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If we'd made the film, there would've been a car here
probably in that spot on the left
and it would've been a California Highway Patrol car
but era-appropriate
so like a 1960s...
black cruiser with a white door
and a kind of...
badge on the side.
This would've all been reenactment, obviously
which is how all these things tend to start now.
Like, everything's got to have that rhythm of drama...
even when it's documentary.
So inside the cruiser, we'd have an actor playing Lyndon,
the cop at the center of the story,
and he's just sitting there minding his own business
when in pulls this other car.
And of all the spots in the parking lot,
this car pulls up right next to Lyndon's.
And so at first, Lyndon doesn't necessarily think much of it.
but eventually he looks over at the guy
and he sees
that the guy is staring right at him.
And we'd have heard Lyndon's inner monologue throughout this
which would've been taken from the book.
I'll just read a little bit of that now.
So he says:
'He did not drop his eyes or turn away.'
'With his face quivering in spasms,'
'and an unflinching stare of hate,'
'I knew I was looking into the eyes of death.'
So he describes it in these almost...
biblical terms.
And obviously we'd have had a close-up of these eyes...
if we could find an actor
with eyes menacing enough to match that description
and probably cross-cutting between that
and Lyndon's eyes, and it's this kind of...
face-off situation
between these two men in silence in this parking lot.
This feeling of a growing tension
that has to break in some way.
And finally, just when you think
that the worst could happen, that this could...
rupture into violence...
Lyndon leaps into action.
I had it so clear in my mind: this shot of Lyndon's hand,
lurching for the gearstick,
pulling it into reverse and then he's out of there
and the hills are whirling through the windows
as the car reverses out of the parking lot
and guns it onto the highway.
And the tension breaks
but there's also this sense of high drama
that has erupted from this confrontation,
even if we don't necessarily know what any of it
signifies...
yet.
So we would've followed Lyndon down the highway,
until he finds a place to pull over and get his bearings
and then he would have lowered his... sun visor
and pinned to the back of it is the famous police sketch
of the Zodiac Killer.
Fuck... it would've been good.
And from there we'd have gone straight into
the title sequence,
which kind of would've made itself.
All these things are basically built to the same model now.
It's lots of layered imagery,
so you can never quite tell what you're looking at...
bodies and landscapes, all intermingled,
but in a very meaningful way.
What are we, but products of the landscape?
But with a kind of disjointed, scratchy aesthetic,
as though it's been made by the serial killer themselves.
The same sorts of images pop up again and again:
you got like... you know...
birds taking flight
and a shadowy man... walking away
and kind of country-inflected music
but with a dark edge.
And everything's vague and fluid,
like it's being viewed through the fog of a dream.
Lots of tiny text...
that's almost too small for human eyes,
I guess to make it look cinematic.
And over the top of all this,
audio that starts to tell the story of the case.
'You can see that this does not look like grief...'
'... does not read as grief.'
And typically by the end, it gets weirdly talky,
It is almost like you're watching a trailer
for the film you're already watching.
'It was the case that goes to the heart of our democracy.'
'This is a murder which, unless solved, won't be forgotten.'
It kind of sets up everything and nothing.
All the soundbites are just people saying things like:
'The things that went on... were beyond the imagination.'
Or whatever.
Like, it doesn't really tell you anything...
but at the same time, it gives you the general vibe
in case you've got one eye on your phone.
So then we'd have gone back to Lyndon
coming back down the highway after this...
unsettling confrontation.
Maybe still stealing the odd glance at the sketch.
And obviously, he's realizing
that he may have just come into contact
with the most wanted man in America.
But for all the adrenaline of that moment,
he also managed to take down the guy's license plate.
So right from the off, we're getting this sense of Lyndon
as someone who's calm in a crisis.
I should probably give some general background on Lyndon.
So Lyndon was a California Highway Patrol cop
for, I think, 30 years, maybe longer.
And towards the end of his life, he published this book,
about his lifelong quest
to bring the Zodiac Killer to justice,
starting that day up at the rest stop.
It's called...
'The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up'
a.k.a. 'The Silenced Badge'.
And it's got this very distinctive cover
with this bright red spider's web
with a little crosshair symbol at the center
because that was the Zodiac Killer's trademark.
And I remember seeing that cover
in thumbnail form on Amazon,
presumably after the algorithm had
exhausted every other true crime book on the market,
and just being very drawn to it.
So I bought the book,
read it kind of absentmindedly at first,
but I remember being struck by how
incredibly cinematic a lot of it was.
It feels like it's been written in the mold
of a true crime documentary.
And so even though I'd never really imagined
making a true crime doc,
working in documentary these days, true crime's got this...
gravitational pull.
Eventually, you just... give in to it.
So I started trying to get the rights to the book,
from Lyndon's family.
And it all seemed to be going well.
We were deep into contract negotiations
and starting pre-production.
I even went out to Vallejo
in the Bay Area, where it all took place, and started...
scouting around for locations,
speaking to people I thought might make good interviewees.
So I was actually out there, working on it,
when I got the email to say
that Lyndon's family had pulled out
and that we weren't getting the rights to the book.
And I still don't know entirely why...
whether it was a case of them wanting more money or more...
control over the finished product, or just...
someone else swooping in
promising to make it the next Tiger King, or whatever.
But it was honestly kind of devastating, by that point,
because I really had figured the whole thing out,
right down to the locations for the re-enactments.
