What Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour got WRONG about the Rodney Alcala murders

Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut Woman of the Hour premiered on Netflix last week and is already being challenged to change key details of the 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 went on the hit game show in 1978 and matched with Alcala.

The Dating Game Killer case has been covered several times, including on 20/20 in a 2017 film and in 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.

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 is believed to be responsible for another 130 deaths.

In the film, Alcala tells the women that he is a photographer and flatters them by telling them that there is something promising in their beauty.

That much is true. The 1970s were an era full of men with cameras looking for the next great beauty – or, in Alcala’s case, his next victim.

He also says he attended NYU with infamous film director Roman Polanski. While the real Alcala enrolled at NYU, he did not complete his studies and there is 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 a student.

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 out the crimes he committed while hiding out in the Empire State.

In the Dating Game, the silly, superficial and sexist questions that the singles asked the participants were written by the show’s producers.

But in Woman Of The Hour, Kendrick changed the facts and chose to have her character ask the bachelors her own questions, setting Alcala’s intelligence apart from the rest of his competitors.

“That was a great device that Anna used to show how this was her character’s opportunity to turn the tables on that sexist culture, even though it ultimately brings her closer to that dangerous place because it leads her to kill Rodney choose,” says Tony Hale. , who plays The Dating Game host Jim Lange, said per USA today.

When asked how a convicted sex offender was able to land a coveted spot on The Dating Game, the answer is clear: the producers did not conduct a background check.

That’s one thing the movie did right.

In real life, Cheryl Bradshaw never went on a date with Alcala after getting bad vibes 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 California prison in 2021 at the age of 77.

The film centers on 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 went on the hit game show in 1978 and matched with Alcala

But Kendrick took some artistic license in telling this story and started from the facts of the story; depicted 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 the questions were written by Dating Game producers. Alcala’s boast about going to school with Roman Polanski also seems fabricated; Kendrick is pictured on October 10

“I can understand why it might be surprising to people that this is something that I would choose as my first time as a director,” Kendrick said, noting that the film gave her the opportunity to tell the story from the woman’s perspective. narrate.

Instead, she focused on the women who fell under Rodney Alcala’s spell.

“On paper, this story was ready for Hollywood, with the focus perhaps on a young detective finally taking on the case, and a determined prosecutor keeping the criminal behind bars,” she said.

“But even though those are facts in this case, it felt emotionally dishonest to have included that in my film.”