Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams — writers, celebrities, geniuses —
catapulted to fame in the 1950s, sparking a friendship and rivalry spanning
nearly 40 years until their deaths within a year of each other.
Inextricably entwined, and fixtures of their age, they were creative
powerhouses (and gay men) who dealt with success and its evanescence in
vastly different ways.
In Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, filmmaker Lisa
Immordino Vreeland (
Love, Cecil, Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has
to Travel
) brings the two forces together in a unique and fascinating tête-à-tête,
comparing and contrasting their trajectories through dueling voices — the
writers’ own, culled from archival footage, and the voices of actors Jim
Parsons and Zachary Quinto (
The Boys in the Band) portraying,
respectively, Capote and Williams at various stages of their lives. Both
created rich, imaginary worlds and characters (Blanche DuBois, Holly
Golightly) that left indelible marks on the era — and both paid the price
of colossal success and fame through alcoholism and periods of artistic
stagnation.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland, whose growing body of work examines the working
lives and social impact of 20th-century creative visionaries, adds two more
remarkable subjects to her oeuvre, tumultuous compatriots who electrified
the culture with words steeped in the nascent forces that shaped them.