The way I was picturing it
the majority of the investigation was going to be
based in Lyndon's home
or what we would've been passing off as Lyndon's home,
where, unable to put this
confrontation at the rest stop out of his mind,
he starts to mount this kind of freelance investigation.
And at first, he's just laying it all out,
and I think we could have had him literally laying it all out
across the table
and seeing if the pieces fit together.
But as time goes on and he becomes
more and more immersed in this case,
we'd have filled the space with more and more stuff:
pin boards and photocopies, library books.
Anyway, he's got the license plate number
so the first thing he does is run a check on that
and comes back with the name:
George Russell Tucker.
Classic serial killer name.
Three names.
Apparently that's because the media always uses
people's middle names after they become serial killers,
so they don't get confused with anyone else with the same name,
the same first and second name.
But as a result, the second you say someone's middle name,
they sound like a serial killer.
It works both ways.
And then, along with the name,
he gets a photograph of the guy.
We'd have had, inevitably, the moment where
the envelope arrives from the DMV and he pulls out
the photocopy of the driving license,
slides it alongside the police sketch,
and needless to say,
the similarities are striking.
And again, we'd be hearing Lyndon's words from the book,
which capture that sense that he's kind of
approaching this with a degree of skepticism
and it's only actually the sheer weight of the evidence
that means he's duty bound to look further.
So he says:
'The horn-rimmed glasses were very prominent.'
'The shape of his hair...
'was nearly a perfect match.'
'A mad dog killer was on the loose'
'and apparently living nearby.'
'Very close indeed.'
It wouldn't have been me reading all of this, obviously.
We'd have hired an actor with a voice more similar to Lyndon's.
But actually, we probably would have left it kind of ambiguous
as to whether it was an actor, or Lyndon himself.
If you show a tape player the first time you hear the voice,
you can kind of just let people draw their own conclusions.
Apparently in the industry, they call those shots...
'evocative B-roll'
You know, like those standalone images
that sort of evoke a scene
without actually showing much of it.
Like sometimes they'll have people in them,
but they're always just at the edge of frame
or kind of falling out of focus
in some improbable way.
'Bactors'.
That's what someone told me they're called.
Because you can only ever see their backs.
But I see why they do it: it is almost like the more...
generic the image...
the more effective it is as visual shorthand.
Like there was this other bit of evidence against Tucker,
related to a boot print
that was found at one of the Zodiac crime scenes,
and if that's the only relevant detail,
you don't really need the whole crime scene.
You just need that one shot of the boot print...
in the mud.
Maybe even like a flashbulb...
like it's a crime scene photograph being taken.
Did they use flashbulbs...
in the 60s?
We'd have gone with it anyway, it's very dramatic.
Like, the big flash of the bulb,
we see the boot print,
and maybe the bulb falls to the ground
and smashes next to the boot print.
You can see it, can't you?
And then the next scene would have been Lyndon
bringing his findings to his superiors
or to the team leading the Zodiac investigation in Vallejo
and they agree to call Tucker in for questioning.
This is actually a library,
not a police station.
It's much easier to film at a library
so we were gonna do the exteriors
and some of the interiors here.
And the way this works in the book is a little convoluted
because obviously this wasn't Lyndon's jurisdiction.
I don't think he was actually present
when Tucker was brought in for questioning.
But dramatically, we would have wanted him there.
So I think we would have at least implied that he was there
without going so far as to actually state it.
In fact, I always imagined Lyndon
behind a two-way mirror
and that he would be monitoring this interrogation
from the relative security of the next room.
So they bring Tucker in
and they ask him for a series of basic personal details:
full name, address...
But for our purposes, this is just an excuse for Lyndon
to finally get like a real close up look at the guy,
not in a moment of heightened tension like at the rest area,
but now in a cool and collected way, where he can actually
scrutinize the man who's physically sat in front of him.
And at the same time, we'd have tried to
fill in some of who Tucker actually was.
As far as I could tell, there's no actual footage of him,
unfortunately,
but
there's those 4 or 5 bits of home movie footage
ofAmerican families in suburbia of that era
that you see in every documentary
because they can stand in for...
the whole idea ofAmerican childhood.
So that would have done the job.
But the point here is that Lyndon's actually getting
a real sense of the guy
and asking,
could this actually be the Zodiac Killer?
And of course, the answer would have been yes
because we would've
staged this entirely to confirm those suspicions
so all the classic interrogative signifiers:
cigarette perched on an ashtray,
reel-to-reel tape recorder,
ticking clock on the wall,
the interrogation lamp.
Do you picture an interrogation lamp
like a desk lamp or a hanging lamp?
A hanging lamp.
And they're always swinging.
Why are they swinging?
Is the implication that it's got tense?
Someone's knocked the lamp.
The bad cop stood to his feet
and knocked the lamp and it's gone swinging.
See, I'm not saying that having seen a lot of these things
is all the training I would have needed to make one,
but I do think it would have got me pretty far.
What happened next would have taken things up a notch,
dramatically speaking.
But actually, it's kind of...
hard to know what I can
and can't talk about here.
Legally.
A lot of what I've described thus far,
there's multiple sources for.
So like, the scene at the beginning in the rest area...
Lyndon filed a police report
so some of the details of that are in there.
He gave interviews
over the course of his life, where he talked about it.
So there's these various sources
diluting the extent to which we're drawing from...
Lyndon's book
which obviously, we don't have the rights to.
The tricky thing is when you get to sections like this
where the book really is the only source.
And so there's kind of a limit
to what I can say.
