By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The saga of serial killer Rodney Alcala is one of the most shocking in the annals of true crime, and had one major facet that was stranger than fiction. In the midst of his spree, Alcala was a bachelor contestant on the popular 1970s TV show THE DATING GAME, and that appearance is the centerpiece of the new Netflix movie WOMAN OF THE HOUR.
Scripted by Ian McDonald, the film marks the directorial debut of Anna Kendrick, who also stars as Sheryl, based on Cheryl Bradshaw, who shared the DATING GAME stage with Alcala. Sheryl is an aspiring actress who takes the gig in hopes of getting exposure, little knowing it will lead her to cross paths with a man (played by Daniel Zovatto from DON’T BREATHE and THE POPE’S EXORCIST) who has already murdered a number of women and girls. Kendrick and McDonald use Sheryl’s experience as the frame for a movie that is gripping and scary while also fully engaging our sympathies with the women unfortunate enough to fall into Alcala’s orbit. These also include Amy (Autumn Best), a homeless teenager Alcala picks up, and Laura (Nicolette Robinson), a member of the DATING GAME audience who recognizes him as the last person she saw her best friend with before she turned up dead, and desperately tries to sound the alarm about him. RUE MORGUE spoke with McDonald, who previously wrote and directed the superior teen drama SOME FREAKS, about writing a true-serial-killer film in which the victims and potential victims take priority.
You first wrote this project as a spec script…
Yeah, I wrote the first draft almost eight years ago, so it’s been a long-gestating project. I had been wanting to write a true-crime screenplay, and I heard about the Rodney Alcala case, and the story just fascinated me.
It’s quite a wide-ranging case, with many intriguing and awful details. What led you to focus on Rodney and Cheryl specifically?
What was interesting to me about Rodney was less the man himself and more the circumstances surrounding him. You always hear about serial killers, when they’re found out, people say things like, “Oh my God, not Jeffrey Dahmer! He always seemed so quiet and friendly,” or whatever. And nobody really seemed that way about Rodney; everyone was like, “Yeah, that kind of checks out. He seemed like a creepy guy.” That was what I found interesting, that he sort of flaunted his bad behavior. Not the killings, but things like taking his photo albums to work that had nude photos of underage girls in them. When you read that stuff, it indicates that the story is in some ways less about him than about everybody around him, and the way we collectively look the other way and how that enables bad behavior.
In terms of Sheryl and all the other people who have the misfortune of encountering him, to me, the only way you can really be scared for someone is if you get to know them as a person, and know what is being lost or has the capacity to be lost. And also, these were the people I could identify with. Sheryl is a struggling artist living in Los Angeles, who moved there from a rural state, and I’m a struggling artist who moved to LA from Maine, and so I see myself in her. There are obviously differences; the male/female dating dynamic is very different, but it was always very important to me that there be a kind of equity of how much narrative real estate we dedicated to the victims vs. the killer.
That’s because I think killers in and of themselves aren’t super-interesting as people; they don’t tend to run all that deep. They’re not brimming with self-reflection or empathy, and to me, the scariest serial-killer movies really restrict how much you get to see them. You know, in SE7EN you don’t really get to know John Doe at all; in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Hannibal Lecter is in it for about 16 minutes and Buffalo Bill isn’t in it for a whole lot longer. That tip-of-the-iceberg effect, I believe, can be really powerful.
There’s a lot of discussion these days about the sensationalizing bordering on celebrating of serial killers, which WOMAN OF THE HOUR very much avoids. It roots our sympathy with Sheryl, and also with Amy.
