Dead Man's Wire

 

Director Gus van Sant

van Sant on the set with Bill Skarsgård

Pulitzer prize-winning photo of Tony Kiritsis and Richard Hall

DEAD MAN’S WIRE           B-                                                                                                  USA  (105 mi)  2025  d: Gus van Sant

I’m a goddamn national hero and don’t you forget it.                                                                  —Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård)

This film reads like a fictionalized documentary, updating an explosive story making all the headlines in 1977 when Tony Kiritsis kidnapped at gunpoint the president of a mortgage company, wiring him to a shotgun pointed at his head and holding him captive in his own apartment for three days, claiming the mortgage company deliberately sabotaged his 17-acre investment property project of developing a reasonably priced shopping center, believing they knowingly convinced the developer to build elsewhere on property they owned.  In a rampage filled with expletives, he instantly became a media darling when he aired his grievances over the television and radio airwaves, becoming something of a folk hero for some, like a little guy finally standing up the heavily-connected giants of finance, finding himself caught in a post-Watergate world of mistrust and greed that would only be amplified further in the Reagan years a decade later, while faith in core institutions has faded even further today.  All taking place in the Midwest heartland of Indianapolis, the story reads like a plea for vigilante justice that pre-dates all the sensationalism of social media coverage of today, like the arrest of Luigi Mangione for shooting and killing the CEO of a large healthcare conglomerate, with van Sant satirizing a society that allows people to be exploited and then applauds them when they react in extreme ways, a reminder of how much worse things have gotten, as populist anger is reflected in contemporary headlines, with some wondering if these outrageous acts can actually be justified.  Van Sant was born in Louisville, Kentucky, where this film was actually shot, also the birthplace of Hunter S. Thompson, whose groundbreaking Gonzo journalism unleashed a torrent of first-person subjectivity that remade the media in the 60’s and 70’s, though van Sant has long been associated with Pacific Northwest filmmaking, aligned with the city of Portland, along with fellow indie director Kelly Reichardt, crafting compelling portraits of outsiders and outlaws, where the works he’s most associated with are New Queer Movement cornerstones MALA NOCHE (1986), DRUGSTORE COWBOY (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1991), all shot in Portland, the star-driven GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997) and To Die For (1995), the more experimental GERRY (2002), ELEPHANT (2003), LAST DAYS (2005), and Paranoid Park (2007), and the biographic MILK (2008), which this film most closely resembles, as it’s based on real-life circumstances.  Coming from a long line of scheming, delusional “losers” in van Sant films, from Matt Dillon’s DRUGSTORE COWBOY to Nicole Kidman’s toxic, fame-seeking, TV reporter in To Die For, alternating between experimental films and more mainstream-oriented, star-driven projects, this film will recall Jodie Foster’s Money Monster (2016), but has a more direct connection to Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), with Al Pacino, the appealing young star of that film, reappearing here in a significant role, where it also seems influenced by Alan J. Pakula’s psychological suspense thriller, Klute (1971), which ushered in the era of 70’s paranoid conspiracy theory movies.  While it’s brazenly disturbing and mildly amusing, with the director returning to feature films after a seven-year absence, viewers may find themselves feeling a disconnect with the central protagonist, as taking things to this extreme reveal a greater underlying problem that is never addressed, leaving a giant hole in the heart of the picture, where criminality and bizarre psychological desperation are inevitably linked.  There is a curious musical choice, Labi Siffre - Cannock Chase (Official Lyric Video) YouTube (4:05), which was also heard in Joachim Trier’s 2025 Top Ten List #1 Sentimental Value  (Affeksjonsverdi), sounding very much like America’s Horse with No Name, America - Horse With No Name (1972) (Official Music Video) YouTube (4:08), while music of Deodato, Roberta Flack, Yes, Harper’s Bizarre, and Gil Scott-Heron add subversive undertones.      