But without getting into it too much,
essentially, Lyndon alleges
a kind of conspiracy
in which Tucker was able
to exert influence within the Solano County Sheriff's Office
and basically get the investigation shut down.
So this would have been a kind of montage
where word is making its way through the corridors of power.
You know, like...
phone call begets phone call begets phone call
until it reaches the highest authority,
the sheriff of the county.
And we'd throw in a few interview moments
where people are like, 'oh, power in Vallejo...'
'it's all about...'
'who you know.'
Finally, Lyndon hears that word has come down from the sheriff,
and obviously it's not what he wants to hear.
I'll read the actual quote from the book...
because it gives you a sense of the
conspiratorial tone of the thing.
The sheriff's message is:
'Belay all such orders'
'and forget about George Tucker completely.'
'I don't care who he is.'
'I am telling you to destroy your notes'
'and burn your files.'
'I never want to hear the man's name again.'
'Ever.'
So that's good... dramatic stuff, right?
I presume the 'burn your files' thing was not literal
but obviously we'd have had to make it literal.
That's too good to pass up on.
I'm imagining all this stuff that we've seen earlier,
like the printout of Tucker's name
or the Zodiac police sketch,
all of this stuff, all of this key evidence
being swallowed up by flames
as we see the scale of the perversion of justice at hand.
And through it all, there's this sense that
you know
not only was Lyndon on to something,
but he actually got too close to the truth.
Alright, end of act one.
So the next sequence would have been a kind of...
dust-settling moment.
Lyndon's off the case
and so by default, he's back to the daily grind:
routine traffic stops,
seeing the normality - the banality - of life in Vallejo.
Oh, wait, this is amazing.
But for him it's instilled with a real sense of of anti-climax.
He's gone from being the cop who's going to solve
the most high-profile murder case in the world
to being the cop who hands out parking tickets.
But the point would have been,
and maybe we'd have had some of our interviewees spell it out:
that that banality is really just a veneer,
masking something more sinister.
And actually, getting people to say that, doesn't really
take much work.
There's two things people ever say about
the places where these sorts of crimes happened.
Like, oh, it was idyllic.
'Waterloo was a great place.'
Kids played out in the street. You didn't lock your doors.
'Kids rode their bikes.'
'It's just a very quiet neighborhood.'
'It's a very isolated little community.'
'It's a beautiful place...'
'but...'
But it had a dark side.
'... there's a dark side.'
And so that shift would have led us
inexorably towards...
Tucker's house.
I think we would have had it so the first time he drives by,
it's almost by accident.
Like he's...
He is driving by on one of these routine calls
and happens to see Tucker...
maybe like...
emptying his trash or...
parking his car.
And is reminded, like, oh...
as long as I do nothing,
this guy is still out in the world
potentially committing further crimes.
But what's more, the way he describes the house is like
this perfect villain's lair.
He says its...
'surrounded by an unusual grove of whispering pines'
and that...
'no stranger's eye can pierce its foreboding veil'.
And the sense would've been that his suspicions were
really starting to solidify here,
really just based on seeing this...
fucking creepy house.
It's intuition more than anything else.
This isn't the actual house, incidentally.
The actual house isn't anywhere near spooky enough.
Anyway, I don't know if we would've needed some moment
that it crossed into... actually sinister.
Oh, in fact I tell you what it would have been...
After a few days of staking the place out,
Lyndon discovered these...
bits of graffiti around the house.
Let me read from the book again.
'One day, I noticed something very strange.'
'Someone had taken white paint'
'and painted an inverted cross with arrows'
'on the telephone pole on the right side of the house.'
'Then Io and behold,'
'on a concrete water cistern to the left of the house,'
'was painted a large hatchet.'
And because he describes finding these symbols
as though he's unearthing some dark, occult mystery,
I always imagined them hidden behind reeds, or something,
like Lyndon had to pull back something
to see these ominous symbols
painted around this creepy house.
Um...
I mean, there is a third one, that we would have had to lose,
because the third one depicts...
'two nude males engaged in explicit homosexual activity'
and the photograph of this in the book is...
to Lyndon, I think, very sinister.
To a contemporary viewer, I think, slightly less ominous
than the hatchet.
We probably would have taken it out, in the interest
of trying to make the theory convincing.
You can still deploy
someone just having a bad vibe
and living in a creepy house
but today's Netflix viewers
don't get as worked up about someone being gay, potentially.
Or bi, actually. He doesn't say he was gay.
He says that Tucker was bi.
Although adorably, he actually says that he was 'AC/DC',
which is a wonderfully 1950s way of putting it.
So next Lyndon starts to build this...
crack team
assembled from across Vallejo society
in order to aid his investigation into Tucker
which is kind of amazing for our purposes,
because that's already like something out of a film.
And this group consists of him, obviously,
and a few of his friends from law enforcement,
from the California Highway Patrol and other agencies,
as well as various people from local government,
and then, weirdly, Lyndon's minister...
a guy called Ernie,
who was the minister at the local United Methodist Church.
And in my head, I pictured them meeting in a diner,
somewhere unremarkable, somewhere everyday,
where they can slowly start to build
this case against Tucker.
And a few of them are still alive,
so I was imagining
getting them down to the diner and filming them...
getting out of their cars,
their boots coming down on the tarmac,
sitting them down in a booth and getting them to
play the role of the hot-shot detective.
You know what I mean?
I feel like all these figures of authority,
the second you point a camera at them,
they just know what to do.
