Zodiac

[JG]

Minkus!

[tpfkabi]

*SPOILERS*

No, the male that was shot in the car, Mike Mageau, survived the attack.  He's the one who picks out Leigh from the lineup at the end.

ok. what about the pond male then? he lived, too, i thought.

thinking on the first murder later, they show the female definitely knowing the killer when he first pulls up behind them. if her actions in the car that are in the film are confirmed by Mike in real life, then that would seem that the guy who came to her party was no doubt the killer then.

[polkablues]

ok. what about the pond male then? he lived, too, i thought.

Yeah, you see him again after the TV broadcast, when he tells the cops that the guy who called in claiming to be Zodiac wasn't the real Zodiac.

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer

[tpfkabi]

ok. what about the pond male then? he lived, too, i thought.

Yeah, you see him again after the TV broadcast, when he tells the cops that the guy who called in claiming to be Zodiac wasn't the real Zodiac.

ok. i think what threw me off is that the older 'minkus' wears glasses, so in my mind i just assumed that was pond guy.

sorry for the lame titles, i can't remember character names. they're not around that long in the film anyway.

[Gamblour.]

I forgot to write about this, I thought the film was great, amazing. In the way that a whodunit or a thriller naturally locks you into an obsession with the ending, this film capitalized on the inherent urge with actually feelings of obsession. I really thought it was just a brilliant film, and perfect for a its running time.

Spoilers:

The only aspect I'm confused about is the man who painted movie posters and took him to his basement. Why was he acting like the killer? Or why are we led to think that? It really confused me when they then went back to Lee as the killer. Was it that other people too were becoming obsessed, manifesting aspects of the case? Was it to exhibit Graysmith's paranoia?

[NEON MERCURY]

spoilers

-i liked the soundtrack
-i liked anthony edwards, ruffalo, downey
-i liked the cinematography
-i liked the production design and props...i've never seen the 70's captured so meticulous in a non-70's made film

-i liked the inner city blues montage...it was a different way to show the progression of a city via a single time lapsed building shot

-i liked cloe but she was underused...please have more in the 3 hour cut on dvd
-i liked the scary shit w/jake and the crazy guy's basement..very tense
-i liked how this was not that gory but left me more disturbed than any other fincher film
-i liked the almost end scene w/jake finally staring at the zodiac

[tpfkabi]

Spoilers:

The only aspect I'm confused about is the man who painted movie posters and took him to his basement. Why was he acting like the killer? Or why are we led to think that? It really confused me when they then went back to Lee as the killer. Was it that other people too were becoming obsessed, manifesting aspects of the case? Was it to exhibit Graysmith's paranoia?

i think it's just a red herring. Fincher does shoot him very eerily though. i like how you see him in the mirror first when Graysmith is trying to leave.

[polkablues]

Was it to exhibit Graysmith's paranoia?

I think you hit the nail on the head right there.

The thing I love so much about that scene is that, were it a fiction film, that would have been the big twist and the climax of the film, in which Graysmith would have been trapped down in the basement, moments from death, when suddenly a shot rings out, the bad guy falls down, and we see Detective Toschi standing at the bottom of the basement stairs with a wisp of smoke coming out the barrel of his gun.  But it's not a fiction film, and that doesn't happen, and that's awesome.

[Ghostboy]

I love that scene, too. The second time I saw it, I payed attention to Roger Rabbit's performance and noticed that he was playing it as if he knew exactly what was going through Graysmith's mind, and was aware how much he was freaking him (and us) out. When he unlocks the door, he even laughs a little bit,

[MacGuffin]

Sevigny Found 'Zodiac' Book Too Tedious To Read

Chloe Sevigny felt foolish on the set of new thriller Zodiac - because she found the book the movie is based on too boring to read. The actress attempted to read Zodiac Unmasked before shooting began but found it so "tedious" she gave up, only to find that all her cast mates had studied the book about San Francisco's Zodiac Killer, and found it riveting. She explains, "I started reading Zodiac Unmasked before we went into production and I couldn't get through it. I found it slightly tedious. He (author Robert Graysmith) went so in depth into the details and I just wasn't that interested. I was frightened by the scarier bits and the details of the crimes. I did, however, feel slightly embarrassed because all the men on the set knew so much about it and they had all these crazy details from the book."