At the center of the picture is Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård, Stellan’s son, doing his best Michael Shannon imitation, is ten years younger than the figure he is portraying), seen arriving at the Meridian Mortgage Company in the early morning after falling behind on his mortgage payments through predatory loans, convinced that the company has deceived him, foreclosing on a mortgage while depriving him of the income to pay it.  He has an appointment with the owner and CEO M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), but he’s out of town, so instead he’s pleasantly greeted by his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery), the firm’s president, walking him back to his office, where things get a little dicey, as the package Tony is carrying is a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun that has been rigged with two wires, one around Richard’s neck, with another “deadman’s switch” from the trigger to his own neck, Dead Man's Wire Movie Clip - Getting Started (2026) YouTube (1:13).  Walking gingerly through the building, ordering the security guards away, he forces Hall out of the building and onto the streets in near-zero weather with snow on the ground, surrounded by policemen and journalists, where they can’t just shoot him, as it will trigger the shotgun, Dead Man's Wire - Hand's official clip YouTube (1:04), so they’re in a violent stand-off until Kiritsis commandeers a police car and drives to his home in the Crestwood Village apartments, which he claims is rigged with explosives.  A few other details happen simultaneously, as a local TV news crew led by a young and still unrecognized Linda Page (Myha’la), who is not yet an on-air personality, as at the time there were still a shockingly small number of black women broadcasters seen on-air, gets wind of what’s happening and films the incident, drawing her network’s attention, while a police detective Michael Grable (Cary Elwes) also arrives on the scene, holding officers at bay, attempting to remain calm amidst this inflammatory situation before it could get even uglier.  Like any good heist movie or police procedural, the principle players are slowly introduced, becoming recognizable presences onscreen, including the charismatic “voice of Indianapolis,” Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), a revered jazz radio host who regularly interacts with callers, like a voice of the people, and is the epitome of cool.  When he receives word of a live kidnapping in progress, with the kidnapper reaching out to speak to him, it comes as a huge surprise, Dead Man's Wire Movie Clip - Open With That (2026) YouTube (58 seconds).  Temple is the voice of calm and reason, who unwittingly becomes a facilitator at ending the standoff, while Kiritsis remains a hothead throughout, though he goes out of his way to be polite to the people he knows or respects, like Fred Temple, First Time Caller Scene | DEAD MAN'S WIRE (2025) Movie ... YouTube (3:53), and for all the threats and profanity-charged outlandishness, he does have occasional quiet moments of respectability, frequently apologizing for his crude language.  But he’s more of an attention-grabbing caricature than a real human being, as his ever-evolving portrait is a collaboration of police work, news reports, and callers from ordinary people, each seeing things differently, creating a kaleidoscopic, elusively skewed perspective, a precursor of how the Internet and cellphones have changed how news is presented, yet it’s hard to find a film more reflective of the inequitable times we currently live in.

Written by first-time screenwriter Austin Kolodney, who comes from a comedy writing background, having written for Comedy Central, yet the characters are imperfectly realized, with little to no backstory, and while understandable for the part they play in the story, there’s simply no depth to any of them, making it difficult to engage with this picture.  While M.L. Hall is vacationing in Florida, with Kiritsis insisting on speaking to him, demanding an apology, along with $5 million dollars in compensation and a promise of no prosecution, Dead Man's Wire Exclusive Movie Clip - Power (2026) YouTube (1:33), Hall’s cold indifference is built into the film, fueled by his own sleazy, larger-than-life ego, never wanting to get his hands dirty, yet his decisions drive the entire scenario, completely disconnected not only from his mortgage holders, but also his own family, which includes the callous disregard and willing sacrifice of his own son Richard, as he’s willing to allow him to become collateral damage rather than apologize directly to Kiritsis in order to free him, Dead Man's Wire Movie Clip - Apologize (2026) YouTube (1:10).  This doesn’t sit well with viewers (or Richard, by the way), or the radio listeners, holding him in utter contempt, much like the equally disconnected billionaires of today who simply refuse to ever admit to any wrongdoing, yet are responsible for some of the worst and most atrocious human behavior.  Watching this play out is like witnessing an ongoing train wreck, with Kiritsis always having the final word, delivering obscenity-fueled monologues on the air, with footage of all-American hero John Wayne appearing on his television screen, where his People’s Choice Award acceptance speech is interrupted, cutting straight to live coverage of Kiritsis, creating a true-life interplay of outlaw entertainment with news of the day, where he’s simply much more relatable to the man on the street than the overly privileged CEO’s of the world who are used to getting their way and always want to control the narrative.  This was originally scheduled to be filmed in 2018, with Werner Herzog as director and Nicolas Cage as the lead actor, but the production lingered, eventually needing someone who could make the film quickly, so van Sant took over the project, crafting a 1970’s-inspired visual language rooted in handheld realism and cinema vérité.  Shot in just 19 days by Arnaud Potier in something of a run-and-gun production of an American Dream gone wrong, it triggers a moment in time when media expanded their power while also probing into the excavation of contemporary mythmaking, elevating one man’s misguided sense of heroism into a protracted class struggle, happening in small town America where things like this rarely occur, though the mother of all exceptions to the rule would have to be the Truman Capote journalistic exposé of the heartbreaking murders in Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967).  With epic rants and sardonic twists, and with van Sant exploring the shadowy psychological corners of a life-and-death experience, the emotional rollercoaster takes us on a wild ride, but where it all leads is open to question.  There is an existing 2018 documentary film by Alan Berry and Mark Enochs (local Indianapolis guys who are listed as consultants on this film) entitled DEAD MAN’S LINE, Dead Man's Line | The True Story of Tony Kiritsis (Full ... full movie on YouTube (1:37:39), which documents the rise of voyeuristic TV news and the 24-hour news cycles, with the filmmakers sending Kolodney police reports, newspaper clippings, and video coverage of the original incident, 'Dead Man's Wire' revisits infamous Indianapolis hostage ... YouTube (4:06), with actual footage playing out over the end credits, where a photograph of Kiritsis with the rifle pointed at the back of the neck of Richard Hall won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 (A Pulitzer Picture).

