Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, premiered on Netflix last week and is already coming under fire for changing key details of her true story.
The film is about Rodney Alcala, a sex offender and serial killer who appeared as a suitor on The Dating Game in the 1970s.
Kendrick, 39, plays Cheryl, a character based on Cheryl Bradshaw, a 28-year-old woman who appeared on the popular game show in 1978 and coincided with Alcalá.
The Dating Game killer case has been covered several times, including on 20/20 in a 2017 film and on a podcast, so Kendrick had plenty of material to draw from.
But Kendrick took some artistic license in telling this story; Parts of the story deviate significantly from the facts of the chilling case.
Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, premiered on Netflix last week and is already coming under fire for changing key details of her true story.
Alcalá, played by Daniel Zovatto in the film, was captured in 1979, a year after his appearance on The Dating Game.
He was found guilty of the murder of five women, but is believed to be responsible for up to 130 more deaths.
In the film, Alcalá tells the women that he is a photographer and flatters them by telling them that there is something promising about their beauty.
This is true. The 1970s were a time filled with men with cameras looking for the next big beauty or, in Alcalá’s case, their next victim.
He also says that he attended New York University with famous film director Roman Polanski. While the real Alcalá enrolled at New York University, he did not finish his studies and there is no evidence that he and Polanski ever crossed paths.
By the time Alcalá was at NYU, Polanski was already the celebrated filmmaker of Rosemary’s Baby, not a college student.
At the time, Alcalá was living as a fugitive from his crimes in California. In the film, he meets, seduces, and kills a stewardess while living in New York, pointing out the crimes he committed while hiding in the Empire State Building.
On Dating Game, the silly, superficial, and sexist questions that single women asked the contestants were written by the show’s producers.
But in The Woman of the Hour, Kendrick changed the facts and opted to have her character pose her own questions to the bachelors, which helped Alcalá’s intelligence stand out from the rest of her competitors.
“That was a great device that Anna used to show how this was her character’s opportunity to change the situation in that sexist culture, even if it ultimately brings her closer to that dangerous place because it leads her to choose Rodney,” Tony Hale, who plays The Dating Game host Jim Lange, reportedly said USA today.
As for how a convicted sex offender could land a coveted spot on The Dating Game, the answer is clear: the producers didn’t do a background check.
That’s something the movie did well.
In real life, Cheryl Bradshaw never went on a date with Alcalá after receiving bad vibes from him, while in the movie, she meets him for drinks and senses his sinister nature.
Alcalá was arrested in 1979 when women’s earrings belonging to one of his victims were found in a warehouse in Seattle.
He was convicted and sentenced to death, but died of natural causes in prison in California in 2021 at age 77.
The film is about Rodney Alcala, a sex offender and serial killer who appeared as a suitor on The Dating Game in the 1970s; Kendrick is here at the premiere.
Kendrick, 39, plays Cheryl, a character based on Cheryl Bradshaw, a 28-year-old woman who appeared on the popular game show in 1978 and coincided with Alcalá.
But Kendrick took some artistic license in telling this story and deviated from the facts of the story; Pictured is a still image from The Woman of the Hour.
One difference was that Kendrick’s character wrote his own questions for the suitors, but in reality all the questions were written by the Dating Game producers. Alcalá’s boast of having gone to school with Roman Polanski also seems fabricated; Kendrick is pictured on October 10.
“I can understand why it might surprise people that this was something I would choose to do as a first-time director,” Kendrick said, noting that the film gave her the opportunity to tell the story from the women’s perspective.
Instead, it focused on the women who fell under Rodney Alcalá’s spell.
“On paper, this story was ready for Hollywood, with an emphasis perhaps on a young detective who finally takes charge of this case, and a determined prosecutor who keeps the criminal behind bars,” he said.
“But while those things are facts in this case, it seemed emotionally dishonest to me if I had included it in my film.”