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Pros: David Fincher's direction, the performances, James Vanderbilt's off-kilter script, Production Design, the San Francisco settings.

Cons: People after gory fantasies, may be disappointed unless they let ZODIAC's theme grip them. Will seem Long to viewers thinking ZODIAC is a conventional "thriller."

The Bottom Line: ZODIAC documents a sensational series of San Francisco murders, their effect on men the public saw closest to solving the crimes. The implied effect is of mass media fear-mongering upon us. 

1969: She had come away from her teaching job in the Midwest to be with the man for a week. They had driven across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the winding road which leads to the crest of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Only one other car was in the small parking lot. They stood on the headland, embracing in the warm haze. The Pacific Ocean was at their feet over a thousand feet below. To their left past a grove of live oak, San Francisco lay in the southern distance, a hundred thousand windows catching the dying sunlight. He had never seen her so beautiful. She might be nineteen, he thought, as when we first -- Suddenly, but almost imperceptibly, a curious Eastern melody came to them. Someone in that grove of trees was playing a flute -- no, a pan pipe of some kind -- watching them, perhaps. A sea breeze, the approaching night, chilled him. She knew nothing of what had been happening. 

"Let's go," he said, nonchalantly. 

"But we just got here," she replied, annoyed as only a woman can be at certain times. 

"Come on!" he said, seizing her by the hand, and they ran for the car as if to escape a reality-bringing sudden rain. 

------ 

@ On the previous December 20, 1968, in a lovers lane off Lake Herman Road in Vallejo, east of Mount Tamalpais, Michael Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, two teenagers sitting in the girl's car, were shot with a .22 caliber pistol multiple times. Both died. 

@ July 4, 1969, Michael Mageau, 19, and Darlene Ferrin, 22, were shot under similar circumstances, but with a 9 mm weapon, in a parking lot near the old California Capital of Benicia in Vallejo. The young woman died two days later in hospital; the young man survived, maimed, but able to give a description of the killer. 

@ August 1, 1969, a letter was sent to several Bay Area Newspapers by someone calling himself the Zodiac, who claimed responsibility for the two crimes above, and promised a further series of murders if his demands were not met. He also included a block-letter cryptogram, such as high school students might have played with, or even studied at the time. Another message followed. There were also crudely drawn symbols: a prominent "Z" and a shooter's cross-hairs. The demands were ignored, but Hearst's San Francisco Examiner and the more "liberal" Chronicle hyped the story as part of a circulation war, No further immediate killings occured. All kinds of experts and agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, were engaged by the newspapers or authorities to crack the killer's code. 

@ On August 4, 1969, a pair of school teachers, Donald and Bettye Harden, over breakfast, solved the puzzle of the premier cryptogram: 

"I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST [sic] BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANAMAL [sic] OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE [sic] IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAT WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE [sic] AND ALL THE [sic] I HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI [sic] DOWN OR STOP MY COLLECTING OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE *EBEORIETEMETHHPITI [sic]" 

*The meaning of the final eighteen symbols was not determined. 

But Zodiac was born, a modern pop symbol for sadism which, in American Media, would grow to rival that of 1888's Jack the Ripper in London. 

In the next two months, as I well remember, amid unprecedented San Francisco Radio and TV coverage, two more killings occurred: 

@ September 22, 1969: On a little island (immediately dubbed "Zodiac Island") in Lake Berryessa, a fishing mecca north of Benicia, Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard, 20 and 22 respectively, were stabbed repeatedly by a man dressed in a black jump suit adorned with the Zodiac logo, a pistol and a sheathed knife on a belt at his waist. Miss Shepard died later in hospital; Hartnell survived six wounds to his back. 

Zodiac began to phone the police and newspapers, and send reporters or detectives Halloween cards; then, souvenirs of his victims' deaths. Every day, there were fresh revelations which put the fear of a domestic Osama bin Ladin in us, especially if we were lovers. He sent a rather elaborate drawing of a bomb, constructed from amonium nitrate, triggered by a homemade device. 

Then, a new twist, an escalation: 

@ October 22, 1969, after picking up a fare in downtown San Francisco at Geary and Mason, Cab Driver Paul Stine, 29, was shot to death in the fashionable Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Zodiac had come to the City, where it really counted. After some confusion with racist implications (a very volatile subject then, becoming so again), sketches guided by surviving victims and witnesses produced the description of a white male, who wore spectacles or aviator sunglasses, his full head of dark hair combed back in a pompadour. 

All of these events are covered within the first hour of ZODIAC. 

