I would take that 215 IQ claim with a grain of salt. It is extremely unlikely — the world’s highest measured IQ is 228. The record before that was 196. An IQ over 200 occurs in one in several billion people.
The claim was probably made by Capote himself, and he was a notorious liar.
I saw it a week ago. Amazing! I was riveted by the flick.
I was surprised by the Harper Lee connection too.
Can anyone explain the significance of the scene where Capote is calling someone from a phone booth outside a sleazy bar (in Kansas I believe), as a rather seedy man watches him, and then the seedy guy enters the bar?
It’s an underground gay bar. No specific significance regarding Capote that I know of (no mention of him having any significant encounters with anyone in an underground gay bar in Kansas in the source material).
He and Lee were neighbors in Alabama where he’d been sent to live. Dill from To Kill a Mockingbird was based on him.
Robin
Sampiro writes:
> I wonder what ground the other Capote movie (featuring Sandra Bullock, most
> improbably, as Harper Lee) is going to cover.
Actually, Bullock and Keener are rather similar actresses. Both are bombshell beautiful brunettes, but they are now a little too old to play the hot young chicks they once could. It took some careful work with clothes and makeup to disguise how good-looking Keener is in Capote. It would require the same for Bullock.
The scary thing for me on seeing the film is being reminded how much I look like Truman Capote. Hoffman looks somewhat like Capote, but it obviously wasn’t easy to arrange all the shots to disguise how tall he is. He’s half a foot taller than Capote, and it seems to me that the reason that he’s sitting down in most scenes is to hide just how tall he is. I’m actually a little too short and too old to pass for Capote, but otherwise I’m quite similar.
Perhaps; for what it’s worth, Wikipedia notes it as fact. I have no idea about the authenticity of this claim; however, here we have someone who, with a very dodgey childhood of abuse and isolation, with no sense of permanence from parents, and with only the basics of a public school education, begins writing at a very early age and quite literally is able to change how we look at the way books can be written.
I figured it was probably a gay bar. I just couldn’t understand how it advanced the plot at all. The first thing Mrs. Mercotan and I concluded was that there probably was a further scene involving Capote frequenting such places while on assignment in Kansas, or further exposition of an outside relationship that he developed, that must have gotten cut.
It just seemed a bit out of sync with the rest of the flick.
I presume the 215 I.Q. is done by the older system for determining I.Q., where it actually was a quotient. I.Q., for a child, was defined as the child’s mental age defined by their chronological age. So if a seven-year-old child scored the same on an I.Q. test as an average fifteen-year-old, their I.Q. would be 15/7, which is pretty close to 215.
Those sorts of I.Q. scores are no longer used though. They would lead to I.Q. scores that would change throughout childhood, and they are hard to generalize to adults. Instead, the average I.Q. for a given age is now 100, by definition, and for each standard deviation above or below average 15 points are added or subtracted. In this system, people can’t get I.Q. scores above 200.
Love Capote, especially Music for Chameleons. Haven’t seen the movie yet, but bought *In Cold Blood * yesterday as preparation. I’m hoping it’s going to be good, based on the other “crime” stories of his that I’ve read- Handcarved Coffins and It’s All Good.