Contested Versace murder drama hits television
Dismissed as “fiction” by the Versace family and met with mixed reviews, a controversial new drama depicting the 1997 murder of Gianni Versace just made its US television debut.
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” is the second edition of a crime story franchise whose first iteration won rave reviews and a bevy of awards for revisiting the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial.
The latest nine-episode series began airing on television network FX late Wednesday, before being released on demand in Europe later this week.
Like “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” which won two Golden Globes and nine Emmy Awards, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is a 1990s celebrity crime story, uniting fame and wealth with the darker underbelly of human nature.
Like “The People,” which spun a larger narrative of racial tension between black and white Americans, “The Assassination” paints a wider portrait of gay life in America in the 1990s, prejudice, hostility and bigotry.
Versace is played by Venezuelan heartthrob Edgar Ramirez, Oscar-winner Penelope Cruz is Donatella – the hardheaded sister who took over the label after her brother’s death – and singer Ricky Martin is ‘long-term boyfriend, Antonio D’Amico.
But publicity in the run-up to its release has been dominated by the Versace family, who released an angry statement from their global fashion emporium in Milan on January 10.
They slammed the series as a “work of fiction,” saying they had “neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series” and reacted with particular fury to claims that Versace was HIV-positive.
“After so many years we still lack respect for the dead, we want to create a scandal around someone who can no longer defend themselves,” said Donatella.
D’Amico, who found Versace on the steps of his beachfront Miami mansion just moments after the July 15, 1997 killing, has complained that images he had seen online of his reaction in the series are incorrect.
“The picture of Ricky Martin holding the body in his arms is ridiculous,” he told the Observer newspaper last July. “Maybe it’s the director’s poetic license, but that is not how I reacted.”
“Its responsibility may be to just be true enough. But there’s something tragic and unfair about becoming a spectacle in death, especially in a spectacle that’s more about a murderer than any of his victims,” griped a New York Times review.
The series is based on the book “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in US History,” by Maureen Orth, which was published two years after the killing and retraces Cunanan’s three-month murder spree.
As such, the drama is centered less on the Italian fashion genius and more on spree killer, social climber and compulsive liar Andrew Cunanan, who murdered four other gay men before killing Versace. His motives remain shrouded in mystery.
Murdering men from San Diego to Miami, Cunanan was on America’s list of top 10 most wanted criminals for more than a month before the Versace murder.
Cunanan – portrayed by actor Darren Criss – comes across as an enigma, at times brilliant and charming but also narcissistic and violent. He committed suicide, aged 27, a few days after assassinating 50-year-old Versace.
The 1990s were a time when living openly as a gay man was still met with prejudice and bigotry in the United States, 18 years before the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a legal right.
Orth suggests in her book that the lackluster investigation into Cunanan’s murders stemmed at least in part from the fact that the victims were gay.
At least some filming took place in Versace’s Miami home, which is today a boutique hotel where rooms can cost in excess of $1,000 a night.
Cruz, whose performance has excited critics – and who has worn Versace on the red carpet – said she won Donatella’s tacit blessing before accepting the role.
“If somebody was going to do it, she was really happy that it was me, because I think she knows what I feel for her,” she told US chat show host Ellen DeGeneres.
“They’re the most generous, kind people. It’s important for me that when she sees what I’ve done, she can feel the love and respect that I have put
there,” she said.
Anti-gay bias
Do the intersecting lives of a fashion designer and the serial killer who murdered him add up to a political saga?
Absolutely, says Ryan Murphy, the series’ powerhouse executive producer.
“It was a political murder,” Murphy said, defending the striking use of “assassination” in the title. The 1997 shooting by Cunanan of the groundbreaking Italian designer is enveloped in social issues that resonate today, Murphy, Ramirez and Ricky Martin said.
Cunanan was a “person who targeted people specifically to shame them and to out
them, and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live,” Murphy said.
Ramirez and Martin concurred in separate interviews with Murphy’s assessment.
Versace, who was 50 and reaching new heights of success when he was gunned down in front of his lavish Miami Beach estate, died because of prejudice, said Ramirez (who, with weight added and hair dyed and thinned for “Versace,” is unrecognizable as the actor who appeared in “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Carlos”).
Although Cunanan was on the FBI’s most-wanted list and circulated openly in Miami Beach before Versace became his final victim in a crosscountry
rampage, he wasn’t stopped because of his gay connections, Ramirez said.
“The underlying subject is homophobia and how homophobia killed him,” Ramirez said. “That’s something that comes up over and over when we look into the investigation. Cunanan was on the news every night, on the most-wanted list, and for some reason all the law-enforcement authorities couldn’t get him.”
The California-born Cunanan, portrayed as a deeply disturbed con man, had cultivated relationships with wealthy older men and reportedly had been lovers or friends with two of the five men whose deaths are blamed on him. The other victims included a wealthy Chicago developer and a New Jersey cemetery caretaker.
Illuminating anti-gay bias is important because the LGBTQ community still must fight it, Martin said. As a member of the community, the pop star-actor said, he feels compelled to use his fame to combat hate and discrimination.
“If I don’t use the power that that music gives or, in this case, a character like this gives me, I’d be allowing the crime to happen,” Martin said. His friendships with Ramirez and Cruz were other inducements to join the series, as was its depiction of the Versace-D’Amico relationship.
Their attachment was illuminated in a conversation Martin had with D’Amico, who in the show’s opening scene is shown discovering Versace’s body immediately after the shooting.
“‘Ricky, my love for Gianni, our love, was open,’” Martin quoted D’Amico as saying. “And I’ve lost him and I’ve never been the same.”
The series unfolds back in time from the murder, finally detailing the journeys of Versace and Cunanan from humble roots to, respectively, fame and infamy.
In a pivotal scene, Donatella confronts her brother about his intention to come out in the late 1980s. She argues the nearly unprecedented move could wreck their business empire, one built on Versace’s talent for combining the glamour of couture with the sexiness and excitement of celebrity. Versace stands his ground, backed by D’Amico.
“Details of private conversations were carefully reported and extensively sourced work of investigative journalism,” Random House said in a statement, and FX Networks and Fox 21 Television Studios said they stand by Orth’s “meticulous” reporting.
A scene with one victim, who’s portrayed as begging for his life before Cunanan kills him, is based on the body’s injuries, producers said.
“What was that conversation like? So you have these tiny points of truth, and you then try to connect the tissue between it. But I would never use the word ‘embellishing’ or ‘making up.’ It’s trying to join those pinpoints,” Murphy said.