On Your Mark, Get Ready, Wrong!

When I read the news in The Hollywood Reporter that ‘Law & Order: True Crime — The Menendez Murders’ Ordered to Series at NBC, I could only hope the series will be more accurate than this promo.

Here is the misinfo that is probably the most blatant:

“The siblings, who were 21 and 18 years old, respectively, at the time of the murders, were tried separately but eventually found guilty in a third trial after no verdicts were rendered in the first two because of hung juries.”

There were only two Menendez brothers’ trials. The first began on July 20, 1993, and ended on January 28, 1994. Although it was a single trial, two juries were seated, one to determine the guilt or innocence of older brother Lyle, the other to judge the guilt or innocence of younger brother Erik. Both juries hung and the trial judge, Stanley Weisberg, declared a mistrial in each case. The second trial began on August 23, 1995, and ended on March 20, 1996. That trial had a single jury which found both brothers guilty and Weisberg sentenced them both to life in prison without possibility of parole.

I attended, handled media issues and interfaced with the judge on both trials.

Less offending but confusing is the sentence in The Hollywood Reporter theis “Like the Simpson trial, the Menendez brothers trial became an early hit for then-burgeoning cable channel CourtTV.” The reason it’s confusing is because it doesn’t specify which Menendez trial “became an early hit for … CourtTV.” What does that matter? CourtTV televised only the first Menendez trial. Weisberg didn’t allow a TV camera in the courtroom during the second one. Because of that ban broadcasters debated how extensively to cover it. The second Menendez trial definitely wasn’t key to CourtTV making its bones.

 

Few Surprises in ESPN Simpson Documentary

I’m more interested in watching the ESPN-produced documentary, “O.J.: Made in America”, which debuted last night, than I was the FX melodrama series aired earlier this year, primarily because it is a documentary.

Granted, documentaries can be skewed to favor a point of view or even “prove” something that isn’t, but at least documentaries are composed of actual footage and interviews with real people.

While the first part, carried on ABC last night, contained few surprises for me, I was surprised at what Dave Nemetz, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, in “‘O.J.: Made in America’: 8 Things We Learned From Part 1“, said he learned that he didn’t know.

The one thing I didn’t know about was Simpson’s father’s sexual orientation. In fact, I don’t ever recall any mention of his father.

But the rest? That Simpson was a living legend in L.A., that he didn’t want to get political and could talk himself out of trouble, was almost a bust in the NFL, his breakthrough role in TV ads, his mediocre acting ability–at least, in his roles as an actor–and his early encounters Nicole Brown was pretty much common knowledge to those who (1) are old enough to remember, (2) lived in L.A. and (3) paid attention to sports. Maybe Nemetz benefited from none of that.

One thing I did learn that Nemitz didn’t mention was how far back former LAPD officer Ron Shipp and Simpson’s relationship goes. Back to Shipp’s school years. I had thought it was much more recent–dating from when Simpson lived in his house in Brentwood.

While my knowledge of last night’s Part I was based on being old enough and exposed to sports enough and living in L.A., it will be interesting to see what I learn from Part II, which airs Tuesday night, as it focuses on my direct, first-hand knowledge of Simpson’s 1994-95 murder trial and many of the issues that swirled around that.

Stay tuned.

 

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/oj-made-america-part-1-901650

Choi Gets Ito

Kenneth Choi as Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito in The People vs. O.J. Simpson miniseries is totally unbelievable to me, unless I close my eyes.

Except for the black hair, rimless glasses and facial hair, Choi looks no more like Ito than I, a Caucasian, brown-haired woman, do.

But Choi does capture Ito’s voice. He also either researched something other than the popular media-created image of Ito — maybe he read my book! — or managed to otherwise understand the no-win situation that crashed down on Ito well enough to develop a fairly accurate sense of what the judge was up against in the Simpson trial.

I learned that from a recent article in The Hollywood Reporter.

“According to the actor, though Ito has received a lot of criticism for the O.J. Simpson case, he has tried to stay impartial. ‘I can’t criticize or be judgmental of the person I’m playing,’ he said. ‘I have to do my best to understand him and what he does. I personally think he had the weight of the world on his shoulders as this sort of ringmaster in this circus played out on such a huge scale.’

