TO SCENE OF O.J. TRIAL ‘CRIME STORY’ RETURNS Bill Keveney
Two decades later, real-life courtroom drama is presented through a prism of a changed — and unchanged — America
“It’s taken 20 years to look back at a distance and say, ‘Why did this fascinate the country?’ It brought us together and ripped us apart.”
Executive producer Brad Simpson
Is America ready to relive the Trial of the Century?
Producers, writer and actors are betting on interest in FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (Tuesday, 10 p.m. ET/PT), hoping viewers will want to revisit the spectacle with two decades of perspective and will connect the story to contemporary challenges, including the fractured relationship between police and African Americans.
“It’s completely relevant today,” says Courtney B. Vance, who plays defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran in the 10-episode project, the first under the American Crime Story anthology label. “What we hope happens over 10 weeks and beyond is that you have this time for people to talk” about a race-related issue that viewers may examine in a new light after racially charged events in Ferguson, Mo., and other cities.
Simpson, based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, recounts the trial and acquittal of the former football great (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) who was accused of the murders of his exwife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman in 1994. Larry Karaszewski ( The People
vs. Larry Flynt), who wrote Simpson with Scott Alexander, says research, which included other books but no interviews with those involved in the case, revealed surprising details.
“For a case 20 years old that we followed so intensely, there’s 1,000 spoilers,” he joked.
Simpson, produced and directed by Ryan Murphy in a structure (if not style) similar to his American Horror
Story, also casts a light on the 24-hour news cycle, reality TV, sexism, forensic technology and the special treatment accorded celebrities.
Along those lines, the Kardashians, then-young children of O.J. confidante Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer), get some cameos, including one in which they learn the power of their father’s famous name.
“One big theme is celebrity culture and reality TV. You can say Before O.J. and After O.J. and how it changed a lot of the rules,” Alexander says.
Simpson focuses on the lawyers: Cochran, fellow defense attorney Robert Shapiro (John Travolta), prosecutors Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) and Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown), and Kardashian, a family friend.
The legal framing of the case, with Clark focusing on domestic violence and Shapiro and Cochran trumpeting race; the jury-selection strategy; and each side’s approach to the media help explain why a case considered a slam-dunk conviction became an acquittal.
“What I think you learn from watching this is why the case ended up the way it did,” Travolta says. “Because unless you know all this background information, you’ll never be able to figure out why something looks one way and ended up another.”
Schwimmer says he hadn’t realized how much hubris and politics were involved. Marcia Clark “thought it was such a slam dunk, she said, ‘ We don’t need that witness,’ ” he says. “As much as it is about race, it’s really about power,” and how you can wield influence “if you have money.”
The sad state of Los Angeles police relations with African Americans had significant influence. Simpson opens with videotape of the brutal beating of Rodney King in 1992 — an early example of the now common practice of filming police/suspect interactions — that ultimately resulted in police acquittals, resulting riots and a poisoned racial environment in L.A.
“We pitched (that) opening three years ago, a long time before Ferguson and Eric Garner” and other incidents involving police confrontations with black Americans brought the issue to the fore, Alexander says.
Executive producer Brad Simpson (no relation) hopes that intriguing details and perspective, including an episode focusing on the jurors, can draw the interest of those who followed the trial and that Simpson can remain relevant to younger viewers who don’t remember the crime. (ESPN takes a broader look at O.J., from hero to villain, in a documentary series that will air this year.)
“It’s taken 20 years to look back at a distance and say, ‘ Why did this fascinate the country?’ It brought us together and ripped us apart,” he says. “One of the essential things is, if you were African-American (or) you were white, you had a different experience with law enforcement and the justice system, and that’s still painfully true today.”
Toobin’s book concludes Simpson was guilty, but the miniseries doesn’t take a stand, “although it’s hard to come out of Episode 1 not thinking he did it,” Alexander says.
“I am willing to say with 100% certainty that he did it,” Toobin says. “They do not do that, ( but) I wouldn’t say there are a lot of alternative suspects presented. They didn’t want to make it about whether he did it or not. They wanted to make it about the larger spectacle of what it meant.”
The drama created by the characters is as much a part of Simpson as the issues are, says Brad Simpson, who says a second Crime Story season, not yet ordered, would focus on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Paulson and Vance are ardent and persuasive advocates for the lawyers they play.
Clark is “an extraordinary woman” who was poorly treated by her fellow lawyers and the media, says Paulson, who met the prosecutor late in production. “She was painted as aggressive, ambitious, strident. If any of those words were used to describe a man, they would not be considered negative attributes.”
Under pressure during the trial as supermarket tabloids and TV pundits criticized her appearance, Clark undergoes a makeover that backfires, creating laughs but also empathy for the embattled attorney. Paulson calls the sexist critique of Clark’s appearance “befuddling.”
Paulson considers Clark “a great lawyer with an incredible moral center” seeking justice for oft-forgotten victims but says her inexperience trying the case in public hurt her chances.
“What she wasn’t interested in was showboating,” Paulson says. “She was not interested in the court of public opinion. Unfortunately, that’s where the trial was actually happening.”
But she insists Clark and Darden shouldn’t be blamed for Simpson’s acquittal. “The climate in the city, post-Rodney King; O.J.’s name; Mark Fuhrman’s racist comments caught on tape; and some of the shoddy work done by the Los Angeles police department was a perfect storm that I don’t think anyone could have been victorious against.”
Cochran had been educated in how the justice system applied to African Americans from his first case, when a black man speeding his pregnant wife to the hospital was stopped and eventually killed by a white officer who avoided punishment.
“Johnnie cut his teeth on this stuff,” Vance says, and used that experience to figure out how to make an unequal system work for his clients. “You’ve got to know how to work the system.”
When the verdict was announced, “What folks of color were cheering, it wasn’t about O.J. Simpson. It was about (how) somebody worked the system,” Vance says. After Rodney King and “all the thousands of people lynched with no recourse, finally somebody got recourse,” he says.
But “what got lost in the all the shuffle were the two people who were killed.”