still unsolved mystery, was a challenge on several levels. Cast as the lead, Gyllenhaal had more pressure on him than the other actors, and therefore the most difficult relationship with Fincher in both of their pursuits of Graysmith. Gyllenhaal said of Fincher, he “paints with people … it’s tough to be a color.” In a separate interview, “David knows what he wants, and he’s very clear about what he wants, and he’s very, very, very smart. But sometimes we’d do a lot of takes, and he’d turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there,” because the movie was shot digitally, allowing Fincher to say, “‘Delete the last 10 takes.’ And as an actor that’s very hard to hear.”

 

Fincher is notorious for demanding take-after-take of even small scenes. Fincher’s response to Gyllenhaal’s carefully respectful complaints was, “I hate earnestness in performance … Usually by Take 17 the earnestness is gone … When you go to your job, is it supposed to be fun, or are you supposed to get stuff done?”

 

Arguably, Gyllenhaal had it easy. During the filming of “Panic Room” (2002) Fincher famously forced Jodie Foster through 107 takes for a single scene. Still, here, all three leads in this film were forced to endure 70-or-so takes for certain scenes.

 

Gyllenhaal also admits that the more experienced actors had a better time of it. Robert Downey Jr, after his Real-World and highly publicized battles with many a personal Demon, is now Hollywood’s go-to guy for tortured Heroes. He played Paul Avery, among California’s most gifted Crime Journalists but descended into alcohol and cocaine addiction and early death, was directly threatened by Zodiac, and is by far the film’s most self-destructive character.

 

Gyllenhaal, “Robert Downey Jr. is extraordinary.  What he’s done, and what he always does, is bring a presence, kind of ‘wipe‐through.’  His Paul Avery is kind of a court jester in that he dances around things and he has this sense of humor, almost a detachment from the situation, but a real sense of humor about it.  Kind of like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan.  He just sheds light all over everybody whenever he flies around.”

 

Fincher, “Robert Downey Jr … is the only one who plays someone that is no longer alive. But I think he has such enthusiasm and because he is someone who could really grasp Paul’s inner demons, he was perfect for the role.”

 

As the film is interested only in this one case, it blames Avery’s personal and career disintegration on his monomaniacal focus on it, which probably wasn’t really true. The film ignores the traumas he suffered before Zodiac and other major stories he did great work on later, like Patty Hearst (kidnapped by Terrorists in 1974, arrested in 1975 after she allied herself with those same Terrorists) and that even after his 1976 departure from the “San Francisco Chronicle,” where he knew Graysmith from, he successfully forced Police and Prosecutors to drop charges against an innocent man wrongfully arrested for murder. Downey’s Avery is the film’s most compelling character, but is at odds with the rigorous accuracy that otherwise elevated this Thriller.

 

Regarding his relationship with Fincher, Downey joked, “Sometimes it’s really hard because it might not feel collaborative, but ultimately filmmaking is a director’s medium … I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to garrote him, that I was going to give him what he wanted. I think I’m a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags.” 

 

Our third lead was Mark Ruffalo as Detective Dave Toschi. Ruffalo chose to play Toschi was Crime Reporters often described him (Reporter Duffy Jennings said Toschi "was by the book, efficient and thorough”), with far less swagger and less obsessed with public attention as the Real-World Toschi sometimes was. Ruffalo made Toschi more like Actor Peter Falk’s “Columbo” (TV series first aired 1968) and less the Media Maven who hobnobbed with actors who then modeled their performances on him (Steven McQueen in “Bullitt” (1968), Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry” (1971) and Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco” (TV series first aired in 1972)).  

 

During the during the course of this investigation, Toschi’s need for attention got him in trouble, and this is part of the film. Tochi was removed from the Homicide Squad and the Zodiac case in 1978 because of anonymous letters he sent to Writer Armistead Maupin talking-up his own achievements. This then led to accusations that Toschi had written Zodiac letters, but he was cleared of that. Not included in the film is that, in 1981, he collapsed at home, and was soon diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer. Despite his highly public embarrassments, Toschi stayed with the Police until 1987, successfully working several more high-profile cases before his retirement even after his stress-related illness. Toschi and Graysmith were both consultants on this film, but Toschi’s family refused to be involved, and don’t appear as characters.

 

Also not in the film is Toschi’s ritual that he’s maintained for more than a generation. “I make it a point to cross that intersection [Washington and Cherry] all the time, especially every anniversary …  I just stop to see if maybe somebody else would be parked there, maybe the killer would show up.  I was always trying to figure out where did we go wrong?  It’s never left me.” In a separate interview, “I look around the intersection and I wonder what the heck happened. Did we cover all the bases? Did we miss anything at the scene? … I will always wonder if he really was watching us, like he said in his letter.”

