How Killers Of The Flower Moon Differs From The True Story

what really happened in oage County all those years ago here are the shocking details killers of the flower Moon left out spoilers ahead in 2017 a true crime story called killers of the flower Moon written by the New Yorker staffer David Grant became a sensation at a time when the genre was taking over bookshelves streaming services and podcasting platforms gr's meticulously researched yet relatively slim volume told the compelling and all but unknown tale of a community of indigenous Americans in turn of the century Oklahoma who'd struck at Rich during an oil boom only to become the targets of what seemed like nefarious criminal plots killers of the flower Moon had all the makings of a great page Turner love lust greed murder not to mention twists that were almost too shocking to be true but true it all was her house was blown up the mom was poisoned and Anna was shot Martin scorsi took on the gargantuan task of adapting the book to film but explained that he reworked the script to be less about White characters and to focus more on the oage characters the film still manages to get most of the important details right but the change in Framing and the time constraints even at 3 hours and 26 minutes have necessarily led to some inaccuracies and omissions Martin scorsese's film adaptation of kill of the flower Moon kicks off when the Osage discover an oil deposit on their reservation just as Ernest Burkhart arrives on a train to try his luck in the Black Gold Rich indigenous American territory from the moment DiCaprio's face comes into view the audience experiences the rest of the movie through ernest's eyes which is a major departure from the book How The oage got to Oklahoma in the first place as well as how they ended up in possession of their land and more importantly their mineral rights is glossed over all of the action takes place at the height of the so-called reign of terror it's mentioned in dialogue that the Osage were driven from their ancestral home but with few other details David Grant outlines in the book version of killers of the flower Moon how president Thomas Jefferson after having acquired the Louisiana Purchase from the French promised peace with the oage who lived there it wasn't to be in the years that followed Jefferson threatened the o AG into signing a treaty lest they become enemies of the state they would eventually Rob them of roughly 100 million Acres of their native land and push them West Molly burkhart's ancestors ended up in Kansas where white settlers soon terrorized the oage the tribe decided the best way forward was to purchase land that white men wouldn't want they bought the hilly Rocky terrain that would eventually make them unimaginably wealthy for 70 cents an acre because it wasn't hospitable to western style development whose land is this my land though they exist slightly more in the periphery of David Gran's book William hail and Ernest Burkhart are arguably the two main characters of Martin scorsi killers of the flower Moon hail is depicted as empathetic toward the O age generous and Charming at least at first later he's shown to be cold cunning and calculating to no end Burkhart comes off as something of a simple with a weakness for women these portrayals closely resemble the picture Grand pains with one key difference as played by dairo and DiCaprio they're both much older than their counterparts would have been in real life which has an effect on the story's veracity according to the book killers of the flower Moon Ernest Burkhart was just 19 years old when he arrived in Fairfax Oklahoma to do odd jobs for his uncle he's meant to be about 28 during the time most of the movies action takes place and Gran's book suggests that his Youth and handsome face were part of what attracted Molly to nnest DiCaprio certainly has a movie star as good looks but at 48 years old when the film was released he was more than double the character's real age of the film's start similarly William hail was between 40 and 51 years old when he was wielding influence over nearly everyone in and around Fairfax with his history of playing villains and anti-heroes dairo is is as intimidating as hail would have been but at 80 he's also three decades more elderly in the film William hail Eng Gracies himself with the oage by respecting and sometimes even participating in their cultural traditions of Molly's father he says that he always made it a point to call him by his oage name characters in the movie also discuss how the oage don't really belong until they are given their indigenous American name and once it's been bestowed upon them it can never be be taken away that's a nice sentiment but as Molly and her sisters as well as her mother are all referred to by their anglicized names throughout the movie it didn't hold true David Gran's book killers of the flower Moon provides readers with the girls real names as well as the story of how they lost them to time even during their own lives but first nikai lost his name sitting outside a trading post as the settlers and Prospectors got to know him while he was selling Furs The Graduate began to call him Jimmy before long his four daughters would be given white names too once America had dealt with indigenous inhabitants by containing them on reservations but the mood had shifted and during Molly's childhood assimilation was preferable that meant girls were made to learn English attend church and practice the skills of the American housewife Molly was just seven when the government sent her to a boarding school for this purpose the film adaptation of killers of the the flower Moon does a good job of illustrating how the Osage dealt with prejudice and horrific unfairness pertaining to their access to their vast wealth it's true that the tribe made tens of millions of dollars off of their mineral rights and it's true that they