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

family home in Indianapolis

Weide and Vonnegut

Weide and Vonnegut

Kurt, Bernard, and Allie (left to right) with parents

Vonnegut as a child

Allie, Bernard, and Kurt

Allie and Kurt

 

Kurt and Bernard

Kurt and Jane

love letter just 2 months after marriage

Kurt and Jane

first published article

drawn decorations on door

Kurt and Jane with their three children

the nephews, Allie's four sons

Vonnegut wall mural in Indianapolis

Kurt and Bernard on a train

Vonnegut with Weide

Kurt Vonnegut

writer/co-director Robert B. Weide

Weide in room of Vonnegut drawings

Weide and co-director Don Argott

Vonnegut and Weide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME            B+                                                               USA  (127 mi)  2021  d: Robert B. Weide and Don Argott

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.                             —Kurt Vonnegut

Having directed and/or produced biographies of some of his favorite comedians, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce, though perhaps best known for winning an Emmy for Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, Robert B. Weide, listed as writer, co-director, and producer, introduces this film by apologizing for appearing onscreen, basically explaining his own difficulties in taking forty years to make this film, yet it was his lifelong friendship with Vonnegut that actually sets the tone for the film.  Interjecting himself into the film isn’t initially troublesome, but as it continues throughout, told from a first person perspective, almost exclusively seen through the director’s own eyes, one starts questioning the reliability of his skewed narration, particularly when he unequivocally asserts Vonnegut is the best living writer of the 20th century, something that might easily be challenged, as Toni Morrison and her Nobel prize comes to mind, 2019 Top Ten List #9 Toni Morrison: The People I Am, though certainly he is among the most unique literary voices, one of the few writers where every one of their books remains in print.  And while there is a co-director, he is neither acknowledged nor recognized anywhere in the film except the credits sequence.  Nonetheless, this is a labor of love, as Weide starting working on the film in 1988 with a promise to Vonnegut that he had a hard time keeping, never able to complete the film during his lifetime, released 15-years after his death, providing a definitive account of the author’s life, while also documenting his evolving friendship with Vonnegut, who sent him archival material throughout his life, including many phone calls, voicemail messages, and letters, including a treasure trove of previously unreleased footage, where the basis of their lifelong friendship actually becomes the storyline of the film, interjecting the personal with a subjective account of the novelist’s life, spending much of the time exploring the process of making this film.  Heavily influenced by Vonnegut since high school, where a teacher’s recommendation to read the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions made him completely obsessed with the man, as no one was better at articulating the chaotic absurdities of the 70’s, where it became his mission to embrace Vonnegut’s vision.  As a young man in his early 20’s, he reached out to him in 1982 by writing a letter expressing an interest in making a film about him, and much to his surprise Vonnegut actually responded, becoming his favorite author for life, not only his mentor but eventually a friend, spending much of their lives collecting material to make a film, but perhaps the friendship got in the way, becoming too close to the subject, where intruding cameras felt unnecessary and even disrespectful, yet it was the vehicle that held them together for the entire life of the novelist.  Extremely popular by students and young people who lined up in droves at book signings, struck by his rebellious tone of subversive absurdity and anti-authoritarianism, Vonnegut was viewed by some as the voice of the 20th century, much like Mark Twain of the 19th century (Vonnegut considered him an American saint), where his anti-war message particularly resonated during the Vietnam War, along with darkly autobiographical satire that occasionally veers into science-fiction and surrealism, while cartoonish drawings help illustrate his train of thought, using humor as a means to address more serious subject matter.  He was captured by the Nazi’s in Dresden along with hundreds of other American soldiers in WWII, with Vonnegut pointing out the absurdity of nations sending kids off to war, “The second world war was fought by children.  The movies give the impression that war is fought by middle-aged men.  It’s startling how young soldiers are,” only to be contaminated and traumatized by the gruesomeness of the experience, forever reliving the flashbacks, finding it impossible to talk about during their lifetimes.  Vonnegut ended up despising war, asserting those who hated war the most were the ones who fought on the front lines.  Conceiving a fractured narrative that actually involves time travel, he writes in his seminal work Slaughterhouse-Five:      