The film begins with a meticulous reconstruction of the crimes, drawing in gradually the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Police Department. After a cold presentation of the horrors, and their ramifications, physical dangers transmute into psychological stress, until near the end of ZODIAC'S 153 minutes. 

How do you accomplish that all of that successfully within two and a half hours? 

With great skill from the director, writer, cast, and crew. 

Then, too, the Thompson Viper Digital Cameras of Harris Savides (ELEPHANT) and Donald Graham Burt's Production Design tie us into this chronicle of obsession. A final touch is David Shire's subliminal score which, stitched with pop music of the 1960's/1970's, gradually works into our souls. [Animals, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Santana and Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" -- Ione Skye Leitch has an uncredited role.] Shire, who has hardly done a theatrical score in 20 years, touches on his great work of the period -- THE CONVERSATION, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, subtly bolstering each leg of the film's triangular shape. 

----- 

We meet young Robert Graysmith (Jake Gylenhaal), the Chronicle's political cartoonist, divorced single dad of two, who has a thing for puzzles. The first two crimes have been ignored by the paper, two murders of many, and both on the edge of the paper's subscription empire.  That is, until on August 1, 1969, when that first letter, with its customary hand-printed address, and two standard postage stamps, is  thrown on top of a mail cart, then wheeled across the newsroom in a tracking shot worthy of a star's entrance.

An editorial meeting (entirely made up of male reporters and editors) is called to decide what to do about the letter. The publisher is asked to attend. 

This story could be BIG. 

Stylishly vested, goateed, acerbic Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr), the paper's "ace crime reporter," a gay effete with a taste for whiskey and cocaine ["Unsavory Avery" to his colleagues], attends, and Robert Graysmith, who would go on to write two books about the case (the basis for ZODIAC's script), begins to doodle with the cryptogram. 

It is the youthful, studious Graysmith who notices a reference in the coded message quoted above to Ernst Schoedsack/Irving Pichel's 1932 horror/adventure classic, based on Richard Connell's short story, THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. In that film, a disaffected White Russian officer, the bearded Count Zaroff, has taken over a rocky, remote island where he lures ships onto the reefs, to supply him with what he considers the finest hunting prey of all: human beings. The film, shot "back-to-back" with KING KONG, shows Zaroff as Connell's story describes him, dressed in a black Cossack uniform, carrying a pistol and dagger.

As in real life, as in the movie, Graysmith and Avery, are hooked.

Zodiac has found his audience and the film's subject. These soon-to-be-called "investigative reporters," of a type lionized in Watergate and ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, would devote their lives to capturing Zodiac. They would inadvertently help create neo-tabloid journalism, which, by presenting fears that ordinary citizens might share, has trivialized and politicized more important stories, and filled the media with endless reconstructions of sensationalized crimes. 

After Avery's early indifference toward Graysmith has been dispelled by the link to THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, the reporter takes the cartoonist to his furtive gay hangouts in the alleys of 1960's San Francisco, and Graysmith invites Avery to his favorite upscale cocktail lounge, where he introduces him to Aqua Velva's (named after the shaving lotion: "two cups of vodka, 1/4 ounce Blue Curacao, etc, in a 16 oz 'hurricane' glass!"). They are soon spending their evenings, thoroughly sloshed, uncertainly examining the days' clues, playing with the code, connecting the dots as we say currently. 

Their one sure conclusion: "Zodiac reads the Chronicle." 

When Avery, on the basis of his articles, receives that Halloween card in the mail from Zodiac, and then Cabbie Stine's bloody shirt tail, the police, in the persons of Homicide Inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), must deal with the reporters. ZODIAC turns out to be a film about how the puzzle of the murders came to dominate and consume the lives of these four men and their relationships. 

----- 

No further killings by Zodiac were ever authenticated though half a dozen were alleged over the next decade, and the myth of Zodiac encompassed dozens more. At least three additional cryptograms were sent to the newspapers, but they were never officially decoded. Yet, Zodiac became known across America and around the World. 

For twenty years, the four men pursued Zodiac, long after the increasingly fickle public had forgotten the factual details and embraced the myth. According to the film, the loner Avery was broken when he tried to connect the case with the murder of Co-ed Cherie Jo Bates, far to the south in Riverside, California. Ever more isolated by his failure, he left the Chronicle, but continued his desultory search, living on a bohemian houseboat in Sausalito. We see him also at a curved bar (which reminds me [in its layout only] of the Zam-Zam in the Upper Haight), watching a fresh Zodiac allegation on TV. He smokes defiantly while a mini-oxygen tank inhalator for his emphysema sits by his cocktail. 

