YMMV / In Cold Blood

---

• Anvilicious: Both the book and film have sections toward their endings that make it very clear how much Truman Capote hated capital punishment.
• Award Snub: Truman Capote was highly annoyed that the 1967 film version wasn't nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, and yet the musical dud Doctor Dolittle was.
  "Anything allowing a Dolittle to happen is so rooked up it doesn't mean anything."
  • Scott Wilson and Robert Blake were also not nominated despite the widespread acclaim both received for their performances.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Robert Blake, who played Perry Smith in the 1967 film, became a real life murder suspect in 2001.
• Outlaw Couple: If one reads into the Homoerotic Subtext between Dick and Perry, They fit this trope.
• Ho Yay: The book has several instances of Hickock calling Smith "honey" and “baby”, and Smith remarks that he has "many thoughts of Dick" during their incarceration at Las Vegas. Given how Truman Capote was a well-known homosexual author and there were allegations that his relationship with the two killers exceeded "simply platonic", one has to wonder how much of this was unintentional.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Although this piece of work is often credited as the first Non-Fiction novel, in fact In Cold Blood appeared nine years later than Operation Massacre, from the Argentinian journalist and writer Rodolfo Walsh. The late was published in 1957, and was well-known at the moment.
  • Also Un millón de muertos (One Million Dead), from the Spanish writer José María Gironella Pous, is from 1964, two years prior to Capote's work.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Ryan Reynolds appeared in the 1996 TV miniseries as a minor character named Bobby Rupp.
  • Scott Wilson (Hickock in the 1967 film) has gained latter-day recognition as Hershel on The Walking Dead.

---