You know, they know the image of a cop
in a true crime show.
And so without prompting, they walk in the right way
and they talk about themselves in the right way.
'What I figured out at an early age in the Bureau is...'
'you push it, and then... you keep pushing.'
Even just the nicknames!
They all have these clearly self-anointed nicknames
and about half of them seem to be 'the bulldog'.
'What was your nickname?'
'The Bulldog'
'Bulldog'
'The Bulldogs'
It's like there's no direction required.
And I was imagining these interviews as a springboard
for discussing each of the killings in more detail.
You know, someone ominously references one of the crimes,
and we cut to the microfiche in the archive, whizzing back to
'July 4th, 1969'.
I think that actually is...
the date of one of the Zodiac crimes.
This is how embedded it is in my head.
And then they discuss the facts of the crime
and how Tucker might be implicated.
And meanwhile,
our 'evocative B-roll' is going into overdrive.
All the classic staples:
the gun...
rising up towards the camera,
shell casings clattering to the ground,
crime scene tape...
stretching out into the distance,
Or...
blood,
pooling on the ground.
Maybe a hand reaching in to touch it,
as though to check it's actually blood.
Plus all the actual police photographs of the crime scene.
Which now
I feel like, even recently, you could just show those,
and now everything's so jazzy.
Like, at the very least, now they have to be placed
in a kind of 3D environment
or be falling in and out of focus
with a bit of dust dancing across their surface,
and the thing I increasingly see now is
they've taken the crime scene photograph and they've...
created a three-dimensional image from it.
You know, it'll be like a layered thing.
It's like you're moving through the space
so you can be not just
at the place where a horrific, brutal murder took place,
but actually traveling through it, like on Google Street View.
It's probably good work
for some graphic artist somewhere,
someone who knows After Effects.
You must just...
forget what you're looking at.
And so between all of that, we'd...
fill in the general contours of the case.
Do you wanna fill in some of that now?
Uh...
No.
Okay.
No, not at all.
I feel like that's...
the only saving grace of not getting to make the film,
is that we don't have to...
re-tell the story of the Zodiac Killer
for the thousandth time.
Anyway, they're doing all this work
to link Tucker to each of the crimes
but obviously, this is all off the books
because Lyndon's been told not to pursue the case.
So next, him and his team
have to take their theory and get it in front of someone
higher up the chain of command.
He puts together a dossier
of his and his colleagues' findings,
and then together they go into these
centers of investigative power,
slam down the dossier,
and they think that's all they need to show,
but instead, these agencies just don't seem to care.
They have their own suspect, their own theories of the case,
and they don't want some outsider
telling them how to do their job.
So the main challenge for Lyndon becomes
getting anyone to hear him out.
But then at the same time, he kind of doesn't
want too many people to hear him out,
because if you get too many people on board,
it kind of ceases to be your suspect anymore,
ceases to be your theory.
So much of what's making it possible for me to talk about
Lyndon and his suspect without the rights to the book,
is the fact that he wasn't terribly discreet.
Like, he went on the radio and talked about his suspect.
He gave interviews to newspapers.
Like, in one sense, he really would have been better
just keeping it to himself.
Like, it's not just the quality of the evidence.
It's the...
exclusivity.
Like, did you watch The Jinx
when it went out?
No.
The final episode of that is unbelievable.
So for six episodes or whatever, they've been pursuing
this guy called Robert Durst,
who is this eccentric heir
to a real estate fortune,
who's suspected of murdering three people.
And he's interviewed in this show and always kind of
dodges their questions
and skillfully evades incriminating himself
right up until this final episode,
where, at the end of his final interview,
with the filmmakers
he goes to the bathroom and unknowingly,
still wearing his microphone, confesses to himself...
It's unbelievably chilling.
Just incredible television.
And the timing was just unreal.
I think Durst was arrested the day before the airing,
and then in the finale,
you see exactly how and why he was caught,
but it did beg the question: how did this ever line up?
Because obviously that interview was conducted
I think years before the broadcast of the show,
and so whatever the legality of it,
it would seem quite ethically dubious if the filmmakers had
left this murderer to be walking the streets
for two years, just in the interest of
holding back a big reveal for their final episode.
And the story that they told
was that they hadn't actually known
that they had captured the confession.
That that tape went unlistened to
for months or years after it was recorded,
and that they realized like a week before
the final episode was gonna air, just in time to edit it in
and the fact that he was therefore arrested
the day of the airing or the day before or whatever,
is just a happy accident,
slash...
the greatest thing that's ever happened to them
in their filmmaking lives.
But anyway, in Lyndon's telling,
any secrecy is very much foisted upon him
by the incompetence of these various agencies,
and from that, he concludes that if he's ever going to
bring Tucker to justice,
he's gonna have to go it alone.
And there's a great...
caustic line about this in the book.
Let me just find it.
He says:
'Do you think I'm going to trust...'
'a bunch of badge-toting clowns...'
'with additional information?'
'Not me.'
'Never again.'
I'm trying to keep all these quotes brief
because I have to justify each one to our lawyer,
but there's 400 pages of this.
Anyway, under cover of night,
they begin pursuing Tucker,
tailing his car wherever he goes,
arranging a series of shadowy meetings with witnesses,
informants, people who know him in one way or another.
They go through his trash at one point
and try and find incriminating evidence in there.
And ultimately, they stage this...
show-stopping sting operation.
Basically, they found out Tucker was in AA,
and I'm not entirely sure how, actually,
but the way I always imagined it playing out was
they're tailing Tucker
around Northern California one evening.
