Philip Baker Hall · Lord Kenneth Clark · Edgar Herbert Smith
the true crime that's worth your time
Eve wondered in our Slack last night if I’d ever Bet-Crapped the recently departed Philip Baker Hall. I hadn’t, and I immediately agreed to do so; I just as immediately regretted it, thanks to the 185 entries on his IMDb page. That gaudy Hey, It’s That Guy! figure could mean his percentage comes in pretty low. It could just as easily mean it’s close to 30, given how many times the word “Judge” appears amongst his credits. My pre-rundown estimate? Around 12 percent.
To the internet!
The Last Survivors, 1975. It’s a seventies TV movie with Leif freakin’ Garrett in it, so the odds of it actually qualifying here seem pretty small, right? But the IMDb lists Martin Sheen’s character’s full name, which, why would they do that unless it’s a real guy, so I Googled “Alexander William Holmes” and I come up with…this, which is basically the same story as far as I can see, except in the film it’s a typhoon and in real life the ship hit an iceberg.So, once I’m done snickering at the myriad uses of the word “seamen,” how do I score The Last Survivors, which per user notes on IMDb is a remake of some other movie? I’m-a award the point: 1
Kill Me If You Can, 1977. You’d think some years writing about the genre would prepare you for Alan Alda playing CARYL CHESSMAN in a telepic; think again. But our man PBH only gets: 1
Secret Honor, 1984. “A fictionalized former President Richard M. Nixon offers a solitary, stream-of-consciousness reflection on his life and political career — and the ‘true’ reasons for the Watergate scandal and his resignation.” That title is…not indicative, and would you believe this is an Altman flick? In any event, PBH plays RMN, so that’s: 3
A Cry For Help: The Tracey Thurman Story, 1989. Have they ever tried to remake this one? I feel like it spent years as a punchline involving Lifetime movies and McKeon Bertinelli LLC; I don’t think I realized it’s a real case. I’d like to think we’d treat it more gently today. But is this a hall-of-famer? I mean…maybe? Or it was once? I can’t quite get there. Hall plays a judge, so no other points on offer, just: 1
Boogie Nights, 1997. …What? Dirk Diggler is basically John Holmes! You know — the Wonderland murders? …Seriously, though: you could make the argument, if you believe Paul Thomas Anderson’s assertion that Diggler is a Holmes manque, and/or if you believe that porn stumbles back and forth over the line of affirmative consent, that this qualifies as a true-crime property. Tempting, but IMO it’s too long a stretch: 0
Witness to the Mob, 1998. A true story about Sammy “The Bull” ratting Gotti. Hall plays “Toddo” Aurello, a real guy who’s the one above-the-fold character I hadn’t heard of, so: 1
Psycho, 1998. I don’t really posit that either Psycho is a true-crime pic despite Norman Bates borrowing heavily from Ed Gein. Mostly I wanted sympathy for having to go see the pointless shot-for-shot remake in the theater, for work. Not even Viggo’s ass could save the disastrous casting of Norman. Thank you for listening: 0
The Insider, 1999. Another somewhat borderline case in terms of genre, but this one I’ll count. Not prepared to go hall-of-fame on it, but PBH is a name figure in the “case,” so to say: 2
Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, 2000. Another neighborhood play, and the real crime here is the casting of Andrew McCarthy as Bobby Kennedy, but there’s enough true crime in this life story for it to count, so that’s one point. Does Hall get another two points for playing a name figure? I guess if you subscribe to the minor JFK conspiracy theory that Aristotle Onassis was involved in Jackie’s first husband’s murder — or the more recent one blaming Onassis for Bobby’s murder — but I can’t quite justify it: 1
The Fugitive, 2000. All the Fugitives derive from the Sam Sheppard story, so: 1
The Amityville Horror, 2005. I suspect we can file this under “debunked” as far as true-crime connections, but as a true-crime bookshoppiste, I can tell you it’s a favored subtopic. But PBH isn’t playing a DeFeo, so: 1
Zodiac, 2005. No, not that one; the slightly earlier one starring Justin Chambers as the lead detective. The “Based on a true story.” in the IMDb plot summary is so sad, truly. N…ot a hall-of-famer, either: 1
Mrs. Harris, 2005. An HBO docudrama about the murder of Herman Tarnower so jam-packed with names, Hall isn’t even on the first page of cast members: 1
Zodiac, 2007. HERE’S our boy. I think the only question here is whether Hall’s handwriting examiner is a “name figure.” For case-heads, I would say he is. It’s a first-ballot hall-of-famer for sure: 4
The Lodger, 2009. Another variation on the Lowndes take on the Whitechapel murders, this one starring Hope Davis and Donal Logue as the Buntings. If I hadn’t reviewed the Hitchcock original, I’d probably throw this out on GPs, but I did, so: 1
All Good Things, 2010. I talked about this one with Kevin Smokler on the Blotter podcast a couple years back; because it’s the Durst case, it counts, but only for: 1
The Chicago 8, 2011. Snark about Danny Masterson’s presence in the cast aside, maybe Hall’s judge character should be a “name figure,” but I don’t think it gets there: 1
Argo, 2012. A hostage-rescue op counts, right? The question here is whether to classify (…as it were) then-CIA director Turner as a “name figure.” We probably can: 3
and I thought about counting that Children’s Hospital in which he’s credited as “Dr. Joseph Mengele,” but: 0
That comes out to 24 points. Divide that by the 185 acting credits, and that puts Philip Baker Hall’s BET-CRP at 12.9 percent. You could argue that I scored him too high — a couple of properties that don’t really rate, a couple of name-figure points I shouldn’t have counted — but it doesn’t get too far below 11 percent with those disqualifications; I got pretty close to the final figure. — SDB
Back in the before time, over cocktails in Carroll Gardens, my esteemed colleague and Blotter Presents guest Piper Weiss and I used to wool-gather about doing a podcast together called…I don’t remember what clever name we gave it — “Wikiholing”? “Google Tesseraction”? The concept, which was really Piper’s, was to start with a prompt, then see where we ended up after holding our noses and cannonballing into the wiki pool. Or maybe it was “go to Wikipedia, click the ‘random article’ link, and see where we come out”? I still think about making that podcast every now and then, especially after a conversation with a true-crime author that has me scribbling notes like “cavett nexus theory??”
