Zodiac Movie - Zodiac Trailer

"Zodiac"
"Zodiac Trailer" - First Look
"Zodiac" - In Theaters March 2, 2007

Zodiac Movie Poster

Based on the true story of one of the most intriguing unsolved crimes in the nation's history, "Zodiac" is a thriller from David Fincher, director of "Se7en" and "Fight Club." As a serial killer terrifies the San Francisco Bay Area and taunts police with his ciphers and letters, investigators in four jurisdictions search for the murderer. The case will become an obsession for four men as their lives and careers are built and destroyed by the endless trail of clues.

STARRING: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards, Ezra Buzzington
DIRECTOR: David Fincher
STUDIO: Paramount
RATING: R (For some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images)

WATCH the "Zodiac" TRAILER

Wild About Movies Grade: D-

Another David Fincher thriller. Oy! And Jake Gyllenhaal's follow up to his Oscar nominated performance in "Brokeback Mountain." Jake doesn't show up in "Zodiac" for almost an hour and we wonder why anyone would make such a tedious movie in which the killer gets away. It's not a secret. The movie is based on the true story and keeping true to form, in the movie, the killer is never caught. But the movie is a complete and utter bore fest.

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Authentic "Zodiac" letters scanned directly at the San Francisco PD crime lab, below!

Zodiac Movie

"Zodiac"
Behind The Scenes

THE PAPER CHASE

He was the ultimate bogey man.

“If you grew up there, at that time, you had this childhood fear that you kind of insinuated yourself into it. What if it was our bus? What if he showed up in our neighborhood? You create even more drama about it when you’re a kid because that is what kids do. I grew up in Marin and now I know the geography of where the crimes took place, but when you’re in grade school, children don’t think about that. They think, `He’s going to show up at our school.’”

Welcome to David Fincher’s second-grade nightmare.

Like many children who grew up in the Bay area in the early `70s, director David Fincher, then 7, was spellbound by the invisible monster known only as the Zodiac.

“I remember as kids talking about the killer calling in on the Dunbar Show. In 1974, we moved away and I remember realizing that other places, other people knew about the Zodiac killer,” Fincher recalls. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that three decades later he would be asked to envision a film that would prompt him to: Retrace the killer’s steps with several of the officers who tracked the most notorious killer of his youth; Comb through 10,000 pages of documents and evidence; Interview the victims who survived, the loved ones of those who didn’t and the relatives of a prime suspect. At that time, that prime suspect was a former teacher turned pedophile, fired and imprisoned for fondling grade school children.

Fincher too would succumb to the need to know; a need that fueled a young San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist’s obsession to unravel the mystery of a murderer. Robert Graysmith would channel that obsession into two books, the bestseller Zodiac and follow-up Zodiac Unmasked, recounting in minute detail every fact and tormented nuance of the unproven for those closest to the investigations in four jurisdictions, his derisive yet engaging colleague Paul Avery and himself.

“Robert Graysmith knew he was a guy on the sidelines of this story. He wanted to be a part of it and he made himself a part of it,” says Fincher. “He was doing it on his own time because he wasn’t a reporter. It was Robert who went after it and after everybody else had pretty much walked away.
Everything we included in the movie, we used from what Robert gave us. But, we had police reports and we backed everything up with documentation, our own interviews and evidence. Even when we did our own interviews, we would talk to two people. One would confirm some aspects of it and another would deny it. Plus, so much time had passed, memories are affected and the different telling of the stories change perception. So when there was any doubt we always went with the police reports. The one thing about the Zodiac story too is there are so many people out there who are convinced Robert is wrong about some things and that their version or interpretation is right and there are so many myths that sprang up so you have to keep all of that in mind when you are dealing with the story of Zodiac. That is why we chose to tell the story the way we did, through Robert’s eyes. My goal was to capture the truth of those books.”

In short, capturing “Zodiac” proved a massive undertaking.

“When you begin an adaptation, the only thing you can be sure of is you’re gonna end up throwing out 5/6ths of your source material for the simple fact that you can’t fit it all in,” explains screenwriter-producer James (Jamie) Vanderbilt. “Add to that the facts that the movie is based on two books, as well as a ton of interviews. The one thing we had going for us is that the movie is about these guys who get sucked down the rabbit hole of the Zodiac case, Graysmith in particular, but also the detectives and a reporter. The dearth of information worked for us, because there was always another conversation to be had, theory to be discussed, suspect to examine. I think the movie itself is one of the most `informationally packed’ I’ve ever seen, and it doesn’t even scratch the surface in terms of the sheer volume of material out there.”

The biggest difference between the books and the film is Graysmith himself, Vanderbilt says.

“Robert doesn’t put himself at the center of the Zodiac books, but it was his involvement that first fascinated me the cartoonist as crime stopper,” says Vanderbilt. “`What if Garry Trudeau woke up one morning and tried to solve the Son of Sam’ was how I used to pitch it” the idea for a screen adaptation of Zodiac, his favorite book in high school. “Getting to know Robert during this process was actually invaluable because the script changed as we became friends; and very rarely in order to make him look better. Robert truly invited us into his life warts and all, and that’s how I think we ended up portraying him onscreen. The great thing about Robert the artist is that he recognizes the value in that, he understands the creative process and what makes a good story. “

Jake Gyllenhaal was drawn to the story by the immediacy of the drama in the page-turner of a script he received from David Fincher, he says. And then he was totally hooked by its verisimilitude. “The first time I read the script, the murders, in particular, were terrifying,” he says. “I remember flipping through the pages and thinking, ‘This is real, this actually happened. I immediately wanted to do it.

“At the start of the story, Robert Graysmith exists on the periphery of the case. He’s a cartoonist , an intern, at the San Francisco Chronicle. He happens to be in the room when the paper is sent a cipher and a letter from the Zodiac Killer asking them to print the cipher. He’s turning in copies of different cartoons. But little do they know he’s sort of obsessed with puzzles and deciphering things. He becomes really interested in the case and then, years later, when the case is not solved, he takes it upon himself, under the guise of writing a book about it, to try and solve the case on his own.

“I think what is most interesting about this story is that when something like this happens there’s mass hysteria. And then it’s given to the experts. And sometimes the experts don’t have the same heart that just a kind of a regular guy like Robert Graysmith would have. They also have so much red tape to go through, all the jurisdiction. Robert, a sort of regular person off the street, doesn’t have to get a warrant for this, or permission for that. They can just go out of pure heart and pure, in Robert's case, obsession. I think that’s fascinating because we rely less and less on ourselves, you know. We rely on expert's opinions, and so often they’re tinged with so many other political things and things related to their own work and where they want to go. A regular person like Robert, you're doing the work on your own, the true hard facts come much more clearly. To me, it’s an empowering thing, to know that there’s this sort of regular guy, who could just, could break open a case that people found impossible, to solve.”

How did the actor prepare for the role of the bold cartoonist? Gyllenhaal’s method was deliberate and scientific. “Robert Graysmith is an interesting bird, I would say. When I first met him I had told him that I was going to put him on tape because I wanted to study his mannerisms and just physically, I wanted to see how he behaved. I was actually really nervous. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, well, what kind of personality does this guy have to have in order to go into this world?’ And I thought, ‘I’m going to meet this guy and it’s gonna be like this weird, dark exchange. What world am I going to have to go to with him in order to get some truth out of him?’ And he walks into the room and he’s this like sweet, unassuming, constantly complimentary, kind of innocent man.