 

That was the site of the Zodiac killing that drew Toschi into the case, Paul Stine, when the Police came closest to catching the killer, the crime-scene that yielded the most evidence, but Zodiac still slipped away.

 

Toschi described Avery, the real person who is also a character in this film whom he knew the longest, longer than even his partner on the Zodiac case Bill Armstrong, played by Anthony Edwards, “I met Paul Avery in 1960 when I was 28. I was with the Bureau of Inspectors and I wanted to be a detective. We shared a lot of history. At the end Paul was doing cocaine and he was on a machine.  He was in really bad shape. He called me before he passed away. He wanted to write a book, a quick paperback before he died to leave to his grandchildren.  He said, `Dave we can make $25,000 each, just like that!’ I felt bad for him, really bad.  But I told him, Paul, I’m committed to Robert Graysmith … I met Robert Graysmith in 1977 when he told me he wanted to write.  He really believed this case could be solved.  He really wanted to try.  We have remained good friends since.”

 

In a bit of irony that the film doesn’t ignore, is that Toschi and Graysmith first met quite casually, a few years earlier in 1971, at the premier of “Dirty Harry,” which was a fictionalization of the Zodiac case where the killer gets blown away by a Hero Cop.

 

At the time, Toshi was adored by the media, but by the next year, Zodiac was deemed a Cold Case. Toshi would then be a member of the Special Task assigned to the Zebra Murders, that’s task-forces structure was in-part a reaction to the errors made early in the Zodiac case. It involved far more murders, ended in the successful conviction of the Perps, and was nowhere near as famous as this case. Zodiac’s greater fame is likely because he was never caught, as Fincher pointed out, "When you finally saw David Berkowitz, you got to erase it, because you were, 'Look at you. You are a schlub.'”  Toshi’s fall-from-grace was a few years after that.

 

Ruffalo, speaking of Fincher’s 70-take shots, sounded like he was describing Toschi, “You can put your expectations aside and have an experience that’s new and pushes and changes you, or hold onto what you think it should be and have a stubborn, immovable journey that’s filled with disappointment and anger.”

 

Ruffalo further describes Fincher, “He knows he’s taking a stab at eternity. He knows that this will outlive him. And he’s not going to settle for anything other than satisfaction, deep satisfaction. Somewhere along the line he said, ‘I will not settle for less.’”

 

This was Fincher’s sixth feature, and in the previous ones, he earned a reputation for cynicism and hyper-stylishness. The most useful touch-stone would be his break-through film, “Se7en” (1995), also about the hunt for a Serial Killer. “Se7en” which borrowed the visual look from a comic-book, Frank Miller’s “Sin City” (first published 1991). With “Zodiac,” we have a story that engenders cynicism, but he chose to under-hype the darkness of the material (all the violence is early in the film) and strip it of all overt stylistics. This was because “Zodiac” was his first film based on actual events, with an unusually information-dense script. It bears no similarity to the Hyper-Noir of “Se7en” but instead consciously echoed Director Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” (1976), which meticulously recreated the downfall of President Richard Nixon, which unfolded during the Zodiac killing-spree. It shares with “All the President’s …” unattractive offices, somehow both mundane and bee-hives of activity; unfashionable, casual, clothing; long dialogue scenes that were professional, not emotional, in their tonalities; and how it demanded close attention from the viewer. It’s a procedural in the purest sense, full of misdirection because the volume of information is confusing to the protagonists, a confusion made worse by jurisdictional issues and rivalries. This Thriller is near unique that it admits that the hard work of Journalism and Law Enforcement is mostly banal.

 

Fincher, “Everything we included in the movie, we used from what Robert gave us.  But we had police reports and we backed everything up with documentation, our own interviews and evidence.  Even when we did our own interviews, we would talk to two people. One would confirm some aspects of it and another would deny it.  Plus, so much time had passed, memories are affected and the different telling of the stories change perception.  So, when there was any doubt, we always went with the police reports.”

 

In the Real-World, the massive, and uncontrollable, volume of information undeniably contributed to the Zodiac case remaining unsolved.

 

The film is long, 2 ½ hours, but even at its unusual length, it was heavily cut. Despite its length, and lack of action scenes, it’s briskly paced, hardly a minute goes by without new evidence, though sometimes that evidence proves to be a falsehood. The same was true of the books it was based on. Graysmith imagined that he could solve the case through his writing, and the first Zodiac books proved to be 10-years work. He conducted 200 interviews, tracked down missing witnesses, surviving victims and possible suspects. He provided composite sketches, maps, graphs and even drew the cover. He uncovered a huge volume of new information and impressed the Detectives who had worked it a decade-or-more before. Graysmith’s first draft was 1,200 pages long, he eventually boiled it down to 462.     