Ten years on, Inspector Armstrong asks to be transferred off the case, burnt out from exploring dead leads. Inspector Toschi, frustrated by over-lapping jurisdictions which cripple evidence gathering, presses forward. Already the model for Steve McQueen in BULLIT (1968), and made famous for his work with Clint Eastwood on DIRTY HARRY (1971), he becomes an advisor to Michael Douglas on TV's "Streets of San Francisco" (1972-1977). But he, too, his middle class family life disrupted, loses his zeal, as the media begin to take over the case. 

KGO-Radio's Jim Dunbar (Tom Verica), a pioneer talk show host, engages famed grandstanding San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli (Brian Cox) in an attempt to flush Zodiac into the open, an operation of entrapment  doomed by primitive telephone tracing equipment. 

Meeting at the premiere of DIRTY HARRY (in front of a sign saying, "Dirty Harry Doesn't Break Cases, He Smashes Them!"), Toschi indicates to Graysmith that if the movies have taken over, it is unlikely the case will ever be solved. Ironically, when novelist Armistad Maupin (Tales of the City) accuses Toschi of writing forged Zodiac letters to the newspapers, he is removed from the case, but still maintains an interest. 

Graysmith, now aspiring to be a true crime author, ignores the girl, Melanie (Chloe Sevigny), he will marry, transforms his children into researchers, lives the isolated life of a collector. The case, and the spirit of the time, has turned him into a figure much like Harry Caul in Coppola's THE CONVERSATION. 

In the late Sixties, through the 1970's, we were waking up every day to the costs of Vietnam, in the throes of "the sexual revolution," the flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the drug culture, the assassinations of our finest leaders, and in San Francisco -- "Everyone's Favorite City -- as I well remember, these events took place: The Hearst kidnapping and a bold downtown bank robbery by Symbionese Liberation Army terrorists, then their annihilation in LA; the Marin County courthouse Black Panther shootout and murder of a judge; a gang massacre in Chinatown; the Jonestown murder/suicides, the slaughter of local Congressman Leo Ryan and four others there, including an Examiner photographer, at Jonestown, Guyana; the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in City Hall, the subsequent homicide trial of Supervisor Dan White, with riots that followed the verdict. Careers connected with the case were created and destroyed in this period.

None of these seemingly as important stories is dealt with in ZODIAC, but their presence is somehow in the film's fabric. Six movies, most notably DIRTY HARRY, Clint Eastwood's great starring role, were subsequently produced indirectly about the Zodiac killings, many more films and stories make allusions to Zodiac, and the case remains famous to this day. 

It would not be too far-fetched to say that, clearly, the serial killer movie time-line, which begins with Fritz Lang's M (1931, is continued in American films by Hitchcock in SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) then PSYCHO (1960), became a genre of pornography, tabloid media, and macabre national celebration with the Zodiac-inspired HALLOWEEN of 1978. ZODIAC is a semi-documentary capstone to the saga. 

ZODIAC's Director David Fincher was seven years-old, living in Marin County, when his father told him that Zodiac had written "The Chron" to threaten that he would shoot children like himself as they got off local school buses. Fincher went on to study film making under John Korty in Northern California, and eventually made such violent cult masterpieces as SE7EN and THE FIGHT CLUB. An admirer of Stanley Kubrick, one can see why he might have become obsessed by  ZODIAC. 

Late in the film, after interviewing several related witnesses, including an imprisoned junkie (Candy Cane), Graysmith thinks he has his Zodiac. It is the dramatic climax of this somewhat bifurcated picture. He goes to the home of a man who once managed the Avenue Theater on San Bruno Avenue, and his experience there reminds me of the sudden terror I felt that evening on Mount Tamalpais, with the woman I later married, and spent some of the happiest years of my life beside. 

[The Avenue Theater, holding a thousand patrons, opened in 1927, one of the last of the great Frisco movie palaces. It might well have shown THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, possibly even CHARLIE CHAN AT TREASURE ISLAND (1939), which features a "Dr. Zodiac." When I went there in the Zodiac decade with the lady in question from my first paragraph, it screened silent films and early talkies, to a clientele which dressed in costume and sometimes wore masks. (It is now a church.) One thing I noticed is that, in a circular design around the art deco chandelier were painted the symbols . . . of the Zodiac.] 

Graysmith, by the way, is writing a book about his recent movie making-experiences; he's going to entitle it, Shooting Zodiac. 

There's much more I could tell you about this seminal case, indeed my tertiary experience with Inspector Toschi, but I'll leave it there, before they take me back to my padded cell. 

*****

[Red Room Edition Note:  ZODIAC has now been featured on SHOWTIME.]