“And, everything they tell you in acting school, like, ‘you should always play the opposite.’ That's exactly what he is. He’s the opposite of everything you would assume to be a person who would be obsessed with a case like this. But then, as you spend more time with him, there is a sense of, if he wants to get a piece of information out of you and you haven’t answered the first time because it’s a little too close or a little too personal, he’ll then insert it in this odd, syncopated way, so that you answer it and you don’t even know you're answering it. He is very smart, and also at the same time, kind of cunning, when he wants to get information. But, as a human being, he’s a gentle guy. It's really interesting.”

“I watched Jake interpret my character on several occasions,” notes Graysmith. He was not doing an impersonation of me but an interpretation of me. I thought he caught my enthusiasm and excitability, my Southern upbringing, polite deference and eccentricities perfectly. We already had the same color of hair.”

As for capturing the sweep of an era, something more than just a recreation of a storytelling experience, he says he and Vanderbilt were “on the same page. At the risk of becoming too `meta’,” Vanderbilt adds, “There was something very cool to me about the movie regarding the power of words – the writer writing about the writer who was writing about the killer who became famous because he was a great letter writer. Because that’s really the reason Zodiac remains with us today, he wrote scary fucking letters and not to the cops, but to other writers. Newspaper guys who went, “Oh, shit, this is pretty good. We should run it.” So they did, and people read those letters, and we’re still talking about him decades later. The power of the written word.”

Graysmith wrote his “first person diaries” (Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked) because he wanted to enlist the public in tracking down the killer. When he began, there were 2,500 suspects to sift through “and a wall of silence to breech,” he recalls. “In those days, police weren’t sharing. Zodiac was a big, big case and the man who solved it was going to be an ace, so they clamped down on all information. It was common for them to hold records so I could not see them and if I got close enough to the truth as we talked, they would verify a fact or two. I was also not allowed writing implements or paper so I had to commit serial numbers and dates to memory. It made for rather long and spirited sessions afterward writing down all I could recall.” After 10 years , 13 drafts and reducing a mountain of research into his 351-page tome, “I guess, my biggest contribution, as I uncovered new leads, conducted interviews and tracked down missing witnesses and suspects, was to visit each police department, consolidate all the facts and share them so that Zodiac could be captured.” That was always his greatest hope, he says today. When he reflects on the tumultuous journey, “it is a wonder any of us survived the Zodiac. The long pursuit, the irresistible lure of the case, its mystery, tragedy and loss, ruined marriages, derailed careers, demolished health of a brilliant reporter; it was a study in frustration as police were beaten back time and again.”

Gyllenhaal credits Robert Downey Jr. with providing some special energy on the set that inspired the players to make the story come alive. “Robert Downey Jr., is extraordinary. What he’s done, and what he always does, is bring a presence, kind of ‘wipe-through.’ His Paul Avery is kind of a court jester in that he dances around things and he has this sense of humor, almost a detachment from the situation, but a real sense of humor about it. Kind of like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. He just sheds light all over everybody whenever he flies around,” Gyllenhaal says.

Fincher felt “very fortunate” to have this cast. “I found the people I wanted to work with. And I was very fortunate to have many of the real people from that time around. I think we tried to give people their due respect. But it was never about duplicating them exactly, their hair, etc.” Example: “Robert Downey Jr., who plays Paul Avery, is the only one who plays someone that is no longer alive. But I think he has such enthusiasm and because he is someone who could really grasp Paul’s inner demons, he was perfect for the role.”

Of the four characters, it was Toschi who knew Avery the longest. “I met Paul Avery in 1960 when I was 28. I was with the Bureau of Inspectors (for the San Francisco Police Department) and I wanted to be a detective,” says Toschi. “We shared a lot of history. At the end Paul was doing cocaine and he was on a machine. He was in really bad shape. He called me before he passed away. He wanted to write a book, a quick paperback before he died to leave to his grandchildren. He said, `Dave we can make $25,000 each, just like that!’ I felt bad for him, really bad. But I told him, Paul, I’m committed to Robert Graysmith. I remember when Robert first came to me and said, `You’re the only guy who has all of the info, the only guy I can talk to. I met Robert Graysmith in 1977 when he told me he wanted to write. He really believed this case could be solved. He really wanted to try. We have remained good friends since.”

Toschi says Fincher was curious why he talked to Graysmith at all. The case was no longer actively being investigated and Graysmith wasn’t a reporter. “It was because of his sincerity and honesty,” he says. “In a couple of minutes I knew he was about that. He was this political cartoonist. I believed him.”
For his part, Mark Ruffalo was totally impressed with Toschi and how Fincher portrayed him in the script. “I don’t love the genre; it’s usually pretty violent,” he says. “But David had written this script that, when I read it, I saw that this character I was going to be playing had come to life in a nuanced, beautiful way. Then I took a trip to meet the guy, and at that point I just felt so fortunate to be doing the movie. After all, he is the model for actors who attempt to play detectives, and I am playing the one that some actors have modeled their career-making roles on.

“And Robert Downey Jr. is amazing. I’ve always loved him and think he’s as close to genius as you can come without falling over the edge. I found it really exciting to work with him, and scary and fun. There’s the danger factor. Not physical or violent danger – it’s his spontaneity.”

It was Vanderbilt and Phoenix Pictures’ Producer Bradley (Brad) J. Fischer who optioned the rights to Graysmith’s book when it finally became available after lingering in limbo at another studio for nearly a decade. They had one director in mind.

“I felt David Fincher would be able to tell the story in a way that would be true to what happened and get to the psychology of what motivated the people who inhabited that world. He had obviously done a serial killer movie before, but this went beyond genre,” says Fischer, “There was something in these characters that exists in all of us: the capacity for becoming consumed by something so fully, that day after day, night after night, year after year, you can’t ever truly put it away. Fincher is able to articulate things about human behavior and emotion cinematically that makes the characters and the world they inhabit so incredibly authentic. He can give the viewer that feeling, that they could be watching themselves up there, sinking down into the rabbit hole without realizing it. The DNA of this story had so much to do with that, with degrees of malevolent deviant behavior whether you’re talking about a serial killer or the men whose lives are drained in the pursuit of something that will probably remain just out of reach for the rest of their lives. There’s something equally admirable and sad about that, but more than that, it is a most human thing to want to know what can’t be known. It is a compulsion that exists in all of us, and it has the potential to be an incredibly destructive force. I knew that was something Fincher would be able to help us explore like no other filmmaker.

“What Fincher knew is that the story had to be made simpler, clearer,” the producer continues, elaborating. “What Fincher knew was that the material we were dealing with, almost everything that was out there about the story of the Zodiac investigation, it was all a bit distorted by this massive game of telephone, filtered through the worst lens you could think of: newspapers.

