History repeats at Telluride

Filmmaker Douglas McGrath says he first started thinking about making a Truman Capote movie in the early 1980s, and started writing his screenplay six years ago. “Looking back on it,” he says, “maybe I should have hurried it up a little.”

There have been dueling movies about asteroids hitting the earth, urban volcanoes destroying big cities, and even the forbidden dance of the Lambada. But rarely have there been two films about the same subject covering the same exact period of time that have come out so closely to each other as McGrath’s “Infamous” and last year’s “Capote.”

The two productions follow Capote as he reports and writes “In Cold Blood,” his landmark account of the 1959 murder of a Kansas family. Both “Capote” and “Infamous” point up the personal cost of Capote’s writing the book, feature flashbacks of the violent crime, include long conversations between Capote and killer Perry Smith, focus on Capote’s relationship with novelist Harper Lee, and show the hangings of Smith and accomplice Dick Hickock.

But “Infamous” is interested in several different storylines, most noticeably the romantic -- if not sexual -- relationship between Capote (British actor Toby Jones) and Smith (Daniel Craig). McGrath, who loosely adapted his film from George Plimpton’s oral history “Truman Capote,” was also drawn to Capote’s New York social life. His film features a number of Capote’s contemporaries, including Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) and Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), reminiscing about the author, who died in 1984.

McGrath says he has been gratified by how well the film, which premiered at the just-wrapped Telluride Film Festival, played; because its screenings were sold out, the festival added additional showings to accommodate demand.

“It’s not as if we are doing ‘Hamlet,’ with different actors in the parts,” says McGrath, whose previous films are “Emma,” “Company Man” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” “We are telling the story from a totally different angle.” His film’s most dramatic statement -- that Capote and Smith were lovers -- will likely prove its most controversial.

Capote’s personal and professional decline after “In Cold Blood” was published, as McGrath sees it, was partially a consequence of the author’s losing a relationship that went well beyond journalist and subject.

“I couldn’t win a court case,” McGrath says, of his theory about Capote’s affair with Smith. “It’s all circumstantial evidence.”

The challenge for McGrath and Warner Independent Pictures, which is releasing his film Oct. 13, is that everything these days -- from movies to mutual funds -- is seen in relative, not absolute, terms. Comparisons between “Infamous” and “Capote,” which started its road to five Oscar nominations last year with a Telluride premiere, may be unfortunate, but are nevertheless inevitable.

“I’d prefer it to be judged in isolation, as they were,” says McGrath, who initially considered making a movie about Capote after seeing the author in a particularly incoherent state on “The Dick Cavett Show” in the early 1980s. “But we didn’t come out first, so we don’t have that advantage.”

McGrath knew well before he made “Infamous” that there might be another Capote movie in the works. He was considering sending the script to United Artists, which was then run by Bingham Ray. McGrath called Ray to tell him to keep his eyes open for his screenplay.

“And Bingham said, ‘I already got it,’ ” McGrath says. “And I said, ‘No, I’ve got it on my desk.’ And Bingham said, ‘I’ve got it on my desk.’ It was eerily coincidental. But I knew it was bad.” Yet even when UA’s “Capote” went into production and was destined to debut before “Infamous,” Warner Independent didn’t shelve McGrath’s production.

“What would have been a tragedy for me was not being able to tell it as I saw it,” McGrath says. “All I can do is my part. So, in the face of what I would say are incredible odds, I have done my part. And now the movie is here, and people can judge it for themselves. If people want to compare the movies, it’s up to them.”

After its world premiere at 2005’s festival, director Bennett Miller’s “Capote” went on to win the best actor Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman. McGrath is hopeful Telluride’s awards history (the festival also helped launch last year’s Oscar winners “Walk the Line” and “Brokeback Mountain”) might also work in his favor.

The filmmaker says that rather than deflate attention, the proximity between the two movies (“Capote” was released last Sept. 30) might actually be sparking interest. “I have to say I am a little surprised,” McGrath says. “Audiences recognize there are going to be similarities but want to explore the differences.”

*

‘Fur’ pays tribute to Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus lived such an extraordinary life (she was raised in wealth, was drawn to take pictures of outsiders, and committed suicide at age 48, at the height of her career) that her story makes for a natural biopic. Director Steven Shainberg has finally made a movie about the photographic pioneer, but there’s little natural about the resulting “Fur.”

