Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour premiered on Netflix last week, and it is already being challenged for changing key details of its 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 in 1978 went on the popular game show and matched with Alcala.
The case of The Dating Game killer has been covered several times including on 20/20 in a 2017 film and in a podcast so Kendrick had plenty of material to pull from.
But Kendrick took some artistic license with her telling of this tale, parts of the story depart significantly from the facts of the chilling case.
Anna Kendrick ‘s directorial debut Woman of the Hour premiered on Netflix last week, and it is already being challenged for changing key details of its true story
Alcala, who is played by Daniel Zovatto in the film, was captured in 1979, the year after his appearance on The Dating Game.
He was convicted of the murders of five women, but it is believed he is responsible for up to 130 more deaths.
In the movie, Alcala tells the women he’s a photographer and flatters them by telling them there is something promising in their beauty.
This much is true. The 1970s were an era crawling with men with cameras looking for the next great beauty – or, in Alcala’s case, his next victim.
He also says he attended NYU with notorious film director Roman Polanski. While the real Alcala enrolled at NYU, he didn’t finish his studies and there’s no evidence that he and Polanski ever crossed paths.
By the time Alcala was at NYU, Polanski was already the celebrated filmmaker of Rosemary’s Baby, not an undergrad.
At the time, Alcala was living as a fugitive from his crimes in California. In the film, he meets, seduces and kills a flight attendant while living in New York, pointing to the crimes he committed while hiding out in the Empire State.
On the Dating Game, the silly, superficial and sexist questions the bachelorettes asked of the contestants were scripted by the show’s producers.
But in Woman Of The Hour, Kendrick changed the facts and opted to have her character come up with her own questions to the bachelors, which helped Alcala’s intelligence stand out from the rest of his competitors.
‘That was a great device Anna used to show how this was her character’s opportunity to turn the tables on that sexist culture, even if in the end it does bring her closer to that dangerous place because it leads her to pick Rodney,’ Tony Hale, who plays The Dating Game host Jim Lange, said per USA Today.
As for how a convicted sex offender could land a coveted spot on The Dating Game, the answer is clear – the producers did not do a background check.
That’s one thing the movie got right.
In real life, Cheryl Bradshaw never went on her date with Alcala after getting a bad vibe from him, while in the movie, she meets him for drinks and senses his sinister nature.
Alcala was arrested in 1979 when women’s earrings belonging to one of his victims were found in a storage unit 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 in 1978 went on the popular game show and matched with Alcala
But Kendrick took some artistic license with her telling of this tale and departed from the facts of the story; pictured in a still from Woman Of The Hour
One difference was that Kendrick’s character wrote her own questions for the suitors, but in reality all of the questions were written by Dating Game producers. Alcala’s boast about going to school with Roman Polanski also seems to be invented; Kendrick is pictured on October 10
‘I can understand why it might be surprising to people that this would be something I would choose to do as my first time being a director,’ Kendrick said, noting that the film gave her the opportunity to tell the story from the women’s perspective.
Instead, she focused on the women who fell under the spell of Rodney Alcala.
‘On paper, this story was ready for Hollywood, with an emphasis on maybe a young detective who finally takes on this case, and a determined prosecutor who keeps the criminal behind bars,’ she said.
‘But while those things are facts in this case, it felt emotionally dishonest if I had included that in my film.’