were subjected to a kind of bureaucratic oppression by way of a system that installed white conservators to oversee their fortunes at dinners held by Molly and Ernest in local places of business and on the streets White characters complain about the oag's comfortable standard of living and their lack of a need to work this wealth should come to us montages and photographs at the film's beginning show oage women dressed up in French finery with flapper haircuts that would have been what visitors to Fairfax would have seen for themselves in the early 20th century but bigoted rumors of the O AG's lavish spending habits went beyond car and home ownership and Martin scores he makes Illusions to the these prejudiced beliefs without fully explaining that they didn't hold water in the book killers of the flower Moon David Gran tells how journalists would write Sensational stories about wasteful oage who would throw pianos out on their lawns or buy new cars every time one got a flat tire or ran out of gas in the film version of killers of the flower Moon a car salesman does tell an oage woman to come back for a new model if she gets a flat tire or runs out of gas the reality was the 's spending habits were no different than those of wealthy white Americans the murder of Molly's sister Anna is along with the murders of Bill and Retta Smith and Henry ran one of the cases that makes up the central Narrative of both the book and the film version of killers of the flower moon in the film version however Anna's death is never much of a mystery it's heavily implied in a coded conversation between Ernest and his brother Byron that hail wants Anna taken care of and that the evening of Molly and ernest's dinner party is the night to do it only the details that Byron was the accomplice and Kelsey Morrison fired the gun are left unresolved until the end in real life there were multiple plausible suspects according to the book killers of the flower Moon Anna had been married to a man named Oda Brown an unsavory character whom she'd written out of her will as Anna had a reputation for drinking and carousing Oda would have had plenty of reasons to want her dead early in the investigation a man confessed that Oda Brown had paid him $8,000 to kill Anna a private investigator also followed a lead that claimed a jealous woman named Rose Osage had done in Anna after the latter had gone after her boyfriend as it turned out some of the very people who were supposed to be solving Anna's murder were actually obstructing the investigation at the very beginning of the film an oage Chief announces that he's symbolically burying the trib's ceremonial pipe as a way of mourning the dying out of their people's traditional ways during the time of coercive assimilation this may well have happened the O AG did use such pipes and rights and rituals no ceremony quite like this takes place in David Gran's accounting however what Gran does illustrate is the burial customs of the oage as members of the tribe are systematically murdered and laid to rest we're making a film about an historical event that is Central to the oage history again Martin scorsi alludes to these Customs but doesn't explain them or show them in their entirety in the film because the deceased Anna's face isn't intact Molly wakes up in the middle of a nightmare worried that the oage God won't recognize her older sister and welcome her into the Afterlife in the print version of killers of the flower Moon Molly is upset at her funeral that Anna's face cannot be painted to signal that her spirit is to join with those of her ancestor ERS also during the film during lizz's and baby Anna's funerals apples are placed on top of the casket when Lizzy passes the audience watches as she's reunited with her ancestors in what's implied to be a spirit realm the book is more explicit about these references the oage would pack the casket with food meant to last the 3 days it took the person inside to reach the happy hunting ground or the oages concept of Heaven There is a great deal of overlap between how Anna Brown's life and death are represented in David Gran's book and in Martin scorsese's movie both characterize the eldest of Lizzy Q's four daughters as a woman who finds trouble easily she really did carry a pistol in her purse when she went out according to the book killers of the flower Moon and she went out a lot so much so that Molly was able to reassure herself for the 5 to 7 days that her sister was missing that she probably had just skipped town to have an impromptu adventure and as happens in the the movie Anna really did cause a scene at Molly's house the night she went missing she did tell Byron she'd kill him if she caught him with another woman and she confessed to a driver that she was pregnant but scorsese's movie leaves open a question that Gran answers in his book Gran points out that some in Anna's Inner Circle knew she was pregnant in the film the news of Anna's pregnancy comes as a surprise to all William hail asks Byron if anyone had been gossiping about Anna's unborn child and implying that it could have been Byron's or even hails this insinuates that both men had affairs with Anna but the line of dialogue is not definitive according to the book several witnesses claimed that hail had carried on a relationship with Anna and was the father of her baby Midway through the film version of killers of the flower Moon William hail becomes increasingly displeased with the behavior of his nephew Ernest has been making mistakes his scheme to have Blackie Thompson steal his car for the insurance money backfired spectacularly a potential henchman wound up in prison and the whole ordeal had the effect of putting unwanted attention on hail and Ernest making them vulnerable to snitches should Blackie ever turn which is exactly what happens Ernest also fails to prevent his wife from lobbying for more intervention from private