American Crime Story is back with its second season, its first being the fantastic and critically acclaimed The People vs. O.J. Simpson. This time showrunner Ryan Murphy is covering another high profile 90’s murder case in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Looking back at last season, I remember going into it skeptically, thinking it was going to be campy but fun (David Schwimmer as Rob Kardashian? John Travolta as Robert Shapiro?) and ended up quickly realizing that this was beyond camp. It was great, filled with memorable performances (some Emmy winning) and did not just simply recount the events of that time methodically from start to finish; it gave us fresh perspective on these faces involved in the trial that became iconic, and with it good reason to find a new sympathy for them. Even more impressively, this FX series forced us to look back at who we were as a culture and society through our present eyes and see how far we’ve come, even from a time that for many of us does not seem all that long ago (that episode where Marcia Clark got a new haircut and was lambasted by the press, the defense team, and Judge Ito still makes me feel bad feelings inside).
All that to say: whereas I came in to American Crime Story‘s first season with low expectations, I could not have higher expectations now for this one. And perhaps that is why I am off the bat not digging it as much as I did last season. Admittedly, I know less about the Versace murder and the people involved in it than I did about O.J Simpson’s trial. But I am also of the thinking that series can not fairly be judged upon their first episodes so I remain hopeful.
It certainly looks nice, I’ll give it that. We open on a morning in 1997 in Versace’s Miami Beach home that looks like it could be an exact replica of an Italian palazzo. The entire opening before the title is just intercut moments between Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) and his eventual killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). Gianni breakfasts surrounded by servants, then walks down the street to pick up some magazines. Andrew sits on a beach holding a book on Conde Nast, glimpsing at a gun in his backpack, and screaming into the ocean. It culminates in Andrew walking right up to Versace as he’s returning to his home and shooting him in the head.
We then flash back to October 1990 and get a glimpse of the first time Andrew and Versace met. At a night club in San Francisco, Andrew pretty much forced himself into Versace’s attention, eventually getting the designer to sit and talk with him. This results in Versace inviting him to the opera, in which he designed all the costumes. Andrew brags to his friends Elizabeth and Phil, who he appears to be living with. They keep shooting skeptical glances at one another. Later, we get that Andrew is a sort of serial liar–he lies about his religion, his sexuality, his past, depending on what company he is currently in the present of. After the opera he and Versace seem to connect even further, but we don’t see anything outwardly romantic, or sexual, happen just yet.
So I imagine much of the series will be flashing back to Andrew’s past to flesh out his and Gianni’s relationship, or at least Andrew’s growing obsession with him. As it turns out, Andrew was already wanted for the potential murders of several other wealthy gay men. By the end of this episode, the authorities still don’t have him. While they are investigating we get to meet Versace’s partner of fifteen years Antonia D’amico. He lived with Versace and made sure he was happy–which included finding him men to sleep with, sometimes paid for. The two were in love and Antonio is devastated and played effectively by… Ricky Martin?! I realized it like halfway through the episode. I haven’t seen him since the mid-2000’s probably. But he does well here, I must say.
And of course, though her role was introduced late in this episode, Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace is sure to steal future episodes. Donatella, the sister of Gianni, is beautiful, stylish, and has just arrived from Italy to deal with the business. Her main concern is making sure that the empire her brother began with one rack of clothes in Milan is preserved. “I will not let him be killed twice,” she says. As I said, I do not know how this all plays out at all. The most I knew about the Versace murder was from an Eminem lyric from 2000. I think it’s good for my viewing experience; I won’t be waiting for landmark moments and will hopefully be surprised with certain turns. As of right now, the first episode lays solid groundwork, but feels just like that–a foundation without even a first floor to admire yet. It remains to be seen whether my high expectations are met.
Can Ryan Murphy return to the scene of the crime and get away with it?
At least as much as any mystery behind the titular slaying, this creative question is what The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story must solve. The Gleemastermind and workaholic TV creator/producer/director’s work is as wide-ranging as it is prolific, with ACS in production at the same time as his other series American Horror Story, FEUD, 9-1-1, the now-canceled Scream Queens, and the forthcoming Pose, Ratched, and ACS‘s third season, Katrina, which may as well be a whole different series.
But however you feel about his other projects, ACS‘s debut season, The People v. O.J. Simpson, is unquestionably his apotheosis. In conjunction with writer-creators Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, Murphy revisited a media-circus murder case nearly everyone thought had been exhausted of any creative or sociopolitical potential, and the result was a kaleidoscopic, knockout-powerful examination of racism, sexism, celebrity culture, journalism, the judicial system, the rise of reality TV, domestic violence, police misconduct, and the whole goddamn human condition. It was one of the best television shows of all time, full stop. Can Murphy, now working with writer Tom Rob Smith and adapting journalist Maureen Orth’s book on the case Vulgar Favors, draw water from that same dark well a second time?
Yes.
“The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” the premiere episode of ACS Versace, is every bit as gripping and impressive as its predecessor, but with two major structural differences. The first is that there’s not even a shadow of a doubt as to whodunnit, and no trial to determine the suspect’s guilt on the horizon. Andrew Cunanan, a handsome young social-climbing sociopath who’d crossed paths with Versace and become obsessed, killed the great Italian fashion designer at the tail-end of a cross-country murder spree; it’s his story as much as the title character’s, if not more so. From the start, this gives Versace a tighter focus, with a tone more in keeping with a serial-killer biopic or a dark Coen Brothers murder-morality play (I honestly catch major Barton Fink/Fargo/No Country/Blood Simple vibes from this thing) than O.J.‘s sprawling canvas.
The second structural change is that while Versace, too, centers on a high-profile crime involving a wealthy ’90s celebrity, it appears poised to tackle virtually the only hot-button issue O.J. didn’t: homophobia. From Cunanan’s quasi-closeted status and resentment of a man able to live more freely on his own terms, to the culture clash between Miami’s thriving gay scene and its reflexively bigoted cops, the era’s prejudices come across like unindicted co-conspirators.
