Maybe not ALL the president's men (a Watergate reading list)

It’s the first edition of the month, which sees me doing the budget-doc equivalent of picking individual bits of lint off the floor after the cleaners come, so I don’t mess up Eve’s nice parlor. Hee. Anyway, a few news items from the last few days:

• Anna Kendrick’s Dating Game killer project heads to Cannes market [Deadline] // The docudrama on Rodney Alcala and Cheryl Bradshaw was set up at Netflix, but has “shaken free of the streamer” (interesting phrasing). It seems Kendrick’s involvement isn’t finalized yet either. The Deadline piece has some inside-baseball stuff on various markets, as well as “creepy snippets” from Alcala’s appearance on the dating show. Alcala died last year of natural causes.

• A Czech documentarian is at work on a docudrama about husband-and-wife serial murderers [Cineuropa] // The working title is Mr. & Mrs. Stodola; here’s the logline: “A killing spree targeting elderly citizens occurred in a sleepy Czech hamlet in the early 2000s, and in 2003, a seemingly ordinary husband and wife were revealed to be the culprits.”

• Netflix’s doc on the murder of an Argentinian journalist drops May 19 [Collider] // Per Collider’s write-up of The Photographer: Murder in Pinamar, it’s not (just) the crime; it’s the cover-up. José Luis Cabezas “was found dead in his charred car with two gunshots to the head and ample evidence of torture to his body. … The area in Argentina where Cabezas was staying, Pinamar, is a location inhabited by the most wealthy clientele with its fair share of who's who in the political world, leading everyone to question exactly who Cabezas crossed.”

• The Unsolved Murder of Beverly Lynn Smith hits Prime May 6 [Toronto Star] // Could a couple of appealing true-crime properties NOT premiere in the next five days? Because I’d like to check this one out and I’m afraid I won’t get to it until, like, June. Smith’s 1974 murder is “[w]idely regarded as one of Canada’s coldest cases,” and touched off what the Star spoiler-aversely calls an unconventional policing op. I’m going to avoid Googling to I’m not spoiled, and if I can get through enough Candy, Staircase, and Bosch before next week, I’ll try to bring you a review.

• And it’s the anniversary of rubber gloves becoming standard at crime scenes, thanks to a “grisly” 1924 murder [History] // The over-killing of Emily Kaye by her lover, Patrick Mahon, was the second in a pair of crimes known collectively as “the Crumbles murders,” which makes them sound “cozy”; they are very much not, but Kaye’s murder at least led to improvements in forensic/crime-scene preservation. — SDB