“The case had taken on its own mythic proportions over the years, and it was our job to undo all that; to draw a clean line between fact and fiction and demystify what had somehow grown so far beyond its roots in reality. You have to remember, it was the media that turned Zodiac into this all-powerful enigma – I mean, he writes a letter and says, ‘This is the Zodiac speaking,’ and then the newspapers start calling him ‘The Cipher Slayer!’ It’s like seeing this gigantic and terrifying shadow mutate against the wall, and then you understand the source is just one man who clumsily shot five people and stabbed two others; and he snuck up on all of them. He’s not “Wile E. Coyote Super Genius,” as we grew fond of calling him, he’s a sad, pathetic and incredibly sick person who came within inches of being caught. The rest was all in the public’s head, ready and waiting for each eager imagination to mold into a most powerful demon.“

And so, says Fischer, “the process was long and difficult, but it was important if we were going to tell the real story. So it was anathema to rely on any secondary or tertiary source. Police reports became the rule. That, and, of course, the people that were there. It was really quite simple: Let’s find everyone we can who was materially involved in the investigation, and let’s sit down across from them, look them in the eye, ask them direct and sometimes difficult questions, and then hear what they have to say. So we talked to Bryan Hartnell; to Mike Mageau, who is now homeless and hasn’t really recovered since he was shot in 1969; to Dave Toschi; to Bill Armstrong; to Ken Narlow; to George Bawart. We put Don Cheney and Sandy Panzarella in a room together for the first time since they were interviewed by police in the 1970s and asked them to tell us every detail of their story. We did our best to get it right.”

Producer Mike Medavoy, Phoenix Pictures’ co-founder and Chairman, says what was interesting about the material “is not so much that it is about a serial killer, which is a movie unto itself, but it’s about the people that went after the serial killer. It is what happens when you get so obsessed with something and you lose sight of what the objective is. You’re bound to get lost and you’re bound to destroy everything along the way … and it happened to every single one of them. Graysmith came back, but he’s no longer married. Look at all the things that happened to the principal characters. To me, that’s what’s fascinating about the film.

“They, in fact, lost themselves in the process of chasing the story,” Medavoy adds. “David and Brad and Jamie” – the trio doing their own gumshoe work – “were maniacal about making it accurate. We thought Brad was going to become a policeman and quit show business (not quite)!”

Producer Arnold W. Messer, Medavoy’s partner and Phoenix President, says to his knowledge “this is probably the most extensively researched script, the most meticulously accurate representation of actual events consistent with dramatic movies. I’ve been producing 30 years and I have never been involved with a movie that has been this close to the truth and the amount of research and energy put into it. Every one of those people represented in the movie who are alive, have been interviewed. Every one of those people who contributed to it in some way or another…the guys went into the books, the raw files, the 10,000 pages of transcripts. It was really impressive the work these guys did to make sure they were in line with the facts.”

THE CONVERSATIONS

The filmmakers worked closely with Bryan Hartnell and the officers who handled the case to understand what transpired at Lake Berryessa Sept. 27, 1969.

Napa Sheriff’s Detective Ken Narlow wasn’t one of the responding officers on the scene that day – Patrol Officers John Robertson and David Collins were. But Narlow, then a detective sergeant oversaw the murder investigation at the time. Now retired, he remains a consultant to the Napa Sheriff’s Department on the Zodiac case, getting continuous leads to this day – “I think it will never leave me,” he says.

“I was up at Berryessa when they were shooting the stabbing scene and when they did the scene of the (Zodiac’s) handwriting on the car,” he says. “I remember it was 6 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon” – the time of the attack. “It tore me up to watch it. He used the knife on those kids instead of guns. In my humble opinion he stabbed Bryan Hartnell about half as many times as he did Cecilia and I think what saved Bryan’s life is that Cecilia started screaming and she distracted him. He stabbed her 10 times, 5 in the front and 5 in the back. I got pretty teary-eyed watching them do that re-enactment. I’m a pretty hard-hearted guy and I never in my wildest dreams thought that it would affect me like that. I mean after 37 years. I’d be up there watching the movie and I kept thinking that is what those kids went through. I took it pretty personal I guess. We should have caught that guy.”

It was Collins, now retired, who was the last to talk to Cecilia before she died. “My part does not show up in the movie but I was interviewed for the DVD so I have seen the movie. It was startling and I was riveted to the screen. I became very anxious watching it because it was so true to life. It was very difficult for me to watch. During the time I spent with Cecilia that day she kept saying `I’m freezing.’ She was going into shock so I put my coat on her and she wore it until the ambulance came. She was crying, injured so badly. She kept saying, `I hurt all over. Give me something for the pain.’ But I didn’t have anything.”

The Zodiac had stabbed Bryan until his body went limp, then he began stabbing Cecilia until she played dead. That’s when he stopped and walked away, Cecilia told Collins. “They lay on the blanket all tied up. There was a fisherman out on the lake nearby. They started screaming for help. At first the fisherman didn’t think much about it. Then he was concerned somebody might be trying to lure him in to attack him. So he waited for about 10 minutes and then he realized somebody was in trouble. They yelled at him and told him they had been stabbed to please come up there and help them. He told them he would go for help. They didn’t want him to leave. But he went to the owners of a nearby resort called Rancho Monticello Resort. After he left, they just laid on that blanket all tied up. They didn’t think he was coming back and their only hope was to try and get out of there. Cecilia told me they untied each other but it wasn’t until the screening that I finally got to talk to Bryan and learn the answer to the question I wanted to know all these years – How did they untie each other with their feet and hands tied so tightly behind their backs? They were so weak from being in that position, from the loss of blood and being terrified. Bryan told me they backed up to each other on the blanket and she was able to get the knots loose. He tried to crawl for help but when we got there he was only about 30 feet from her before he collapsed.”

By the time Collins and Robertson arrived, the resort owner, a park ranger, the fisherman and his son were at the scene waiting for the officers and ambulance to arrive. It took the patrol officers 30 minutes to get to the scene because of traffic on the mountainous winding road; the ambulance another 20 minutes. From the time of the attack to rescue, the victims waited 1½ hours. Cecilia died on the way to the hospital.

“I didn’t get to talk to Bryan that day. Cecilia would not let me leave her for a moment,” says Collins. “You could look at her and tell she couldn’t hurt a soul. She was a pretty, fragile little lady. … He didn’t take anything. He just wanted to kill.”

Although she was the only one of the couple who had seen the Zodiac’s face that day, before he put on the hood, Cecilia told Collins she had never seen him before. “I personally don’t believe the suspect has been identified,” he says. “If he is still alive, he’s still out there.”

Despite all the details and all the evidence compiled over the years, one thing is astoundingly clear says Fischer. “Memory is subjective by its nature, and while the passage of time rarely serves to clarify traumatic events, the perspective of those that were there is invaluable,” he says. “A police report in one instance trumped the memory of a Vallejo police officer who was absolutely certain that Mike Mageau described the report of Zodiac’s weapon as loud, not silenced. When I read the now retired officer’s own report back to him, describing what Mageau had said, `he heard some more muffled sounds, sounding like a gun with a silencer on it,’ the officer said he remembered it differently, but admitted these facts were correct. Mageau, for his part, remembered quite clearly that the sound was muffled. In fact, it wasn’t until the second or third bullet hit him that he realized they were being shot. When he felt a sudden pain in his neck from the first shot, he told me, he thought the man had whacked him with a flashlight.” Fischer used a private detective to track down Mageau. He was in jail on a vagrancy charge and Fischer interviewed him from a jail videophone. “It was fascinating to have a conversation directly with the guy who was there,” who saw the Zodiac killer face to face, Fischer says. Mageau and Hartnell - the sole survivors - would spend their lives navigating the legal realm, their experiences at opposite ends of the spectrum.

George Bawart, now retired, was called by Vallejo Police Department asking him to cooperate with the filmmakers. “The reason the Vallejo Police Department is cooperating with them 100 percent is they are hoping the movie will come out and somebody will come forward with something very specific and we can solve this case once and for all.”