This gives the assassination a truly tragic air. After all, the show’s approach to Versace himself, per writer Smith’s own characterization of it, is one of straight-up celebration. In this episode he emerges as the opposite of what you might expect from his almost grotesquely lavish, Young Pope-esque taste in furnishings and home design: a real man of the people, a guy who’s kind to his employees, who’s friendly to the neighbors, who (as he tells Andrew) wants nothing more than for his “love for life” to shine through in the clothes he designs. He and his partner Antonio (Ricky Martin, restrained and heartbreaking) have an open relationship, but it’s an openness they share together — an “if you’re happy and feeling good, I’m happy and feeling good” kind of deal that the tawdry imaginings of the local cops can’t even begin to encompass.
He’s also a family man. To the extent that there’s any strife in Versaceland at all, it’s because his partner Antonio and his sister-slash-heir apparent, Donatella, are basically locked in a contest over who loves the guy more. As he tells Andrew, his sister is his muse, and their childhood adventures together exploring the local ancient ruins inspired the Versace brand’s legendary Medusa logo. (“I know that many people call it pretentious, but I don’t care. How could my childhood be pretentious?”) For pete’s sake, the thing that wins him over to Andrew is when the young man tells a story about his beloved Italian mother! More than a fashion designer or a gay icon, the Gianni Versace of ACS is a secular saint.
And if you’re going to kill an angel, you need a demon. That role falls to Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan, a performance that in this hour alone looks headed for cinematic serial-killer hall of fame. It’s not too soon, I think, to compare Criss’s work as Cunanan — a straight man playing a gay predator — to Psycho‘s Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates — a gay man playing a straight predator. Physically and verbally they’re not so far apart: lean physiques, softly handsome features, gentle voices, a tone of good cheer that sits atop a wellspring of hatred, resentment, self-loathing, and violence like the lid of a pressure cooker. Cunanan’s love of the finer things, his ability to convincingly portray himself as a “normal” young upper-class up-and-comer, and his penchant for creeping around bare-chested and bikini-briefed will also call to mind Christian Bale’s iconic Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Indeed there are several times throughout the episode — most notably the moment where Andrew sees a news report on the murder he’s just committed and literally mimics the shocked reaction of a nearby onlooker — where you can see Cunanan physically applying Bateman’s “mask of sanity.”
The difference between this killer that one, the thing that makes him closer to the original Psycho than its American descendent, is the sense that underneath that mask of sanity there really is something, someone. The show isn’t above portraying Andrew’s personality in a comical way to make that point, either. With his hoity-toity manner of speech, his compulsive social climbing, and his constant stream of impressive names to drop, places he’s gone, things he’s done, et cetera an ad nauseam, he often comes across like David Hyde Pierce on Frasier, if Dr. Niles Crane had happened to be a murderer.
But there’s pain in Andrew, too. Recall how he screams into the ocean water during his pre-slaying swim, how he vomits into a public toilet as he works up the nerve to pull the trigger. When he bullshits his way into Versace’s presence and winds up attending the opera for which he’s the costume designer, the music moves him to tears. After the show, he clearly wants to believe all the kind, supportive things Gianni is saying about him as they hang out on stage together. (And there’s every reason to believe Gianni means every word, him being such a mensch.) Andrew sucks people in with lies and sucks life out of his resulting proximity to wealth, glamour, sex, and power to fill a hole in his heart, yes, but his heart really does exist. He’s a vacuum, not a void. It’s a subtle distinction, but so far it seems to be a crucial one.
There’s so much more to talk about here: the gauzily gaudy cinematography by Nelson Cragg, capturing the splendor of Versace’s Miami mansion with a lens so wide it’s almost fish-eyed; memorable cameos by Mad Men‘s Jay R. Ferguson and Raging Bull‘s Cathy Moriarty; Edgar Ramírez’s instant likability as the powerful but kindly designer; Penelope Cruz’s appropriately mush-mouthed but resolutely non-caricatured turn as the larger-than-life Donatella; all the stranger-than-fiction touches, like Antonio’s blood-spattered tennis whites, the wannabe model striking poses in front of news cameras at the crime scene, the cops and FBI’s multiple blown chances and near misses in their pursuit of the killer, the bird that got caught in the crossfire when Cunanan made his move. Between the subject matter’s milieu and the swirlingly stylized approach the show takes to it, you may be tempted to describe the result as camp. To do so is to deny the depth of what’s happening here, and the moral seriousness with which Murphy, Smith, Criss, and company are depicting it. Until it all wraps up eight weeks from now, a killer walks among us.
You finally need two hands to count all the current TV shows with Asian American protagonists. Fresh Off the Boat (ABC) and Master of None(Netflix) arrived with fanfare for breaking ground (though a third season of Aziz Ansari’s romantic comedy was uncertain even before the star’s current scandal), while Quantico(ABC) andInto the Badlands (AMC) keeping chugging along, and the comedy Brown Nation (Netflix) and children’s melodrama Andi Mack (Disney Channel) have yet to become blips on the mainstream pop cultural radar. So it’s a bit strange, and off-putting, that the latest series with an Asian lead—one of the most anticipated shows of the year, it so happens—isn’t being described as such. In fact, its network—once a standard-bearer for prestige TV’s lack of diversity—is highlighting the drama’s focus on queerness and homophobia—and by doing so largely erasing its main character’s racial identity, especially in the first half of his story.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story isn’t about the titular victim but his killer: Andrew Cunanan, a San Diego native born to a Filipino father and an Italian American mother. Writer Tom Rob Smith adapted journalist Maureen Orth’s nonfiction account Vulgar Favors, structuring the episodes in reverse chronological order so we work backward from Versace’s murder. In a recent interview, Smith said of his source material that it “reads very much like an outsider commenting on a world of which they’re not part, and sometimes that can make you seem quite removed from it.” I agree with his assessment; Orth’s book includes lengthy and salacious discussions of Versace’s HIV status and the popularity of meth among gay communities. But Smith’s description could also be turned on The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which is a white writer’s dramatization of another white writer’s interpretation. American Crime Story’s first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson, tackled issues of both race and gender skillfully; there’s no reason why we should accept any less from its second.
The show’s Andrew, played by Darren Criss, does mention his father’s plantation in the Philippines early on. But between his pathological lying and that country’s colonial past, his race isn’t confirmed till about midway through the nine-hour season. A few character details here and there suggest Andrew’s racial self-hatred and the prevalence of anti-Asian racism within the gay community, but the relative sparseness of these implications is all the more noteworthy in contrast with the richly developed portrait of the decade’s homophobia.