[modage]

also saw this last weekend and really liked it, as much as someone who does not himself make films or read books about Zodiac could.  i think the film is definitely frustrating by design.  i don't think you're supposed to watch it once and LOVE IT.  it's not built that way.  it's definitely not a traditional 3 act structure plot based film, and it's not a character based film either.  the snippets of articles and interviews i had read about the film beforehand had prepared me somewhat for what i was getting into but had misled me about certain things.  one was, yes its about the obsession the men had trying to track down the zodiac.  but it was more about the facts of the case.  thats why these characters drifted in and out of the story, we werent really supposed to feel for them.  we didnt get too many scenes of family life falling apart and things that would help us relate to them, instead the story would jump forward to the date of the next event. 

there were more title cards in this film than in any film i have ever seen in my entire life. 

oct 14, 1969, two weeks later, dec 1969, 1 year later, 2 months later, 4 years later.  it was CRAZY.  the movie was SO concerned with the facts, getting them right, that where other films would've molded these events around something that resembled a movie, fincher resists and sticks to the facts.  he uses almost no dramatic license!  the funniest bit of one of the previous interviews was asking him what he had to fudge to make the story work and the ONLY thing he could come up with was having the halloween card arrive at someone elses desk first.  for a movie THIS drenched in specifics, that is damn incredible. 

so i was never bored.  when it ended i couldnt believe it.  the final scene seemed almost designed to infuriate.  why hadnt they ended the story earlier, why did he feel the need to jump forward to the 90s for that little epilogue?  why not include that in the title cards at the end with the rest of the facts?  or why didnt he film a few of those facts and include them?  i'm not sure.  but had the film really been about graysmith or avery or toschi it would've ended with one of them.   but it wasnt.  the acting was great all around, visually incredible, as restrained as fincher was it was still perfect.  and it wasnt anything like Se7en so there was no repeating himself.  i think this is probably one that will age really well though i can't imagine wanting to jump into another viewing anytime soon.  still, really good, probably great.  welcome back fincher.

[polkablues]

but had the film really been about graysmith or avery or toschi it would've ended with one of them.   but it wasnt.

That's a really good point.  It's almost as though the film didn't have a character or even multiple characters as the protagonist, but rather cast the investigation itself as the protagonist.

[MacGuffin]

Safekeeping a precious commodity: the image
Pictures today often are captured not on film but as digital data, which on a project like 'Zodiac' are handled by an engineer.
Source: Los Angeles Times


R. Wayne Tidwell; Supervising engineer

Credits: David Fincher's "Zodiac," currently working on Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

The data: "The digital equipment we [shot 'Zodiac'] with is relatively new — the Viper camera and the S2 digital recorder from the S.two Corp. Unlike a film camera, the Viper digital camera does not record anything; it is the electronic camera that has the lens and the three chips that make the picture. The S2 records [the images]. There is a dual length cable [attached to the Viper camera]. That is where I get my signal for the data recorders. We had two data recorders on 'Zodiac.' One for A camera and one for B camera, and I had one backup just in case."

Job description: "The job I do is called data capture, and I would be the data capture engineer. I record each take we do. I am responsible for the stock of digital magazines, which is basically our shooting stock. I am responsible for managing the stock with my assistant. I am also monitoring a waveform monitor for each camera image. I am assisting the cameramen by watching the light levels that are entering the lens — more specifically the amount of light hitting the color sensors in the camera.

Review, keep, delete: "In addition to recording the image and monitoring the waveform monitor and managing the stock, I am also doing the playback as a video assist operator would. So as soon as we 'cut,' I am immediately playing back for the director on the monitors the master footage, so he can review each take. Now, we take that a step further. With the S2 data recorder, you have the option to delete unwanted takes from the magazine, thereby recapturing hard drive space.

"One of the more critical functions I perform is deleting unwanted footage while retaining the keeper takes. That took a little getting used to because my background is in many years of normal video assist on feature movies where I am recording the reference material. I don't have a hand in the master footage to any degree. Now I have gone to this position to where I am responsible for the master footage throughout the day and, needless to say, I have to pay more attention than I have in the past."

