By Any Means Ends on Text Cards Instead of a Final Scene, and the Real 1966 Case Had a Better Ending Already Written

The true story behind this film did not end with a baseball bat. In January 1966, two men walked into a Laurel, Mississippi TV repair shop: an FBI agent and a Colombo crime family hitman named Gregory Scarpa. The man behind the counter was a klansman who was a suspect in the firebombing that killed Vernon Dahmer. They bought a television set and asked him to help carry it to the car, and he carried his own kidnapping out to the trunk. Scarpa beat him until he talked, and he gave up a 22 page confession naming the exalted Cyclops of the White Knights. That piece of paper is what put a case in the FBI files. The movie has a baseball bat instead. Hold that thought, because the same swap happens again at the very end.

The movie's actual ending is not a scene at all. David Strathairn walks up to a podium, tells the press the bureau has its confessions, the screen goes black, and then white type starts appearing on black cards, naming Gregory Scarpa, his FBI handler, and other figures from the case, card after card with photographs of the real people. I sat there reading a movie I had just watched. I wanted one more scene, and the movie handed me a bibliography. I understand that true story movies end on cards, that is the genre and that is fine. What is not fine is what these cards are being asked to carry, because everything that makes this a true story lives on those cards and almost nowhere else.

The biggest card jumps thirty years ahead for Scarpa's FBI handler

The largest card in the pile describes events involving Scarpa's FBI handler that happened roughly three decades after the last frame of the movie. The film reaches three decades past its own ending to make a point its last act never actually made on screen.

The film's opening baseball bat scene is contested by the FBI agents who were actually there

The movie opens in 1964 with Scarpa, a baseball bat, and klan preacher Edgar Ray Killen, staged as the reason the FBI found the three civil rights workers buried in the dam. Whether that scene happened is, as I found when I went looking, the single most fought over detail in this whole story. Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion Ledger and Mississippi Today, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient whose reporting is the reason Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers finally went to prison in 1998 for ordering the hit on Dahmer, wrote about the film in December. What he reported is that the former FBI agents who were actually in that field office say the bat scene did not happen, and that the location of the bodies actually came from a highway patrolman who knew the klansmen and told an FBI inspector, with agents digging four days later. The bat comes from a book by Peter Lance, and Lance is a five time Emmy winner, so I am not waving him off, but the bureau has never once in 60 years confirmed Scarpa was even in Mississippi. Meanwhile the television set story is the one that is actually in the files. The truth had a television set in it, and the film chose the bat. That is the whole movie in one decision for me.

The film gets Vernon Dahmer's death exactly right

What this movie gets right, it gets right in the most important way, and I am not going to let the rest of this piece bury that. On January 9th, 1966, Vernon Dahmer went on the radio and said he would collect poll taxes for his neighbors and pay them out of his own pocket for anyone who could not afford it. The next night, the White Knights firebombed his house and his store. The film stages it the way it happened: he is in the doorway returning fire so his wife and children can get out the back, and he dies from the burns and the smoke he swallowed standing on that door so his family could live. Giancarlo Esposito plays him with a stillness I did not expect from an actor whose recent career has leaned on menace, and it is the best scene in the film, not close.

Vernon Dahmer's own children disagree about the movie's fictional additions

His son, Dennis Dahmer, is petitioning Paramount, saying in his own words that "it's fiction, they're creating a black FBI agent that didn't exist and his legacy deserves to be told truthfully about who he was and not intermeshed with fictional characters and vigilante justice storylines that did not happen." His sister Betty, who was 10 years old that night and was burned, told Jerry Mitchell, "The way the movie is portrayed, it's not about Vernon Dahmer. It's about Gregory Scarpa. I have no problem with it." Their mother Ellie is 101 and alive. I am not going to stand here and tell that family who is right, because I think they both are. Dennis is right that the composite agent character never existed. Betty is right that it is really Scarpa's movie. The film got the night of January 10th exactly right and built fiction on either side of it, and I can hold both of those truths at the same time.

"I got to live here" is the line the film wrote and then forgot it wrote

There is a knock down, drag out street fight in the film where Scarpa keeps pushing the composite FBI agent, played by Mark Wahlberg, until he finally swings, and the line the character says is "I got to live here." That is the whole character in four words. The producers have said flat out that this composite character grew up in Mississippi and moved to Chicago, and the bureau sent him back with a killer in the passenger seat. After the confessions, after the podium, after he gets fired and goes back to his motel, the movie has exactly one question left to answer: does the man who said he has to live here actually go home and live there? Instead the movie cuts to black and types the ending at you.

The Klan violence looks like a history channel reenactment by design

Director Elegance Bratton said this week that he shot the klan violence in a way meant, in his words, to "deny you that satisfaction," because he did not want the burning cross to be a spectacle. I respect that. But what it produces on screen is a klan that is all pseudo religious mumbo jumbo, men spewing scripture while pouring gasoline on a cross with nothing underneath it, no hierarchy, nothing showing the White Knights as an organization with a chain of command and a man at the top who could order a firebombing over the phone. An important story told with that easy look starts to feel like something the production was obligated to make rather than something somebody was dying to make. I want to be careful here because I am describing what the screen feels like, not what anyone intended, and Bratton's own life argues against the idea that this was phoned in. But he is also the one who said the film was shot in 25 days, and a paint by numbers schedule like that buys you a story that needed more like 40. It did not feel like the film ran out of story. It felt like it ran out of days.

The ending I would have shot: a handful of dirt on a Mississippi road

The cheap fix costs a graphics artist a week: keep the cards, but give every card a picture, slow motion black and white, a newspaper front page with an animated image, and let the headlines tell the story, then cross fade from Mark Wahlberg to the actual Gregory Scarpa on the last card and dissolve to black. That alone beats what is there now. The version I actually want keeps Strathairn at the podium, keeps the cut to black for a single beat, then hard cuts to the country road the film has already shown a dozen times. A tight close up at road level, the composite agent's shoes walk into frame, his hand comes down and picks up a handful of dirt off that road, a very common thing for a man from the South to do, and if you are from there, like my father is, you know exactly what he is doing without me explaining it. Cut to the wide shot, he stands, dusts his hands off, looks past the camera toward whatever comes next, then turns and looks back down the road toward home. Diane Warren wrote a title song for this film, and it has nowhere to live right now, so the credits could roll over him walking away from us until he is a shape, then nothing, fading to black on the final title card. One location the production already paid for, one actor, almost no dialogue, maybe an hour out of a 25 day schedule, and it answers the only question the film left open: whether "I got to live here" was a threat or a promise.

I can see the movie they wanted to make very clearly, in that doorway and on that road. That is just not what we got, and that is the most unfortunate part of it. They had the road, and they used the cards instead.

If you have seen it, what would you have put on that road for the final shot?