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.  Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.  He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941.  He’s gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.  He’s seen his birth and his death many times he says.  He pays random visits to all the events in between, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun.

Spending little time actually evaluating his work, this isn’t that kind of film, with Weide leaving that for others, instead it’s more an appreciation of the man himself, profoundly affected by his acerbic wit and gallows humor, his stubborn sense of injustice, and near maniacal demand for fairness, though the film clearly unveils a gloomy underside, as Vonnegut was no stranger to loneliness, chain-smoking, and a gut-wrenching alienation.  Weide instead provides personal details about his unconventional life, using a combination of home movies, constructed animated sequences that resemble his signature style, writers and friends in the publishing field, voiceovers read from his novels, some by Vonnegut himself and others by Sam Waterston, interviews with his three children Nanette, Edith, and Mark, and four nephews, also various biographers (Jerome Klinkowitz, Gregory Sumner, Ginger Strand and Rodney Allen), with frequent interjections by the director himself, creating a portrait of the man from early childhood, providing a glimpse of where it began, what happened in between, and where it ended.  Vonnegut grew up in one of the wealthiest families in Indianapolis, Indiana, that, to a large extent, helped build the city, with architects, a brewery, and a successful hardware store, but they lost their family fortune during the Great Depression, taking a toll on his parents, particularly their mother, who suffered from depression, eventually taking her own life, forcing them to move out of their stately home built by his architect father just for them, where the family handprints embedded into cement still remain.  The youngest of three children, Vonnegut claimed the youngest always has to resort to humor in order to get attention, growing particularly close to his older sister Allie, five years older, who provided the affection and emotional nourishment missing from his mother, going everywhere together, as she always looked after him.  Jumping back and forth in time, paying homage to his most famous literary work, the film plays out like a fractured memory with no conventional structure, feeling more abstract, yet it is massively researched, making his life difficult to film, as according to Vonnegut, “anything that is any good of mine is on a printed page.”  Weide is the perfect vehicle to channel Vonnegut’s life and cultural significance, as his affection for the man is felt in every frame of the film, feeling more like a heartfelt tribute to his life, a living testimonial to the kind of man and artist he would become, combining social criticism, black humor, and a call to basic human decency.  Success did not come easy, forced to take a job provided by his world-renowned atmospheric physicist brother Bernard (eight years older) doing corporate public relations work in the research division for General Electric, where he was privy to the latest scientific developments, some of which managed to reappear in Cat’s Cradle.  Becoming less enamored with science, growing more and more disgusted by the inhumanity of its effects, they moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts to become a full-time writer, where he started writing short stories, greatly encouraged by his wife Jane, who remained one of his biggest lifelong supporters, writing personalized letters back to publishing houses from the piles of rejection notices he received indicating why they were wrong, leading to his first published story, Report On the Barnhouse Effect, appearing in Collier’s magazine in 1950.  He quickly discovered that writing short stories was much more lucrative financially than writing novels, which can take a year or more to write, developing an unadorned writing style that he could churn out at a faster rate.  Short stories were the television of the era, delivered by mail to American households on a regular basis through magazines, also available at libraries, though it was television that eventually drove the short story market into oblivion.  Nonetheless, he wrote his first novel, Player Piano, which was published in 1952.  Vonnegut wrote briefly for Sports Illustrated, fired after a single article, and even managed a Saab dealership in Massachusetts, the first in the country, but used the building primarily as an office, having little interest in selling cars.  More than anything, what this film reveals is that time spent with this man, as Weide does, is invaluable, like a preserved time capsule.     