On July 4, 1969, Bawart was a sergeant on the force. His boss Jack Mulanax, now deceased, was the lead detective on the case. Bawart would oversee the ongoing Zodiac investigation years later. When Ferrin and Mageau were attacked, Bawart says, “It was not an investigation of a serial killer at the time. It was the killing of a young couple on lover’s lane and it was treated like any other killing. It could have been a jealous boyfriend. Everything changed when the murders happened at Lake Berryessa. It was shortly after that the letters started coming in. When all the publicity started, that is when everyone became concerned that we might have a serial killer on our hands.” He wasn’t one of the responding officers on the scene and he didn’t become involved in the case until 1971, when he started investigating Arthur Leigh Allen as his prime suspect. It was Bawart who would interview Mageau 25 years later at an airport, after Graysmith’s book was released. “Everyone made a big deal about Mageau’s identification of Leigh Allen as the Zodiac,” he says. “When I met him at the airport it was, `Here’s a lineup of the photos,’ and that was it. He picked him out. I asked him how he could be so sure and he said: `I know. He looked at me and shot me. I’m certain.’” Even with Mageau’s eyewitness testimony, Bawart believes today a defense attorney would shoot holes in Mageau’s testimony because of the passage of time.

“To me the best evidence is what we found in Leigh Allen’s house,” says Bawart. “We found bombs, many of the things the Zodiac talked about in his letters. Before I got the search warrant I went up to Napa and talked to Ken Narlow. It was near the anniversary of one of the Zodiac killings. The media got wind of what we were about to do and they printed a bunch of stories. It was good and bad. The good that came out of it was one woman who read about it, noticed the name Robert Emmett the Hippie and said, `God, I know that guy.’ Until 1992, nobody knew who Robert Emmett the Hippie was. He was Robert Emmett Rodifer, a gay guy who used to manage a swim team. Arthur Leigh Allen was a diver on that team. He was shy and quiet but Rodifer was outgoing. So I flew to Germany to interview (Rodifer). He said he remembered Leigh Allen. `He was that guy who hated me,’ he said. It was what he told me that made me believe Leigh Allen was the Zodiac. How he described him and how he reacted to him."

EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

”As an editorial cartoonist you develop a strong sense of justice, a need to change things, and as a painter and cartoonist I worked with symbols every day… At the time, no killer since Jack the Ripper had written the press and taunted police with clues to his identity. The letter’s strangeness ensnared me.” Author Robert Graysmith, Zodiac

Greek symbols. Morse code. Weather symbols. Alphabet characters. Navy semaphore. Astrological symbols. Such were among the mishmash of coded terror hand scribbled in blue felt-tip pen that would first appear in letters to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and The Vallejo Times-Herald Aug. 1, 1969:

“I want you to print this cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my identity. If you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Fry, 1st of Aug 69, I will go on a kill rampage Fry.night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night…”

The letters would continue for decades, filled with the grim details of murders known only to law enforcement, hard evidence – a piece of a murdered victim’s bloodied shirt and detailed bomb and sniper threats for the planned mass murder of school children on a grand scale.

Code breakers for the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and Naval Intelligence were stumped. The killer’s ciphers could not be cracked.
Until North Salinas High School teacher Donald Gene Harden decided to feed a one-time boyhood interest and solve what the experts couldn’t – the killer’s motive and a possible identity or the identity of a link to him.

“What happened was, after the story appeared, my ex-wife was trying to do it, but she didn’t know what the heck she was doing,” recalls Harden, now 78, remarried and living in Fountain Hills, Arizona. “I had to do it to keep her from doing it because it was driving me crazy watching her try. She wouldn’t let up on it. He had used all these signals. I worked on it for three days. I didn’t do much code breaking then. I did a little bit of it in Boy Scouts. I read about it and dabbled in it a little bit when I was a kid. I called the paper and told them I figured it out and they just told me, `Yeah sure, mail it.’” So he did.

After the Hardens’ decryption was published, they became overnight celebrities, something they never anticipated. Then they received a call from the FBI. They were right. “I don’t know what my ex-wife told them. I wasn’t there. All I know is we never heard from them again,” he adds. “We didn’t realize the media fallout that would follow. I was interviewed on America’s Most Wanted for about half a second. But my ex-wife got so paranoid that every time a reporter would come by she’d start worrying the killer was going to find us. I had to buy a gun and put it under the bed. I never had a gun before and I never used it. I just bought it to calm her down. I got rid of it a couple of years later.”

His students were amazed at their teacher’s prowess and terrified like all school kids in the Bay area of the cipher slayer. “When it was published, the kids at school wouldn’t let up about it. So one day I sat them all down and told them all about it, how I did it and that was it,” Harden recalls. “I did it to calm them down and after that nobody ever mentioned it again."

First, he had to teach them about code breaking, a jargon term for decryption or breaking encryption, which is the process of obscuring information to make something unreadable without special knowledge. Ciphers are the plain text letters, characters or symbol substitutes that can stand alone or be used in groups in an encrypted message. Although the term code is used interchangeably with cipher, codes are usually converted words or phrases that are generally used to shorten a message.

In Graysmith’s book Zodiac, Harden told how he broke down the killer’s encrypted missive. First he checked for frequency of certain letters. “He knew that E was the common letter in the English language followed by T, A, O, N, I, R and S. The common double letters are L, E and S,” wrote Graysmith. The letters most frequently occurring together are TH, HE and AN. More than half of all words begin with T, A, O, S or W and the most common three letter combinations were THE, ING, CON and ENT.

Harden decided the killer was using substitution ciphers which are symbols or figures, not letters. Since the killer had used a multitude of symbols, a one-for-one substitution for letters wasn’t possible. Harden had to get creative, deduce the killer’s method of repeating symbols and reduce the number of variables. Then it hit him – the most commonly doubled letter in the English language is L. So he looked for four letter patterns in the killer’s cryptogram that would mesh with the word “kill.”

“Battlefield cryptanalysts, for example, scan any captured ciphers for symbols that might stand for attack,” noted Graysmith. With that thinking in mind, the Hardens used “killing” twice and “killed” and “thrilling” once each. Other double-L words were “will’’ used four times and “collecting” once. Then they determined the killer’s traps – he used the symbol of a backward Q 15 times to lure code breakers into thinking it was an E, the most commonly used letter. For an E the killer used 7 different symbols. Two different symbols were used for A and S interchangeably. The killer’s spelling was not only poor but in some cases there were mistakes in the ciphers themselves. Thus:

“I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERIENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF SLAVES FOR AFTERLIFE.

EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

Since the killer said in the cryptogram he would not give his name, the Hardens thought the anagram was ROBERT EMMET THE HIPPIE. It was not until August 1992, 23 years after the Hardens deciphered the name that police learned key suspect Arthur Leigh Allen was a jealous swim team rival of his high school classmate, Robert Emmett Rodifer who became a hippie in college and later moved to Germany.

“Even that people can’t agree on,” says David Fincher. “Even after 35 years, and all the experts, there is no absolute truth. There are some disputes about the decryption of the codes including Robert Emmett the Hippie, which Robert (Graysmith) is convinced was accurate.”

Fincher is right, says Graysmith. He does believe Emmett was the tip, a link to the killer’s identity.

“In 1969 an amateur code-breaking couple, the Hardens, broke the 312 symbol cryptogram that gave us Zodiac’s motive,” Graysmith adds. “They had done what the NCIS, FBI and NSA could not.”

Using the Hardens’ translation it was Graysmith who connected the villain’s methods in the 1932 RKO film “The Most Dangerous Game” to the killer’s coded intent: To hunt the most dangerous game. Man.