Credit where it’s due, even if the bar for praise here is laughably low because Hollywood’s institutional aversion toward Asian stories and characters remains so entrenched: In casting Glee’s Criss (who played Blaine Anderson), Ryan Murphy hired a half-Filipino (if white-passing) actor to play the half-Filipino role of Andrew Cunanan. Criss is excellent, and in later episodes, the Philippines-born Broadway performer Jon Jon Briones is electrifying as Andrew’s father, the sociopathic Modesto, who teaches his favorite child all the wrong lessons about the American dream.
If The Assassination of Gianni Versace feels urgent as it revisits the stifling homophobia of the ’90s, it’s far less successful in reimagining Cunanan from a racialized point of view, at least in the first eight episodes. (The season finale was not provided to critics in advance.) It’s certainly not as if those racial and ethnic depictions of Cunanan don’t exist. In his analysis of the divergent foci of the mainstream American and Filipino American media narratives about Cunanan, scholar Allan Punzalan Isaac notes that the former wagged its tongue about his “deviant” sexuality (Tom Brokaw infamously referred to the killer as a “homicidal homosexual”), while consumers of the latter looked on with a mixture of “pleasure and horror.” The horror is understandable enough. The pleasure, perhaps, is easier to grasp when you’re part of a group whose presence and history are constantly made invisible by the larger American culture. “Perhaps [the Filipino American fascination with Cunanan] stemmed from a longing to be reflected in the small screen in this American media sensation,” Isaac wrote several years after Cunanan’s death. Filipinos preferred participation, he conjectures, in “any American drama, even for the wrong reasons.”
Nearly all of the eight Filipino American scholars, activists, and advocates I talked to for this story say that Cunanan has fallen out of popular Filipino American lore, just as he’s been forgotten by American pop culture until now. Professor Christine Bacareza Balance told me in an email interview that when she polled 40 or so students in a recent Filipino American Studies course, only one or two knew who Cunanan was. But among gay Filipino Americans, he remains something of a cult figure and for a few Filipino American writers, a literary muse. Isaac begins his seminal book about Filipino American identity, American Tropics, with a meditation on Cunanan’s incarnation of many of the concepts central to his subject: the possibility of “assimilation gone wrong,” the fear of rejection and the eagerness to belong, the embodiment of Filipino/American “mestizo” beauty standards, the corresponding ethnic ambiguity. (Isaac quotes a New York Times article describing Cunanan’s face as “so nondescript that it appears vaguely familiar to just about everyone.”) Paul Ocampo, a co-chair of the Lacuna Giving Circle, a philanthropic group that fosters leadership in LGBTQ Asian American communities, offers a more cynical interpretation: “There’s an aspect of the glitter and glitz of Hollywood to this story that attracts many in the Filipino American community more than the macabre.”
It’s important to remember that Cunanan murdered five people, apparently in cold blood. His victims deserve to be mourned. But in the absence of other well-known personages (or the inconspicuousness of many successful celebrities’—e.g., Bruno Mars’— Filipino-ness,), it’s perhaps inevitable that some Filipino Americans see or project certain facets of themselves in one of the very few Filipino Americans to appear on TV and on page 1, especially during that era. Ben de Guzman, a policy advocate in D.C., saw Cunanan on the news and thought, There but for the grace of God go I. “As a young, gay Filipino American man who was around his age when he was in the news,” de Guzman recalls via email, “I was forced to look at how the same forces of homophobia and racism that informed my life must have affected him too.”
The former party boy and escort remains a symbol of queer defiance for some in the gay Filipino American community. “Here was a gay Filipino man who seemed unapologetic and daring in his acceptance of his sexuality,” says Ocampo. “In this, he seemed to exude a self-possession that many people struggle with.” Balance says that the image of Cunanan as a “queer Asian/Filipino American on the warpath” “truly goes against many dominant representations within ‘mainstream’ U.S. media.” Isaac contrasts Cunanan’s narrative with the gay/bi film Call Me by Your Name, which he observes is “set outside the U.S., outside the AIDS scare, outside any class conflict—all part of the Cunanan spectacle.” Isaac seems to anticipate a reckoning as Cunanan’s story unfurls on the series: “How is this story of intergenerational sex, wealth, casual prostitution, and reckless living in the gay demimonde of the ’90s to be received in this age of domesticated gay marriage?”
And if Cunanan’s messy and unpredictable life story seems ripe for fictional inspiration, The Assassination of Gianni Versace certainly didn’t get there first. A decade after Cunanan’s death, novelist and playwright Jessica Hagedorn (a canonical Filipino American writer), along with songwriter Mark Bennett, launched in the killer’s hometown a workshop production of their musical Most Wanted, a thinly fictionalized version of Cunanan’s story that explores media sensationalism and marginalized individuals’ desperation to belong. Smaller-scale works like Regie Cabico’s poem “Love Letter From Andrew Cunanan,” Gina Apostol’s short story “Cunanan’s Wake,” and Jason Luz’s erotic short story “Scherzo for Cunanan” likewise attempt to humanize a murderer who, while deplorable for his actions and indisputably extreme in personality, almost certainly had some desires and experiences common to many Filipino Americans. None of these works add up to a complete portrait, or could. But created from Filipino American perspectives, they explore the aspects of Cunanan’s life that white America still isn’t fully grappling with.
Ryan Murphy and company are back with a new installment of their ever-expanding collection of anthology series. The second season of American Crime Story debuted last night dripping with opulence and the warm blood of the titular slain fashion icon.
Murphy’s series excel when they’re given permission to indulge. Regardless of your opinion on American Horror Story: Coven and Hotel, the lavish sets were a wonder to behold. Here too, Versace’s palatial estate and signature extravagance radiates off the screen.
The story’s basics are well-known, so the series appears to be taking some liberties with timeline and specifics in an effort to refocus the crime on what it says about society at the time. Whereas last season’s The People v. O.J. Simpson explored the complex (and widely discussed) racial component to Simpson’s trial and cultural impact, Versace aims to contextualize the Versace murder and the manhunt that followed within American culture’s understand/acceptance of gay men in the ‘90s.
