@BBCTwo: If you haven’t seen #ACSVersace yet, Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace is everything…
carineroitfeld: calls me « Caroline » like Gianni used to… @edgarramirez25 #acs
massifurlan: TONIGHT!!! YES THAT’S PENELOPE CRUZ AND SHE PLAY MY NEW BOSS DONATELLA VERSACE. #gianniversace #italiandesign#americancrimestory@americancrimestoryfx#americancrimestoryfx #acsversace#acsfx #americancrimestoryversace@acsversace #penelopecruz#donatellaversace @fxnetworks@penelopecruzoficial @donatella_versace
evangelinethedreamer: On set of ACS Versace…going from #brunette to #blonde…check out the new #episode #tonight on #fx #EP7 Ascent: The Rise Of Donatella …looks like they switched the episode order a bit but I should be in this one tonight…starting right at the beginning of the episode…👩🏼✨🎬🎥 #americancrimestory #acsversace #young#donatella #versace #penelopecruz#evangelinelindes #darrencriss#edgarramirez #wolffleetwoodross
The new series telling the story of the fashion designer’s murder is on 9pm, Wednesday 7th March, BBC2.
What can we expect from the first episode?
There are moments of deep, dangerous darkness in Tom Rob Smith’s brilliant screenplay for this very adult, hugely accomplished drama as we step into two worlds that will soon collide.
Fashion designer Gianni Versace is at the height of his career, while Andrew Cunanan, the man who is plotting his murder, has already killed four men when he arrives in Miami. He’s an unstable, terrifying presence, a fantasist who can’t stop telling stories and is unpredictable and obsessive.
There are echoes of Tom Rob Smith’s London Spy as Cunanan follows Versace (Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez, both terrific) into Miami’s edgy gay underworld. But Versace returns to his opulent beachfront home, while Cunanan holes up in a rancid, cheap hotel.
Pick of the Week: The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story
If you thought The People v OJ Simpson was a one-off hit, prepare to be stylishly corrected. Ryan Murphy (king of anthologising such shows as American Horror Story) has done it again with this new true crime drama, which tells the events of The Assassination of Gianni Versace. We’re slickly sashayed back to 1997, when the pink dressing gown-wearing fashion designer was gunned down in Miami. It was a murder that happened at the height of gaudy fame and sunbathed glitz, and Murphy’s series gorgeously wallows in the vibrance of it all, filling the frame with vivid colours, delicious costumes and super-slick camera moves. There’s no mystery, of course, as to who the assassin was: that’s Andrew Cunanan, played by Glee’s Darren Criss with a magnetic presence – almost as if he’s staking claim to the screen before Penelope Cruz can walk on set and try to steal it as Versace’s sister, Donatella. Between the two, Edgar Ramirez is almost understated as Gianni, as we fly back to see the first meeting between him and his eventual killer in a nightclub. It’s an electrifying encounter, one made more so by Criss’ compelling portrayal of a man who can’t seem to stop lying, almost as if he’s read The Talented Mr. Ripley one too many times (or just pretended to). This is flashy crime drama at its most soap operatic, and when it’s this well done, it’s hard not to get sucked into its whirlwind of fame, greed, jealousy and Ricky Martin. Welcome back, American Crime Story. This is killer telly.
Andrew Cunanan was half-white, half-Filipino—and so is actor Darren Criss, who plays the ‘90s serial killer in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. That’s the extent of the conversation about race in the current FX series produced by Ryan Murphy, who is also the creative brains behind television hits like Nip/Tuck, Glee, Scream Queens, Feud, and American Horror Story. On July 1, Murphy will join his fellow showrunner Shonda Rhimes at Netflix. The 5-year contract is believed to be the most expensive in television history, putting up to $300 million in Murphy’s pocket.
“His unfaltering dedication to excellence and to giv[ing] voice to the underrepresented, to showcase a unique perspective or just to shock the hell out of us, permeates his genre-shattering work,” Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, told Deadline of the deal, adding that Murphy’s stories are “broad and diverse.”