"Go learn how to do it": "Fincher started doing tests and commercials with the Viper camera roughly four years ago. Fortunately, he called and said, 'I want to try this digital system. This is how I want to shoot, so go learn how to do it.' There was no class. We started with a different data recorder, and it didn't serve David's needs, but I went to the company that reps the data recorder and the engineer taught me how it worked and how to use it. Then David went to the S.two Corp. with the S2 machine, and their engineers taught me. Their representative, Steve Roach, was present with us on just about all the commercials we did leading up to 'Zodiac' — he helped me with questions I needed answers to throughout the commercial shooting."

Background: "I was born and raised in Ventura. And I was in law enforcement for a while. I was a police officer for three years.... I realized I wasn't going to make a career of that. My mother said, 'Why don't you look into the film business? It's California. Everybody makes movies.' So we started looking into it, and I eventually got into the sound union and got into video assist."

Working with Fincher: "He makes everybody better. The sound mixer on this show called me before we started working and he said, 'Do you have any advice?' I said the best advice I can give is you do your job thoroughly, do it quickly and if you have a problem, be honest. That is it in a nutshell. He expects 100% from everybody, but he's very loyal and likes to take the same people from show to show."

[MacGuffin]

INTERVIEW: ROBERT GRAYSMITH (ZODIAC)
Source: CHUD

Sometime when I do a press day or a junket I get interviews that I know cannot be appreciated until after the movie is out. Occasionally these just never make it on to the site while other times they run before the movie's release as part of the standard week-before hype up. With Robert Graysmith I decided to do something different. The author of Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked and the person who Jake Gyllenhaal is playing in David Fincher's masterpiece Zodiac, Graysmith is a guy who lives and breathes the infamous murder case. His interview was made up mostly of case-specific talk, the kind of stuff that would be meaningless until people saw the film. Judging by the box office, not enough of you have (seriously, it's so fucking good), but for the people who did see the movie, I present Graysmith.

He walked into the room at the Regency Hotel on Park Place in Manhattan warning the assembled journalists that he had a tendency to talk long and go off on tangents. He wasn't kidding. I tried to clean up some of what he said for clarity, but much of it I left as Graysmith spoke it, often seeming like stream of consciousness, like these facts are never very far from the top of his thoughts.

Can you talk about Jake Gyllenhaal's portrayal of you? Did you have to walk him through your mannerisms and personality?

I don't think you have to walk Jake very many places. I was just talking to Mark Ruffalo in the hallway. One of my best friends is Dave Toschi, and that's one of the benefits of this, he really calls himself my best friend. We go and have lemon meringue pie and French fries over at the Copper Penny in San Francisco. We talk about the case maybe once a week. Mark Ruffalo came back as Toschi – he had the Toschi hair, he talked like Toschi. Where as Jake, he just watched me, we talked about Jarhead, I looked at his cell phone, which was all beat up. So we make this movie, and I never tell a person on this Earth that when I was living in Japan I was in the Boy Scouts... and by God, he got it! I don't know how he knew. And he got the deferential thing and the obsessive thing – apparently I was very obsessed with this case. I did not know this until I saw Jake's performance!

Of course, the other portrayal [was by] Robert Downey Jr. We have the meanest, nastiest bunch of editors at the Chronicle. They are so cynical. They hated Star Wars. That's George Lucas' morning paper! Just to be mean to him, I think. Anyway, I thought they'd hate this movie and they said, "We knew Paul Avery for decades and Robert Downey Jr. has nailed it. He is Paul Avery." So I didn't see that coming because they're both different physically. So they are the three leads and they all did great jobs.

How long did you spend working with David Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt?

Three years. I found them. I wrote seven true crime books and had two movies. At the premiere of my Auto Focus movie, I met [producer] Brad Fischer and James Vanderbilt, who wrote the script. I really liked him. Zodiac Unmasked ended in present time with finding the witness, the boy who was shot in the beginning, and as you saw he finally got to see the suspects and he didn't hesitate – he pointed right at Arthur Leigh Allen. Right then my phone starts ringing; I had Goldie Hawn, I had CAA, I had a lot of really good people, including I think Michael Mann, who loved James' script. But since I knew Brad and James, I chose them. They wanted David Fincher, and David Fincher had only one person in mind – that was Jake Gyllenhaal.

