While the challenge often is truncating an abundance of material, sometimes the dilemma is the opposite. In producing the follow-up to the hit limited series American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, producer Nina Jacobson found that FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace proved a more difficult story to tell than its predecessor.
“Whereas with the O.J. Simpson trial virtually every person involved with the story had written a book, in the case of Versace, we had much less information available to us,” she says.
The series creators based many of the key events in the story of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered the famous fashion designer outside his Miami home, on Maureen Orth’s 2000 book Vulgar Favors. They gathered additional information from newspaper accounts and available video footage. “But what happened between David Madsen and Andrew Cunanan, for example, when they went missing for several days, or how exactly some of the murder scenes went down — the only people who know about them are dead,” says exec producer Brad Simpson. “They had to be imagined based on what we knew of the personalities and the crime scenes.”
That’s where the storytellers must rely heavily on what they call “emotional truth.” “Marcia Clark used that phrase after she saw [People v. O.J.]. She said, ‘It’s not a documentary, but they captured the emotional truth of what happened,’” recalls Simpson, adding that producers did not, for either season, contact any of the people involved. “We want to be cognizant of the victims, but at the same time we think it’s best to tell the story based on historical evidence and to try to unpack what happened but not be beholden to telling one particular story in one particular way. That’s been our approach for the Crime Story series in general.”
Writers on ‘Versace,’ ‘Tupac’ and More Reveal Secrets to Bringing True Tales to the Screen
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