Perhaps. But Murphy’s on-screen history suggests he gives the most depth and complexity to stories of rich, white people. The first season of Feud, for instance, is about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford; the second season will be about Buckingham Palace. Scream Queens was a horror series about a mostly-white sorority in a southern American university. He directed the film adaption of Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts, which is about a wealthy white woman who travels the world to discover herself (and have good sex).
But Murphy has a glaring blind spot when it comes to telling the stories of people of color. Just look at his biggest television hit, Glee, which was where Criss landed his first primetime role: yes, there is an Asian American girl, an Asian American boy, a disabled boy, a black girl, a Latina girl who came out as bi, one white cheerleader who came out as bi, one white gay boy, one gay boy who passed as white (Criss), and many, many more white straight characters.
“It’s still about whiteness at the center and people of color as accessories who have a little bit of a story line, but are seen as sort of decorative accents,” Ronak K. Kapadia, PhD, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explained. “He has this sort of shallow understanding of a kind of racial justice project in relation to TV work.”
This season’s American Crime Story, featuring half-Filipino American Cunanan, is a continuation of Murphy’s lack of nuance when he attempts to focus on minority-focused narratives. As noted by Slate’s Inkoo Kang, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is preoccupied with examining ’90s homophobia particularly in rich, white communities—it is not so preoccupied with anti-Asian racism or Cunanan’s potential self-hatred of being Asian.
To Murphy’s credit, he doesn’t exactly whitewash Cunanan. Criss is half-Filipino. You see cursory acknowledgments that Cunanan is Asian and how that plays out in the conservative San Diego community where he lived. It’s an incestuous community—one which Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth describes as “Omaha by the bay” in her book, Vulgar Favors, on which the show is based.
When he auditions to be an escort, for instance, Cunanan is told that no one wants a smart Asian—he is not a desired archetype by the rich, white men he wants to attract. Broadway performer Jon Jon Briones, who is Filipino-born, steals the show towards the end of the series as Cunanan’s father, Modesto. We see that Cunanan’s delusions of grandeur, propensity for taking shortcuts, and obsession with materialistic wealth and status stems from Modesto, who in the show (and in real life) fled back to the Philippines in 1988 to evade embezzlement charges. Sometimes, Orth reported, the real-life Cunanan would pretend to be Jewish.
But when Cunanan—real and fictional versions—did acknowledge his Asian background, it was a lie constructed through a fabulist’s filter: his father owned pineapple plantations back in the Philippines, he would say, or his father was the personal pilot of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines who was known for her extravagance and marriage to a dictator.
“This is not just a story about how much alternative sexuality or sex panic there was in the 1990s,” Kapadia said. “It’s also the story about a multi-racial mixed-race person from California in the very moment in which California’s becoming a majority minority state and there were all of the kinds of questions around the new face of America into the new millennium.”
But Murphy doesn’t touch these complex racial points—about how Cunanan may have struggled with his racial identity, about, even briefly, what it was like to be a mixed-race kid going to the exclusive mostly-white private school he attended. Race is not given the complexity of storytelling it deserves—the complexity Murphy so readily gives sexuality.
We will never know Cunanan’s exact relationship to his racial identity, just as we will never know his exact motives for killing. Those explanations died with his suicide on July 23, 1997. But we do know Murphy’s interpretation of Cunanan—and unfortunately, Murphy doesn’t seem to think that race matters at all.
Versace…! Head is officially starting to hurt trying to keep this timeline straight.
Versace is back from its week hiatus, the new episode of American Crime Story: Versace goes back even FURTHER in the timeline of Andrew Cunanan. Granted, not all the way back to his first interactions with Versace, but a year before he started his killing spree.
In 1996, Andrew is doing alright for himself, as he’s living the glamorous life. That is, he’s crashing at a mansion with a luxurious swimming pool (in which Andrew swims in naked during the opening scene), which is technically owned by an older man named Norman (Michael Nouri).
Andrew and Norman aren’t dating, per-say, despite having had sexual relations in the past. Rather, and this is where the tale turns sad, Norman pities Andrew. He sees that he’s become accustomed to his lifestyle, and doesn’t want to throw him out on the street.