investigators and law enforcement regarding the murders hail and ernest's brother Byron escort him into a room within the local Masonic Lodge where hail bends him over backward and beats him repeatedly with a large paddle Until It Breaks according to David Grant William hail was the kind of man who not only amassed real political power but also symbolic status he was a reserved deputy sheriff an honorary position that nevertheless allowed him to carry a badge in firearms and medal in criminal cases he also took to calling himself Reverend as well as king hail did wear a Mason's lapel pen but there's no mention of any official affiliation with the secretive organization in the book records exist showing that hail was initiated into the local branch but they suggest that he likely wasn't a very high ranking member this 10 scene is almost certainly a Martin scorsi invention in keeping with his style of intrigu Laden organized crime sagas perhaps the most significant Omission in Martin scores he's killers of the flower moon is the scope of the corruption and the burgeoning governments and industries of o County which extended all the way to what would become multinational corporations and the White House as Ernest burkart arrives in Fairfax Town's folk advertise opportunities to the men disembarking from the train some hold signs bearing names like Phillips and Burbank it's mentioned once in the film that oage headrights couldn't be sold will these women D with how oage suffer from illness you have to make it the head rats come to you but drilling leases could be so David Gran describes how major players like Getty Phillips Sinclair and representatives from golf oil would show up at Fairfax auctions run by the department of the interior and spend on occasion more than a million dollars for access to Choice tracks of land these same families and companies would use their vast incomes from the oil direct to influence federal government officials into enacting policies that benefited their interests which allowed their businesses to grow exponentially they supported the election of President Warren G Harding and Infused his campaign with cash the infamous Teapot Dome scandal that occurred on Harding's watch has indirect ties to the OS killings the same oil men who bought leases at Fairfax auctions also bribed the Secretary of the Interior with hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange they got secret lucrative contracts to formerly protected Naval petroleum reserves like the one near Teapot Dome Rock in Wyoming a cone quence of making Ernest Burkhart the anti-hero protagonist of killers of the flower moon is that the film has to create an inner life for him David Gran relies only on the historical record in which ernest's true feelings and motives remain a mystery in the film Ernest has little problem dispatching the oage including his wife's family members but he deludes himself into forgetting that in the end Molly will have to die too DiCaprio's Earnest testifies under oath that he genu genely fell in love with his wife when he worked as her driver and as his fate becomes unavoidable he seems only to care about his family's well-being even after she learns he was involved in her sister's deaths Molly remains devoted to him she only walks away when he struggles to say whether he gave her more than insulin when administering her injections Gran writes in the book killers of the flower Moon Burkhart never admitted having any knowledge that Molly was being poisoned perhaps this was the one sin that he couldn't bear to admit or perhaps hail had not trusted him to kill his own wife instead the Sha brothers who were probably still responsible for the injections were questioned about them that doesn't mean Molly was as understanding as she is in the movie in real life Molly did cling to the illusion of their marriage even after her health improved when she was removed from her husband's care but as soon as Ernest was proven to be complicit in the murders she divorced him and recoiled in horror At The Mention Of His Name thereafter I don't care for watching horses well I'm a different kind of horse the film killers of the flower Moon definitely takes some creative liberties with Molly Burkhart possibly because the character who's suffering from diabetes is restricted to a bed for most of the film's runtime Lily Gladstone is given more to do in a fictionalized scene with some historical basis after the private investigator they've hired is killed Molly makes the trip to the nation's capital to implore President Calvin kulage to do something about the unsolved oage murders that's not exactly how it happened according to David Grant the oage tribal council did draft a formal resolution urging the justice department to intervene as shown in the film but Gran's book acknowledges that Molly who had become paranoid and reasonably so disappears from the historical record until 1925 as far as anyone knows she didn't trap Trav to Washington DC instead a lawyer and a Kansas Senator both part indigenous American pressured the government to do something Calvin kulage did meet and pose for pictures with OS Representatives but Molly doesn't appear to have been one of them at one point in the film Molly's family hires a private investigator she's introduced to one William J Burns who colorfully rattles off his address as being just about every big city on the planet Burns takes the case but is promptly silenced by Ernest and Byron Burkhart later at dinner hail convinces Molly that the Pi had simply skipped town with her money since she made the mistake of paying him first he and Ernest know full well what really became of the gumshoe Burns was a real private investigator and the book killers of the flower Moon provides much more information about him he really did introduce himself with that overlong slogan Burns was a Pioneer in the field of private investing ation