Anybody who’s serious about appreciating film, and filmmakers, can admit that David Fincher— whether you like him or not— is one of the great contemporary directors in America. If anything, his style is so evident you know you’re watching a Fincher film before you see his name appear on-screen. Zodiac (2007) is no different. Each frame drips with Fincher-esque qualities. His use of rich colours and his care for mise-en-scène is, as always, ever present. There’s no doubt that stylistically this film is among his greatest works.
Then there’s the whopping sore thumb bulging out that may not alert most people: a screenplay riddled with lies.
Only serious true crime enthusiasts, and likely only those with specific knowledge of the Zodiac Killer case, will notice the lies among the truth. Sometimes, in other films, these kinds of misrepresentations are innocuous— names, dates, locations, even minute details are often changed when real life crimes are adapted into fictionalized scenarios, for many reasons, usually to help the plot feel more cinematic. The issues in Fincher’s film are of a far different sort, because they go against the director’s own claims, and, worse than that, they play into a historically faulty narrative that’s an affront to the truth.
James Vanderbilt wrote the screenplay based on Robert Graysmith’s book, also simply called Zodiac, and this is where the problems begin. Jake Gyllenhaal’s baby-faced Graysmith is a wonderful antihero in the film, at once trying to juggle a marriage, a family, and a job while also struggling through a rabid obsession with the Zodiac murders. In reality, the author’s book has been discredited widely, by everybody from other authors to amateur true crime experts to some of the very people quoted in it. Vanderbilt’s screenplay does touch on Graysmith as a cautionary tale of obsession, though the fact it’s based on his book hinders much of that angle. The screenwriter, Fincher, and producer Bradley J. Fischer claim to have done 18 months of research, including interviewing witnesses, family members, suspects, retired and active investigators, the only two surviving victims, and the mayors of San Francisco and Vallejo.
Funny enough, Fincher’s ideas about what the film was doing were decidedly different from one point in time to the next. In the 2007 second edition of the book Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed by Graysmith, Fincher was quoted as saying: “I don’t want [the film] to be about convicting Arthur Leigh Allen … If the characters in the movie believe Arthur Leigh Allen is the Zodiac, I’m completely fine with that, but I don’t want to make a movie about convincing the audience.” In the New York Times, Fincher’s quote there reads quite the opposite: “It was an extremely difficult thing to make a movie that posthumously convicts somebody” (in reference to suspect Arthur Leigh Allen, portrayed by John Carroll Lynch). Regardless of a disparate opinion, Fincher’s film is framed entirely through the already existing lens of Graysmith’s discredited, improperly sourced, and heavily biased book, and it’s easy to see by looking at what the director chose to include and what he curiously decided to leave out.
At the beginning of the film, a card displays the suggestion that the production will be as honest as possible in its recreation of events due to being based on actual case files. It should have mentioned sticking to Graysmith’s book instead because even the case files wouldn’t have led to certain scenes being included in the film. What Fincher and his production team do get right in Zodiac are many of the small details. In the opening scene depicting the second Zodiac killing— the 1969 murder of Darlene Ferrin (played by Ciara Moriarty), also resulting in the serious injury of her friend Michael Mageau (the young version is played by Lee Norris, of Boy Meets World fame), who survived the attack— there are several details that are secondary to any of the actual plot. Such as the casual mention by Darlene that Mageau’s wearing several layers of clothing, despite it being July, which was a habit of his in real life because he was a smaller guy who got cold easily. Then there’s the fireworks going off. They don’t only pinpoint the date of the murder, they were also mentioned in police files by people who thought they might have heard gunshots that evening but passed it off as July 4th celebrations, and one person reported hearing firecrackers or a similar sound before hearing actual gunshots.
Strict attention to detail is of importance during another early scene depicting the second murder, which took place at Lake Berryessa in Napa County, California on September 27th, 1969. A couple— Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard— were approached by a man holding a gun and wearing a black executioner’s-type hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eye-holes and a bib-like device on his chest that had a white cross-circle symbol on it. The man tied them up, then proceeded to stab them each repeatedly, though Hartnell later survived the attack. Here, the details of the Zodiac’s costume and the conversation are recreated painstakingly from the eyewitness account Hartnell was able to give police. This is the most faithful recreation in the film, all due to Hartnell’s own harrowing account of the attack rather than so much of the rest which is based in Graysmith’s bad writing.
