C. Ray Sellers

The movie does a disservice to the book. If you can’t acknowledge that Holly Golightly is a prostitute, nothing she does makes sense. Paul is straight? That’s as confusing as Holly getting $50 to visit the powder room. He’s a very silly straight man, if that’s the premise. Holly invites him into her bed, feeling perfectly safe and she’s not wrong. His agent pays him as though he’s a genius writer on retainer, but she pays for his lifestyle because she wants him to fulfill her needs. Yeah, straight young men would find that degrading. Right. (If only I’d had such a degrading experience as a young man). All this euphemism makes the movie absurd and silly. Whatever public persona defined Truman Capote, he could paint amazing images with words. In terms of imagery and lucid decription, I’ve never read anyone better within his zeitgeist. What he chose to write about wasn’t really in my genre, but even when it wasn’t I was amazed at his talent. Read Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, you’ll have the experience of reading a story told by a real writer’s writer. Not arty-farty or inaccessible like Faulkner or Fitzgerald and not primitive like Hemingway, Capote wrote readable, beautifully structured paragraphs that often have you putting down the book and pondering what you’ve read in a state of awe. I rewrote that to avoid saying awesome. Awesome is what you hear when you order a vanilla latté at Starbucks. Capote inspires awe like one truly capable of articulating the ineffable.