 

Something akin to that happened with the film. When shooting wrapped, Fincher had the equivalent of 1.3 million feet of film (note: this wasn’t really film, it was digital), or enough for two full, pre-edited, features. After months he got the turning time down to a bit more than three hours, and that’s where the harsher cutting began, and by then, that work was competing for time with his next film.

 

Fincher’s obsessiveness with period detail was expensive and impressed many. Said Graysmith, “The old Chronicle newsroom was a city‐block long.  [On the set] Everything was authentic – the light fixtures, old typewriters, the molding, the U‐shaped copy desk.  Everything worked – old phones, drinking fountains, elevators and pneumatic mail tube stations.  The desk drawers were even stocked with Chronicle notepads and Eagle pencils.  Yet who would know the difference all these years later if those details were wrong?  David Fincher would.”

 

Fincher, “I wanted it to be true and that meant, surroundings informed by older siblings, a world that would reflect their parents’ time as well in terms of the houses they grew up in.  Things carried down over generations most of us have ... I think what we show is a pretty good representation of the time.  It is not technically perfect … You will definitely know it from the music.”

 

Production Designer Donald Graham Burt says one of the costliest sets on-location was Lake Berryessa, scene of the first attack, “When we got there … The oak trees the killer hid behind were gone.  We had to helicopter in two huge oaks trees.  We drilled holes in a piece of the land and hauled in some water so they wouldn’t die … We really reconstructed that from photographs taken of the site during the day.”

 

Fincher’s first feature-film was the disastrous “Alien 3” (1992), which could’ve easily ended his career, except within the industry, it was pretty-well-known he had inherited a train-wreck that he had limited control over. Directing commercials and music videos is what earned him his second feature, “Se7en.” But before any of that, his start was with George Lucas, working as a Camera-man, in the Production Design, and FX Departments of “Return of the Jedi” (1983), “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984), and other projects. Even as a freshman Director, he understood cameras and FX better than most, and this is on full display in “Zodiac,” especially the FX, because this is actually an FX-heavy film, but all the FX are invisible.

 

The film has a multitude of helicopter shots, but, in fact, there are none. The Bay Area is much transformed over the decades, so everything that appears to be a helicopter shot was actually CGI created, and flawlessly so.

 

The single most complicated scene was on-location, except it wasn’t. It concerned the Stine murder at the above-mentioned intersection of Washington and Cherry Streets; but the residents of the neighborhood objected to the filming, and the intersection had changed dramatically over the decades, so this apparent-location filming was done on a soundstage and achieved through chroma-key and CGI techniques.

 

Squibs, or exploding balloons filled with fake blood, were replaced with CGI. Though CGI is expensive, squibs require getting the shot right the first time, otherwise one must re-dress the actors and wash of the scene, possibly even more expensive. More-and-more low-budget film-makers are turning to CGI for just that reason. For Fincher, given a generous budget, his driving force is that squibs can only do what squibs can do, and to meticulously recreated what he saw in crime-scene photos, he felt he needed to take it to the next-level technically.

 

Digital film-making had been creeping into feature-production for some time, but this is among the first features made almost entirely so, and specially for its very early (maybe first-time-ever) use of the Viper camera for a feature-length project (the Viper soon became an industry standard). There’s something revolutionary in this, but Fincher wasn’t trying to start a revolution like Stanley Kubrick often did in his own use of innovative film-tech; Fincher had just gotten accustomed to the Viper because of his commercial and video work. The Viper enabled Fincher’s endless re-shoots and perfectionism.

 

As it was a new technology for this film format, it required further technical modifications, many of these fell on Supervising Engineer Wayne R. Tidwell, who had previously with Fincher on “The Panic Room” and other films and, other than Fincher, the only member “Zodiac’s” crew who’d used the Viper system before.  “Instead of watching dailies all day long we’re viewing full resolution in the camera, instantly.  And it is the negative, not a video regeneration.  It is the master footage – the light digital, the shadow digital, you see it on the set.  There are no color corrections.  You take the raw data to post production.” He added, “We had concerns about the robustness of the equipment.  What we found is that we had far less equipment failure than on a film set.  All total we may have had maybe 1 to 1½ hours of lost or down time … With film you have camera jams and sometimes when you’re shooting the film negative you’ll find hairs in the gate or a scratch on the negative.  With this there is no gate or film negative to damage because the image data goes directly to the hard drive.”  