Eventually they see his car
pull up outside a church.
Not this church,
but a church,
and this one would have done.
And so Lyndon's maybe across the street,
watching Tucker as he gets out of his car
and makes his way into this church.
Um...
Eventually, maybe, he sneaks in and realizes
that it's an AA meeting.
And so this is like hitting paydirt,
because what do people do at an AA meeting?
They confess.
And so immediately, Lyndon and his team start discussing
how to get someone inside,
but also who to get inside,
because obviously a lot of them are...
too high-profile, in one way or another,
would be too easily recognized by Tucker.
And so eventually, all eyes fall on Ernie...
the minister.
And maybe we'd have set up earlier in the film that
Ernie is a bit of a redundant member of the group,
like it's nice to have him, but he's not the big guns
of this investigative team.
But Io and behold, now it falls to Ernie
to do what the others cannot.
So Ernie begins driving up to the church every week,
takes his collar off...
I'm imagining the dramatic scene of him
putting the collar on the bedside table
to go out and deceive a man he doesn't even know,
in a church.
And then at the end of each meeting,
Ernie would record these tapes
reciting back everything that Tucker had said.
And apparently the tapes still exist,
so we would have played them over this sequence.
Here's a quote from it.
This is Ernie on one of these tapes, saying:
'I felt like he was trying to say,'
'I am a rotten S.O.B.'
'but I can't tell you what I have done.'
'I've done things I'm not proud of, and would never tell you.'
'Terrible things.'
'If only you knew.'
'But you will never know,'
'and I don't care anymore.'
'It's in the past now.'
Imagine going to an AA meeting...
... and then what you say being published in a book.
Well, yeah.
Not great.
Um...
You know, invading
the sanctity of an AA meeting
to listen in on someone's confessions,
hoping they admit to committing the Zodiac killings.
That's the thing, though.
If he did...
it's fine.
Right? If he did, it's absolutely fine.
You could go much further.
It's only if he didn't, that you start to feel a bit...
sweaty about it.
And I feel like that's what
we would have been trading on with this.
You need people to be fully convinced
going into this sequence, or it just seems way beyond the pale.
I always think back to that scene in...
Paradise Lost.
I think it's the second Paradise Lost film, where...
It's like... Have you seen Paradise Lost?
No.
It was a trilogy of documentaries about this...
miscarriage of justice where these teenage boys were...
sent to prison for the murders of some children
that they clearly hadn't committed.
And in the second of the three films,
they start sniffing around the possibility
that the dad of one of the dead kids
could have been responsible for these deaths.
And in the interests of exploring this idea,
they film him out in the woods
performing some sort of commemorative ritual,
um...
which is admittedly...
incredibly weird and creepy
and the takeaway of the scene is clearly:
oh my God, this guy is guilty as sin.
And he wasn't. He had nothing to do with it.
And I think even at the time, they got a bit of stick for...
having kind of...
exploiting his grief in this way,
um...
but if it had been him,
no one would have cared about exploiting the grief.
If you're convinced it's for the greater good,
there are very few ethical lines
as far as...
HBO execs are concerned.
So Tucker is saying all this creepy stuff in these meetings,
but obviously he's not about to confess
to being the Zodiac Killer.
And so they realize they need to go one step further.
They need something undeniable.
And what he arrives at is...
this palm print.
Basically, after one of the crimes,
the Zodiac Killer himself called the police
to report what he had done,
and they managed to get to the phone booth that he used
quite quickly
and so they found on it, a palm print
that was considered to be definitively his.
And so Lyndon seizes upon this
as the ultimate test of Tucker's guilt.
And so, from here, we'd have been straight into our scheme,
and I think we'd have done it a little bit like a heist film,
showing it step by step and piece by piece,
before people have a chance to make sense of what the plan is.
You feel it coming together like this jigsaw puzzle,
until at the end,
the picture reveals itself.
So the first step is that a friend of Lyndon's
bandaged Ernie's arm into a cast,
and he wore this cast
every week at this AA meeting where he was undercover,
getting Tucker used to the idea of him in an arm cast.
And then Lyndon...
gives Ernie a gun.
He arms him, with a revolver.
And I could just imagine the inserts of all of this:
the gun tucked into the ceremonial robes...
Does a Methodist minister wear robes?
We would've had him wear robes.
Just, that image of...
the gun going into the religious garb
and then maybe the bandaged arm...
swinging back in front to hide the gun
and then the...
In fact, I have to hand this one over to Lyndon
because the way he describes it is so perfectly understated.
Let me find it.
He says:
'As March 1st, 1977, approached,'
'our plan was right on schedule.'
'I bought the fishbowl required.'
I mean, as a cliffhanger... just incredible.
If this was a series,
that's where you'd put the episode break,
and then there's no way people are stopping watching.
And so Lyndon gives Ernie this fishbowl,
and he drives up the highway
to this fateful AA meeting.
He's sitting outside,
thinking about whether his grand plan is going to work.
Eventually, he sees Tucker arrive,
and so he gets out of the car,
walks to his trunk, pops it open, and there it is:
the fishbowl.
So he says,
could you carry this into the meeting for me?
Because of my broken arm.
And I guess he explained that he was gonna
give a presentation to the group
and use the fishbowl as a prop.
And so this is our make or break moment.
Is Tucker gonna reach his hands into the trunk,
plant them on the sides of this fishbowl,
leaving, presumably...
the platonic ideal of two handprints
on the side of this glass bowl.