How’d it do? Let’s discuss in our recap below.
1990: Andrew Cunanan and a friend enter a San Francisco nightclub. Cunanan (played with chilling intensity by Glee’s Darren Criss) zeroes in on Versace in the VIP area. Immediately, he breaks through Versace’s disinterest with a just-believable-enough story about how they had met once before and his own family’s Italian heritage.
The ease with which Cunanan is able to ingratiate himself with the famed fashion designer is key to his psychopathy. As he recounts the encounter to friends later, each telling gets a little twist. When discussing their meeting with the straight couple he lives with, he calls Versace a ‘faggot’ with disgust. However, when retelling the story about how Versace invited him to an opera to a gay friend, it’s a date. The friend is already onto Cunanan’s dishonesty: He tells gay people he’s gay and straight people he’s straight. “I tell people what they need to hear,” he responds coolly.
The night of the opera ends with Versace and Cunanan chatting on the stage of the empty theater. Cunanan spins a tale about his upbringing — raised by a pineapple farmer that moonlighted as Imelda Marco’s private pilot. According to Cunanan, his father ran away with a man that worked on his pineapple plantation.
The entire exchange feels like another one of Cunanan’s elaborate tales, but the entire nature of his relationship to Versace before the murder is a matter of speculation. Little is confirmed when it comes to if — and how much — they ever interacted before the shooting, so these scenes liberally apply some poetic license.
Still, Criss does an incredible job as Cunanan. He’s got the natural charm and charisma to believably sell this compulsive liar, but he’s also got the intensity to bring some menace to the performance. This is not the Dalton Warbler we once knew, that’s for sure.
1997: Gianni awakes in his luxurious compound, surround by the gilded gold trimmings, terrazzo floors and marble sculptures. It looks as if he’s living in a Versace ad in Italian Vogue.
Elsewhere, Cunanan wades into the ocean fully clothed and screams out over the horizon.
Versace makes the trip to the newsstand, returns home and Cunanan guns him down at point-blank range. An unlucky dove is also struck and falls dead beside him. Of course, I initially assumed this was more of Ryan Murphy’s typical ham-fisted metaphor at play, but, turns out, there really was a dove struck when Versace was killed. How ‘bout that!
Cunanan flees the scene, racing to a pickup truck to change into clean clothes. He evades chase, and, in one expertly acted scene, mimics the shock of a woman he observes watching the news of Versace’s murder.
Police are able to identify Cunanan by tracing the stolen pickup to the original murdered owner. Cunanan was already wanted for four other murders by the F.B.I. before shooting Versace. Authorities had done an awful job finding him, failing to flyer neighborhoods with his picture and ignoring a reported sighting from a pawn shop owner days before the killing.
They’re not doing a better job now. Questioning Versace’s longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (played by Ricky Martin, doing a serviceable job portraying the grieving partner), the cops are confounded by the couple’s sexual escapades, including three-ways and what Dan Savage might call “monogamish” behavior.
If the cops were insensitive to D’Amico’s loss, Versace’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz) was savage. She bans him from talking further to the public without her consent (“I won’t allow that nobody to kill my brother twice”). She also admonishes him as he weeps, telling him “That’s not what I need from you right now.” She rejects his hand when he reaches for him and later closes a door in his face. (There’s that signature Ryan Murphy on-the-nose metaphor.) Cruz’s heavy Spanish accent doesn’t quite fit Donatella, but her expressive face and unparalleled screen presence elevate the performance beyond the delivery.
As we wrap the first episode, Donatella is halting Gianni’s plan to take Versace public and Cunanan is still on the loose. The authorities’ chase a lead to a motel only to find a strung out junkie, Ronnie (New Girl’s Max Greenfield).
Cunanan, meanwhile, is buying up all the newspapers covering the Versace murder.
Finally, he’s got a story even grander than even he could imagine.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Storyis going to disappoint a lot of people, I think. The people who had such a blast with The People v. O.J. Simpson, who rolled around in the ’90s nostalgia and gawked at how well the actors were playing these pop culture footnotes whose faces and actions we’d remembered from 20 years ago — those people are not going to find very much fun in revisiting the killing spree of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered five people beginning in April 1997, culminating in the murder of Italian designer Gianni Versace in front of his palatial Miami home in July of that same year. This wasn’t a media circus nor a long-running judicial soap opera, and it doesn’t say the Big Things about the American justice system or racial dynamics that The People v. O.J. did. That show was a perfect storm; a thrillingly multi-faceted story that we all remembered with a mixture of fascination, disbelief, and humor, even as we took the appropriate moments to nod mournfully at the deaths of two people. It was good and good for you, and it was also a whole lot of fun. This is not that.
Versace will also likely disappoint anyone looking for a deeper look at the life and accomplishments of its title character. Though Versace’s death is the focal point of the first episode, and his character recurs throughout the series in scenes from earlier in his life, this is no more a series about Gianni Versace — famed gay Italian fashion designer whose clothes and runway presentations brought a pop celebrity element to fashion in the ’90s — than The People v. O.J. was about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. …Okay, he’s not that absent from the narrative; you don’t cast Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz, and Ricky Martin to play the Versace wing of this story and completely cut them off. But anyone looking for a gaudy Ryan Murphy take on the excesses of the Versace lifestyle, with Cruz doing her best Maya Rudolph “get ooooooout” as Donatella will have to be content with the first episode. That hour pauses to stare lasciviously at the decor of Versace’s Miami mansion; the servants who hold trays with orange juice in champagne flutes for Gianni’s morning routine. It’s luxurious and excessive, and since the one thing we do know about this story is that Versace will soon be dead, it feels sharply cruel. It feels, in short, like a Ryan Murphy series, which often gives you exactly the sex/violence/intrigue you want and then slaps you a little bit for watching it.
But beyond those first minutes, Versace fades into the background to make room for, as cosmically unfair as this may seem, his killer, Andrew Cunanan. It may not turn out to be a popular decision — I’ll be shocked if The Assassination of Gianni Versace is even a fraction of the hit that People v. O.J. was — but creatively, it’s hard to quibble, because here’s the thing: the show that we get, the show about Andrew Cunanan and his murder victims and the systems that kept them hidden away, either in the shadows or behind gilded gates, that show is a bit of brilliance.