Quick as the film depicts true crime minutiae with precise detail, it slides into wholesale fabrication, too. The relationship between Paul Avery (played by Robert Downey Jr.) and Graysmith is a work of fiction, yet it’s an example of a harmlessly fabricated change to real life that helps the screenplay’s plot move along. Other changes aren’t as harmless, neither are they necessary. One of the earliest scenes— when the San Francisco Chronicle receives the first Zodiac letter and cypher— has Gyllenhaal’s physically touching the cypher, marking down the symbols to study on his own. First of all, this would be a massive blunder in terms of fingerprints, and even in the late ‘60s it’s highly probably the Chronicle’s team would have tried to keep a whole conference room full of people from touching the letter. Second, Graysmith himself never actually claimed to have gotten his hands on the letters or the codes, nor would the Chronicle’s cartoonist have been handed them in the first place. Another moment where the film lies concerns the cypher: Graysmith didn’t actually solve it. The media did cover his claims, but the FBI determined Graysmith did not ultimately solve anything. Likely why there’s no further talk of the cypher being solved or the author’s connection to it. The scene’s tossed aside, not to mention it’s set in 1979 and features Avery, aged and using an oxygen tank at a bar, when he was healthy at the time, not requiring the use of oxygen for another 11 years. It’s an easy— or lazy, depending on how you view it— method to make Graysmith appear heroic, as his old buddy, who was never actually his buddy in real life, watches him triumphant after years of hard work. A saccharine moment of pure sentimentalism. Worst of all it’s fabricated, like the plot of a fake detective story.
The fabrication becomes increasingly worse and ethically troublesome when the attention turns towards Arthur Leigh Allen, usually called only Leigh by his friends and family. To be clear, Allen wasn’t a good man. In 1974, he was arrested and pled guilty to committing lewd acts on a 12-year-old boy, serving a couple years in prison for the crime. This doesn’t excuse fabricating stories to help pin the Zodiac murders on him, and it also doesn’t help to actually solve the murders. Graysmith is known to have lied about things concerning Allen in his book, and Fincher only goes on to perpetuate them in the film. Most damning of all Zodiac’s issues with the truth is the scene involving Allen being questioned by the police. A man named Don Cheney reported Allen, though the latter had already been talked to before the scene depicted in the film. Cheney claimed Allen tried to molest one of his children, then told detectives many things about his former friend. According to Graysmith, Cheney said that Leigh had told him about wanting to write a book based on a killer named Zodiac, as well as the fact he was a fan of “The Most Dangerous Game”— first a short story by Richard Connell from 1924, and later turned into a film, for the first time, in 1932. But Cheney was a notorious liar, whose story changed over the years. More than that, he never actually told police about any so-called book, and he didn’t mention anything about the short story. Again, it’s fabricated bits and pieces which Graysmith used out of pure conjecture to make his own biased case against Allen, which Fincher and the rest of his team followed blindly. Even if Graysmith weren’t at least partly a fraud, the film still suffers from using Cheney and not including the flipside: that he was known for making things up. Cheney would alter details of his original story several times, most specifically after Graysmith’s books— released respectively in 1986 and 2002— were published.
The most problematic part about the interview scene is the focus on two fabricated moments. First, the boot prints found at one of the scenes, known as Windwalkers, are a point of total lies when it comes to Allen. No boots matching the ones at the scene were ever found, not even during the searches of Allen’s property, both times. Neither did any of the police see him wearing the boots. Yet Fincher uses several shots during the interview scene to show Allen wearing the boots, and the detectives even take note— this never appears, in any form, through any of the case files. If this were a throwaway detail, it wouldn’t matter. But the camera clearly makes notice of the boots, and the detail is treated like it was another part of the case files that were apparently consulted closely during production. Secondly, one of the lines in the screenplay leans far too heavily on trying to convict Allen in the court of public opinion, when he says: “I am not the Zodiac, and if I was I certainly wouldn’t tell you.” He never once said anything like that. In fact, in the intro to the podcast Monster: The Zodiac Killer, audio of Allen himself is used and, almost in a direct refutation of the film’s dialogue, he says: “They haven’t arrested me because they can’t prove a thing. I’m not the damn Zodiac.” Within a few key scenes, like the interview, there are instances like these that show just how far off the beaten trail of the fabled case files Fincher and Co. actually went in their attempt to tell a cinematic story.
Another couple scenes around this same section reaffirm Fincher going solely off Graysmith’s narrative, and also the fact that Graysmith is of questionable character as an author himself. Detectives Bill Armstrong (portrayed by Anthony Edwards) and Dave Toschi (portrayed by Mark Ruffalo) speak with Allen’s brother and sister-in-law. If Fincher’s film is to be believed, Allen’s own family believed he was potentially the Zodiac and they gave evidence to support their claims. This is another Graysmith lie, and one of the worst. Allen’s family did not once believe he was a suspect. When cops contacted them, the brother and sister-in-law were surprised to hear Leigh was a suspect, and they said they didn’t believe he could have committed such crimes— a belief they’ve always maintained. A while later, a scene shows Dt. Armstrong being contacted by Allen’s sister-in-law and he goes to speak with her again. This also never happened, and, coupled with the earlier scene of the brother and the sister-in-law, it reinforces Graysmith’s false claims about Allen’s family believing he was the Zodiac. Unfortunately, this isn’t the end of the many Graysmith lies that worm their way into the film.