But all good things must come to an end. This relationship does end up crashing and burning eventually, shortly after Andrew’s birthday party.
Most noticeably amongst the guest that Andrew invites is David, whom he killed two episodes ago, and Jeffrey, who met his fate in the previous episode.
Andrew loves David (lol some things never change). Like, head-over-heels in love, despite the fact that David clearly doesn’t feel the same way. Jeffrey, at this point, is no more than just a close friend to Andrew— a close friend that he plans to use to get closer to David.
After trying forcing Jeffrey to put on his old navy uniform for a conversation starter (clearly Andrew was manipulating people long before he started killing them), David arrives and is almost immediately impressed.
Impressed with Jeffrey, that is. The two hit it off right away, leaving Andrew running to the bathroom to do lines of coke and wonder what’s happening and where he went wrong.
The party doesn’t improve when he’s interrupted by Lee, the guy who Andrew killed THREE episodes ago (are you starting to see where the headache comes from?). Andrew, evidently, is embarrassed of Lee and doesn’t want David knowing about his relationship with him.
After gathering together everyone who he eventually ends up killing for a group photo, Andrew has his confrontation with Norman. Norman catches Andrew in a web of lies and then gives him a pretty solid ultimatum: either tell the truth or get out.
Andrew being Andrew choses to leave. The problem is he really doesn’t have anywhere to go — his apartment is literally falling apart.
That’s not going to stop him, though. Oh no. As we heard referenced in previous episodes, Andrew then saids the letter to Jeffrey’s dad — hoping to out him as gay before he’s ready and sabotage the relationship between Jeffrey and David.
The plan has the exact opposite effect. Jeffrey confronts Andrew, telling him he’s moving to Minneapolis — where David lives.
Panicking, Andrew comes up with another brilliant plan (since he’s so full of those): he’s going to invite him to a fully funded trip to Los Angeles and try to win him back. Sorry, did I say invite? David really didn’t have much say in the matter, as Andrew refused to take no for an answer.
Of course, Andrew doesn’t have the money to pay for any of this, but that’s not really his concern at the moment. He just wants David to see how much he means to him.
And, to his credit, David realizes that feeling pretty quickly. Problem is, it’s not a mutual feeling. He eventually tells Andrew that they can’t be together and he’s not the one. Even when David gives him the slightest chance, Andrew reverts back to his lies and the whole thing falls apart.
A couple of days letter, Andrew is hitting a new low. After stumbling into a bar and making up a lie about his new fiancé to the bartender, he comes across a shady guy sitting in the corner who offers him meth. He takes it and winds up having a trippy dream that involves Versace, love and a measuring tape.
Now, with a new drug addiction to support and an exponentially growing credit-card bill, Andrew is officially out of money.
He returns to Norman’s house, pleading to be let back in, but Norman opts to call the police instead (can you blame him?), He gets bailed out by his mother, who takes him back to her apartment — a housing situation that somehow looks even worse than Andrew’s.
His mother, though, seems to think Andrew is destined to great things. Even when Andrew straight-up tells her that he’s unhappy, his mother won’t let him stay in that frame of mind — he’s a born star.
A born star who ends the episode declaring he’s on his way to Minneapolis. And the rest is history.
There’s only three more episodes of Versace left, what do you think is going to happen next? Check out the newepisode on Wednesday nights at FX and read our other Versace recaps by clicking here.
“This TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.” That was the view of the Versace family before The Assassination of Gianni Versace aired. The FX series, showing in the UK on BBC2, is one of a recent run of shows to dramatise recent history. It focuses on the designer’s murder, on the steps of his Miami mansion in 1997, taking it as the starting point for a nine-part drama that admits to some storytelling licence. Meanwhile, The Looming Tower, which began on Amazon Prime last week and is based on Lawrence Wright’s book, has reopened controversy about 9/11, and in the US, critics are discussing whether Paramount Network’s drama Waco has too much love for cult leader David Koresh.