Produced by Ryan Murphy, written by London Spy‘s Tom Rob Smith, based off of the Maureen Orth book Vulgar Favors and told in reverse chronology, from the Versace movie on backwards, the story of Andrew Cunanan — con artist, drug addict, rent boy, striver, liar, killer — doesn’t lend itself to the kind of armchair quarterbacking (forgive the football pun) that the O.J. Simpson trial did. It’s all murkier, dirtier, sadder than any of us remember. While Versace’s murder and the subsequent manhunt for Cunanan made national news, the details of the killing, and the four murders that preceded it, weren’t the kind of kitchen-table fascinations that Marcia Clark and F. Lee Bailey were. There is a sense, after watching the series (8 of the 9 episodes were made available to press), that the Cunanan killings were treated in the American imagination as a kind of niche gay horror, mired in the darkened clubs and closeted assignations that still characterized the gay experience of the 1990s.
As successful as the series is at following Cunanan, played by Darren Criss as a frighteningly unknowable cipher whose desperation to feel important (rich, famous, beautiful, loved) leads him inexorably to murder, it’s even better as a depiction of the role homophobia and the closet played in both the murders and their subsequent investigations. Four of Cunanan’s five victims — excepting cemetery caretaker William Reese, who was murdered essentially as a bystander as Cunanan stole his truck — were either gay or rumored to be gay, and their relationship to Cunanan (lovers? objects of desire/envy?) unclear. The low-key but persistent homophobia of the time period is insidious and pervasive. It’s there as Miami police question Versace’s partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) about his and Gianni’s sex lives. It’s there as investigators question Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) about her husband, Lee, the Chicago real estate tycoon and Cunanan’s third victim. (Miglin’s relationship to Cunanan has long been in dispute, and while Murphy and co. keep the technicalities shrouded, it’s clear where the show stands on the matter.) It’s there in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell minefield traversed by Jeff Trail (a fantastic Finn Wittrock), Cunanan’s first victim, who met Cunanan in the San Diego gay bars he visited in secret while he was in the Navy. And it’s there behind the haunted eyes of David Madson (the utterly revelatory Cody Fern), Cunanan’s second victim.
The David Madson killing is the one we know least about, and as a result the one that Murphy and Smith take the most liberties with. But where you might expect “Ryan Murphy takes liberties” to lead to something gaudy and over-the-top, the show instead imagines a devastating series of events that lays bare the show’s clearest theme: 1990s American attitudes about LGBT people kept these murders quiet, kept these victims trapped, kept their salvation out of reach.
In Darren Criss, Ryan Murphy has found one of his most deeply committed and terrifying muses. He disappears into a character who himself disappears into whomever he’s trying to be. He’s not a Catch Me If You Can-style chameleon. Andrew’s is a sneaker and more darklyrelatable kind of malleability. He’s whatever version of himself he wants to be. He can come from wealth, he can be building sets for the upcoming Titanic movie, he can work in the financial sectors of the entertainment industry, he can have met Gianni Versace one night at a San Francisco club. Criss does this all with a frightening amount of charm in a performance that’s as deeply committed as anyone on a Ryan Murphy show to date.
The Versace material, beyond the first episode, acts in a kind of counterpoint to the events of the Cunanan story. Versace’s bold move to out himself publicly, at a time when even the most obviously gay celebrities never talked about it in the media, is contrasted with Trail’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell struggles. Donatella Versace’s determination to keep her brother’s fashion empire in the family finds a mirror later in Marilyn Miglin holding tightly to her and her husband’s legacy. Anyone looking for Penelope Cruz to burlesque her way to an Emmy will probably walk away disappointed that the show doesn’t give her enough to do, but for once Murphy has opted for moderation.
Rather than a portrait of the life and death of a fashion icon, Murphy and Smith have created a diffuse collage of tragedy and crime that will probably confound and frustrate the very audience that found The People v. O.J. so intoxicating. But there’s real gravity to this story and a frustrated, heartbroken scream into a hostile void that cuts far deeper than mere rubbernecking. It’s not fun, but it’s not to be missed.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story continues the series’ track record of being Ryan Murphy’s best show on television. Two years ago, The People v. O.J. Simpson was a surprise hit for a variety of reasons. It featured excellent actors in amazing roles and the season maintained its thrilling momentum, even while exploring the minute details of the Simpson case. The show was engaging and thoughtfully delivered throughout. My thesis at the time was that the show’s secret weapon was that it was based on a book by Jeffrey Toobin, and that’s what forced Murphy and company to keep the production on its tracks from start to finish. A common complaint about American Horror Story is that every season tends to go off the rails after a few episodes. Because American Crime Story has been based on thoroughly-researched texts about real-life events, there aren’t as many opportunities to embellish or stray into territory which might lose an audience.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace benefits by having a source text in the same way that The People v. O.J. Simpson did. This time around, the source text is Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History by Maureen Orth. The book largely follows serial killer Andrew Cunanan, whom Orth had been investigating while writing for Vanity Fair before Cunanan took the life of his most famous victim. Cunanan and Simpson make for two very different real-life suspects for the series, but Assassination builds on many of The People v. O.J.’s strongest storytelling elements.
In the first episode, the camera rarely sits in one place for long. Viewers are treated to gorgeous sweeping shots of Versase (played perfectly by Edgar Ramirez), his servants, and his incredible Miami mansion. Care is taken to avoid a focus on Verace’s face in all scenes taking place in present day. We view him from behind or afar, which further elevates his celebrity status and untouchable allure. It is only in flashbacks or when the camera dwells on the horrific aftermath of his senseless murder that the camera rests on his face. The cinematography is handled elegantly and with precision throughout the entire episode, and it makes the whole production feel more cinematic than what’s usually available on cable television.
