I’ve just seen There Will Be Blood, and assertions that it’s based on oilman Edward Doheny are a stretch. Yes, Doheny started out as a miner; yes, he found oil; yes, he had a mustache … and that’s about it. The real Doheny story, if you’re curious, is in the excellent biography Dark Side of Fortune by Margaret Leslie Davis.
But it’s clear that Doheny was on the mind of PT Anderson, or his location scout, at least. The final scenes were filmed in Greystone, the mansion Doheny built for his real-life son and his wife. Now the center of a park owned by the city of Beverly Hills, the mansion is frequently used for filming. When I was there this summer, I saw the recently restored bowling alley and basement bar. Restored — for this movie?
Paul Dano sat on those green velvet cushions! And Daniel Day Lewis sprawled on this bowling alley floor!
Which is neither here nor there — well, technically, I guess it’s there — but I bring it up because I love this kind of feedback loop between fiction and reality. A character marginally based on Doheny winds up inside a real house Doheny built, lending the film a verisimilitude, even though it’s not really about Doheny and Doheny never lived in that house at all.
Both Daniel Plainview and Edward Doheny are from Fon du Lac, WI.
There Will Be Blood would have been better if there was more of the real Doheny in the plot, because his life was more dramatic — he caused the great Teapot Dome scandal and his son and son’s secretary died in a still unsolved murder-suicide shooting in Greystone just before they might have been called to testify against the old man. The killings in LA’s biggest mansion and the subsequent hushing up by the police and press had a big influence on the subsequent writing career of an LA oil industry executive named Raymond Chandler (see “The High Window” where it’s specifically referenced).
Best Upton Sinclair adaptation ever?
http://diary.typepad.com/alan_horns_diary/2008/01/january-22-2008.html