Yeah, and we also took pains to reveal the little ways in which Rodney’s kind of a fool, for want of a better word. In true-crime circles, he’s sometimes compared to Ted Bundy, because he was handsome and well-educated and kind of charismatic, and you can hate those qualities only so far. The moments I find most interesting and revealing about Rodney are when his charm doesn’t work. He has the same shtick throughout the movie, where he’ll tell a woman, “Oh, you look like this actress from that movie.” It works with some women, but it doesn’t work with Sheryl, and she just laughs at him. Suddenly, he goes from being very cocky and confident to embarrassed and angry and insecure. I think those little moments where we reveal how fragile his ego is are very important for undermining the “sexiness” of these sorts of dark characters in movies.
Screenwriter Ian McDonald.
Speaking of actresses, you also address sexism in ’70s Hollywood through Sheryl’s experiences, dropping references to people like Roman Polanski. It’s kind of a perfect era to set a story like this.
Well, Rodney did in fact study with Roman Polanski; that’s a fact, that’s not something I added in. Which is fascinating. I always knew I wanted the movie to be about the spectrum of misogyny. Rodney is one end of that; he is the darkest, most extreme version of it, but he isn’t the whole spectrum. At the most mild end, you have Laura’s boyfriend, who’s telling her, “Don’t you think they would have vetted him? Your instincts are probably wrong, they’re probably leading you astray here.” He means well, but he’s very dismissive, so that’s another end, and then the DATING GAME host is somewhere in the middle. I always knew I wanted this story to be about all of that. Hollywood now, but especially in 1978, is obviously a good landscape in which to explore those themes.
Were you able to talk to Cheryl Bradshaw or anyone else involved with the case when you were working on the script?
No; I tried to contact Cheryl, but it quickly became clear that she didn’t want to be found and/or involved. There were DATELINE episodes about Rodney Alcala, and in those they tracked down some of his victims and people who knew him and prosecutors, and there were articles written about him, and she didn’t really appear in any of those, which to me indicated that she didn’t want her life being defined by this one weird encounter she had with someone decades ago. For that reason, I didn’t try too hard.
Beyond that, Rodney actively chose to make himself the center of this story, because of his actions. The victims didn’t choose that, you know? This was something that merely happened to them. For that reason, I changed their names and their biographies and backgrounds, while at the same time trying to capture some essential thing about what they represented and where they were from, and making sure the characters felt specific. That applied to Cheryl as well, because again, she didn’t ask to be involved in this. That’s one of those tricky moral balancing acts you have to engage with if you’re going to write a true-crime story.
Is the DATING GAME sequence verbatim from what actually happened on the show, or is any of it your invention?
Most of that is mine. That’s the part that’s probably the most fictionalized, for a couple of reasons. One, with the Alcala episode, you can still find his lines on the Internet in some places, but everything else, with the other bachelors, you can’t find anywhere; it’s been scrubbed from existence. So that’s stuff I had to make up, simply because there’s no record of it.
And with Rodney himself, one of the things I really thought a lot about was, if you were to take Rodney’s exact lines from the show and plug them into the movie, contemporary audiences would probably go back and watch his portions and be like, “Oh, that dude’s a serial killer. Cheryl, you need to run! Why are you talking to this guy?” Because he seems kind of sleazy and icky. The problem is that dating etiquette and norms in terms of humor and what jokes are funny and what jokes are not, that’s changed since 1978. So at the time, he wasn’t coming off as icky and off-putting, he was just a guy making slightly offbeat jokes. He was playing the part he was supposed to play. My concern was that if you put those lines into a movie now, audiences would think Sheryl is dumb: “How do you not see this guy is a serial killer? How do you not see that he’s dangerous?” And if that’s their takeaway, you’ve done a disservice, not just to Sheryl the character but to the audience, because ultimately what you want is for the audience to go on the same emotional journey Sheryl does. So there some updating was necessary to allow the audience to have that experience.
You also give her more agency by having her write her own questions that put the guys in their place.