It was after the Hardens broke his code in his first letter that the killer began calling himself the Zodiac in successive letters. Some of the symbols proved perplexing. Graysmith combed books on codes and ciphers and learned the killer used some of the 13th Century cipher picture alphabet known as the Zodiac Alphabet. He would also learn that all code books had been stolen or were missing from area libraries including the San Francisco Presidio, the Treasure Island Naval Base and the Oakland Army Terminal libraries.

As for the Hardens, one decryption was enough. Their codebreaking days were over.

“Certainly, one of the most tantalizing aspects of the case is the still-unbroken ciphers that Zodiac mailed us,” notes Graysmith. “I still hold out hope that someone seeing the film or reading the books will break the two cryptograms and map that Zodiac says tell us his name and location."

EXHIBIT 1

Zodiac Movie

THE ELEMENTS OF DISGUISE

Handwriting and a partial bloody fingerprint from the Oct. 11, 1969 crime scene of the fatal shooting of San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine were believed to hold the key to Zodiac’s identity. That was the consensus of forensic experts at the time.

But it would be decades later that another expert would look at the handwriting of the Zodiac’s letters and find a disguise that would reveal his identity – write in plain sight.

Gerald McMenamin, an internationally known Forensic Linguistics expert, professor of linguistics at California State University at Fresno and author of Forensic Linguistics: Advance on Forensic Stylistics, was hired by Fincher and Fischer to take a look at the Zodiac’s letters and see what they revealed to him.

“I didn’t pay much attention to the codes because that is an artificial language,” McMenamin says. “It is in the natural language that the unconscious mind is at work. That’s where you see the pattern and that’s why I look at -- how he divides his words, his syllables and the morphemes.” A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of language. It carries a semantic interpretation.

Unlike the document examiners who focused on the formation of the letters, the handwriting, paper and ink, McMenamin focused on the language of the Zodiac and how he formed his sentences, specifically the word structure and spelling.

The difference between now and the ‘70s is that “document examiners, handwriting experts, are more at a loss because everything is done on the computer. You don’t see that many samples of actual handwriting anymore. But you still have the language. As a forensic linguist, the two things you look for are disguise and how the writer would break down the words,” he says. “David Fincher wanted me to do the work I would do for court.”
McMenamin was given the Sept. 20, 1972 requested right-handed handwriting sample Allen gave to police and asked to compare it to the Zodiac’s handwritten letters. It was the only known right-handed writing from Allen who, while naturally left-handed, was known to have some ability with his right hand.

“The exhibits I made an examination on related to the issue of disguise,” he says. “Did the Zodiac attempt to disguise his writing? Yes. Allen was ambidextrous and his weak hand was his right hand. His strong hand was his left hand, which he normally used for writing and other tasks. What I noticed in the Zodiac’s writing was the division of his words into syllables and morphemes. There was one example of Allen’s right hand. I found 5 lines and 3 divisions in that writing that were comparable to the Zodiac.” But that was not enough. “My personal conclusion? It is the same word separations or word segmentation in those 5 lines,” he says.

“I do think Allen wrote the Zodiac letters, but it is one thing to think that and another to prove it in court. The answer has to be very clear. I have to satisfy my peers to make the evidence scientific and to do that I have to establish a pattern.” Establishing a pattern means more examples of commonalities. That meant getting more samples from Allen.

Once again the evidence against the prime suspect had proved convincing.

Once again it came up short.

THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO

Washington and Cherry.

Every year at 9:59 p.m. on Oct. 11 Dave Toschi drives to the Presidio Heights intersection in San Francisco, parks his car, watches and waits. It is a ritual he has performed for 36 years.

“I make it a point to cross that intersection all the time, especially every anniversary. A lot of times I go and stop and think about it, the prints and the blood. I just stop to see if maybe somebody else would be parked there, maybe the killer would show up. I was always trying to figure out where did we go wrong? It’s never left me.”

Solving the murder of Cab Driver Paul Lee Stine was supposed to be the case of his career – a case that went from being a routine murder investigation to one of many connected through the lettered trail of a mass murderer; the one that was supposed to catapult the young homicide inspector for the San Francisco Police Department to Police Chief. That was his aspiration in 1969. Instead, fame would lead to infamy. It was not to be.

Now elderly and a private detective for North Star Security, Toschi remains one of the unsung heroes in the Zodiac case. Taunted by the killer when he was a young detective, he lives with the taunts of his memory and incompleteness.

“I felt very humbled when Robert called and said David and Jaime and Brad wanted to meet. The first thing David said was, `I don’t want to make another “Dirty Harry” (a film that had been loosely based on the Zodiac.) I wasn’t sure if I could but when I met them I did remember quite a bit. David and Brad asked me a lot of questions and I remember thinking to myself when it was over `Hey Toschi, I think you are believable to these people.’ I have no idea how this picture will be received but when I walked out of the Clift Hotel after meeting them that first day, I realized that I had learned so much from them.”

Believability is an agonizing paradox in Toschi’s life. A detective who believed he knew the author of the Zodiac letters, only to be accused by a San Francisco Chronicle columnist of writing one of those letters in April 1978 to try and revive a case that had gone cold in 1974 – a case that had brought him acclaim. He would suffer the shame of a departmental internal affairs investigation. Although exonerated of forging the letter deemed by some a hoax, it became a political tool to boot him from homicide. His fall from grace would leave him demoted and over time, desperately ill. In 1981, he collapsed at home. He thought he had the flu. The magnitude of the case he grappled with, off and on for 19 years, had finally taken its toll. He had a bleeding ulcer. It cost him $70,000 in hospital care. To this day he sees an internist every six months.

This is the same detective who was once the template used by Hollywood in earlier years to model its superhero cops – star making roles for each of the films’ leading men. “Dave Toschi was extremely well-known,” says Fischer. “He served as the basis for Steve McQueen in “Bullitt,” Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry” and Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco” (the 1970s’ long-running hit television series).” Adds Medavoy: “They became legends off of him.”

“I think they liked my holster,” quips Toschi. “It’s the way I’ve always carried my gun. My holster is special made the gun fits in upside down. I had them made that way for a quicker draw and so my gun would never show when I opened my sport coat. I carry cuffs and extra bullets under there too. It was easier that way.” Although he was fond of Douglas, McQueen and Eastwood and even attended the “Dirty Harry” premiere, he remains an avid fan of another mythical detective, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Sherlock Holmes. To this day he wears a 221B pin, the London Baker Street address for the world’s most famous detective.

“Graysmith and his son shared a fascination for James Bond and comic book superhero cops like Dick Tracy as well as a passion for deciphering codes and figuring out puzzles,” muses Fischer. “When Toschi would come into the newspaper, he was this kind of almost Hollywood-like figure, who was an idol in some ways of Robert’s, like something that came off the television, off the comic book page and into real life.”

Ironically, Graysmith would meet Toschi at that “Dirty Harry” premiere years after Paul Lee Stine was shot to death that fateful night in 1969; years after Avery had left the paper and Toschi and his longtime partner Bill Armstrong had parted ways; Armstrong leaving homicide for good.

Back then Stine’s murder first appeared as a routine robbery homicide. The killer took the cab driver’s wallet and keys. Three teenagers watched the crime in progress from the windows of their home at the corner of Washington and Cherry streets. A composite drawing would be taken from their eyewitness accounts of a white man, mid-to-late thirties in a dark windbreaker with a paunch and crew cut. But police dispatch radioed two of the first officers who arrived on the scene, Don Fouke and Eric Zelms, to look for a black suspect in the area. Two blocks from the crime scene they came upon a man walking up the sidewalk. It remains a point of some controversy whether they stopped and talked to him, though Fouke denies to this day that the encounter lasted more than a second or two or that any words were exchanged.

