This phase of Capote’s career attracted Hollywood interest around the turn of the millennium, at a time when films about writers had become reliable Oscar-bait.

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The romcom Shakespeare in Love (1998) swept seven Academy Awards; Nicole Kidman won Best Actress, by a nose, for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002); and Phillip Seymour Hoffman took out the gong for Best Actor for his unnerving impersonation of Truman in Capote (2005). (Another accomplished but less heralded film on the same subject, Infamous, with Toby Jones as Capote, appeared the following year.)

Nearly two decades later, another Capote has arrived in Feud: Capote vs The Swans (screening on Binge). And if Tom Hollander has form playing evil gay henchmen, as in a trusted lieutenant to an arms dealer in The Night Manager (2016) and a charming but debauched villain in The White Lotus (2022), his portrayal of Capote has a much more complicated balance of sympathy.

The series takes up Capote’s gruelling descent into drug and alcohol abuse post-In Cold Blood; his years mixing with the glamorous, ultra-rich women of New York’s jet set (whom he called his “swans”); the ostracism he faced from them when he published excerpts from Answered Prayers, an unfinished exposé of all the hypocrisy and viciousness lurking under the respectable public mask of high society.

Many of the secrets Capote revealed came from betraying intimate friendships with these women. They never forgave him for it, although his intent in writing was not to hurt them. He did it because he believed, with an air of tragic extremity, that art is more important than life.

This is a point driven home with rhetorical power in the final episode, where Capote at his lowest ebb is chaperoned through art galleries and gay bars by another writer, the prolific queer critic and author James Baldwin.

This imagined encounter is brilliant television, and it reframes the question of whether Capote is a genius or a monster, a great artist or an asshole, by examining structural power between writer and subject, and across society of which literary culture is part.

Writing creative nonfiction about rich white women blighted by privilege and gender expectation is, after all, a very different proposition from writing about death-row inmates, and the series doesn’t take sides: it provokes the viewer into thinking about the ethics and aesthetics of Capote’s work for themselves.

Still, Capote lived an eventful life. He was a celebrity as much as an artist. What about someone like Gerald Murnane, who lives a hermetic existence in rural Victoria and rarely leaves home? Could that make a decent movie?

Well, no, but not because Murnane’s a virtual recluse. The most successful television series streamed to date (according to Parrot Analytics), oddly enough, is Dickinson (Apple TV+, 2019-21), a high-spirited and deliberately anachronistic dramedy starring a bright young Emily Dickinson (in reality, a deeply private woman whose poems weren’t published until after her death).

So, alas, cultural neglect is the fundamental reason Murnane won’t make the cut.

Screen adaptations about Australian writers are criminally thin on the ground. We can cheer Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers, the Aussie-born author of Mary Poppins, sticking it to Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks (2013). The New Wave film of My Brilliant Career (1979) with Judy Davis and Sam Neill arguably counts, too. The heroine’s writing career never materialises, but Miles Franklin’s certainly did.

And in the upcoming series So Long, Marianne, Anna Torv and Noah Taylor will play Charmian Clift and George Johnson, living a Bohemian life with Leonard Cohen and friends on the Greek island of Hydra.

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Where, though, is the Patrick White biopic? I choose White as he might be the closest analogue we have to Capote: openly homosexual, a Nobel laureate, and so devoted to the cause of art he fell out with almost everybody.

And yet, the sad truth is that no one reads his work anymore. A 2006 literary hoax sent a chapter of White’s novel The Eye of the Storm to publishers and agents under the pseudonym Wraith Picket, an anagram of Patrick White. The response was predictable and embarrassing. Rejection came thick and fast; recognition did not.

In the end, we must accept that caring enough about our stories, and those who write them, is a precondition of adapting literary lives to the screen. Once they make it there, anything goes.

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