who excelled at self-promotion and even wrote detective stories about his exploits but Burns himself didn't work for Molly and he didn't die at the hands of the Burkhart Brothers The oage Hired not one but several private investigators to pursue leads they operated anonymously using numbers as code names and many worked under Burns as employees of his detective agency however it was later revealed that Scott matthys the owner of the big hill Trading Company which was the town's retail Center had served as a middleman matthys was loyal to William hail which meant at least some of the detectives hired to solve the case were actually being paid to provide cover for the criminal conspirators in rewriting the film killers of the flower moon to focus more on Ernest and Molly Burkhart Martin scorsi and co-writer Eric Roth drastically reduced the role of Tom white who is originally supposed to be the lead played by Leonardo DiCaprio white is the protagonist of the second half of David Gran's book which reads in part like a character study of this real life Texas Ranger turned federal agent in the film he's little more than a functionary in a wide rimmed hat he arrives at the Burkhart home at the start of his investigation and unsuccessfully pressures Ernest to let him see Molly that didn't happen but white did assemble a team of undercover agents including a Rancher and insurance salesman and an indigenous American looking for long-lost relatives as depicted in scorsi killers of flower Moon manad look seems more like an epidemic than bad luck to me otherwise much of White's fascinating backstory is left unexplored as is what became of him after his tenure in Osage County according to Grant white was a nonviolent Man by Nature despite his profession his bravery and intelligence outshined his capacity for administrative work which often put him in opposition to J edar Hoover in addition to being a profile of agent Tom White the print version of killers of the flower moon is also the story of the founding of the Bureau of Investigation the intelligence gathering and law enforcement organization within the American government that would shortly thereafter be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the FBI in fact the subtitle of David Gran's book is the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI but by switching the point of view from white to Ernest burkart Martin scorsi necessarily EX IES the FBI plot in contrast chapter upon chapter in the book deals with the agency's inner workings and the methods and Technologies developed either just before or concurrent with the oage murder investigations Jer Hoover's name is mentioned just once in the film even though he's a looming presence in gr's reporting and of course in history rather than Lone Rangers with guns drawn Hoover's ideal crime Fighters were multi-skilled and highly capable CA in a machine they were taught to identify suspects with the use of mug shots and fingerprinting and they were expected to be able to remain under cover for long periods of time the film includes characters like John Ren working undercover as well as scenes in which suspects like John ramsy Buckle Under Pressure but it doesn't attempt to tell the FBI's origin story the film killers of the flower Moon concludes with an unexpected framing device the camera pulls away from the oage and suddenly the audience realized is what theyve been watching has been the subject of an early 20th century True Crime radio show complete with scripted reenactments fly effects and sponsors Martin scorsi himself appears to read what amounts to a postcript the somber reality is that the public quickly lost interest in the story of the Osage murders after providing a brief summary of what became of all the key players scorsi tells us that Molly's obituary memorialized her dead family members but failed to mentioned that they were killed in Cold Blood by her husband and his associates as David Gran describes in his book told from his perspective the awful true story of the reign of terror really was turned into a radio program paid for by Lucky Strike cigarettes however the show was produced at the behest of Jay Edgar Hoover in the FBI to valorize the agency's achievements rather than lamenting the Injustice Molly's family faced even in death while the film killers of the the flower Moon ends on a down note it's nothing like the sinking feeling the reader gets when David Gran widens the lens on his version of events throughout Martin scorsese's movie short scenes sometimes only a single shot depict various oage victims and the manner in which they were murdered such as an oage woman being gunned down at close range outside her home and the murder staged to look like a suicide the movie uses the figure that's generally attributed to the reign of terror when all was said and done approximately 24 oage lost their lives due to hail's malevolence but the book killers of the flower Moon ends with this sentence there was another layer to the case a deeper darker even more terrifying conspiracy which the bureau had never exposed Gran claims that William hail was only one of many killers picking off oage for their head rights and fortunes while the reign of terror is said to have lasted from 1921 to 1926 Gran uncovered suspicious deaths that dated from 1918 to 1931 records show that many many Osage women died under the guardianship of the supposedly upstanding white men who controlled their Estates and for the most part their deaths were never investigated hundreds of oage may have been the victims of the hate and greed that fueled the killings which were carried out not by one family of conspirators but by an entire towns worth

Channel: Grunge

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Keywords: grunge, killers of the flower moon, true story, movie, scorsese

Id: 6j6PrxkbKVk

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023