Zodiac Movie

SOMETIMES a reporter has to stick his neck out just a little. Even if that means putting himself squarely in the sights of a killer to get him to make a move. Robert Downey Jr. plays San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery on the trail of the Zodiac Killer in David Fincher's "Zodiac."

Author and cartoonist Robert Graysmith's obsession with the famed Zodiac serial killer began in 1969 when he was a shy young political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle. Thirty-eight years later, the killer, who was never caught, is still very much a part of Graysmith's life. Graysmith's book "Zodiac" is now in its 39th printing and reportedly has sold 400 million copies; his follow-up, "Zodiac Unmasked," is in its seventh printing.

Director David Fincher would do well to bring crime writer James Ellroy along to all of his interviews, as he did just days before the opening of his film "Zodiac." Tall, beanpole thin, the 58-year-old author riffs like a jazz musician on violence, masculinity, the toll of obsession. Ellroy is a charter member of the high-functioning, trying-to-be-happy walking wounded.

WHEN a studio picture wraps production, crews often take away jackets or T-shirts emblazoned with the movie's logo. But the visual effects team on David Fincher's "Zodiac," an exhaustively detailed take on the unsolved crimes of a Bay Area serial killer, said: "Crew jackets? No, thanks." "It's not that we aren't proud of our work on 'Zodiac,' " said Eric Barba, the visual effects supervisor for Digital Domain, which handled the bulk of the movie's 200-plus effects shots.

DAVID FINCHER, the director of "Se7en" and "Fight Club," has a reputation for obsessiveness. It's a quality apparent in the perfectionist virtuosity of his visual style and backed up by the stories of countless takes and other taskmaster demands that tend to emerge from his marathon shoots. Only his sixth feature in 15 years and his first since "Panic Room" in 2002, "Zodiac," out on DVD this week, makes literal the underlying theme of Fincher's career.