“Though Choi admitted that the pressure on Ito ‘absolutely’ affected some of his decisions, he also pointed out that Ito was known to be a ‘very good, very smart, very fair’ judge.

“Asked whether or not he thinks that Ito’s decision about the Mark Fuhrman tapes affected the verdict, Choi answered, ‘I don’t know that it affected the outcome.’

“‘The jury heard the two snippets from the tapes, and I think that was enough,’ he explained. ‘The damage was done.'”

I do know this: Choi did not come to his conclusions by talking to Ito.

 

A Fact that Just Isn’t

People are emerging from the woodwork all over the place getting their “memories” of the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial published in all manner of places.

Such is the case with The Hollywood Reporter “guest columnist” Craig Tomashoff. In a piece with the headline ‘People v. O.J. Simpson’: My Date With Juror No. 7 (Guest Column), Tomashoff, who says he was working as a correspondent in People magazine’s Los Angeles bureau in the mid-1990s,  writes:

“A dozen of us were given a special bit of information we had to keep to ourselves: the name and address of one of the jurors.

“The fact that we had these details, courtesy of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, was proof of how the media had taken more control of the case than the attorneys; it didn’t fill me with a lot of faith in our judicial system that such private information was so readily available.”

I can’t attest to the veracity of Mr. Tomashoff’s claim of chasing Simpson juror Brenda Moran, or conversations with Moran’s relatives, but one of his assertions I know that is absolutely false is that he or any other member of the media got the name and/or address of any of the jurors “Courtesy of the Los Angeles Superior Court” — at least not in any straightforward means.

The jurors’ names were never made public by the Court. Nor were they given to members of the media. Neither were their addresses, employers or other personal information.

It is true that the news media did obtain the names, addresses and who their employers were, but that was from private investigators one or more news organizations hired to ferret out that information.

To their credit, even though most, if not all of the media covering the trial had that information well into the trial, none identified them in any of their reports until after the trial.

It is not surprising that People magazine and other print and broadcast/cable outlets knew the jurors’ names and home addresses had staffers staking out the jurors’ homes. That was well known by Court officials as jurors were dismissed for various reasons during the trial. (In fact, all 12 jurors ended up being dismissed as the trial progressed and were replaced by the 12 alternate jurors who sat in the jury box and were sequestered with the primary jurors throughout the trial. One of the trial judge’s concerns is that juror misconduct or illness might cause an alternate who had become a regular juror to be excused, which could have resulted in a mistrial.)

It could have been that once People and other media organizations learned the jurors’ names and who their employers were, they contacted the employers, in Moran’s case that could have been Human Resources or the department where she worked, to confirm that she, indeed, was a court employee, but at no time did the Court itself officially release the names and/or other information about the jurors on that case.

Prior to the Simpson trial, court policy was to provide names, only, of the jurors, that was changed, however, following a string of high profile cases in which jurors were hounded by the media who wanted to interview them post verdict. Because of juror complaints claiming media harassment, the Court changed its policy, allowing jurors to indicate that they did not want their names to be made public. The Court also began to make juries on some criminal cases, such as the Simpson trial, anonymous, keeping their names confidential post-trial.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/people-v-oj-interview-juror-877435

A Pistorius Documentary Based on Speculation?

That didn’t take long!

The Hollywood Reporter has reported that just a week after South African Olympics hero Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, a documentary is in the works — not about Pistorius’s life or athletic feats (sorry ;), although that’s sure to be included, but about the shooting.

“BBC Three commissions an hourlong ‘fast-turnaround’ special about the South African Paralympics star and the killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.” http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bbc-orders-oscar-pistorius-documentary-422980

Is that the fastest dash on record to document a crime and its preliminary heats?

Perhaps the now-defunct Dove Books had Nicole Brown friend Faye Resnick under contract to produce a book within a week of former football star O.J. Simpson’s June 17, 1994, arrest for the murders of his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman. By Oct. 22, just four months after the June 12 murders, word was out that “750,000 copies of Ms. Resnick’s book, ‘Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted,’ have been rushed into print.”   http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-10-22/features/1994295053_1_faye-resnick-brown-simpson-nicole-brown

Since so many facts about the Steenkamp shooting are as yet unknown and so much of what has been reported is based on rumors, gossip and fabrication, it seems like a lot of that is what the BBC documentary will be based on.