And Io and behold,
that's exactly what happens.
And I can only imagine the triumph
of that moment, as this bowl is carried into the meeting,
and we're caught up on this wave of energy,
thrust into the building,
albeit obviously, that momentum immediately interrupted
by a two-hour AA meeting
and whatever Ernie's presentation was.
My assumption is it would've been some kind of metaphor,
like, take life one day at a time,
like a goldfish.
Because of the short memory.
Maybe? I don't know.
Uh...
So, at the end of the meeting,
Ernie has Tucker carry the fishbowl back to the car,
pops the trunk...
I'm imagining this...
this empty trunk of this car opened up,
the little interior light just perfectly illuminating
the spot where this bowl is gonna go,
and presumably from there, be whisked...
straight to whatever expert is gonna
painstakingly extract these palm prints,
which can then be matched to the...
file print of the Zodiac Killer
and the whole thing is gonna be wrapped up
in this perfect, neat bow,
as soon as Tucker places this bowl
back down into the trunk of the car.
But then...
Actually, let me read the version in the book,
because Lyndon describes it in such exquisitely tragic terms.
'But then, for some strange reason,'
'our suspect did something totally bizarre.'
'After the bowl was set securely...'
'in the trunk of Ernie's car,'
'Tucker slapped the bowl with his palms'
'several times'
'and then rubbed the bowl'
'several times as well.'
'Ernie said,'
'I could not believe my eyes, Lyndon.'
'It was like he knew.'
Pretty good, right?
And I think we would've tried to play it
right down the middle of either an intentional act of sabotage,
or just about plausibly,
an innocent action.
That's a fun knife edge.
Either it's like the wily behavior of a serial killer,
or it's like your dad,
kind of
patting the sides of something to show you how robust it is.
And I think by shooting it slow motion,
we would have really extracted
every agonizing clap of the hands against the bowl
and then that terrible, dreadful rubbing of the sides.
Like this...
I could just imagine...
Oh god, I was so excited about shooting this sequence.
The feeling of agonizing loss
in that moment.
And so it's that feeling of loss
that would've set the stage
for the final third of the film,
which begins with a real error of judgment
on Lyndon's part,
and that's that he agrees to meet with another man
who's been on his own parallel hunt for the Zodiac:
Robert Graysmith.
Will that land, do you think? Or should I explain who he is?
So, Graysmith is the author
of the most successful book about the Zodiac Killer,
so successful, in fact, that in Zodiac circles,
it's often just called 'the Yellow Book,'
like it's Macbeth or something,
because it's got this very distinctive yellow cover
with 'Zodiac' written down the center.
But at this point,
he's still chasing the story down
and so him and Lyndon have been
speaking to the same sources, following up on the same leads,
but it's only now, at this low ebb,
that Lyndon agrees to meet,
figuring, I guess,
what do I have to lose?
And pretty soon he gets his answer.
I think we could have gone
pretty swiftly from that to...
Well, what I was imagining was Lyndon wandering innocently
around his local bookstore
and then spying
in the new releases or the bestsellers section,
this bright yellow...
Actually, I think the first edition was black, but...
it's got that crosshair symbol on it
and 'Zodiac' in massive writing,
and so I was imagining him
feverishly searching through the pages
to see if it favors his suspect,
and instead, not only does it present
an entirely different suspect, but it also includes
some of the juiciest details from Lyndon's story
almost as this, kind of, funny aside.
And one of the main reasons I was able to describe
the fishbowl story in such detail a minute ago
is that the story got out
20 years before Lyndon wrote his book,
which must have been...
annoying.
But then he can't really make it about that
because that seems sort of vain,
so the version in Lyndon's book is all about how this was...
You know,
a threat to his family's safety,
and how this was putting lives in jeopardy and all this stuff.
Let me find the thing.
He says:
'Graysmith, a complete novice,'
'went on to disseminate...'
'sensitive investigative findings to the entire world,'
'things which could place my family members...'
'in a great deal of danger.'
So he frames it as an ethical concern, essentially,
and we would have run with that in the film, but...
but I think the real violation was that...
not only was this book hugely successful,
and made Graysmith a very wealthy man,
it also made him...
the de facto authority.
It's very hard to be the second true crime book,
or the second true crime film about any given subject,
because as soon as one is a hit,
that kind of sets the terms by which
the thing is understood.
It assigns the guilt,
I think, more powerfully really than even the...
law enforcement agencies directly working on the case.
Anyway, my plan had been to bounce
straight from the Graysmith stuff
into some of Lyndon's more out-there detective work,
as he becomes increasingly desperate
to get his own investigation moving again.
I imagined it like that classic cop movie thing
where they go back to the drawing board,
start re-examining all the old evidence to see if they can...
shake something loose.
So he'd be re-reading interview transcripts,
going back and meeting with witnesses again,
trying to see if there's something that he missed
first time around.
There's an ice cream truck
just out of shot here.
But as Lyndon looks closer and closer,
and obsesses over every little detail,
we would've been trying to build this sense of
kind of...
growing paranoia.
Like, maybe the leads start off fairly reasonable,
like there was this thing about him buying Tucker's old car,
the one that he'd been driving that day at the rest stop.
Lyndon buys it, and he searches through it,
looking for any old discarded items that might...
have evidentiary value.
But as he starts to look at each of these things closer,
there's kind of a mania that sets in,
you know,
and in particular,
there was this whole thing where he found a button,
in the car
and became convinced that this button
had some sort of massive significance to the case.
