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Infamous
Directed by	Douglas McGrath
Produced by	Jocelyn Hayes
Written by	Douglas McGrath George Plimpton (book)
Starring	Toby Jones See also cast list
Music by	Rachel Portman
Cinematography	Bruno Delbonnel
Editing by	Camilla Toniolo
Distributed by	Warner Independent Pictures Arclight Films
Release date(s)	October 13, 2006 (limited)
Running time	110 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$13,000,000 (est.)
Official website
IMDb profile

Infamous is a biographical film drama about Truman Capote which premiered August 31, 2006, at the Venice Film Festival. Warner Independent Pictures released the film on October 13, 2006, to mostly favorable reviews, followed by the February 13, 2007 DVD release.

Written and directed by Douglas McGrath, Infamous is based on the 1997 book Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton.

Released almost exactly one year after the initial showings of Bennett Miller's Capote, the film Infamous covers much of the same ground yet also depicts Capote in New York before he began work on In Cold Blood (1966). David Thomson, reviewing in The Independent, wrote about the film's alternative approach:

What does it have that's different? Well, first of all, it is written and directed by Douglas McGrath. He wrote Bullets Over Broadway with Woody Allen; and he wrote and directed Emma and Nicholas Nickleby. His film has a gallery of Truman Capote's Manhattan friends, people who adored him without ever quite trusting him: I'm thinking of Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver), the clothes horse wife of Bill Paley, who controlled CBS; Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), the fashion magazine editor; Slim Keith (Hope Davis), the woman who was married to Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward; Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich), the publisher. These cameos give a tone-perfect sense of Capote's life before In Cold Blood. He is placed as the phenomenon of culture, celebrity and outrage that he was.

And here's another thing that Infamous has. In the opening scene of the film, Truman and Babe Paley are at the El Morocco night club in 1959, listening to a singer, Kitty Dean (Gwyneth Paltrow). She leaps into her number ("What Is This Thing Called Love") and then falters. She breaks down, slowly recovers, and finishes the song. It is the best thing I have ever seen Paltrow do - and it is for us to judge how far the incident is a model for Infamous. Pianist Rob Schwimmer (of Simon and Garfunkel fame) plays on this track, although is not onscreen.

Speaking of Jones' role, McGrath (in the Telegraph magazine) stated, "He purely becomes the character." The film previously was titled Have You Heard?, and it also had the USA working title Every Word Is True. The character portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow was originally Peggy Lee; interviewed in 2004 about her upcoming roles, Paltrow commented, "Well, the Peggy Lee role involves one day of work on my friend Doug McGrath's movie, and the Marlene Dietrich project is something that was put into development before I got pregnant. I would absolutely love to do it if the script gets approved, but it's just being written now." ^[1] However, the situation of an audience held spellbound by a singer falling silent in the middle of a song was actually based not on Peggy Lee but on a real-life nightclub performance by Broadway legend Barbara Cook. ^[2]

Sandra Bullock and Toby Jones as Harper Lee and Truman Capote in Infamous (2006)

• Capote (film)
• Truman Capote

• Infamous trailer

• Hollywood Reporter: Kirk Honeycutt review
• The Independent: David Thomson review
• Infamous official site
• Infamous Reviews at Metacritic.com
• Infamous at the Internet Movie Database
• New York Observer: Rex Reed review
• New York Times: Ed Liebowitz: "Playing a Historical Figure, You Can Copy... or Conquer" (8/6/06)