Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, freshly landed on Netflix, is a serial-killer thriller that tells the barely-believable but entirely true story of Rodney Alcala, Cheryl Bradshaw and a fateful 1978 episode of US TV matchmaking show The Dating Game.
The Pitch Perfect and A Simple Favor star plays Bradshaw, a professional actress who agrees to go on the show, only to encounter a well-grooved system that was built on casual sexism and a near total absence of due diligence processes. The result of that system? The opportunity for a killer who preyed on young women to win a date with a potential target – in the full glare of studio lights and in front of a national TV audience.
Is Woman of the Hour a true story?
Extraordinarily, yes. Director-actress Kendrick and screenwriter Ian McDonald dug into the 1978 taping of an episode of The Dating Game in Los Angeles and discovered a true story that played like a David Fincher thriller. ‘[Anna] was just like: “I kind of wanted it to be like Zodiac meets No Country for Old Men,”’ McDonald tells Indiewire.
Billed on the show as a ‘successful photographer’, Texan-born Rodney Alcala appeared as one of the three bachelors that Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) was invited to pick from via a series of double entendre-heavy questions and answers. At the time, the photographer, who’d studied fine art at UCLA and worked for a stint at the Los Angeles Times, had already served two terms for molesting two girls under 13 and had also been discharged from the army for sexual misconduct. Unbeknownst to Bradshaw or any of the show’s producers, he’d already murdered five women.
‘The hard part is diving into the story and the research,’ Kendrick tells Today.com, ‘and just realising how frequently this person was allowed to slip through the cracks in the system, because the system was really not set up to prioritise victims.’
The system was really not set up to prioritise victims
As charted by McDonald’s script, an entry on the influential Black List of 2017’s best unproduced screenplays, Alcala’s charm landed him a spot on the show and even led Bradshaw to pick him from the line-up of three bachelors. How the show’s producers and myriad other people had failed to detect is the crux of a thriller that resonates strongly in the era of Weinstein and #MeToo.
The meat of the story is factual, although some names have been changed – The Dating Game’s host was called Jim Lange not Ed Burke, IRL– and a few liberties taken in the telling. Laura, the audience member who was friends with one of Alcala’s earlier victims and who clocks him on stage, is a construct of the movie.
Who was Rodney Alcala?
Alcala was a serial killer with convictions for seven murders but who was likely to have committed many, many more (some put his tally at more than 100 killings). He was eventually caught and sentenced to death in California for five murders committed between 1977 and 1979, but not before making this improbable appearance on network television.
Did Rodney Alcala attend NYU and study with Roman Polanski?
Yes, Alcala studied at the prestigious New York university under the name ‘John Berger’ in 1971. He took a film course taught by disgraced Chinatown filmmaker Roman Polanski, an experience referenced in a flashback scene where he flirts with deeply uneasy flight attendant Charlie (Kathryn Gallagher).
How did Rodney Alcala get on The Dating Game?
In short, a lack of background checks enabled the killer to slip through a non-existent net. The show’s executive producer Mike Metzger and contestant coordinator Ellen Metzger initially disagreed over whether Alcala should be allowed on the show – ‘He had a mystique about him that I found uncomfortable,’ said Metzger – but it was ultimately decided to leave him on.
What happened to the real Cheryl Bradshaw?
It’s not known what became of the real Bradshaw. Screenwriter McDonald made efforts to track her down during the filmmaking process but without success. ‘I couldn’t find her anywhere and sort of took that as a sign that she didn’t want this 15-minute encounter to define her life,’ he tells Indiewire, ‘and so I tried to respect that and not pursue [her more].’
Who’s in the cast?
Kendrick plays Sheryl Bradshaw, while Costa Rican-born actor Daniel Zovatto (It Follows, Station Eleven) plays her on-screen nemesis Rodney Alcala.
Arrested Development’s Tony Hale plays The Dating Game host Ed Burke, and The Affair’s Nicolette Robinson is Laura, the fictional audience member who realises that Alcala had murdered her friend. Autumn Best plays the resourceful Amy, a hitchhiker who is based on one of Alcala’s luckier victims, Monique Hoyt.
Matt Visser and Jedidiah Goodacre are Alcala’s fellow bachelors on the show.
What are the reviews like for Woman of the Hour so far?
Since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, with praise for Kendrick’s assured direction and the potency of her film’s commentary on both toxic men and the systems that failed to deter them. ‘An assured subversion which elicits both engrossing chills and surprising humour,’ is how Screen Daily describes it, while The Guardian calls it ‘a fascinating and frightening stranger-than-fiction tale’.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, applauds Woman of the Hours’ unsettling tone, highlighting ‘the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there’.
In an otherwise positive critique, Playlist takes the script to task the liberties it takes with some of the facts. ‘The story of Alcala’s eventual arrest and the infuriating information conveyed via on-screen text about what happened after, appear to have been manufactured out of whole cloth,’ its review notes, ‘which is a pretty cheap way to play your audience in the home stretch.’
Woman of the Hour is streaming on Netflix now.