This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 4/26/2022
CAPOTE, Truman (1924-1984). Typed document signed (“Truman Capote”) for the motion picture rights to the novel “In Cold Blood”, 9 November 1965. 2 pages, 4to (279 x 216 mm), stapled at upper margin. A contractual agreement between Columbia Pictures Corporation and Capote in regard to acquiring the motion picture and certain allied rights for the soon-to-be published novel. Richard Brooks is to be the director of the first motion picture and Marie Dewey, wife of Alvin Dewey who was the chief investigator in the case in which the novel is based on, is to be a technical consultant in connection with the pre-preparation and production of the photoplay which will pay her as compensation for her services the sum of $10,000. The film was released in 1967 and was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Adapted Screenplay. Noted for its early example of Hollywood new realism, the film was shot at where the crimes occurred including the Clutter house in which the murders took place. In 2008, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant”. This contract was recently used as source material for a Wall Street Journal article (10-11 February 2013) that uncovered “lost files” from the now-deceased KBI agent, Harold Nye, which undermined Capote’s claim that his best seller was an “immaculately factual” recounting of the murder of the Clutter family. “A long-forgotten cache of Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents from the investigation into the deaths suggests that the events described in two crucial chapters of the 1966 book differ significantly from what actually happened. Separately, a contract reviewed and authenticated by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Capote in 1965 required Columbia Pictures to offer Mr. Dewey’s wife a job as a consultant to the film version of his book for a fee far greater than the U.S. median family income that year. In researching ‘In Cold Blood’, Truman Capote received first-class service from the KBI and Mr. Dewey, its lead detective on the case. Mr. Dewey gave the author access to the diary of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter- her final entry logged only moments before two strangers invaded her home in late 1959 and murdered her, her brother and her parents. Mr. Dewey opened the KBI’s case file to Mr. Capote. He pressured press-shy locals to cooperate with the author and granted him extraordinary access to the killers... And Mr. Capote’s book painted Mr. Dewey as the investigator who led the KBI’s brilliant cracking of the case, and the KBI as a model agency. But at a key moment in the 1959 investigation… the KBI didn’t snap into action, according to the new documents. It didn’t, as Mr. Capote’s book says, dispatch an agent that very night to the Kansas farmhouse where one of the suspects had been living with his parents. Instead, the KBI waited five days to visit the farmhouse, according to the KBI documents”.