Hoffman as Capote: Playing an asshole is more fun than being one (Photo: Sony Classics)

David Carr—arguably the man responsible for this very site—makes an interesting showing in today's Times, breaking down the sudden surfeit of Truman Capote films and what they say about contemporary journalism. In short: Capote could write his ass off, even if he cheated his sources to do it.

While it remains unclear if Carr has seen either film (Bennett Miller's finished Capote opens Sept. 30, while Douglas McGrath's Have You Heard? has been pushed all the way back to fall 2006), the temptation to re-interpret their subject's impact on non-fiction storytelling proved too strong for the writer to overcome. So instead of a look at what separates the film's narratives, Carr dives into extended media crit as though no alternative means of justifying their coexistence is available.

As you might expect, The Times could only do this with the complicity of guys like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, a couple of New Journalism dinosaurs who owe Capote at least a portion of their careers for making reporting safe for self-obsessed bullshit. Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm get their obligatory mentions as well, as does Bob Woodward's Capote-esque "fly-on-the-wall" style of making things up. Of course, it all reads well, and as a J-school wonk myself I am well aware of the prevailing wisdom that nothing reacts to a massage more beautifully than the truth. We wouldn't have In Cold Blood without that.

But what of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who portrays Capote in the eponymous Miller film? Or Toby Jones, the Capote of Have You Heard? What of the author's motivations as the actors interpreted them? I mean, as long as we are avoiding writing about actual movies, why not look at Capote's consequences beyond the realm of writers and artists who canonize him? No less an authority than Lillian Ross claims that "(Capote's) influence is not a literary one;" nevertheless, I have the vague feeling that because Capote "knew that some eggs needed to be dropped to make his soufflé" (to borrow Carr's own mangled metaphor), and dropped them purposely and irrevocably, there is a bit more sociopathy than social science going on here.

Which, of course, could potentially make for a great movie. Not that anybody is interested in those or anything.