Well, it’s funny; there used to be a lot more DATING GAME episodes on YouTube than there are now; a lot of those have been taken off. But man, I saw this one from 1976 or ’77 where a young woman did exactly that. So while Cheryl didn’t do that, it was inspired by that episode, where that woman saw the show for what it was, and decided to use her platform on it to spotlight the sexism she saw in it. So we fictionalized some things here and there, and sometimes it was done to incorporate a perspective I had found in the research where there wasn’t necessarily a clean place for it. Sometimes it was just done for dramatic purposes, to make it more suspenseful, but often there were moments where it was like, oh, this is a true thing that happened, and it didn’t happen here per se, but it feels honest to include it anyway.
Does the character of Laura have any basis in fact?
Basically, she’s meant to represent all the friends and family who lost someone. I read a lot of articles about people who said, “I was in a bar and saw my friend talking to this guy, and he gave me creepy vibes. I wanted to say something, but then she went home with him, and I never saw my friend again. And somehow he didn’t wind up in jail, and I don’t know why.” I would read these stories about people going to check on their friend, knocking on their apartment door and there was no answer, so they got the landlord to open the door, and there was a body there. Or the police showed up first, and a week later they found themselves emptying out their friend’s or sister’s apartment, and there was still a bloodstained mattress sitting there. That was one of the perspectives I found very interesting and tragic and touching in the research, and it had to find its place in the movie somewhere. And Laura’s character felt like the most clean, economical way of folding that in.
Chloe Okuno (WATCHER) was the original director attached to the film; how much work did you do with her, and what led her to drop out and Kendrick to take over as director?
I love Chloe to pieces; she’s so fucking smart and talented, and she did a lot of work on the script with me. She gave plenty of notes, she was really incisive in her feedback, and that was a multi-year-long process. She ended up bowing out not because she wanted to; that was a hellaciously busy year for her, and the scheduling didn’t work out, it was as simple as that. It was gutting when I got the news that we couldn’t make that work, because I think she’s one of the three or four most interesting horror filmmakers working today. We’re still friends, and it was sad, but it was kind of like, the show must go on. Initially I felt like the movie wasn’t going to happen, because that was maybe the fourth time it appeared to fall apart, but didn’t. It almost died so many times.
Then when Anna came on board [as director], my initial response was just, “Oh my God, it’s still going to happen!” Because the studio was saying, “We need to shoot this year, we need to start basically in six weeks,” and Anna came on and allowed the movie to survive. I didn’t have any idea of how she wanted to direct it, or what her vision was for the movie, and at that point I hadn’t even met her, because when she was just an actor on it, we didn’t have a whole lot of reason to engage.
So I went over to her house, and asked her, “Well, how do you see the movie?” And Anna just said, “I want it to be like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN meets ZODIAC.” I was like, “That’s great! Those are two of my favorite films.” I was not necessarily expecting that from the star of the PITCH PERFECT movies [laughs], but damn, color me surprised! And she was tough and smart and fearless and had a really clear vision for the project immediately. We had about a month of time to dive into the script, where I could really tailor it to her, and make sure this was the version of the story she wanted to tell. It is dark subject matter, and she wasn’t afraid of it at all, but she also was mindful that because we were dealing with real people, there was a right way and a wrong way to handle this, a way that was ethical and responsible and a way that was reckless. We did the best we could in terms of walking that line and making sure it never felt exploitative.
What are you working on right now?
I don’t know how much I can talk about them, but there’s a true-crime movie and a thriller, and a horror movie I’m supposed to direct next year in Europe. And I just finished producing my wife Julia Max’s horror movie THE SURRENDER, which she wrote and directed and stars Colby Minifie from THE BOYS and Kate Burton, and I’m so excited about that. It turned out amazing, so we’re going to be starting the film-festival circuit with it very soon. It’s about a mother and daughter who lose the patriarch of the family, and they hire this very strange shaman-esque man to bring him back from the dead, and it all goes terribly awry. I like to think of it as a very dark indie version of PET SEMATARY. Colby and Kate give powerhouse performances; it’s a real actor’s showcase, which is one of the things I’m most excited about.
