Script Comparison: Murder By Numbers

The Leopold-Loeb inspired movie Murder by Numbers is turning 20 this month, so I wanted to celebrate its anniversary. A while back I bought scripts for Rope, Compulsion and Murder By Numbers. The first two only had very minor changes from the scripts I bought and the movies that were eventually released, but the Murder By Numbers script diverged significantly.

According to a script available for sale on ebay, the version I bought is from 6/29/2000, it’s the first revision after the original draft, was written by Tony Gayton, and is untitled. Starting on 2/8/2001 screenwriter Tony Bean was brought on for rewrites, and it is one of those rewrites which is up for sale, a 3/7/2001 version, called Foolproof, but since it’s $400, I won’t be able to use it for comparison.

By my count there are 16 scenes which are just in the original script, 16 just in the movie version, and 43 scenes that both share, even if the content is very different.

There are some minor changes: both the police captain and Justin’s love interest have different names (Jimbo Kills-A-Man and Sandy, I’ll let you decide who is who), the detectives Cassie and Sam don’t have sex in the earlier version and Cassie’s story ends not with her testifying against her ex-husband but joining a support group for victims of violent crimes. There are also racial slurs, a Nazi character, and Ray’s baboon kills itself with Cassie’s gun. But I assume if you’re here reading this, you’re more interested in the killers based on Leopold and Loeb, so I’ll focus on them.

The homoerotic but not overtly homosexual element seems to have been part of this project since the beginning. Though in the early version there is perhaps more of an emphasis on Justin’s love interest: she has more and longer scenes and is a turning point in the final confrontation. Before Justin goes to Richard for that confrontation he tells her: “There was a hole in my life…Richard got there first…but he didn’t fill it…he just made me emptier. I just wish I had let you in first. Things might have been different.” This reminds me heavily of the role Ruth played for Judd in the Compulsion novel, and casts Justin as a victim of Richard’s and the heterosexual relationship as what could have saved him.

There is more emphasis on philosophy in the early script, each scene where the killers discuss their motive goes on for much longer, and they each quote philosophical ideas to each other. In the movie this is dulled down to something like: freedom means doing crime, but in the early draft the opening voiceover of them on the cliff (there is no house on the bluff in this version) one says:

“His name is the word and the word is power. And he justifies all that goes before him just by being.”

And the other replies: “And the weak-minded shall name him evil and cast him down in a dark place and renounce his great deeds.”

This is much more in depth than in the movie version which is just: “One cannot live fully without embracing suicide and crime.”

In the early version the Leopold character Justin is described as wearing “designer glasses and even though he doesn’t dress like a nerd, his clothing is definitely different from the other kids. In a word, mature. And freakishly intelligent.” Which is quite different from the greasy, chain wearing Michael Pitt of the movie. In the early script there is much talk of Justin and Richard creating a new person together, which they swear to while holding hands as fire burns their arms chanting “the two of us are him.”  Justin explains: “We created another person from the two of us. My brains, Richard’s cunning. He was above the law. A superior being. Richard wanted to see what he was capable of. It was supposed to be like some sort of fatal calculus. Murder by numbers. Cold and intellectual.” A vestige of this remains in the movie, visualized in the movie’s title and a melded picture of Richard and Justin, but isn’t nearly as explicit.

While the movie plays with the idea of who was worse, with Cassie believing Justin and mistrusting Richard right until the end when there’s a reveal than Justin was more cold and heartless than previously thought, in the earlier script there’s much less subtlety: Richard is much more evil all the way through. He also plants evidence several times leading the police to Justin alone, in the hopes that he would be able to go free. There’s again a line indicating this in the movie, in which Richard says they only have evidence on Justin and not him-but Richard didn’t plant that evidence.

Related to this, the biggest change relating to scenes involves a plot about Justin’s greenhouse. He raises orchids and has a hybrid with unique seeds. These seeds are some of the evidence Richard planted on the body, leading the police to Justin. Scenes of Ray’s ex-wife being questioned, Ray’s body being examined and much to do about the seeds and analysis were replaced completely with Cassie being confronted by Richard, hitting him with her car door, rummaging through his trash, sending it off for DNA analysis and being told to stop working on the case-all of which were not in the early draft. Far from the squeamish Richard we see in the movie who cries when killing Ray and who can’t bring himself to kill their victim, early script Richard records the murder and listens to it in his car in the school parking lot.

As Justin explains to his love interest: “The night of the murder…it was supposed to be a rehearsal…I didn’t know he was going to kill her…not until I got to his house and saw her there. Dead. I panicked. I did what Richard told me to do.” There is no indication that he’s lying here, both his love interest and Cassie believe this and nothing in the script contradicts it (other than Richard’s false confession to the police, which is also in the movie). In the movie it is Justin who kills their victim, and both boys seem to know what’s going on and are on board with the plan every step of the way.