I couldn't have asked for anything more. David Fincher had done Seven and he got it out of his system; this is a newspaper film. He said it would be the serial killer to end them, because he finds them rather pornographic, really. He's one of the brightest guys I've ever met. We went up to Lake Berryessa [location of one of the Zodiac murders] and the original detective who discovered the bodies is with us. He says, this is where they were, here's where the picnic blanket was and so on. So David Fincher looks at it, he goes back to the road, he gives a yell and listens for an echo. He feels the ground, gets up, goes all the way around, comes back and does the same thing again. He says, 'The murder site's over there.' And [the detective] says 'You're absolutely right. My god, I took you to the wrong spot!' I thought, my god, I'm looking at Sherlock Holmes here.

And he's gone on. He's not let up. The movie's done and he's still finding out facts. It'll all be on the DVD they're doing. After a while I was writing everything down – the fact that it's three Hollywood detectives, come on, that's great! And [Fincher] doesn't like to be photographed, so I have one of those little throwaway cameras and I'm taking pictures. I've got tapes. So I wrote another book. I didn't want to do another book about Zodiac, but this one is about them. It's called Shooting Zodiac, and I was going to hold it back, but if you guys make the movie a success, I'll bring it out. Otherwise we'll wait until it's a cult film. It ends with 'We've been greenlit!'

You talk about how you still meet and talk about the case. With our favorite suspect long dead, meaning you can never bring him to justice, what is the point for you of still talking about it?

That's what David Fincher said. He said to me, 'I see the end of this movie where the cartoonist goes to the Ace Hardware, looks him in the eye and he's satisfied.' You know my therapist tells me, you don't have to corral all the rattlesnakes, you just have to know where they are.' We got so close to whoever this was, and there was a point where [all the suspects] were being watched, and he could no longer be Zodiac. I think in a way the fact that I've made the case vivid enough to see it and that there's a film, that's what I wanted. I didn't want all these nice young people that got wiped... [chokes up] Excuse me. These young people that got wiped away, I try not to think about them. I try to keep it cerebral. But I thought they deserved a certain amount of justice and that it was an important case, and that's what the film will do.

But some critics don't buy into your theory about Allen...

Absolutely. It's not a matter of that but you know, let's just pretend real quickly: you're Arthur Leigh Allen. You stand on your porch and you take a quarter and you toss it. Do you know what you hit? You hit [Zodiac victim] Darlene Ferrin's workplace. He's watching her. He's the janitor across the way from the first girl. He's a suspect in the first two sets of murders.

He not only predicted it two days before the murders, he tells Don Cheney, 'I'm going to be Zodiac. I'm going to hunt people at night. I'm going to taunt the police and call myself Zodiac.' He's just gotten a Zodiac watch on the 18th, the murders start on the 20th of December. This is a guy up at the lake when there are only ten people. You have the two victims, two sets of fathers and sons, one on the lake, you have the two park rangers and three college women. You interview one of the college women and she identifies him. You interview a surviving boy, he identifies him. Allen says that he was at the lake that day and that he left an hour before. He tells his friends, he writes from prison. Zodiac left footprints that are exactly Allen's size and weight - about 220 pounds or 230. He's the same height. He wears a very unique shoe size that Allen's size, a 10 and a half R. That's a shoe you can only buy at naval stations and you can only buy it if you're in the Navy or a dependent, and his father is a naval commander. There are a limited number of only 169,000 pairs made total and distributed throughout the United States. He's a guy who we know has certain skills. He's a chemist because of the bombs. He has to know cryptology. It's amazing - we could do three pages. But the one thing Zodiac had to be was a skillful draftsman. If you look at the symbols, the 312 symbols, there are no guidelines. You need a light table, you need a T square. Allen's father, at the time, was a draftsman in Vallejo, the Vallejo city planner. You go on with the fact that he was involved in the Southland, that he worked near a very similar murder in 1966 up to the Bay Area. This guy is wearing his watch until the end of his days and is giving interviews. He either wants us to think he's Zodiac or... Dave Toschi sayd, 'My god, he has to be. He has to be.'

Now, there are two other suspects that are very interesting but you know what? The whole thing was that I had to reach a point where I made the case come alive. I provided all the information I could find and it's very difficult because I give all my documents away now. But those are very hard fought; you had to feel them out and ask questions. I'm satisfied, Dave Toschi is satisfied... by the way, Captain Dave Clark of Vallejo PD thinks it's Leigh Allen. Paul Avery thought it was the second suspect. He really believed that and so did Ken Harlow. They had the same suspect.