And so I think we could've taken little things like that,
and used them to create this sense that we're...
delving deeper and deeper into Lyndon's...
psyche.
Like...
We're falling down the rabbit hole with him,
not knowing how deep it goes.
But because Lyndon was such a lone wolf by this point,
almost by definition, this is where we have...
the fewest sources
outside of his book.
So people just have to...
take my word for it that there would've been...
you know...
some great twists and turns here.
Like, have I even... I haven't even mentioned...
the building yet, have I?
Basically, there would've been a key scene here,
where there's an explosion,
uh...
with narrative significance.
But the purpose of all this would've been
getting Lyndon to a more reckless state of mind,
where he's ready to make the kinds of rash decisions
that he wouldn't have made a few years earlier,
or half an hour earlier,
for our purposes.
And again I can't get into the intricate...
plot mechanics of this,
but basically in a bizarre twist of fate,
Lyndon finds himself presented with the opportunity...
for him and his wife...
to go to dinner with Tucker and his wife
as friends.
Like, they've fallen into the same social circle
through this very strange series of events
and now, the situation is such
that it could make sense for them to...
essentially double date.
So Lyndon writes in the book about them preparing
to go to dinner with Tucker and his wife,
and he writes about it like they're preparing
for a military operation.
So he says:
'The evening before this arranged dinner,'
'I retrieved my .38 five-shot...'
'Centennial Smith and Wesson hammerless,'
'cleaned and lubricated it,'
'and loaded it with high-velocity,'
'light-grain hollow points.'
'Next, I checked my small...'
'palm-sized.22 Magnum Derringer,'
'the dynamite stick, which holds two bullets.'
'I called my wife into the kitchen and asked her,'
'do you remember how to load and shoot the Derringer?'
And so, with the guns tucked into the...
the pocket of Lyndon's jeans and his wife's purse,
they set out...
for a date with justice.
I think 'double date with justice'.
A double date with justice.
See, this is why it's a bit...
bittersweet doing this.
Like, this is the fun of this genre, right?
Getting to that point where things that would have seemed
impossibly outlandish at the outset
now start to seem perfectly reasonable.
Like, you watched Making a Murderer, right?
That first season, even though it was built around this
very dramatic story of this...
possible miscarriage of justice,
the actual content of the show
was pretty restrained.
Most of what you were looking at was just...
grainy interrogation footage
and shots of people standing about in courtrooms.
But then they made a second season,
and you can just feel this inevitable slide
into sensationalism,
from the off—from episode one of season two,
they are taking a mannequin, putting a wig on it,
and covering it in red paint to simulate blood splatter.
'I wanted to re-enact it.'
And you look back at the previous season
where it was all basically men in dusty suits
sitting around discussing legal precedent,
and you think,
how did we get here?
Like, the bounds of rational behavior
are just ever-expanding.
So if you accepted Lyndon and his team
searching through Tucker's trash,
then why wouldn't you accept them...
eavesdropping on the AA meeting?
And if you accept them eavesdropping on the AA meeting
then why wouldn't you accept the whole...
fishbowl caper?
And yeah, here we are, at a steakhouse,
with the Zodiac Killer.
So this is the actual steakhouse
that they went to, up in Winters, California,
and I think from the moment they would've met,
we would have had this question of recognition.
Like, does Tucker remember Lyndon from the rest stop?
Or did he somehow sense his presence...
at the police interrogation?
To what extent does this man know
that this meeting is not a first encounter,
it's the culmination
of years of police work.
So in the book, Lyndon writes:
'The next hour...'
'was one of the most bizarre in my entire life.'
'Staring straight out at about a 30-degree angle,'
'Tucker appeared to be in another dimension,'
'some kind of Twilight Zone.'
And in the context of all of the suspicions
that we would have built up by this point in the film,
I think Tucker just seeming kind of detached
would have become a kind of
absorbent surface,
for anything we wanted to throw at it.
And that's even before the...
the drive home.
So they're driving back along the I-80, down to Vallejo,
and I was imagining this as already a tense scenario:
the road stretching out before them,
and we're packed into this tight space
with our hero
and our villain.
And then that tension
would have ratcheted up even higher
once Tucker takes an unexpected turn
off the highway and onto this little side road called
Cherry Glen Road.
And I think if we'd charted that rising tension effectively
it would have all felt inevitable.
We would've felt Lyndon's hand reaching into his pocket
to grab the gun before he even did it.
We'd have seen the Derringer coming out of the purse
a split second before it's on screen.
And the audience is becoming convinced that this is it.
This is the moment
where all of the latent threat and violence of the film
is about to suddenly burst forth.
And we're pushing the tension
as far as it will go,
but we know it can only sustain
for so long before it has to...
break....
somehow.
But instead...
nothing happens.
They return home.
They're dropped off.
The air clears.
But now there's no mistaking
who has the upper hand.
You know, like
Like so many Zodiac victims before them,
he's showing them that they're at his mercy.
By driving home.
Yeah, but on an unconventional route!
See, if we'd done it right, though,
you wouldn't be thinking like that.
You haven't seen enough of these things,
but when they work, you just kind of go with it.
The internal logic of the film just pulls you through.
And I think we'd have got the audience there by this point
and then we would've been on the home straight.
We're at an hour and 15 now.
So next, we would have gone to...
the letter.
Basically, as a sort of last resort,
Lyndon wrote a letter to the president,
and it's quite somber, quite serious,
all about duty and honor.
