Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener in Capote; (below) the actors present their film at the 56th Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin. (AFP)

Capote, the film that fetched Philip Seymour Hoffman the Academy Award for best actor this year, releases on March 24 at the city theatres. Here?s the low-down on the film that mirrors the fascinating life of the flamboyant writer of In Cold Blood. Based on Gerald Clarke?s biography, Capote the film co-stars Catherine Keener and is directed by Bennett Miller.

In November, 1959, Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the author of Breakfast at Tiffany?s reads an article on a back page of the New York Times. It tells of the murders of four members of a well-known farm family ? the Clutters ?in Holcomb, Kansas. Something about this catches Capote?s eye.

It presents an opportunity, he believes, to test his long-held theory that, in the hands of the right writer, non-fiction can be as compelling as fiction. What impact have the murders had on that tiny town on the wind-swept plains? With that as his subject ? for his purpose, it does not matter if the murderers are never caught ? he convinces The New Yorker magazine to give him an assignment and he sets out for Kansas.

Accompanying him is a friend from his Alabama childhood: Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who within a few months will win a Pulitzer Prize and achieve fame of her own as the author of To Kill a Mocking Bird.

Caught in Las Vegas, the killers ? Perry Smith and Dick Hickock ? are returned to Kansas, where they are tried, convicted and sentenced to die. Capote visits them in jail. As he gets to know them, he realises that his subject is now as profound as any an American writer has ever tackled.

It is nothing less than the collision of two Americas: the safe, protected country the Clutters knew and the rootless, amoral country inhabited by their killers.

Gerald Clarke?s story

?Truman, I?ve been asked to write your biography. Will you cooperate?? From the other end of the telephone there was a short pause and an even shorter answer: ?Sure.? And so I began.

I thought my book would be relatively easy to write. I had, after all, written many profiles of famous people for Time magazine ? from Mae West to Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Taylor to Joseph Campbell.

And, finally, Truman Capote, who was then the most celebrated writer in America ? the author of In Cold Blood, the publishing phenomenon of the Sixties and a book that has influenced non-fiction writing ever since. Writing it was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was also the most exhilarating.

In search of information I crisscrossed the US and travelled several times to Europe. One of my destinations was of course, Kansas, the setting for In Cold Blood. I came to know all but two of the main characters in Capote, the movie ? the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. They were executed in 1965.

But I got to know them ? intimately, I thought?through the 40 or so letters they wrote to Truman. Most of their letters run several pages, and they are unsparing windows into life on death row.

?There?s the one and only T.C.,? Truman said at one point. ?There was nobody like me before, and there ain?t gonna be anybody like me after I?m gone.? That?s true ? who could dispute it? For a couple of hours, however, Philip comes close.

The man in the writer

Capote the film invites one to imagine a time when writers achieved the kind of fame and notoriety that is today associated with pop culture personalities. More importantly, Truman was a natural born self-promoter who paved the way for the cult of celebrity that is omnipresent today.

His fame cut across all categories, from high to low culture, from literary seriousness to high society frivolity. His name was a constant in newspapers, magazines and TV shows. When he walked around Manhattan, truck drivers would affectionately call to him ? ?Hey, Truman, how are ya ?? ? and long distance telephone operators would know who he was the instant he picked up the phone.