Another plot that was completely cut from the movie was that the victim looks like Richard’s mother, Cassie saying that before she married Richard’s rich-step father, his mother had a police record for prostitution, drugs and drunk driving, giving Richard a motive for subconsciously wanting to lash out against her. Both Justin and Richard’s parents are given more focus in the early script; Justin’s mother a ghostly figure who drifts around silent in the background of scenes and Richard’s parents are shown to be almost equally uninterested in their son: sitting drunk in front of the tv. While movie Cassie has a line about both teenagers getting money instead of familial affection, much of this was cut from the eventual movie.

The confrontation between the killers and the police is also very different. Going with the version of a much softer Justin, early script Justin asks Cassie the name of their victim while holding a gun to his head. When she tells him he replies “That’s a beautiful name. Will you tell her family that I’m sorry? Will you do that for me?” When Cassie tells Justin that his love interest said she loves him he doesn’t kill himself, but reaches out for Cassie, who hugs him, despite Richard’s attempts to get him to pull the trigger. When the cliff crumbles and Richard falls, Justin grabs him and though Richard tries to pull Justin down with him, he doesn’t succeed. Richard dies, and his body is pulled out to sea.

Being able to read this earlier version, many things that confused me about the movie that was released now make sense. The focus on the melded version of Richard and Justin especially, but also missing scenes; in the movie we see detective Sam go to school and talk with Lisa, but it never comes up again. In the earlier script Sam brings her in to talk to the police and Cassie tells this to Justin during the confrontation. The scene with Justin confronting his love interest in the hallway about her having sex with Richard also goes on longer, and she pleads to get him to understand, rather than the movie version, which just ends with a slap. It’s jarring in the movie to then see her trying to help him when it’s revealed he’s a murderer, if they ended on such bad terms, but the longer version better explains her state of mind and the guilt she feels. I’m unclear if some of this was changed in later versions of the script or shot and edited out of the final movie. While I’m not sure if the earlier version would have been better than the product we got, I do think it would have at least made more narrative sense than what was released in theatres.

Murder Among Friends: Creative Nonfiction for Teens

Spring is starting off with a new young adult Leopold-Loeb book: Murder Among Friends: How Leopold and Loeb tried to Commit the Perfect Crime, by Candace Fleming. This is the first book to cover the topic from a big publisher since 2008. And though it is the third book to cover this case for a young adult audience, it is by far the longest and most detailed. To hear what I think about the other young adult books, you can read my post about them here.

Off the bat, Fleming’s book is quite attractive, with a striking cover, and the beginning of each section and chapter has a graphic background. She also includes occasional snippets from newspapers throughout, which are distinct from the narrative sections of the text.

While the book is definitely meant for a young adult audience, it can be enjoyed by adult readers as well. Some of the more in-depth sexual details are not stated, but it’s a hardly noticeable loss. The only time I thought it was a shame she couldn’t talk about specific sex acts was during the testimony with one of the psychiatrists when Healy stated that Leopold and Loeb had only committed a childish rather than adult form of homosexuality. Because Fleming only says that they had sex and gives no other details, the context is missing that this is referring to the fact that they did not have anal sex, only intercrural or occasionally oral, which was deemed more ‘childish.’ But Fleming reinforces the idea that he was saying that all homosexuality was childish, by talking about the old belief “that every little boy passed through homosexuality on his way to heterosexuality.” This isn’t an egregious fault, but it is something that’s not quite clear because of the necessary editing out of sexual material and reinforcing a slightly different context to explain the quotes.

Keeping her younger audience in mind, Fleming also takes the time to explain certain concepts: the legal system in the 1920s, the changing Jewish neighborhoods of Chicago, the corrupt police force and antisemitism as it appeared at the time. I suppose these could annoy more knowledgeable adult readers, but they were some of my favorite parts of the book, which added much needed context and flavor to the story. I especially enjoyed her many breaks to explain how antisemitic the time was, as that’s often something people today don’t understand, tending to write Leopold and Loeb off as ‘privileged, rich white boys,’ without understanding what discrimination they and their families faced because they were Jewish during that time period. And, for people who have read multiple books about this case, these sections add information you may have never seen before. Unfortunately, that’s some of the only new information you’ll find.

I don’t expect a book for a young adult audience to break ground or do new research, but aside from the background information and Fleming’s creative nonfiction writing, the book very much reads like a shorter version of Hal Higdon’s Crime of the Century or Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of it, just targeted towards a younger audience. This isn’t really an issue, as it’s filling a niche for a different demographic, but if you’re an adult who has already read those books, you won’t really find anything new here.

As for the writing style: your mileage may vary on the amount of creative nonfiction you can stomach: some people have no problem with it, but I tend to avoid it in the nonfiction I read. Making up conversations, inserting thoughts into someone’s head or making up details to describe scenes to make the book more readable skews too close to fiction for my tastes.