The performers of The Assassination of Gianni Versace are all acting at the top of their game. Just like how The People v. O.J. showed us actors and actresses in a new and interesting light, Assassination captures the spirit of Versace’s loving sister and business partner, Donatella, through a strong performance by Penelope Cruz. Musician Ricky Martin acted in Argentinian television programs at the start of his career, and his appearance in Assassination is enough to make you think he never left the craft. Darren Criss is versatile in his intense portrayal of serial killer Andrew Cunanan. The first episode shifts between a couple of different moments in time, and Criss’ Cunanan is sometimes enigmatic, sometimes detestable, and always engaging. In one moment he shares with Ramirez’ Versace, I could have sworn he was channeling Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. And that’s one of the major things that sets Assassination apart from O.J.: it’s clear that Assassination will be spending much more time inside of the suspect’s head. In O.J. there were so many fascinating characters and so many unusual things going on that we often only viewed Cuba Gooding Jr.’s O.J. from other characters’ perspectives. Trust me: Assassination is not lacking in fascinating characters, but it does seem to be taking much more time to dwell on the actions of Cunanan than O.J. ever did with, well, O.J..
Beyond the simply gorgeous set pieces and strong performances, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story seems eager to explore the various social issues and complexities of this tragic historical event. The first episode doesn’t feel rushed, and it seems to be suggesting that the series plans to take its time with the way in which its events will unfold. We still know very little about all of the key players in this story, and it appears clear that the details will be unveiled through a series of flashbacks alongside present-day events. One thing’s for sure: The Assassination of Gianni Versase: American Crime Story is off to a tremendous start, and I look forward to tuning in for future installments! Should it continue the first season’s trend of faithfully sticking to the source material with restraint and artistry, true crime aficionados and Ryan Murphy fans will be in for a treat!
Stay tuned to Horror News Network for more reviews of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story as new episodes hit the airwaves!
LOS ANGELES—“‘Versace’ miniseries is the first great show of 2018,” New York Post critic Robert Rorke raved about FX Networks’ “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.” Rorke added, “The performances of the leads are outstanding, but special mention must be made of (Darren) Criss, who beautifully captures (Andrew) Cunanan’s ability to tell the biggest lies anyone has ever heard and literally charm the pants off anyone he sets his sights on.”
Rorke went so far as to say that Jon Jon Briones, who plays the Fil-Am Cunanan’s father, could be a “future Emmy winner.” Here’s from Rorke’s review: “And we get a ringside seat at the twisted Cunanan home in San Diego, where Andrew’s con-man father, Pete (future Emmy winner Jon Jon Briones), sold the family home from under his wife and four children before fleeing the country on an embezzlement charge.”
Praise for the entire cast is typified in Variety’s review by Sonia Saraiya: “ … An impeccable Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace and a strong performance from singer Ricky Martin as Versace’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico … (Edgar) Ramírez, Cruz and Martin are so compelling together … It’s worth noting that practically every performer in ‘American Crime Story’ is stunning … ”
“The Assassination … ” is creator Ryan Murphy’s Season 2 installment of his “American Crime Story” anthology series, which debuted with the critically lauded “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”
Based in part on “Vulgar Favors,” Maureen Orth’s intensively researched nonfiction bestseller on Cunanan’s crime spree, “The Assassination … ” tells the story in reverse. Ryan directed the premiere episode, which begins with Cunanan fatally shooting Versace (Edgar) in Miami in 1997.
Ryan then narrates backward, “Memento-style,” the journeys that Cunanan and the famous Italian designer went through before their tragic encounter on the marble steps in front of the latter’s mansion in South Beach. Other directors of the nine-episode series include actor Matt Bomer.
Jon Jon Briones
Jon Jon, in an e-mail from New York as he was busy packing on the day after his successful “Miss Saigon” run on Broadway ended, wrote, “I had a wonderful experience working on ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ with fantastic writing from Tom Rob Smith, inspiring direction by Matt Bomer (Episode 8) and Dan Minahan (Episode 9), with Matt, Ryan (Murphy), Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson (producers) giving their confidence in me. I felt very fortunate to be given this opportunity.”
It seems Jon Jon’s fellow Fil-Am, Darren, plus Ryan, Matt and Nina were so impressed with the Quezon City-born actor that they watched him as The Engineer when they were all in New York.
Jon Jon shared, “A couple of weeks before they saw ‘Miss Saigon,’ Brad Simpson wrote me an e-mail saying they were very happy with my finished episodes and that I will be very pleased when I see them. Brad also mentioned that everyone wanted to see me in ‘Miss Saigon.’
“A week or so later, I got text messages from Matt and Darren saying they’re all, including Ryan Murphy, coming to the show. I’ve never met Ryan before that. I was so excited to finally be in the same room with him. They came to a Saturday show, and they all loved it. I was humbled that they all came to see the show.”
In May last year, we visited the Miami set of “The Assassination …” which was filming in Casa Casuarina, Versace’s lavish villa where he was gunned down by Cunanan after his usual morning routine of buying coffee and magazines in a nearby restaurant. We wrote about our on-set interviews with Darren, Penelope and Ryan in previous columns.
In this column, we feature Ricky Martin and Edgar Ramirez, whom we interviewed in a room right beside the entrance to the mansion that continues to draw gawkers and tourists.
Ricky Martin
Ricky, who acted in a TV series in Latin America and in the US soap series, “General Hospital,” talked about how he prepared to portray real-life figure Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s longtime partner, who rushed to the front of the house when he heard the gunshots.
“The amount of research that we’ve done and, of course, by the production company and Ryan, has helped me so much,” the Puerto Rican singer-actor said. “Ryan tapped into the big story, what’s known and what’s not known. I feel confident that I’m going to do justice to what Antonio D’Amico went through. There’s a lot of highs and lows in this character … a lot of sadness.
“But at the same time, you have the love and connection between Antonio and Gianni that was magical—to be able to live for 15 years together, in an era where that relationship was forbidden in many aspects, that nothing stopped them is something that I definitely want to talk about.
“It’s a big challenge for me as an actor. The confidence that I got from spending years on Broadway was very important, but television is different. And to be able to maintain the pain for long hours is something that I’ve been dying to do for a long time.”
Ricky shared that shooting in the actual villa of Versace helped him as an actor. “It’s a luxury to be able to walk into a room that helps you to find your emotion. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but I’m being really honest when the first scenes that I shot here were when I actually found Versace dead in front of the house. I got here at 5 o’clock in the morning. I just started working on my emotions, but when I actually walked into that area, it hit me in my chest. I started crying hysterically. I swear I could feel it.
