THE MOVIE DEAD Man’s Wire, directed by Gus Van Sant and opening in theaters nationally on January 15, retells the sordid saga of Tony Kiritsis. On February 8, 1977, Kiritsis, an Indianapolis businessman, instigated one of the most bizarre hostage standoffs in history. If the details of this long-ago incident are a bit fuzzy or if you weren’t born yet, here’s a brief review to get you up to speed for the film.
On that fateful day, Kiritsis, who was behind on mortgage payments on a piece of property he owned, visited his brokerage office to see about getting an extension. At least that’s the story he fed them. Kiritsis was convinced the folks holding the paper on his property, Richard Hall and his father, M.L. Hall, wanted to foreclose and keep the land for themselves. He showed up for his “meeting” toting a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun and looped a wire around Richard Hall’s neck, connecting it to the scattergun’s trigger and creating a “dead man’s line” that would go off if either Kiritsis lost his grip on the weapon or Hall tried to get away.
Kiritsis then called the cops, led Hall (first on foot, then by car) back to his apartment, and spent 63 straight hours holding court with local media about what he’d done and why he did it. Reporters and cops swarmed his apartment building as the nation watched, enthralled.
In the end, after police made a promise that Kiritsis would not serve time for his actions and Hall signed a document under duress stating that he’d wronged Kiritsis and would give him $5 million, Kiritsis brought Hall down to the lobby of the building. There, he launched into a passionate diatribe, letting out a storm of obscenities on live television and radio that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. During his speech, the flatfoots had a plan to take him out if he looked like he was about to pull the trigger—shoot him in the head and grab the shotgun before it went off—which stood a good chance of unfolding on live TV. Finally, Kiritsis removed the wire from Hall’s neck and fired the shotgun into the air to prove he hadn’t been bluffing. He was promptly arrested.
And then things got really weird. Among a certain segment of the proletariat, Kiritsis, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity, became a folk hero of sorts. So much so that when the verdict was announced on October 21, 1977, at an Indiana Pacers game at Market Square Arena, the audience cheered. Kiritsis cooled his heels in a mental institution until his release in January of 1988. He spent the rest of his life puttering around Indianapolis until he passed away in 2005 at the age of 72.
It should come as no surprise that podcasters and documentarians have found this story incredibly compelling. Over the decades, plenty have retold the story. A 1982 documentary about U.S. violence called The Killing of America featured it prominently, and a documentary about the incident called Dead Man’s Line came out in 2018, followed in 2022 by a podcast dramatization of the story voiced in part by John Hamm.