The biggest examples of this kind of writing can be found in the first ¼ of the book, before things go into the crime and hearing, which is more drawn from newspaper accounts, stenographic reports and the trial transcript. Like Baatz, Fleming describes the dinner which the Franks family had on the night Bobby was kidnaped (though she mercifully left out the fictional 4^th Franks child which Baatz included). She also includes Baatz’s description of Loeb groping around on the floor of the car for the chisel before hitting Bobby-a detail in none of the material from the time.

Another even more whimsical example can be seen when Fleming is describing Leopold and Loeb’s early life. Leopold is introduced this way: “Nathan Leopold loved birds. They were magical in that manner of all things just a little beyond his understanding. To him, they were creatures of wing and air.” Leopold never said anything like this, it’s just Fleming’s guess work on what he may have thought.

She also really leans into Loeb being delusional in the beginning of the book, writing: “At first, picturization was like being in another world, detached from reality. Sometimes, while drifting into it, he panicked, fearing he might not find his way back. Soon, though, Richard didn’t want to come back.” Oddly, this emphasis on Richard’s detachment from reality (which reminded me a bit of Artie Strauss in Compulsion, a fictionalized version of the case from 1956), is only covered in detail in the beginning and not emphasized as much later on. That being said, Fleming’s use of the device does make the book a quick, enjoyable read, as long as you’re not overly concerned about some stretching of the truth.

There are some aspects of Fleming’s writing which I dislike: her constant use of brackets in the middle of quotes where she’s changed words or ellipses to show that she’s cut portions out. While I appreciate that she didn’t just doctor the quotes without indicating that she did so, reading a quote that’s a paragraph long without getting more than one or two full sentences without an ellipses in the middle is frustrating and makes me wonder what was missing. She also consistently uses Frankses’ instead of Franks’ when talking about multiple members of the Franks family. I’m not a linguist but that just feels wrong.

There’s also a lot of jumping around in time, sometimes without indicating she’s doing it. She introduces Susan Lurie and Richard Rubel on the same page and this makes it seem like they became acquainted with Leopold and Loeb around the same time, though that wasn’t true. People will also often show up before they’re introduced: readers first hear the name Hamlin Buchman when he’s standing in the doorway of Leopold and Loeb’s room, then it’s explained who he is and why he’s there. I suppose this was done to add suspense, but it seems a bit odd.

There are some inaccuracies here, but they’re usually the same inaccuracies that other authors have made, likely because Fleming read books like Baatz’s and Higdon’s and believed them without checking herself. Not checking the original sources can clearly be seen when she describes Leopold’s classmates drawing a speech bubble above his photo in his high school yearbook and have him saying a quote that pokes fun at him. She cites the psychiatric report for this, and that report does include the quote but not the part about the speech bubble. Looking at the actual yearbook, the text making fun of Leopold was part of a list of text describing or poking fun at each member of Leopold’s class and is not on the same page as the school photos. And as an aside, she states that the stills taken from the Kirtland’s Warbler video in 1923 were the first photos of Leopold ever taken, that no earlier photos of him existed. This is obviously untrue, as even ignoring the family photos of him that exist, he had yearbook photos from high school dating long before 1923.

As another example of something Fleming repeated without checking: she conflates the account of Pauline Van Den Bosch who claimed to have watched Leopold from the ages of 14-16 (though she was never mentioned by Leopold, his family or the psychiatrists, which makes me skeptical of her claims) and that of Leopold’s governess Paula who watched him for 6 months when he was 6. Fleming takes Pauline’s quotes about Leopold shooting a bird and swearing and credits them to a six-year-old, rather than a 14-16 year old. Fleming acknowledges the strangeness of this, saying: “That a six-year-old would be allowed to carry a gun (or curse) seemed idiotic to lot of people.” This same mistake was made by Higdon, even down to calling it idiotic, and Fleming just rewords and repeats his passage.

And some rapid fire corrections to inaccurate facts in this book:

• The Leopold family could all speak fluent German

• The Loebs did not have a nine hole golf course in their Chicago backyard

• The Loebs were strict prohibitionists and were not illegally importing alcohol from Canada

• One of her photo captions mistakenly identifies Loeb’s cell as Leopold’s

• Leopold’s autobiography sold many more than 20,000 copies

And, to cap things off, as usual with Leopold-Loeb books, the beginning and ends of their lives are given extremely little detail. Loeb’s life after being sentenced to prison is given only a few paragraphs, most of them focused on his death. While Leopold gets a bit more, there’s not much to chew on, and most of the section on his later life is taken up by an extended tour of Rosehill Cemetery, which seems like an excuse to let the readers know what the Franks tomb looked like and how close the three family plots were to each other.

I’ve probably spent too long nitpicking here, and I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked Fleming’s book. Though I wasn’t the target audience I found it a sweet, easy-to-digest version of the story told without any cynicism. For the demographic she’s aiming towards I think Fleming does a good job, despite my problems with some of the reliability of her facts. If this helps get teenagers interested in history, or if they look in the sources and decide to do their own research, then I think it’s fantastic that this book was able to open those doors, even if it isn’t quite my cup of tea.