“I went with my gut, and it helped me so much to reach a level of sadness before I heard ‘Action!’ All I had to do was touch the walls, because it was so vibrant.”
It is July 15, 1997. The sun is shining in Miami Beach. Gianni Versace, the famed and opulent Italian designer wakes up, grabs a fabulous robe, and heads to his balcony where he looks out onto the immaculate view; he’s like a king surveying his sun-kissed kingdom. The camera guides us to the beach where a young man is enjoying the morning breeze. In his backpack, he has two items: a copy of the book The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Conde Nast and a gun. One need only look at the title of Ryan Murphy’s new show, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, to see how these two men are connected. By the middle of the first episode of the FX series, we witness the young man (Andrew Cunanan, played by Darren Criss) approach an affable Versace (a balding Edgar Ramirez) and shoot him at the steps of his home.
These first scenes are scored, as most of the Murphy-directed episode is, with operatic chords that amp up the capital letter DRAMA. And really, when you’re telling the story of one of the most infamous assassinations of the late 20th century in the United States, one involving an Italian fashion designer known for an aesthetic that flirts with what’s gaudy, you could do worse than aim for operatic drama.
And boy does Murphy deliver on that account. The first episode follows the events of that fateful day as well as flashing back to when (allegedly, we’re encouraged to take everything our sociopathic antihero tells his friends with a grain of salt) Cunanan and Versace first met. But let’s be honest, the main draw of this latest American Crime Story is its amazing cast.
You wanted to see Ricky Martin tapping into his Alcanzar una estrella II and General Hospital roots? You’ll find him here screaming out for help as Gianni’s partner after finding him bloodied on the steps of their home.
You wanted Ramirez to finally get a chance to show off the talent that’s nabbed him roles with Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, and Kathryn Bigelow? You’ll see him in full deglam mode as the aging Versace who’s both intrigued and slightly wary of the charismatic Cunanan.
You wanted Almodóvar muse Penelope Cruz deliciously using her Oscar-winning phrase (“gee-nee-us!”) but on the small screen to talk about Versace? You’ll see her totally transformed into the heartbroken – if driven – sister of the slain style mogul Donatella, who’s all platinum blonde hair flicks and heavily accented put-downs.
In sum, this is the place to be this winter if you want to see your faves chewing scenery and plunging us deep into a sun-dappled, neon-tinged world of murder, homophobia, and fame.
This Week’s MVP:
Ramirez may have the title role, Criss may dazzle with his uncanny take on the compulsive liar that is Cunanan, and Cruz may nail Donatella’s lower voice register and no-nonsense attitude, but – and here, perhaps my own Ricky obsession is showing – I loved the interaction that Martin’s Antonio D’Amico (in a blood-splattered tennis outfit) has with the police investigating Gianni’s murder. It illuminated why this story needs to be told in 2018.
Framed by gold-encrusted patterns, D’Amico is humiliated, needing to explain that he was Versace’s “partner” (“His companion. I loved him,” he tells the cop), but that he also procured young men who sometimes came to the house to have sex with one or both of them. The cop, claiming ignorance, asks him, “These other men, did they consider themselves to be Versace’s partner?” to which D’Amico is forced to talk about how it wasn’t the same; he’d been with Gianni for 15 years. But to these straight cops, Versace’s unorthodox romantic arrangement is as alien as the Greco-Roman decor that littered his estate.
Therein lies the most radical aspect of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. It’s clear from the get-go that this show is interested in the insidious homophobia that still ran rampant in the late 90s and which encouraged law enforcement to treat crimes against homosexuals to be of lesser concern (and worthy of less empathy) than those happening to quote-unquote “normal” people.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, we’ll have to wait until next week (at least!) to get our first glimpse of Ricky in those tantalizing speedos he sports in the promo pictures for the show.
After a title card reading “July 16, 1997,” fade up on the trompe l’oeil clouds painted on the ceiling of the bedroom of Gianni Versace. The camera drops down to the man himself, lying in bed first thing in the morning and contemplating said clouds while Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” begins on the soundtrack – an eminently clockable choice due to its ubiquity, but perhaps more appropriate than usual to accompany the story of the murder of a creative genius by a grifting striver, given its provenance.
Gianni rises and dons velvet slippers with the Versace seal on them. The camera follows him through his baroquely appointed home as he selects a pink bathrobe with a frieze pattern at the collar, to match the gold silk pajamas with the frieze pattern at the waist, and heads out to his balcony to enjoy the morning sun and survey his domain.
On the beach – not far away, it’s implied, but of course worlds away at the same time – Andrew Cunanan sits at the water’s edge, amid clumps of washed-ashore seaweed. He takes Caroline Seebohm’s The Man Who Would Be Vogue: The Life And Times Of Conde Nast from his grubby backpack and turns it to the camera so we get it (drink!), then takes out a gun and regards it, then stuffs both items back in the pack and broods at what looks like a healing burn mark on his left thigh before wandering into the water and screaming at it…screaming with all his might, but barely audible against the legendary piece of music and the roar of the implacable sea. Just in case you were wondering if the motif of Cunanan’s unfulfilled need to feel important weren’t in play from the moment we see him.
Gianni takes pills already laid out for him on a tray. We see the prescription bottles, but not what the pills are or are for, which I note for a reason, but we’ll get back to it; in the meantime, Gianni has descended through the house to the atrium, where casually liveried staff wait for him with perfectly correct posture. Taking the orange juice that one butler is holding on a silver salver, Gianni gives them a cheery “good morning,” and most of them bow. Sipping his juice, he heads into the pool area, which, like the rest of the house, looks like something out of Petronius (but before it gets too nutty with the live birds cooked into pastry shells).
By contrast, Cunanan is breakfasting on Jolt and blearily giving the leathery old gents in banana hammocks on the beach promenade the side-eye.
A servant brings Gianni a covered tray of fresh fruit. Gianni fondly rubs his arm when the breakfast is unveiled. I note this because here and in the scene just prior, there’s an apparent divergence between how Gianni thinks of or treats his household staff and how they’ve been instructed to behave; maybe nothing significant, but it caught my attention.