He says:
'Mr. President,'
'after a devoted and dedicated 32 years of investigation,'
'into the infamous Zodiac Killer case,'
'I am in fact writing my last letter of appeal.'
'My request is not really about me.'
So he does that maneuver you see in a lot of these things,
which is that he reframes it...
as being... really about the victims,
and their families.
About seeking closure for them.
And, you know...
Sure.
But...
as true crime's got bigger and bigger and people have got...
like maybe...
10% more squeamish about it,
that little disclaimer has become
even more ubiquitous.
Like, did you watch that Netflix Dahmer show?
I've never seen anything with such an outsized
sense of its own moral righteousness.
It's like ten episodes long,
and the first nine episodes are just...
Jeffrey Dahmer drilling into people's skulls,
and then the tenth episode is this lecture, about how...
we shouldn't really focus on...
Jeffrey Dahmer drilling into people's skulls...
'Just when you thought folks couldn't stoop any lower.'
'It's sick.'
Obviously they do the final grid.
That's when you know these shows really care, right?
When they end with a photo grid of all the victims.
Eight and a half cumulative hours of violent gore,
and now a single passport photo of each of the victims
to remind us what really matters.
You watched it though.
Yeah, it was good.
Evan Peters.
So Lyndon sent his letter,
and then it would have been a case of waiting
to see if it's going to lead to anything at all.
And so I figured we'd have him
drive out to the outskirts of town,
where he finally has time to reflect
on everything he's given over to this,
on all the years lost
to the pursuit of Tucker,
that could all be for naught if nothing comes of it.
It's just so beautiful.
Uh...
We would've shot a less...
distractingly beautiful sunset for the actual thing, but...
good job,
nonetheless,
camera team.
And then finally, the word comes back
from the FBI
that they're not going to take up the case.
And Lyndon writes quite
strikingly about it in the book,
as almost like, the end of hope,
where he says:
'So now I tell the world there is no justice,'
'there is no integrity,'
'and there are no existing laws that morality can supersede.'
'There is no agency and not one individual'
'who will step forward to intervene'
'in this noble cause of justice.'
I definitely haven't quite...
made my peace...
with this.
With not getting to make the film.
Like, obviously, I'm happy with what we've done instead,
but how many people are ever going to watch this?
Realistically.
So in this final stretch,
the question would have become,
what is the closure
that the audience now needs?
Once it becomes clear that
Lyndon isn't going to definitively prove
that Tucker was the Zodiac Killer.
Not least because he wasn't, obviously.
But, that's...
parenthetical.
Like, he definitely wasn't?
I mean...
no?
I mean, maybe.
But no, probably not.
But yeah, either way...
we know now that Lyndon isn't gonna get it over the line,
at least in a legal sense.
And so the stakes become much more about
the internal drama of the film
and the ending that the film demands.
And, the book doesn't necessarily
offer an obvious one, but I think that the closest one
I found in it, and how I was planning to end the film...
was with this party at Tucker's house.
Basically, Tucker threw a summer barbecue
and invited Lyndon and his wife.
And so they drive up there, they go inside,
and he describes Tucker...
at the bar, mixing cocktails,
which is a wonderfully... innocent action.
I don't know if we'd
try and like...
make that seem more sinister in some way.
Maybe he's mixing blood red cocktails.
The book's description of this encounter is fairly minimal.
He says:
'He looked at my wife and said, thank you,'
'but never made the slightest eye contact with me.'
'It was very awkward,'
'but I extended my arm for a handshake...'
'and felt like a complete idiot.'
So in Lyndon's own telling, it's an emasculating moment,
but I think it could've been made into the moment we needed
of Lyndon finally holding his own against Tucker.
And in particular, the thing he says about eye contact...
that he never made the slightest eye contact,
even when they're shaking hands,
because eye contact was how we began down this road...
They were in these adjoining cars, they locked eyes...
and then Lyndon feels that he lost face
by letting himself be stared down by this stranger...
I think this could've been the moment
where he reverses the dynamic:
Where he goes in for the handshake with Tucker,
realizes he doesn't want to meet his eyeline,
but he just holds him there.
Maybe he won't let his hand go,
until Tucker...
raises his eyes to Lyndon's,
in acknowledgment,
and there's a sense that even if
he knows he's never going to see Tucker put away,
he's forced Tucker to recognize
that he is a worthy match.
That's actually quite good, isn't it?
And I think it would have been a good cue for us to
swerve towards a larger takeaway.
You know, what is it in all of us that makes us want to...
revisit these terrible crimes?
Why can't we let the past be in the past?
And I think we'd be building a rhythm up by this point.
It's almost becoming like a montage
as we revisit these little moments from the film.
We'd have little snapshots of each crime scene,
and interviewees coming back to the fore to...
give their final thought.
We'd re-run our 'evocative B-roll' of...
bullet casings,
dropping to the floor and...
the paperwork consumed by fire.
And the sense you get is that there's something
tying all of this together, as though...
everything we've seen thus far was...
speaking ultimately to the same idea,
something sort of universal...
something profound and open-ended.
And you can kind of...
you know, at that point, re-wrap...
this lack of a conclusion as almost a moral virtue.
That actually, it would be simplistic to have an ending,
to give an easy answer,
because, what is life,
if not accepting the chaos of reality,
and the mysteries
at the heart of human existence?
It's funny, you build up the rhythm...
and the feel of closure...
and you almost just get it.