Premiering in Telluride and due in theaters Nov. 10, Shainberg’s movie, written by Erin Wilson, begins with more disclaimers than accompany most car rental agreements. The film “is not historical biography,” the audience is informed. “What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’ inner experience on her extraordinary path.”

Movie rights to Patricia Bosworth’s Arbus biography had fruitlessly circulated for years. Producers Ed Pressman and Bonnie Timmermann eventually secured the book’s movie rights, but still no film was produced. With his 2002 sadomasochistic love story “Secretary” an art-house sensation, Shainberg made his pitch.

“I said, ‘I have an odd idea.’ And I think they were helpless, and at wit’s end,” the filmmaker says.

Shainberg’s “odd idea” did not involve experimental cinema, puppets or Aramaic. Instead, it relied on fantasy, not fact, as its narrative engine.

The film focuses on 1958, the year Arbus left her job as her photographer-husband’s stylist and began to take pictures of her own. What prompted the switch? As Shainberg tells it, Arbus (Nicole Kidman) found creative inspiration -- and her artistic voice -- by meeting a mysterious upstairs neighbor, a former sideshow freak named Lionel Sweeney (Robert Downey Jr.).

Every inch of Sweeney’s body is covered in thick brown hair. Arbus thinks she wants to take his picture. But before she can photograph him, Arbus needs to learn how to see. So Sweeney instructs her to put down her camera, and close her eyes.

“My fundamental interest is always in the most intimate relationships possible,” Shainberg says. “It’s not just the relationship between subject and photographer, but between photographer and subject. It’s the risk she has taken in getting involved with her subjects. She puts herself in a situation that is profound.”

As Sweeney and Arbus grow closer, she becomes more distant from her family and husband. But as that door closes, a new one opens -- allowing her to appreciate that which earlier had terrified her. “It’s a truly heroic story. She gambled everything,” Shainberg says.

As for his imagined plot, Shainberg defends the technique, and says he can’t think of telling his Arbus story any other way. “I wasn’t interested in trying to re-create Diane Arbus,” he says. “That’s a formula for disaster.”

*

O’Toole’s the talk of the gondola

The Telluride Film Festival has a respectable track record in establishing films and actors for awards-season consideration. And the buzz starts in a most unusual place: the free ski gondolas that shuttle festival patrons from town, where the festival’s theaters are located, up to the Mountain Village, home to Telluride’s most luxurious hotels.

Judging from gondola chatter, among the performances likely to draw critical attention this year are Derek Luke as a member of the African National Congress during apartheid-era South Africa in “Catch a Fire”; Kate Winslet as a bored housewife in “Little Children”; Forest Whitaker as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland”; Laura Linney as a troubled parent in the Australian drama “Jindabyne”; and, more than anyone else, Peter O’Toole as an elderly actor falling for a much younger girl in “Venus.”

“He’s no longer playing the raffish cad or the delightful charmer,” says Roger Michell, the British director of the film. “He’s now a really, really old man. And all that is now playing for him -- a poetic delicacy, a lilting charm. That was the real discovery for me.”

At age 74, O’Toole has never won an acting Academy Award (although he was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2003). This despite leading roles in “Lawrence of Arabia” (he lost the Oscar to Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”); “The Lion in Winter” (he lost to Cliff Robertson for “Charly”); and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (he lost to John Wayne for “True Grit”).

Michell, the director of “Changing Lanes” and “Notting Hill,” says that despite O’Toole’s age and few leading roles over the last 20 years, the actor was unfailingly valiant in making “Venus,” even resuming work three weeks after breaking his hip and having replacement surgery.

“He was in terrible pain, he’d taken this terrible shock,” Michell says. “And he got through it.”

In the film, which is scheduled for a Dec. 15 release, O’Toole plays Maurice, a London theater actor whose days are mostly filled chatting and bickering with his equally aged friends, particularly Ian (Leslie Philips). When Ian hires a young relative, Venus (Jodie Whittaker), to look after him, Maurice is immediately smitten. The movie follows his yearning; Maurice’s reconciliation not only with his own inopportune affections but also with his ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave).

At one point in the film, Maurice finds Venus work as a life model in a drawing class. Eager to see her body through an elevated window, Maurice perches atop a trash can, only to come crashing through the door, falling across a row of easels. O’Toole actually performed the stunt himself.

“He did two takes. And then he said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do any more,’ ” Michell says. And then, at the end of the day, he said, ‘That made me feel young again.’ ”

john.horn@latimes.com