Film Clips: Zodiac writer Robert Graysmith
At one point in his life, the sound of a ringing telephone sent shivers down the spine of Robert Graysmith. The author, who began his career as a political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has devoted most of his career to writing about Zodiac, the serial killer who terrorized California’s San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and 1970s. He felt at times the subject of his writings dialed his number just to make contact.
“I started getting breathing calls,” Graysmith said from his Los Angeles hotel during an interview for “Zodiac,” which opens March 2 and is based on his books “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked.” “It got to the point where some nights when I went home, I would carefully push the door open with my foot (so he could get away quickly if he saw anyone inside).”
At age 23 in 1968, Graysmith began working at the newspaper as a political cartoonist, but he quickly became obsessed with the case, which often revolved around letters containing ciphers and references to the film “The Most Dangerous Game” (in which a hunter trails, shoots and kills humans). The author, who’s portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal (“Brokeback Mountain”), interacted with hard-bitten reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr. of “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”) and two meticulous inspectors – Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo of “Collateral”) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards of TV’s “ER”) – to break the case.
Those four men faced emotional challenges due to the length of the investigation, pressure for an arrest and the continued exposure to the grisly crimes. The others eventually gave up for personal reasons, leaving the former political cartoonist to eventually put all of the pieces together.
Graysmith believes Arthur Leigh Allen was the killer, but he died before any trial could be held.
“This guy lived across from the school where the first victim was,” Graysmith said of Allen. “He was a child molester and a horrible man. Allen said there were 50 or so victims, but who really knows?”
Director David Fincher (“Fight Club”) grew up in the area terrorized by Zodiac and always wanted to make a movie about that era. The filmmaker, who’s known for his painstaking attention to detail, decided that audiences should see “Zodiac” through the eyes of Graysmith, the dedicated writer who refused to give up the hunt for the killer.
“Robert Graysmith (then a political cartoonist) knew he was a guy on the sidelines of this story,” Fincher says in the production notes for “Zodiac.” “He wanted to be a part of it and made himself part of it. He was doing it on his own time (in the 1960s and 1970s) because he wasn’t a reporter.
“It was Robert who went after it (evidence to find the killer after other journalists and police officers felt the trail had gone cold).”
Graysmith was particularly impressed with Gyllenhaal’s attention to detail in playing him.
“I’ve done about 400 radio and TV shows (as a guest), and I know Jake saw many of them, because he was wearing some of the same clothes I had on when I did them,” the author said. “He even drove the same models of cars that I had.”
And could a madman like Zodiac commit the same number of crimes now?
“Today, they’d have him in a minute, because we have the sharing of information (between police departments),” Graysmith said. “We didn’t have that then, and the killer counted on being able to commit his crimes due to blurred jurisdictions.”