You shall know the true crime documentary by its tropes: close-ups of shell casings falling, a voiceover opining about life in a small town, super-8 home movie footage, camera-ready detectives. At some point, someone will say, \u201cThere was blood everywhere.\u201d We are in a true crime boom (more likely, the tail-end of said boom). Streaming platforms need \u201ccontent,\u201d and true crime does really well. But the cracks are starting to show, especially to people who watch a lot of true crime. Things are getting a little stale. Series like 48 Hours and Dateline set the template, and it\u2019s getting to the point where the format is interchangeable.<\/p>\n
Charlie Shackleton\u2019s \u201cZodiac Killer Project\u201d is a commentary about true crime documentaries, but it\u2019s also about his thwarted desire to adapt the 2012 book\u00a0The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge\u00a0by retired California police officer Lyndon E Lafferty. The Lafferty family gave Shackleton the go-ahead (or so he thought), and he began pre-production, financing much of it himself. When the Laffertys withdrew their support, Shackleton was left with a pile of research, many ideas, and no movie. He made \u201cZodiac Killer Project,\u201d instead, a film about not being able to make a movie, showing what he\u00a0would\u00a0have done had he been able to actually do it.<\/p>\n
For some, this may be too meta to endure, particularly since Shackleton\u2019s plans involved using familiar true crime tropes. He wasn\u2019t trying to \u201cThin Blue Line\u201d anything. He wanted to fit into the pre-ordained format. He tells us all this in voiceover (we don\u2019t actually see him until halfway through), and his tone is engaging in a really interesting way. There\u2019s a wry twist, almost a mischievous attitude, as he lays out what he wanted to do and why. It\u2019s nearly like he was making fun of the format while submitting to it. (One can understand why the Laffertys might have hesitated when faced with this tone).<\/p>\n
The unsolved Zodiac Killer case is almost tangential to Shackleton\u2019s project plans. This may be because Lyndon Lafferty was a side show to the main event, barely a player. However, he insinuated himself into the conversation to such a degree that Robert Graysmith addressed it (and dismissed it) in his definitive 1986 book on the case. Lafferty was a patrol cop who was 100% sure he knew the identity of the Zodiac killer, after having an intense staring contest with some guy at a rest area who looked like the one police sketch available. Lafferty\u2019s \u201cevidence\u201d was slim to the point of being totally delusional. He could not get his police department to back him up and, in fact, was told to lay off his \u201csuspect\u201d. Lafferty then went rogue, doing his own \u201cinvestigation,\u201d basically stalking this guy for decades, even getting one of his friends\u2013a priest, no less\u2013to infiltrate the \u201csuspect\u201d\u2019s AA meeting.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all so \u201cout there,\u201d and Shackleton was drawn in by Lafferty\u2019s dramatic tone. Even the title is self-dramatizing (\u201cthe silenced badge\u201d: you\u2019re writing a book, how have you been silenced?). Shackleton uses this opportunity to show us what he\u2019s filmed so far: long, stationary shots of rest areas, intersections, and a creepy house in the woods, which he informs us isn\u2019t actually the suspect\u2019s house (but it might as well be). He also analyzes the expected true crime format and the way its tropes function. You can\u2019t unsee the \u201cevocative B-roll\u201d concept once Shackleton points it out. He does side-by-side comparisons of \u201cevocative B-roll\u201d shots\u2013sunlight through trees, grainy home movies, cassette tapes, a shadowy figure walking away from the camera\u2013lifted from recent true crime docuseries (\u201cMaking of a Murderer,\u201d \u201cThe Jinx,\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t F**k With Cats\u201d). They are the exact same shots.<\/p>\n
As interesting as all of this is, \u201cZodiac Killer Project\u201d feels like it could have been made by any number of thoughtful YouTube commentators who use their channels to deconstruct film and literary tropes. These people come with receipts! There is much to be said about the true crime boom from a sociological standpoint, and people wear themselves out trying to understand the \u201cmorbid curiosity\u201d of true crime \u201cfans\u201d. Shackleton isn\u2019t interested in those things (which tend towards the earth-shatteringly boring). His interest is in how stories are told, how to play around with shots and sequence to craft a narrative\u2013even a narrative as full of hot air nothingness as Lafferty\u2019s.<\/p>\n
The film Shackleton wanted to make clearly wasn\u2019t a passion project coming from his deepest soul. It\u2019s not like he\u2019s Orson Welles yearning for the unfairly butchered \u201cMagnificent Ambersons.\u201d \u201cZodiac Killer Project\u201d is fairly thin in both conception and execution, but it is very much \u201cmy kind of thing,\u201d particularly his dry, humorous tone. He makes a good and entertaining guide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You shall know the true crime documentary by its tropes: close-ups of shell casings falling, a voiceover opining…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-146715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}