So, should we view these shows only as works of fiction? The debate boils down to whether the point of fact-based dramas is to reveal what really happened, or if it is to tell a wider dramatic truth. That’s tricky, because the answer is almost always: both. This means that, callous or unethical as it might seem, it’s sometimes OK for such programmes to ignore complaints about events being reshaped for artistic purposes.
A stark and difficult example was The Secret, ITV’s grim 2016 dramatisation of the murder of Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell by their adulterous spouses. The complaints from Lesley Howell’s daughter that her mother had not been portrayed correctly deserved, of course, to be heard – but they didn’t deeply affect the validity of the series. That was all about telling the story of Colin Howell (James Nesbitt), a predatory egotist for whom religion offered justification for pursuing his sexual urges at all costs. Dramatically speaking, it didn’t matter if his victims, who didn’t feature heavily, were not presented with precise accuracy.
In contrast, it did matter that The Curse of Steptoe, a BBC4 biodrama aired in 2008 but then withdrawn from circulation in 2010 after a damning BBC Trust investigation, drew flak from relatives and colleagues of Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell: among their assertions was that the central point about Brambell and Corbett hating each other and subsequently feeling cursed by Steptoe and Son was false.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s showrunner, Ryan Murphy, is acutely aware of the dangers. His series from last year, Feud: Bette and Joan, was a fabulously gossipy take on a bygone Hollywood era, only slightly marred by the fact that one of the supporting characters, Olivia de Havilland, is still alive and is now suing. That’s annoying for Murphy, but for us, Feud’s smart take on the lonely, bitter showbiz world isn’t diminished. Murphy is brilliant at finding the story beneath the story; the moral that renders exact truth irrelevant.
The Versace story is the second series under Murphy’s American Crime Story banner. The dramatic truth of the first, the Emmy-winning The People vs OJ Simpson, was that the Simpson trial illustrates how modern America’s ravenous 24-hour media and ingrained racism interlocked in the 1990s and are still a twin menace today. The Assassination of Gianni Versace doesn’t make as profound a point about society, although a theme develops about how the celebrated designer had a different experience of being gay in the homophobic 20th century US to lonely dropout Andrew Cunanan. It is primarily a chillingly authentic portrait of Cunanan, a fantasist who became a serial killer.
In that sense, the show is roughly in the same category as The Secret. The Versaces’ complaints also feel akin to those made by the Matthews family about The Moorside, BBC1’s 2017 dramatisation of the fake “disappearance” of Yorkshire nine-year-old Shannon Matthews. Her relatives didn’t want the story to be examined afresh and thought they ought to have been consulted, but for viewers there wasn’t a compelling reason to heed them. Similarly, to the extent that The Assassination of Gianni Versace is even about the Versaces, it’s about analysing their effort to maintain and control their public image. Seeking their approval would undermine that.
In any case, New York Magazine’s online culture site Vulture has been fact-checking each episode, with help from a reporter who covered the Cunanan story at the time. The embellishments and elisions they’ve turned up have been no more than an intelligent viewer would expect from a fact-based drama. The genre creates its own unique suspension of disbelief, where what we see is both real, in the sense of being plausible or instructive, and not, because we know that some of it has been invented.
Amazon/Hulu’s political expose The Looming Tower, starring Jeff Daniels as John O’Neill, the FBI agent who tried to bring down Osama bin Laden before he committed a major atrocity, illustrates the point in a different way. Daniels plays a whisky-downing, ursine veteran who is juggling two mistresses and rubs the stuffed shirts in the CIA up the wrong way. He’s too much of a boilerplate flawed/ambiguous hero, in other words. Even if O’Neill really was like that, it doesn’t feel true. The plotting of Bin Laden and his associates, and the field work by US law enforcers trying to break these terror networks, is also too laden with familiar spy-thriller devices to be convincing. Lots of what we see might well have happened, but since The Looming Tower all has the air of contrived fiction, it doesn’t matter, because we don’t feel as if we’re witnessing reality. That’s a very delicate balance, but it’s the one Ryan Murphy has mastered.
ACS news 