But the other version of the podcast is the one that starts at the end, and traces the tunnel backwards to the beginning — what X was I solving for, only to end up with Y? Because sometimes it’s pretty straightforward, or it’s not but it’s not terribly interesting either.
Other times, you find yourself staring at a painting of an eight-months-dead medieval pope whose successor dug him up and put him on trial, and you’re like, how the corpse-waxy hell did I get here.
Let’s start with the “here” in question, a painting by Jean-Paul Laurens.
The caption does the bulk of the work here, to tell you the truth; as with so many criminal-justice stories, the “why” is both baroque and illegible to the non-power-mad, particularly when it comes to the papacy of the first millennium. That said, you could ask for worse guides than UMKC law professor Douglas O. Linder, who wades into the scheming of/around the ill-fated Formosus with wry alacrity:
Formosus was convicted, defrocked, and excommunicated.
You might think that would be the end of Formosus’s papal ambitions, but you’d be wrong. Six years later, the excommunication was lifted. In return, Formosus promised never to return to Rome or execute priestly duties. And for a while, he didn’t.
But then, in 882, Pope John VIII was clobbered over the head with a hammer, thus becoming the first pope to be assassinated.
Newly installed Pope Marinus didn’t share his predecessor’s grudge with Formosus. So he released Formosus from his oath, and restored him to his old diocese.
Three more popes came and went—they seemed to drop dead with alarming regularity around this time—until at last, in 891, Formosus became the first former ex-communicant to be elected Pope.
I mean, I don’t know that I would use the verb “to clobber,” but it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate someone else doing it.
How I got to Linder’s page is a bit murkier. I had Lord Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation on before bedtime, as I sometimes do because I find it soothing aurally and visually,
and somehow my synapses took me from “tapestries as holy and secular symbology sets” to “Arthurian legend both rejecting and reflecting the trauma of intrigue at court” to “what is the equivalent of the murder ballad in pre-Renaissance art.” A check of my phone reveals the blunt-force “medieval murder painting” in my search history; forensic reconstruction of my thought processes will necessarily have its limits, but I think that’s how I got to an etching of a painting by a minor French academic artist, depicting a pope’s remains getting hectored while a massive pot of incense simmers in the foreground.
I may have to find a copy of that Bad Popes book Linder mentions; in the meantime, enjoy the Guardian’s list of the top crime scenes in art, and feel free to recommend reading in the comments. — SDB
Apologies for the delay, but the second part of my interview with Sarah Weinman is finally up at the Exhibit B. B.log. This part of the convo ranged from Richard Hickock’s biological children to the ubiquity of Selwyn Raab to, well, research rabbit holes. Here’s a snip:
Yeah, [Jimmy the King by Gus Garcia-Roberts has] been on my list. First I have to get through -- I did not realize that Lee Israel had done a book about Dorothy Kilgallen.
That was how I first heard of Lee Israel, was that book. I am also a Kilgallen obsessive and definitely fell down the rabbit hole of, like, how she died and what the hell happened there -- but there's a project that I've been trying to get off the ground for a long time related to her first book, which is called Girl Around The World when she, um, traveled the world, first on the Hindenburg -- and it was this competition with these two male writers. And I just feel like, this is such a good story. And she's just come off, you know, covering the Lindbergh trial and she's young and she's trying to impress people and I'm just like, this would be fun. But finding a copy of Girl Around The World has been a real headache. It's almost impossible. But just like getting a copy of Capote's ABC documentary, we all have our white whales. And those seem to be the two at the moment.
Even Murder One, it's like, it's just us book dealers swapping the same fourteen copies.
I've got mine.
Weinman also recommended a pair of recent Zodiac books that I’ve picked up, and I’m looking forward to round-tabling them with her and Elon Green later this year. Maybe it’s time to get that Best Evidence Book Club off the ground at last. — SDB
Later this week: Montel Williams and myths of the crime wave.
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