Netflix subscribers may have already seen trailers for the shocking crime thriller Woman of the Hour, starring Anna Kendrick. The film, which also serves as her directorial debut, is set to land on Netflix on Oct. 18. Per the trailer, Woman of the Hour claims to be based on a true story, and sees a woman crossing paths with an enigmatic serial killer on the set of a popular 1970s game show. While it may come as a shock to learn that a murderer would so brazenly advertise his name and face on a national broadcast, we can confirm that Woman of the Hour is in fact based on true events. In fact, true crime super-fans may already know the chilling tale, as footage from the game show has gone on to become the stuff of legends in found footage circles.
So, let’s take a look at the real world events that Woman of the Hour depicts, and see what we can learn about the unsettling true crime story. Be advised that looking into the true tale may inadvertently spoil the film, so read ahead at your own caution, or bookmark this page and check it out after you’ve watched. For now, there’s no way of knowing what creative liberties the film will take with the material, so there will surely still be a lot to enjoy even if you know how things panned out for the characters in real life. Like many true crime tales, the following write-up will contain some explicit references to horrific crimes such as sexual assault, mutilation and child kidnapping, so please read ahead at your own discretion.
What Is ‘Woman of the Hour’ All About?
If you’re too young to recall the hit game show The Dating Game, you may be highly surprised to learn about the series’ premise. The show, which began airing on ABC back in 1965, would task a young woman with questioning a trio of male suitors who are hidden from her view. Once she has gotten to know the flirtatious men based on their responses to prompts alone, she would make her selection for the man with whom she shared the most chemistry. The winning man would then be offered an opportunity to take the woman on a real life date as his grand prize. The show has been rebooted a number of times, and serves as the inspiration for a number of modern online dating shows.
The focus of Woman of the Hour, of course, centers on a single 1978 episode of The Dating Game, wherein aspiring actress Cheryl Bradshaw took center stage to anonymously choose her best match. Like any normal episode of the show, Bradshaw engaged in a verbal volley with a few men, including a few leading questions like, “What are girls for?” These questions are designed to trip the men and make them expose underlying negative traits. Despite the set-up, all three of the gentlemen managed to do a solid job at representing themselves, and Bradshaw ultimately chose a Texas-born man named Rodney Alcala as her champion. While audiences around the nation were satisfied with this conclusion, they would have no way of knowing that Alcala would later be found guilty of a laundry list of heinous crimes, including a spree of gruesome murders.
Who Was ‘The Dating Game’ Killer?
In the real-life episode of The Dating Game that serves as the basis for Woman of the Hour, Rodney Alcala was introduced as a professional photographer, with a penchant for extreme hobbies like motorcycle riding and skydiving. What producers of the romantic game show didn’t realize at the time, was that Alcala had already been arrested for numerous violent crimes before appearing on the program. In fact, Alcala was even listed among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives in 1971, after evading capture for the horrific sexual assault of an 8-year-old girl. Through what can only be described as a miscarriage of justice, Alcala was eventually given a 3 year prison sentence for the rape and attempted murder of the child, and was paroled after just 17 months behind bars.
Despite this lenient punishment, Alcala was undeterred, and went on to assault a 13-year-old girl less than 2 months after he was released from prison. The violent criminal was sent back to lock-up and once again paroled after only 2 years, in a maddening sequence of events that just doesn’t seem to add up. Alcala had also committed a number of murders during the 1960s and 1970s, though none of these slayings would yield a conviction until after his landmark appearance on the game show.
In 1978, just months before his selection to appear on The Dating Game, Rodney Alcala took a job at the Los Angeles Times. Alcala’s coworkers from the Times have since stepped forward to confirm that he had portfolios of hundreds of pictures of underage girls and boys posed in nude and sexually explicit situations, which he would display to his coworkers proudly. Sources claim that Alcala’s peers were confused by these volumes of photos, though none thought to alert the authorities. Today, many of the children in the photographs are unidentified, leaving Los Angeles police to believe there may be hundreds of cold case victims still tied to Alcala’s twisted murder spree.
What Happened to the Real Cheryl Bradshaw?
As stated above, Cheryl Bradshaw actually chose Rodney Alcala as the winner on her episode of The Dating Game. As a result, they had the opportunity to go on an all-expenses-paid private date. Despite the structure of the show, and Bradshaw’s initial warm feelings toward the bachelor, she eventually changed her mind about Alcala once the cameras stopped rolling. Apparently she found his presence to be quite creepy, and described him as having a generally unnerving nature. We can surmise that the young woman would definitely have become one of the potentially hundreds of victims of Alcala if she had gone through with the date, so clearly she made the right call. Criminal profilers have since speculated that this rejection may have fueled his bizarre bloodlust, as the killer began ramping up the frequency of murders shortly after the episode released.
Since the narrative of Woman of the Hour is primarily centered on Cheryl Bradshaw’s experience, we can speculate that the film’s final act will showcase a more involved rejection than the simple one provided in real life. Certain shots from the trailer appear to show Anna Kendrick briskly walking through a dark studio lot with a shadowy figure tailing closely behind her, so there are a number of ways the feature film can ratchet up the tension.
Alcala After ‘The Dating Game’
After appearing on the game show alongside Bradshaw, Alcala went on to murder at least 10 women and girls, the youngest of which was only 12 years old. Each of these victims were discovered to have signs of beating, mutilation and sexual assault, establishing a truly disgusting pattern of behavior in keeping with Alcala’s profile. In the decades since his final arrest in July of 1979, Alcala has been convicted, accused or named as a person of interest in dozens of additional assaults, kidnappings and murders. His alleged victims come from New York, New Hampshire, Arizona, Mississippi and Washington state.
Alcala was tried by California multiple times over the course of several decades, as new DNA evidence became available to the court. Each time, his criminal conviction was solidified, resulting in a sentence of the death penalty. After serving 42 years behind bars, Alcala died of natural causes in 2021, thus closing the book on his heinous life. While it’s certainly a net positive that the Earth is rid of this monster, it remains tragic that so many cases have been left unsolved, and so many families are still left with unanswered questions due to the actions of this man.
For now, there’s no way of knowing how much of this shocking tale will be present in Woman of the Hour, though critics who caught the film’s premiere at Toronto International Film Festival have already given the project excellent reviews, resulting in a near-perfect rating of 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
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