Murrow and Capote went after the big story

11:41 PM CDT on Saturday, October 15, 2005

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

Journalists pursue their subjects for any number of reasons, from professional duty to personal glory to public service. Some stories bring honor to their authors, others shame and self-destruction. But the dance between power, responsibility and motive is a constant.

These matters don't just get writers thinking; they also get filmmakers excited. And so we have the Edward R. Murrow movie Good Night, and Good Luck, which opened in Dallas on Friday, and the Truman Capote chronicle Capote, which opens this Friday. The films shine a spotlight on vastly different journalists pursuing the stories of their lives. Together, they raise ever-relevant questions about why storytellers tell stories and what they risk in the process.

These are essentially "white whale" movies, in which journalists make like Captain Ahab in their passionate pursuit of Moby Dick-size stories.

Murrow's whale was McCarthyism, particularly the persecution by association that went along with the Communist witch hunts of the '50s. As portrayed by David Strathairn in Good Night, the straight-shooting Murrow, already a national icon after his radio broadcasts from London during World War II, could not abide anyone or any movement that would "confuse dissent with disloyalty." And he used his CBS news series, See it Now, to voice his disapproval.

"He was a very compassionate man," said Mr. Strathairn during a recent stop in Dallas. "He believed in the Constitution as a bedrock of this democracy, and he felt that it was being assailed. He believed in the right to face your accuser whether you're guilty or not. He believed you could not be accused under false pretenses. He saw all those things being attacked by McCarthy, and he saw that people weren't standing up for it while other people were being victimized by it."

He first took on McCarthy over the case of Lt. Milo Radulovich, who was kicked out of the Air Force because of allegedly radical views held by his father and his sister. A later broadcast issued a more sweeping attack on McCarthy. Both broadcasts served as a precursor to the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, in which the Wisconsin senator's bullying, lies and innuendo were exposed for 37 days in front of 20 million national viewers.

"There was a fear across the land that he sort of took by the horns and wrestled down," says Mr. Strathairn. "He accomplished so much in his life, but this was one of the great moments in the history of broadcast journalism and also a huge moment in our history as a nation."

Capote's story is more personal, his motives less altruistic.

The film covers his life during the reporting and writing of In Cold Blood, the novelistic true-crime book still regarded as the standard-bearer of literary nonfiction. In 1959, the hyper-ambitious Capote (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) reads a New York Times story about a Holcomb, Kan., family brutally murdered in its home. He tells New Yorker editor William Shawn he wants to cover the story, heads out to Holcomb and ingratiates himself with the town folk and law enforcement. So far, so good.

Then he meets the murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, and creates his own little ethical hornet's nest. Capote grows close to Perry and identifies with his troubled home life: "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house," the big-screen Capote says. "Then one day, he stood up and went out the back door, and I went out the front."

Capote's emotional attachment to his subject proves to be his undoing. First, he helps get the killers a new lawyer, largely so he can keep Perry alive for more interviews. Then, when he wants to finish his book ("When I think about how good my book could be, I can hardly breathe," he says in the movie) he finds himself wishing for Perry's death so he can write the ending.

"He cared about this guy, and they really understood each other in a way that nobody else in the world understood either one of them," says Capote director Bennett Miller at the Toronto International Film Festival. "Yet he goes to this place where he's sick with a desire for Perry to die, not because of anything he did, but because his very existence is in the way of you publishing your book. At the wrath of Capote's ambition, Perry's life became expendable."

Capote's case is an extreme example of the personal/professional conflict that lies in many journalists' hearts. Take Hurricane Katrina as an example. As human beings, reporters were horrified and saddened by the death and destruction. But many reporters were also excited by the scope of the story, and the opportunity to cover it.

Big stories, after all, are what journalists live for. And so unspeakable tragedy, personal ambition and professional responsibility are wrapped up in one package.

Both Capote and Murrow paid a price for their single-minded pursuits.

Murrow may have won his battle with McCarthy, who wasn't successful in his attempts to brand Murrow a Communist sympathizer. And history obviously remembers Murrow kindly. But Murrow's insistence on pursuing a controversial story alienated sponsor-conscious CBS chairman William S. Paley, who punished his star newsman by exiling him to a low-profile weekend time slot. He died of lung cancer in 1965 (he smokes like a chimney, on-air and off, throughout the film).

Capote's demise was more dramatic and internal. He never finished another book after In Cold Blood; the chapters he finished for Answered Prayers ruthlessly tore apart former friends and confidantes. (There's a point of overlap between the films here: One of the subjects Capote forever alienated was Babe Paley, wife of William S. Paley). Capote drank himself to death in 1984.

"You can tell at the end of the movie that it's going to be pretty hard for him to move on," says Mr. Hoffman. "He's a different man. His character flaws become inflamed because of this event. They grow in order to get this obsession sated."

So what lasting effects did these stories have on journalism?

Good Night portrays Murrow as one of the last guardians against the ratings barbarians, and the McCarthy broadcasts as a hot potato that moved TV news into a fluffier, less consequential place. As for Capote, his editor, played by Bob Balaban, predicts the impact of In Cold Blood: "It's going to change the way people write." The urge for narrative thrust and literary structure and detail, popularized in the '60s by Tom Wolfe and others, is now a big part of journalism. In some unfortunate cases, so is the convergence of fact and fiction. Even Capote was guilty of that with In Cold Blood's ending.

Then there's the impulse to become the story rather than just report it. In an odd way, that's what these films represent. Edward R. Murrow and Truman Capote were master storytellers. Now they have movies to tell their own stories.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com