 

All of this is enormously expensive technology, but much of it proved time-saving, and in film, time often costs more than technology.  

 

Cinematographer Harris Savides, said the Viper “was a bit of a mystery at times, because it’s an electronic thing that has no moving parts. If there’s a problem of some sort, you turn it off to reboot it, and when you turn it back on, it magically works. I felt I had to have a lot of faith in our technical support, which was a little unnerving. But on the whole, the Vipers ran great and we got the job done.”

 

Savides also pointed out the complications it created, “[T]he audience has some impression of what [the Seventies] looked like … [the contemporaneous photos of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston] became our bible ... We also worked from a lot of photos in the actual Zodiac police files.  

 

“To my eye, the Viper’s digital images have a synthetic quality that is at odds with what we were trying to do … It’s hard to put an audience in a darkened theater and screen ‘reality’ for them, because the whole thing is a falsehood. But if you have a synthetic image like the Viper’s — which reminds me a bit of the vivid, colorful look of a cibachrome photo — you’re taken right out of the story. I wanted to give the image a patina, to remove the newness. However, that vivid, hyper-real quality may also work to bring a psychological tension to the surface, since we have these characters searching and trying to see something that’s just beyond their vision. With the Viper, the audience will see more than what they normally see in a movie — literally, the pores on people’s faces and every hair on their heads — so it may have an almost immersive effect. Your eye can search the frame as all this information, the facts of the case, come at you.”  

 

Let me close with some info on the identified suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, played by John Carroll Lynch with consummate sinisterness (to increase the audience’s uncertainly, the face-less Zodiac at the crimes was played by three others, John Lacy, Richmond Arquette, and Bob Stephenson).

 

Toschi said Allen was the “best suspect” he ever investigated, and that presumably included the cases closed and resulted in convictions. Allen was known for impulsive rages; he received a dishonorable discharge from the Military; he moved into teaching, but soon was fired, arrested, indicted, convicted and incarcerated for violently molesting one of his students; after his incarceration, he lived with his elderly parents and worked nominal jobs; he knew several of the Zodiac’s killing grounds well; he obsessively talked about killing people even before the first murder and referred to himself as Zodiac; his associates and members of his own family thought he was guilty; his shoes and clothing matched descriptions and crime-scene evidence; he perfectly fit the descriptions of some witnesses and survivors; during a Police interview, he taunted Detectives with oblique admissions and flashing around his Zodiac-band wrist-watch; search warrants of his house revealed bomb-making materials, consistent with the letters, letters that specifically in a referenced basement apartment, and basements were rare at that time in that region.

 

On the other hand, other witnesses and survivors bluntly contradicted the positive ids; a handwriting expert flatly rejected he wrote the famous letters; and he was never the only suspect, he wasn’t even the only good one.

 

Most considered the case cold by 1972, and after 1978, I’m not sure anyone at all was working on it.

 

Graysmith’s 1986 book brought forward not only a volume of new evidence, but a convincing counter-argument against the hand-writing analysis. This resulted in a re-examination of the case which, by 1992, seemed to be leaning towards the arrest of Allen. But then Allen then died of a heart attack before he could be re-interviewed, and the case went cold again.

 

Graysmith’s second Zodiac book came out in 2002 and, again, spurred another reopening of the case.

 

A lot had changed between 1978, 1992, and 2002. New eyes affirmed the earlier conclusions regarding the handwriting. New technology was applied to the partial prints from the Stine killing, and excluded Allen. DNA testing, impossible in 1978, and not advanced enough in 1992, was applied to trace evidence from the envelopes of the confirmed letters, and again excluded Allen. This seemed definitive; almost impossibly, it seems Allen has been proved innocent.

 

These developments reflect little on Toschi and Graysmith’s Detective work, it simply is what it is. Toschi and Graysmith are incredulous of these conclusions; perhaps after living more-than-a-generation with what they struggled to establish, they’ve become immovable. But this is problematic given that the film pointed the finger at Allen specifically, and was not made in 1978, 1992, or 2002, but 2007, and made no mention of the newest, and seemingly most conclusive evidence.

 

As I wrote this, there has been news reports of another new name rising to the top of the list of maybe-Zodiacs.

 

What these Real-World intrusions into this powerful dramatization suggests to me is scary. Allen was, who he was – not only the best suspect, but a violent creep who seems as if he should’ve been guilty. So, what does it mean if he’s innocent?

 

It means that if another was Zodiac, then there are more out there like Allen, and maybe that the whole world is full of potential Zodiacs.