Eschewing anything resembling objectivity, bordering at times on self-indulgence (Vonnegut was himself self-indulgent), their lives merged and intersected through an increasingly close 25-year friendship, often seen chatting together, eventually taking center stage in the film, “He thinks what I think about the world,” gaining a unique vantage point of intimacy.  Given full access to the life of an iconic figure, this is mostly a love fest with rare moments of poignancy that can be extremely moving, eliciting genuine warmth, though it does include the artist in his best and worst moments.  Just a month after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he married Jane Marie Cox in a Quaker ceremony on the backyard terrace of Jane’s house in Indianapolis, with Allie as the maid of honor, honeymooning at French Lick Resort on the edge of the Hoosier National Forest, with Jane making him read her favorite novel The Brothers Karamazov on their honeymoon.  A decade later, he lost his sister prematurely to cancer, viewed as his guardian angel, contending Allie was the one person he always wrote for, becoming his exclusive target audience, adding her four children to his own, as her husband also died in a tragic railway bridge accident just days before her death.  These kids describe the seemingly unlimited joy and freedom they had wreaking havoc, like a marauding gang of hellraisers, pretty much left alone, turning Vonnegut’s life into chaos, subject to drastic mood swings, a grumpy and inattentive father, belligerently yelling at them to shut up when he was working, making everyone afraid of him, yet also growing elated after a successful day of writing, showing a relaxed and more playful side.  He ascended to overnight celebrity status with the massive success of Slaughterhouse-Five, a book that he painstakingly worked on following his war experiences, described as his Dresden novel, taking nearly 25-years to write, initially thinking it would be easy recounting what he saw, instead writing draft after draft until he finally got it right, where the money that had previously eluded him all his life suddenly poured in by the bucketloads.  Unfortunately, even for a Midwesterner like Vonnegut, success can go to one’s head, breaking up with his long-supportive wife Jane as he moved from his Cape Cod residence to New York, leaving her for Jill Krementz, nearly twenty years younger, a photojournalist who spent a year working in Vietnam, meeting while working on a photographic series about writers in the early 1970’s, eventually publishing 31 books of her own.  For such a quirky and inventive writer who challenges the norms, this couldn’t be more typical male chauvinist behavior in a midlife crisis, hoping for salvation by discarding the old and finding something new.  His kids, of course, were devastated, mostly feeling cruelly abandoned, having no words to describe what this did to their mother, who once thought she’d be a writer too, quickly recognizing her husband’s tremendous talent even before he did, sacrificing her own dreams and ambitions in order to help him (How Jane Vonnegut Made Kurt Vonnegut a Writer), making their divorce all the more heartbreaking.  Vonnegut had a difficult time living up to expectations after having such considerable success, as writing a follow-up work was a painful struggle, splitting his time between numerous anti-war rallies, college commencement addresses around the country, and also teaching a Harvard University course on creative writing.  While his personal life was disintegrating, facing his own issues with depression, critics lambasted his next novel with a scathing rebuke, unleashing a wave of criticism they may have held in reserve for years, claiming it lacked substance, exhibited a lack of fully realized female characters, with no racial diversity whatsoever.  In much of his work Vonnegut’s own voice is apparent, yet occasionally it is filtered through the literary alter-ego of a recurring character, science-fiction author Kilgore Trout (based on science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism about the human condition.  In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works before he died at the age of 84 from brain injuries in 2007, a result of falling and hitting his head.  Often derided and overlooked in intellectual circles and print reviews, as humor is never taken seriously, yet Vonnegut was able to incorporate it in unique ways, offering a sly commentary on the times we’re living in, conjuring up characters and places from his imagination that felt strangely different, where the irreverence of his breezy style recalled J. D. Salinger from the 50’s, writers that served in the war, deeply affected by the experience, but distinguished themselves afterwards by appealing to the alienation of youth with edgy, offbeat humor and biting sarcasm that set them apart by making literature fun to read, offering a kind of iconoclastic wisdom.