Movie Matchmaker: Martin Scorsese's The Devil in the White City
by Brian Tallerico

"He had to concentrate to hear the sobs from within. The airtight fittings, the iron walls, and the mineral-wool insulation deadened most of the sound, but he had found with experience that if he listened at the gas pipe, he heard everything more clearly. This was the time he most craved. It brought him a period of sexual release that seemed to last for hours, even though in fact the screams and pleading faded rather quickly. He filled the vault with gas, just to be sure."

The loving, warm feeling usually created by Movie Matchmaker, a recurring feature that has already matched David Fincher with World War Z, Edgar Wright with Discworld, Alfonso Cuaron with Odd Thomas, and Quentin Tarantino with Grand Theft Auto turns particularly dark this week... just in time for summer!

As flowers bloom and the sound of birds and playing children fill the air, the twisted souls at The Deadbolt remain indoors, watching movies, TV, and DVDs. Even when we get outside to read, it's often books with a darker edge. There are enough smiles and giggles in mainstream media, and sometimes you just want something a little darker to reach into the shadowy corners of your demented inner-child’s tree house of horrors. We'll get to some happier times with Movie Matchmaker eventually, but probably not until at least Memorial Day. Until then, we're still in our winter funk, imagining which masterful filmmakers can best tackle some of our favorite, slightly-disturbing reads and, this week, we’re featuring one of the best of the last decade, a book that already has a film adaptation working its way through the Hollywood machine but in a way that makes us worry whole-heartedly about its future. This week's Movie Matchmaker attempts to take a beloved non-fiction book (one that's already made the rounds on the Hollywood dating scene) and point it in the right direction for, not just settling down, but a date with multiple Oscars. Keep your baseball, parades, and other cliches of summer for a little while longer. We're going back to the White City.

THE BOOK

There are a few modern non-fiction writers whose works you should always buy without question, even before reviews. Jon Krakauer - Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven - is one. Buzz Bissinger - Friday Night Lights, Three Days in August - is another. There are certainly more, but perhaps the most consistent non-fiction writer across his first three books has been Erik Larson, who released the masterful Isaac's Storm, the riveting Thunderstuck, and the absolutely fascinating The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Thunderstruck was a slight disappointment compared to the first two and, while Isaac's Storm may actually be my personal favorite (you should read it as soon as possible), The Devil in the White City would make the best film, by far.

Does Devil in the White City sound familiar? It should. It achieved an uncanny popularity for, what is really, a nonfiction history book. But don’t let its mainstream success fool you. Devil is the real deal, a chilling and compelling tale about how much the world changed at the end of the 1800s and how it allowed two very different men to rise to prominence for two very different reasons. However, both men had something incredible in common - the way they used America’s turn-of-the-century advancements in technology and population to their advantage. As Chicago was coming to life as a major metropolis in 1893, the World's Fair was held there, bringing countless workers, businessmen, tourists, and those in search of a new life to the not-yet-Windy City. By some estimates, nearly HALF of the country's population attended the World's Fair. Think about that - that's an insane number, and it changed Chicago forever.

Architect Daniel Burnham, who helped design the fair, used the event to build. H.H. Holmes used it to destroy. With language that reads more like fiction than the horrifying reality it is, Larson details the incredible, nearly-simultaneous rise of these two fascinating men. While Burnham was constructing the Fair, a place where a large number of people would see electricity for the first time, Holmes was designing "The World's Fair Hotel," a motel right outside Burnham’s Fair, complete with torture chambers that included a gas chamber, dissection table, and crematorium. As more and more people were getting off the bus to Chicago, Burnham put them to work, and Holmes took advantage of the fact that anyone who would notice they were missing lived thousands of miles away. Burnham's accomplishments are so many that there are buildings still standing that he designed in Chicago and around the Midwest, while Herman Webster Mudgett (a.k.a. Dr. H.H. Holmes) is credited as the first American serial killer, reportedly offing 27 people, though, as Larson is quick to state, the number could be much higher. The duality of progress - how it can be used for growth and destruction, simultaneously - is the fascinating theme of Devil in the White City and one that could make for a great movie. This is the kind of source material that they started the Best Adapted Screenplay category for.

Movie Matchmaker: Martin Scorsese's The Devil in the White City Page 2