When the Scariest Character Is Your Own

My taste in films runs pretty wide. I prefer comedies, but a great drama or romance can always sweep me away. Just don’t subject me to any monster movies or slasher flicks.

I’ll always opt for “Tootsie” over Freddy, “Sunset Boulevard” over Elm Street. Even the classics of the genre don’t interest me; Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” beats Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein” any day.

So it’s hardly a big surprise that I’ve never been gripped by terror quite like Kenneth Turan has. His fascinating essay (“The Most Fiendish Face in Movies,” page 24) explores why silent-film star Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, “haunts my dreams, disturbs my sleep and troubles my waking moments.”

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I’m not occasionally horror-struck at the theater. Just recently, I found myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat while watching “Capote,” simultaneously riveted and revolted. What creeped me out was not that actor Philip Seymour Hoffman revealed anywhere close to 1,000 faces. Seeing him play a man so blatantly two-faced was unsettling enough.

Every journalist has wrestled with the questions posed by the Truman Capote biopic: How far should you go to seduce information from a source? When does your manipulation cross the line?

I myself have never flat-out lied in the pursuit of a story, as Capote did with Kansas killer Perry Smith. I’ve come close, though.

Once, when I interviewed a police detective who I was convinced was guilty of misconduct, I pretended that I believed his version of events. I was so good, I could have won an Oscar myself, luring him into my confidence so that I could squeeze out a few more details.

As a journalist, it was justifiable. As a person--well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be too proud if my kids acted that way.

Such behavior is not the exclusive province of reporters, of course. A Hollywood executive I know watched “Capote” and also got queasy, believing that it captured the duplicity of so many in her industry. And one can only imagine what theatergoers in Washington and Sacramento think.

But it’s in journalism that we like to hold ourselves out as pure. Dan Futterman, who wrote the screenplay for “Capote,” has said that one of his inspirations was “The Journalist and the Murderer,” the Janet Malcolm book that opens by condemning the way reporters prey “on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness.”

Not everyone views Capote that way. Gerald Clarke, Capote’s biographer and an advisor on the film, suggests that the author was conflicted about the murderers he portrayed in “In Cold Blood.” “Truman was torn,” Clarke says, “genuinely torn. They were talking to him as a friend. And he was a friend.” Besides, Clarke adds, if Capote was using the murderers in some fashion, “they were using him too.”

That’s all true. But I still saw something in Hoffman’s Capote that I found absolutely frightening: a little piece of myself.