When Fouke and Zelms reached the end of the block, at the corner of Jackson and Cherry, they were flagged down by Armond Pelissetti, a patrol officer walking in the direction the young witnesses at the scene said the killer fled. He informed them that the man they were looking for was white. Realizing they may have just let the killer go, they sped up Arguello and back into the Presidio in an attempt to cut the man off. It was too late. He had disappeared.

Three days later a letter marked “Please Rush to Editor” arrived at the Chronicle, the return address was a crudely drawn symbol of the cross hairs of a gunsight; inside - a letter and a scrap of bloodied gray and white cloth. It was a piece of Stine’s shirt.

Zodiac Movie

More letters would follow. On Oct. 22, a call was made to the Oakland Police Department demanding that renowned Attorney Melvin Belli appear on the Jim Dunbar morning talk show. Belli showed up; so did a caller. But it was not the Zodiac. The call was traced to Napa State Hospital; the caller was a mental patient.

On Nov. 8, 1969 Zodiac sent the Chronicle a card. On the front was a drawing of a dripping wet fountain pen hanging by a thread. Inside was a cipher of 340 symbols 20 lines deep and signed with his scrawled symbol. It has never been decoded.

Zodiac Movie

On Nov. 9, the Zodiac followed up with his seventh letter. In those 7 pages, he claimed that Officers Fouke and Zelms talked to him three minutes after he shot Stine; that he had killed 7 people and that he would change his way of “collecting slaves” for the afterlife.

“… I shall no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders, they shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger and a few fake accidents, etc.”

He wrote that he didn’t leave a fingerprint, that he only appeared like the composite when “I do my thing” and that he ordered his tools to make a bomb through the mail.

To this day Dave Toschi is convinced Arthur Leigh Allen is the Zodiac killer.

“His brother contacted me after he called and spoke to some of the officers at Vallejo. His sister-in-law believed it was him. Bill and I went to see him with Jack Mulanax at the refinery where he worked. He was wearing a watch his mother gave him. I asked to see it. It was a Zodiac watch with the same symbol on it used in the letters. He had a basement apartment in his mother’s house. The Zodiac wrote about a basement where he made bombs. Not many dwellings had a basement in the area back then. There was so much that pointed to him, the (military) boots the killer wore at Berryessa, the windbreakers in his closet. When we conducted our search of his trailer he remembered me from the refinery. But we just couldn’t get enough evidence to get the search warrants we needed at the right time from the D.A. until the trailer. We had to have his brother collect evidence for us when he went off to school and that is not the optimum way. Our hands were tied.

“In the end,” says Toschi, “after all the thousands of suspects and all the people involved in investigating the case, it really came down to Bill and I on the Z case. That’s what we called it. Then the killer went underground.”

When he looks back on it, Toschi says “Z” was the first multi-jurisdictional police investigation in California. Before this case, there was no organized effort between departments as a rule “and I think Bill and I might have stepped on some toes because we pushed hard. But this killer had become the Zodiac Killer. We just wanted to solve it and move on.”

Fincher found Toschi “a generous man” when it came to sharing information and helping others.

Fischer wonders, “What was it like for Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong the first time they looked Arthur Leigh Allen in the eye? Why didn’t they feel the need to give Don Cheney (Arthur Leigh Allen’s former roommate and informant) a polygraph? Police work, as they’ve both said to us, has a lot to do with instinct, with a feeling you get being in a room with someone. But ultimately, it’s about something much simpler: whether the evidence is there. Is there a case that will get past a grand jury that the DA can then win in court? That’s something about real police work that we rarely see in movies. The villain isn’t always going to get caught. Dirty Harry won’t always be there to offer vigilante-style justice to an appreciative city. There is a line between facts and instinct, between what you know in your heart and what you can prove, between justice and whether closure can exist when there is no justice…that’s what “Zodiac” is about. What is the emotional truth of this case for the people whose lives it changed, for some who’ve been able to find closure and for others who are still haunted by a mystery they know in their heart may never be solved?”

In 1992, authorities were reviewing new evidence they had collected against Allen, including bombs seized from beneath his Fresno Street home, Mike Mageau’s identification of him, and a polygraph test given to Don Cheney, the man who first implicated Allen, which demonstrated that he was telling the truth. This evidence would have formed the basis for a decision to be made by the Solano County District Attorney: whether or not to file against Allen and arrest him for the murders attributed to Zodiac in the city of Vallejo and Solano County. On August 28, 1992, before that decision could be made, Arthur Leigh Allen dropped dead of a heart attack in his Fresno Street home.

In the meantime the “Z” case remains open and the killer for all intents and purposes is still out there.

THE AWE OF IRRESOLUTION

For a film that was never meant to have a signature score, music was critical to the telling of “Zodiac.”

It was meant to have only vintage music, 40 signposts that would keep track of the Zodiac story spanning nearly four decades. They would at times serve as an interlude to a continuum of the story, when the killer went underground.

But it was not enough.

The obsessive nature that takes over with any aspect of telling the story of “Zodiac” had permeated the mix – something else was needed.
“It wasn’t until we got to the second and third acts, when we realized we had to take the emotional part of the film to another level,” explains Sound Designer Ren Klyce. “First it was 10 minutes, then 20, then more and there was no budget for a score, only for the 40 copyrights” from the 1960s through the late 1980s. It wasn’t until he pulled together the temp track, using pieces from Francis Ford Copolla’s “The Conversation” and Alan Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” that he knew. He wanted David Shire, composer of both. “This is a film about losing your life in a mystery that can’t be solved, and it’s a newspaper story,” adds Klyce. “Even though the studio was getting a sense we needed a score, I sort of had to do this under the radar.” Despite the fact that Klyce and Fincher had been friends since they were 18 and he has composed, edited or served as sound designer on every one of Fincher’s films, because a score had not been budgeted for ‘Zodiac.’“ I knew my head was on the chopping block.”

Fincher knew the 70-year-old Shire was a talented composer. He trusted Klyce’s certainty. But “at first I wasn’t sure I wanted a score and I knew that I didn’t want a dirge, I didn’t want to ape anything done before,” Fincher says.

Fincher was consistent in that deference to Pakula’s 1976 Oscar nominee throughout the making of “Zodiac.” “I remember David said from the beginning `I don’t want to make another serial killer movie. I want to make the last serial killer movie.’ And on the other hand, he said `it is not really a serial killer movie – it is really a newspaper story’,” says Fischer. “The model he held up was “All the President’s Men,” which was also a true story about a real event, real people.” Fincher is quick to note, “’All the President’s Men’ is certainly much more high-minded journalism. But, it is the story of a reporter determined to get the story at any cost and one who was new to being an investigative reporter. It was all about his obsession to know the truth.”
Shire composed 27 minutes of music that plays throughout the film. Much of it plays on the escalating pressure and discord between police and the press – an undercurrent, Fincher says, that “had to play carefully.”

“The first chord you hear is an unresolved note,” says Shire. “There are 12 signs of the Zodiac and there is a way of using atonal and tonal music. So we used 12 tones, never repeating any of them but manipulating them. We were looking for patterns to play off the feeling of the story itself, the patterns of a serial killer.”