Again, in the final scene, there’s further evidence of Zodiac sticking to the dishonest narrative in Graysmith’s book, as one last blow to Arthur Leigh Allen. In this scene, an older Mageau (this time portrayed by Jimmi Simpson) identifies Allen with relative certainty. In the actual case, police didn’t consider Mageau’s identification valid, and the detective who originally interviewed him days after the attack believed he wasn’t able to accurately identify the gunman at the time. Mageau said he never got a look at the Zodiac’s face— the first scene of the film depicts him looking up at his attacker, but he never did in reality and only saw the killer’s face briefly in profile view. Fincher does lean slightly towards other possible suspects, even in this final scene where Mageau, as he did in real life, wavers in his identification for a moment. That being said, like other points throughout the film, what Fincher chooses to leave out is as important and as effective as what he chooses to include. His subtle suggestion here, that Mageau correctly pinned Allen as the Zodiac, is another instance of egregious ethics skewing the whole film in an unfortunate direction.
Just like what’s not shown in horror is sometimes more powerful than what’s shown, the information a director opts to leave out in the final product of their film is as significant as what they’ve included. One scene shows the cops searching Allen’s trailer in 1972, which they really did and found nothing to link him to the crimes. Of all things, Fincher’s strange attention to the wrong details fixates briefly on a shot of a Vaseline jar and a wooden dildo, with remnants of feces on it, by Allen’s bed— the police actually found sex toys among Allen’s things, as well as dead squirrels in the fridge like we see in the film. What isn’t included is that after Allen was cleared as a suspect, once his handwriting and fingerprints were ruled out definitively, Graysmith’s book came out fourteen years later and made him a suspect again. Over the years, his book has sold millions of copies, influencing both the media and the public, and, very clearly, the Zodiac director. But Graysmith, like the film, bent the truth to fit a theory, rather than letting the truth lay out a theory. Several people quoted in the book have publicly stated they never actually spoke to the author. Dean Ferrin, husband of Darlene, refutes rumours Graysmith included about his wife which point to Graysmith’s lack of thorough research— the author claimed Dean and Darlene may have purchased their home through illicit money earned from drugs, when Dean says that, if Graysmith had actually researched this instead of going on hearsay he would have seen the mortgage and exactly how it was paid— and he denies ever giving a quote for the book. Detective Ed Rust likewise says he was never contacted for a quote, despite his words appearing in print.
When Fincher claims he and the screenwriter, as well as the producer, worked off case files, he’s only fooling himself. The entire film is crafted through the perspective of Graysmith, which would’ve been totally fine had the first frame not proclaimed the story would be factual, by suggesting case files were the sole source of information. Zodiac is 10% based on case files and the remaining 90% is all Graysmith, at least half of which is circumstantial evidence and conjecture by the author himself. This article doesn’t even touch on everything the film got wrong, neither does it once scratch the surface of the ethics involved in a couple of the Zodiac murders depicted in highly stylish fashion, set to famous rock music.
In a day and age when truth and lies have become dangerously blurred across the media landscape, in large part due to political nonsense, it’s tough to get behind a biopic like Zodiac. Fincher’s own comment about posthumously convicting Arthur Leigh Allen is an extremely troubling quote, though unsurprising after realizing how closely he seems to stick to Graysmith’s faulty narrative. His audacious claim about the veracity of the film’s details, and the 18 months of research done before going into production, are not only laughable in light of this, they’re offensive to anybody smart enough to read about the real case themselves.
Maybe the worst offence is that the film could have been used to look at Graysmith’s obsession in a more effective way. In a roundabout way, the story still looks at the questionable methods of the author, insofar as Fincher focuses on how Graysmith chased the Zodiac case so long and so deeply that he, to a degree, lost himself, along with his wife. When Gyllenhaal utters the line “Because nobody else will,” there’s absolutely a sense of the arrogance in his obsession, believing himself the only person continuing to investigate or care about the case being resolved. But the film misses the big opportunity to show the extent to which Graysmith went to push his personal narrative, bending facts and actually outright fabricating information, quotes, and so on. The film does two bad things extremely well: pushes misinformation about a dead man, and helps glorify an author with a tendency to lie. If Fincher wasn’t so adamant that his film was a totally factual representation of the case, Zodiac would be a far better piece of fictionalised history. Instead, an impressively stylistic achievement in this auteur’s filmography is marred by its sketchy ethical fumblings.
New York Times article for Fincher’s quote: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/movies/18halb.html
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