Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, Woman of the Hour follows Rodney Alcala, a savage murderer, and his infamous participation in a reality show that paired up one bachelorette with three bachelors.
In 1978, Rodney Alcala appeared on The Dating Game. Neither the audience nor the producers of the show had any idea of his real identity.
Trending
Woman of the Hour closely follows Alcala and how he was eventually captured. Anna Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, the real-life Dating Game bachelorette, and Alcala is portrayed by Daniel Zovatto.
Who is Rodney Alcala in Woman of the Hour?
Proving that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, Rodney Alcala did appear on the dating reality show, The Dating Game amid a murder spree.
He had assaulted and killed at least three women before his appearance on the show and murdered two more after the episode. Some believe that his actual number of killings might be around 130.
Alcala was born in 1943 in San Antonio and enlisted in the US Army at the age of 17. However, he was discharged after some time following a nervous breakdown and allegations of sexual misconduct.
In his long spree of murders and assaults, Alcala was eventually convicted of only seven murders during the 1970s, committed throughout New York and California.
How was Rodney Alcala caught as shown in Woman of the Hour?
It was Amy Best, who brought about Alcala’s end. Amy was a runaway whom Alcala had picked up in San Gabriel. After he drove her into the desert and assaulted her, for some strange reason, he broke down into tears.
As reported by Tudum, screenwriter McDonald mentioned:
"The story where the young drifter wakes up after having been attacked, and she looks over at him, and he’s crying — there’s a way in which I still don’t quite know what to make of that."
“I don’t think these sorts of people are really capable of empathy. So I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s probably something more [like] shame or embarrassment on some level.”
The situation gave Amy a good opportunity to escape. She somehow convinced him to spare her and once they were at a gas station, she ran for help.
Deep inside the desert, Alcala finally got arrested. Anna Kendrick observed:
“It felt important to me to connect these women to nature for several reasons, but one of which was, I kind of wanted to put them in places that spoke to the vastness of their life beyond this moment.”
She added:
“It’s a 90-minute movie. There’s only so much screen time that everybody can have. And I wanted — in spite of the way that we’re meeting them — I wanted their environment to reflect the beauty and the fullness of their whole life before that and what they should have had after.”
What happened to Rodney Alcala?
On July 24, 2021, Alcala died in a San Joaquin Valley, Calif. hospital while waiting for execution. He was previously held at San Quentin prison near San Francisco and was 77 years old when he passed away.
Woman of the Hour is streaming on Netflix.
Stay tuned to SoapCentral for more updates!
Reply