Shire strove for a subtle suspense score “that was driving but not in an overt way. They wanted the score to add another dimension to the picture. The music is not just about the scene but about getting inside the characters’ hearts and minds. I was thinking about the instruments to sort of represent the characters. The trumpet was Toschi, the solo piano was Graysmith and the dissonant strings were the serial killer Zodiac.”

Shire drew his inspiration from American Composer Charles Ives’ 1906 master work “The Unanswered Question.” The multi-layered piece involves the scoring for a string quartet, a woodwind quartet and a solo trumpet – each layer with its own tempo and key. Ives called it a “cosmic landscape” with the strings representing “The Silences of the Druids who Know, See and Hear Nothing.” The trumpet asks “The Perennial Question of Existence” six separate times and each time the woodwinds seek “The Invisible Answer” but eventually abandon the effort in frustration. Composer Leonard Bernstein ascribed the woodwinds’ effort as representing our human efforts that grow increasingly impatient and desperate to answer the unanswerable, until finally all efforts lose meaning. In the end, only the “Silences” hold the answer.

“This whole movie is an unanswered question,” says Shire. “Even at the end you don’t get the answer 100 percent; even after more than 20 years and still you question. There is this awe of irresolution about it.”

That sense and tension of uncertainty was heightened by the inclusion of a style that is a favorite of Klyce – musique concrète. Invented by Pierre Schaeffer in 1939, it is a French term that describes electronic music composed of instrumental and natural sounds altered and distorted in the recording process. It would later influence such contemporary musicians as Frank Zappa, The Beatles in their song “Revolution 9” and Pink Floyd’s “Bike” from their album The Dark Side of the Moon.

“I was really into this style of these guys from the `20s, `30s and `40s who kind of redefined sound,” says Klyce. “Its kind of like chopping up pieces of taped music, throwing it up in the air and then splicing the pieces together, just analogue taping and splicing.“

Shire took his cue from Klyce. “Musique concrète really consists of textures of the real sounds of the world that you make into sort of a textural bed that runs under a scene. So I tried to come up with a score that worked in tandem with it.”

In the end, the score heard in the film was performed by the 54-piece San Francisco Orchestra’s string section and recorded at Skywalker Sound.
“Since the basic emotion at the heart of this film is obsession, my hope is the music captured it,” says Shire. It captured his.

PUSHING THE PARADIGM

“One of the great things about working with directors like David who are so creative is that you get to learn a lot. You get to see what they’re up to, what they’re trying. They’re always doing something innovative, something you can learn from,” says Messer. “No one was going to tell David no. We all wanted to understand how it worked. ”

“It” is the Thomson Viper Filmstream Camera, a high-definition (HD) video camera that marks its debut as the director’s camera of choice for a studio feature film in “Zodiac.” Previously it had been used in commercials and on smaller films, mainly foreign. Basically it is non-compressed video that uses ambient light more effectively.

“I chose the Viper because I wanted to see if it was properly nurtured what it could do,” says Fincher. “I had shot commercials with it but never a feature. I felt it was time to try it. I liked the process of working digitally and I didn’t like waiting until the next day to see what I had shot. “

Supervising Engineer Wayne R. Tidwell, who previously worked as Fincher’s video assist on “The Game,” “Fight Club” and “The Panic Room,” is the only member of Fincher’s “Zodiac” team who had worked with the Viper system before. Tidwell was Fincher’s data capture engineer on five commercials Fincher shot for Nike, Hewlett Packard, Heineken and Lexus – all smaller projects, all allowing him to get comfortable with the equipment, to weed out the glitches and keep the good.

“The thing about David Fincher is there’s very little vaguery with him,” says Tidwell. “He knows what he wants. Instead of watching dailies all day long we’re viewing full resolution in the camera, instantly. And it is the negative, not a video regeneration. It is the master footage – the light digital, the shadow digital, you see it on the set. There are no color corrections. You take the raw data to post production.” Tidwell’s job as data capture engineer was capturing that data onto the hard drive with a digital field recorder made by S.Two Corp.

Fincher is familiar with the longstanding argument that film has a higher-quality look.

“But, I don’t think there is an issue of lesser quality with digital that a lot of people say there is. I don’t think an audience is going to be able to tell the difference in it being shot digitally or on film,” Fincher says. “That is not to say I would never shoot film. There are times when you do. I don’t think I would go to the Himalayas with the Viper, or the desert, or the jungle – any place with extreme temperatures. This equipment is fairly new and its not that it requires a clean room, its just that you know for certain that film is going to withstand the stresses of working in less than ideal circumstances.” And, he adds, “I think cost savings in the future will grow as we perfect the process.“

Tidwell says it already has. “We had concerns about the robustness of the equipment. What we found is that we had far less equipment failure than on a film set. All total we may have had maybe 1 to 1½ hours of lost or down time,” he recalls. “With film you have camera jams and sometimes when you’re shooting the film negative you’ll find hairs in the gate or a scratch on the negative. With this there is no gate or film negative to damage because the image data goes directly to the hard drive.”

During the three years Fincher and Tidwell were working with the Viper on commercials, Fincher came up with another cost-saving aspect for filmmakers. It is a time saving feature called the auto slate. “The first 5 frames of each take has a visual slate, just like the physical slate – the stick you hit at the (beginning) of every scene. That process takes time, quite a number of seconds and it adds up. With the auto slate, the camera marks it and hits it.
Consider it takes about 10 seconds - multiply that by 250 to 500 takes a day that we’ve eliminated. Time is money. That was David’s idea, his vision and he had it years ago doing commercials. He made it work for this.”

But the ingenuity didn’t stop there. Fincher broke ground with his editing process using Final Cut Pro.

“The editing process with Final Cut Pro was just the idea of using off the shelf Mac technology,” Fincher says. Basically, “I was really angry at AVID because they weren’t really responding to what filmmakers needed. They didn’t seem to care. They were cavalier about it. And Apple got into this side of the business and built this really great system that works. It is simple and direct and it cut costs.”

From Editor Angus Wall’s perspective, “this technology makes an editor almost entirely self-reliant and it is great, so much more efficient. It is simpler because you’re plugged into the production day to day. And there’s no chemical waste like you have with film and that’s important. We have had so much interest from young filmmakers on how we used this equipment. One woman from American Samoa making a documentary wanted to know all about the equipment used and the process.”

Specifically, the equipment used in shooting “Zodiac” included: HD to film out; 2 Thomson Viper Filmstream cameras; Each camera records into S Two D.Mag digital field recorder; 2 x Back Focuser's; 2 x Astro HD 6" on board monitors; and 8 x 29volt 18amp lithium batteries. Basic support: clip-on matte boxes/follow focus/baby/standard tripods/hi/low hats/; 2 x O’Connor Ultimate 2575 Fluid Heads; and 1 x Lambda Head. Basic filter pack:

NDs/Polas/optical FLAs/Tiff Diffusions/Dioptors/. Lenses are all Zeiss digital primes: 5mm t1.9; 7mm t1.6; 10mm t1.6; 14mm t1.6; 20mm t.1.6; 28mm t1.6; 40mm t1/6; 70mm t1.6 close focus; and 2 x Zeiss 6-24mm zoom t1.9.