So, we'll find out. That's the nice thing about this; I keep my mind open. I'm not in the game of being right, but I would like to write that last chapter and the fact that people are interested, we'll have that information I think.

There is some evidence that shows it wasn't him, though.

A guy named 'Lee' was sitting outside Darlene Ferrin's house and watching her. He was just back from Mexico, our guy [Arthur Leigh Allen] was back from Mexico. But somebody said either he lit a cigarette or the light inside came on, and Allen doesn't smoke. That bothers me.

America's Most Wanted just had a handwriting expert who said –

But that's a graphologist! Right up there with fortune telling. That's personality.

But there's DNA evidence on Zodiac letters that seems to exonerate him.

In 1978 all the letters were taken to Sacramento. They're sat in wonderful style in cardboard boxes in 112 degree heat for 12 years, they're never refrigerated. They bring them back – OK, that's great, they're in custody and I'm thinking maybe we'll get DNA. But no, they're outside police custody and in private hands. There's a chain of evidence that's gone. But they bring them back, that's fine. They test the back – and I talked to the guy who hired the people who did this – test the front, test the back of three letters and probably the gummed label. They get one [DNA] print, and it's a fragment. And if one of those letters is a hoax... But they only get a partial DNA fingerprint, and they can't even run it through Codus, really. Fine still, it still could be the guy. But Arthur Leigh Allen, from prison, writes a letter with no stamp on the envelope, doesn't seal it and asks his friends to mail them from outside prison. This is a guy who is thinking of the very primitive ABO test, which will tell you from saliva your race, if you're male or not, so on. He knew not to lick an envelope.

Why did a political cartoonist like yourself become so fascinated with this case?

Well I just don't give up. That's my thing. I'm the long distance walker. I was there [at the Chronicle], we're sitting at a big conference table and all of a sudden, Carol Fisher comes in and she throws this letter down and it began with that. You got to remember: I was 24, had lots of hair and was really thin. I'm watching Dave Toschi and he comes in with the trenchcoat, big bow tie, he's handsome and they based Bullit on him and they will base Dirty Harry on him, and there's Paul Avery and there are cameras around him with his silk shirts and scarves. Believe me, they were really romantic so I did what I did in the film and that was be in the background and listen.

After a while, I watched the lights dim and these guys just got burned out and the leads fade. So I thought, I can't let this die. So I went in and asked Avery's permission. But what really attracted me were the visual aspects. The costume, the symbol, the movie madness, the wonderful cryptograms and weird symbols, and the fact that I did political cartoons – I would use symbols to make a change in real life and I thought this guy was using symbols and pictures to cause fear. I was going to put all my information that I was going to use as an editorial cartoon and people would read it and catch him. That's what happened. That's why we have all the suspects because people read it and were interested in it and so I've achieved my purpose.

Some of those cryptograms haven't been solved to this day...

That's right.

Is it possible that there aren't any solutions to them?

I don't think so. We call those "nulls". He had 16 symbols in the letter E in the first set [that was solved]. That's very time consuming. It could be that that was the big thrill he got, which was composing those letters. And he really hated Toschi, really hated the SFPD because they got really close.

But there are all kinds of weird leads in this case. [This next bit is a little confused. Here Graysmith refers to the murder of a cab driver, which was witnessed by some kids in a nearby house] At Washington and Cherry... he stopped at Maple originally, but had the driver go on. By the way, that little girl that saw the shooting, she identified Allen as well. The policeman around the corner – Vallejo didn't give up, and as late as 1990 they were interviewing witnesses – identified him. So he goes around the corner, and the street around the corner from Maple was very steep, he was going to shoot the driver and run down the block and get into his car, but something makes him go another block. Once he sees the officers he runs into the Presidio and he's going past Letterman Hospital at a diagonal. Well, one of the [future] Zodiac victims, Donna Lass, is working there that night. A year later, supposedly the Zodiac kills her in another state. You think, that's impossible, but Darlene Ferrin lived close to [victim] Paul Stine's house at one time. You look at all these leads and you go... the case offers so many possibilities for an armchair sleuth.