While a Doc Channel crew hung out and worked Austin last week at SXSW, I watched David Fincher’s “Zodiac” twice in two different Nashville theaters. I think it is a great film.
It entertained, informed, and best of all, it’s driven with sharp, developed character acting. And miraculously “Zodiac,” a docudrama, informs and entertains at high levels and in equal measure. It can stand alone as an entertaining Hollywood movie or a documentary-style film about a cartoonist from the San Francisco Chronicle who tracked the Zodiac case.
I’m extra curious about the Zodiac because six years ago, as a newspaper reporter for the Tahoe Daily Tribune in Northern California, I covered an aspect of the case. Donna Lass, a young nurse who worked at one of the casinos at the lake in 1971, disappeared from her desk at 2 a.m. She was never seen again and her body has not been found.
The Zodiac sent a postcard to the Chronicle, as was atypical, claiming he had done something bad at Tahoe, but never specified what he did. On the 30th anniversary of Lass’ disappearance, her sister and nephew walked into the Tribune. I was the crime reporter.
They handed me a copy of private investigator Harvey Hines’ report that accuses Larry Kane, a resident at the time of the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, of being the Zodiac Killer and the man who ended Lass’ life. South Lake Tahoe police detectives vetted Hines’ report, even buying enough of it to order up some FBI investigators to x-ray a possible Lass burial site on the North Shore. But the case fizzled out and remains unsolved.
So going into Fincher’s “Zodiac,” I was biased. I thought Kane to be the No.1 Zodiac suspect. The film, based on the book the cartoonist, Robert Graysmith, wrote about the case, pins blame on a man from the Bay Area named Arthur Leigh Allen. Oddly Allen died of a heart attack in 1992 at the age 58 only days before he was to meet with police for the umpteenth time. Allen was not shy.
Fincher has such a tight hold on the story that neither the drama nor the documents get in its way. And that allows the two-hour-and-forty-minute-film to fly by. Plus it looks great. Fincher, a Bay Area native, takes you high over the Golden Gate Bridge and down along neighborhood streets to create a real sense of San Francisco.
The scariest part of the messy Zodiac tale is that this handful of heinous, motiveless murders happened in sunny California when murders don’t happen: During a daytime picnic next to a lake, along a peaceful rich San Francisco street, in a parking lot next to a college classroom.
Shouldn’t the Zodiac be killing people back East in New York alongside the Son of Sam? That’s what creates the chill. Nothing fits. There’s no motive. It could happen around the next corner … even to you.