Director of Photography Harris Savides, ASC, explained the technicalities of how the equipment works:

“The Viper is a high-definition (HD) video camera that captures data raw – meaning the camera outputs the image data off the sensor chips without modification. HD sensor chips generate tremendous amounts of data. Initially,” he continues, “HD cameras recorded to tape – a medium that cannot support HD’s high data rate. Camera manufacturers decided to address this drawback by compressing the data and reducing the data rate that the tape mechanism can handle. When the data is compressed, decisions about color balance, contrast, brightness, etc must be made during the compression process. Once these decisions are made and the results compressed, any subsequent modifications degrades image quality. In effect, the filmmakers must live with what was recorded to tape. The Viper represents a drastic departure from this paradigm. Rather than making image processing decisions and then compressing the data, Viper only captures the data and outputs the unmodified, unprocessed data. Without an onboard recording device, the Viper depends on an external recording device. Filmmakers can opt to record to a tape recorder, like the Sony HDCAM tape system. In this instance, image decisions would be made and the data would be compressed. However, with the availability of S Two digital field recorders and Thomson’s Venom data recorders, filmmakers can choose to capture the raw data. These recorders are high-capacity, high-speed recorders that are able to handle the HD data uncompressed. As a result, filmmakers can modify the data as much as they wish without degrading the image. Plus, filmmakers have access to the full range of image controls available from postproduction tools rather than being limited by the in-camera image controls.”

Savides previously worked with Fincher on “Se7en” and “The Game.” Like the director, he says, “I tend to keep things on the edge.” Indeed. Savides shot the credits on Fincher’s “Se7en” – credits that pushed the paradigm to the edge and influenced the look of credits on other films for years to come.
“If people only knew,” jokes Savides. “It was so much fun. We were just playing around with the camera. It was about a two-day process. We were just screwing around with these broken mirrors. I did this job where there were mirrors and I thought why not! We were goofin’ around. There was a sequence where we started doing these close-ups of a string tied around a guy’s finger really tight, trying to make it scary and intense. I started laughing so hard the camera started shaking and we just went with it! And that’s how we came up with that jagged image moving effect! It is kind of funny that it took off.”

So when Fincher broached Savides about taking a shot at the Viper, Savides was game. “The thing about the Viper is that you’re lighting without meters,” explains Savides. “With lighting it is all about placement of light and shadow. There are certain tolerances with film and I kind of know where it is gonna go. What’s interesting about this is that I still don’t know in some ways how it reacted. What’s cool about the Viper is the camera doesn’t have any compression issues. And the one disadvantage,” he notes, “is shooting in high light, when you are shooting against the sun or light in windows, it can’t handle a backlit situation as well as film. It’s just one of the problems inherent in a digital camera.”

Savides is working on two upcoming features, both shot using film. “To compare the experience of shooting with the Viper to film is like comparing apples and oranges,” he says. “This was a new challenge for me. We had to work with raw images.”

And that, says Wall, was the plus. “You know, this whole process is just beginning and I think we’ll look back on this in a few years and be amazed at how far we’ve come from this point. I do think this is how movies are going to be made in the future.”

SHOOTING “ZODIAC”

“The old Chronicle newsroom was a city-block long. Everything was authentic – the light fixtures, old typewriters, the molding, the U-shaped copy desk. Everything worked – old phones, drinking fountains, elevators and pneumatic mail tube stations. The desk drawers were even stocked with Chronicle notepads and Eagle pencils. Yet who would know the difference all these years later if those details were wrong? David Fincher would.” - Author Robert Graysmith

The look of “Zodiac” had a singular mandate – restraint.

Although it is a period film, several periods in fact, “I didn’t want pastiche or early `70s kitsch. Not Starsky and Hutch, not so much harvest gold and avocado appliances or homage to Peter Max,” says Fincher. “But I wanted it to be true and that meant, surroundings informed by older siblings, a world that would reflect their parents’ time as well in terms of the houses they grew up in. Things carried down over generations most of us have. You can see that certainly in Robert’s bachelor pad. I suppose there could have been more VW bugs but I think what we show is a pretty good representation of the time. It is not technically perfect. There are some flaws but some are intended. You will definitely know it from the music.”

Fischer said five weeks of the film’s production was shot in the Bay area, the rest in Los Angeles. He credits Producer Ceán Chaffin with a smooth run. “Ceán managed an incredibly complex, 100 day-plus production between the Bay area and Los Angeles and brought it in under budget. She’s one of the best line producers in the business,” Fischer says. “She’s able to strike that fine balance of getting the director what he wants while managing the financial needs of the picture, and all the while maintaining the respect and admiration of the crew.”

In Los Angeles, the San Francisco Chronicle was built in the old Post Office in the Terminal Annex Building downtown. A building on Spring Street subbed for the Hall of Justice and SFPD. Since the Blue Rock Springs golf course is completely different today than it was in 1969, other sites outside of L.A. were used. Vallejo has also changed dramatically so some of the scenes were shot in Downey to simulate it. In the Bay area, the production filmed for five weeks.

Production Designer Donald Graham Burt says one of the costliest sets on location was Lake Berryessa where Shepherd and Hartnell were attacked. “When we got there, there was a little spit of land like a little peninsula that jutted out into the water. The oak trees the killer hid behind were gone. We had to helicopter in two huge oaks trees. We drilled holes in a piece of the land and hauled in some water so they wouldn’t die. We set them up for 3 or 4 days before filming knowing they would only have a few days,” Burt says. “We really reconstructed that from photographs taken of the site during the day.”

Fischer says the trees were critical to the story, “because the Zodiac hid behind those oaks and Cecilia saw him there. They were some kind of protected California oak! It was an expensive prop.”

As for wardrobe, Graysmith provided Costume Designer Casey Storm with photographs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, “probably taken by the paper’s staff photographer. Because a lot of the people in this story are still alive it was very important to make them feel comfortable with how we portrayed them then. Actually, I’ve never done a film with so many real life individuals. With the look overall we tried to keep it real because it is about reporters and cops and they aren’t necessarily known for being overly stylistic.”

Storm says he used police photos of the murdered victims’ clothing. “We duplicated the exact garment Darlene Ferrin wore, a blue tank top jumpsuit. We scanned the image and made the fabric from scratch,” Storm says. “There’s something a little morbid about it but at the same time because we are dealing with a true story, it was important to Fincher that we be sensitive to the facts and those involved.” One victim who survived the attack, Bryan Hartnell has a cameo appearance in the film, he notes. “He plays a detective in the Hall of Justice and he’s wearing gray pants and a tweed coat.”

Savides says the palette and the look of the film reflected “the heightened realism but not in a stark way. I hate to talk too much about what the look is because when I work on a movie I like to let people take away from it what they want to take away. The story mandates the look. There definitely were some influences but as influences do they kind of fade away when you start working. For me it would be the naturalism of (photographers) William Eggleston, Todd Hido and Steven Shore.“

“For all intents and purposes David made the film he wanted to make. It is his vision,” says Medavoy. Although the film is 2 hours and 34 minutes, “to me the story is so engrossing you don’t really notice the time because you’re watching these character never give up and you ride it with them. Length to me has always been a function of interest. If you’re interested you don’t notice length.”

Production began Sept. 12, 2005 and wrapped in February. “Because David is a master of story and technology and a strong visual leader, the entire production was a well-oiled machine,” says Executive Producer Louis Phillips.

Robert Graysmith is writing a book about that well-oiled machine:

“I taped them at the murder sites with the original detectives, snapping pictures with disposable cameras and taking advantage of such access to a great director not known for giving a lot of interviews. I watched them find and uncover startling new facts. They were relentless. My book is a book in progress. It ends where most books about films begin, with ‘Zodiac’ greenlighted. It’s called Shooting Zodiac.”