Gianni, dressed, heads out, blowing kisses to his be-tennis-whites-ed companion Antonio D’Amico and tenderly patting Antonio’s hitting partner as he passes him. When a tourist couple asks him for an autograph, he politely declines…
…as Cunanan dashes into a grotsky bathroom off the beach and hurls into a revolting toilet that, were he not already nauseated, would probably get the job done on its own. He slumps against the side of the stall and stares dully at the homophobic graffito left on the opposite wall.
Not exactly American Vandal-level work there, Miami bigots. Cunanan splashes water on his face and tries to pull it together…
…while Gianni greets a friend at the news café, then orders up a whole whack of magazines, including Vanity Fair, which he calls “Diana.” Aw.
He’s tooling home when Cunanan, seemingly almost coincidentally passing by across the street, spots him, starts, and fumbles the gun out of his bag. As Gianni is taking his time figuring out his keys, Cunanan stalks across the street, gun extended, and starts firing. Doves startle up all around Gianni, who turns and grunts, “No.” Another gunshot smashes us into the title card.
Cunanan, wearing an open shirt and grey briefs, lurks at a bedroom door, then lets himself in and creepers over to the bed, where a man and woman are asleep. (They are Phil and Elizabeth Cote; Elizabeth is described in contemporary coverage of the crime as one of Cunanan’s “patrons,” which would answer – sort of – Tara Ariano’s and my questions about their relationship from our recent The Blotter Presents conversation about the show. Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which this season is at least loosely based, Cunanan had known Elizabeth since middle school and was godfather to the Cotes’ daughter; I haven’t read the book yet, but you can find more in this Vanity Fair article.) He tugs at himself while looking at them with an unsettlingly opaque expression, but before that goes any further, Elizabeth half-wakes to see him looming there, so Cunanan switches gears: “Guess who I met?” He leaps into bed in between them as Elizabeth wails, “Andrew!” With great fanfare, he announces, “Gianni Versace!” and Elizabeth gasps and demands that he tell her everything while Phil clambers out of bed with a “this fucking guy” expression on his face. It’s not entirely clear at the beginning of the scene when this takes place, but the next title card reads…
“October 1990,” so let’s assume shortly after that. We’re in San Francisco, following Cunanan down the stairs into a gay club to the strains of “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life.” He greets a redheaded friend, and they cut through the dance floor in slo-mo so the audience has more time to appreciate the care taken by Wardrobe with the leather harnesses and mesh t-shirts. The friend gets them into the VIP area, and Cunanan hasn’t gotten more than a few steps inside when he’s ensorcelled by the sight of Gianni, deep in conversation on a banquet; you can practically hear him getting starfuck wood. He leans forward and over-accents, “Signore Versace. Buona sera.” Gianni and his seatmates give Cunanan the “asshole says what” look, so Red is obliged to lean down and note that it’s his friend, Andrew. Cunanan gets a dismissive “hi” before Gianni returns to his conversation, so he tries again: “It’s good to see you in San Francisco.” Gianni:
Again he tries to return to his friends, but Cunanan is chastened only for a second before saying grandly that he’s excited to see the opera Gianni is doing the costumes for, that it’s time a contemporary designer did that work. Impatiently, Gianni cuts him off: “Have we met before?” Taking a beat that, if you were looking for it, would give him away, Cunanan says yes, at a garden party at Gianni’s “residence” in Lago di Como. He gives just enough detail to imply that he’s actually been there, and adds, “You were most gracious, of course…I remember, but for you to remember is very flattering.” Who knows if this exchange actually took place, but it’s flawless writing of this kind of con regardless: so-called specifics, likely available to anyone with a VF subscription; assumed intimacy, which is a gamble with VIPs but will make most marks accept that it exists regardless of social station, because the first instinct is seldom to think you’re being lied to; obsequiousness that relies on the social contract to be, if not appreciated, then at least acknowledged.
It doesn’t get Cunanan as far as he’d like here, though, as Gianni gives him a perfunctory “Lago di Como; that must be it, yes,” and returns to his discussion. Cunanan sets his jaw, and Darren Criss does a wonderful job of showing us Cunanan’s wheels turning as he refocuses his fury at Gianni not immediately inviting him into the charmed circle based on his beauty and wit, and tries to find another in. It’s uncomfortable to watch, but also a master class in portraying predatory behavior that, in the beginning of its cycle, can register as merely pathetic and awkward. Cunanan hurries to say that his mother’s parents are from Italy, from the south, and blares the family name: “Maybe you know them?” Hard to say if we’re meant to see this as a saddish blunder – if Lake Como were any further north, it would be in Switzerland, and there are 55 million people in Italy – but, despite my initial assumption that Cunanan just borrowed the name of an Italian football star who had just featured in the ‘90 World Cup, “Schillaci” is in fact his mother’s maiden name and it does get Gianni’s attention, albeit in the form of a somewhat concerned expression. Cunanan quickly blathers that his mother feels a “strong connection” to Italy but she’s never visited: “Can you believe that? An Italian-American that’s never even seen her own country?” Gianni shoots his seatmates a look and confirms, not entirely interestedly, that she’s never gone to Italy; Cunanan takes the opening, sitting down and confiding that he thinks she wants to keep Italy “in her mind as this perfect place,” and of course he’s talking about himself, his own idealizing of situations and estrangement from his true self – provided you believe a sociopath can have a self, versus, in the words of Cloeckley, a finely-tuned reflex machine built to mimic human responses.
Gianni sends the guy next to him off for a refill and semi-gestures for Cunanan to take the empty seat, asking where Cunanan’s mother’s parents were born. “Palermo,” Cunanan says, scrambling into the seat and imperiously telling Red that he’ll have whatever Gianni’s having. Red sort of rolls his eyes and goes to get Cunanan a club soda.
Back at the Cote…uh, cote, Cunanan is talking up how exclusive the club is and its “strict policy” on not approaching celebrities, which he would “never do, by the way…uch, so tacky.” As Phil is rolling his eyes, Cunanan says “this agreeable-looking man” came up and introduced himself as Versace. “I say to him, honey, if you’re Versace, I’m Coco Chanel.” Remember that phrasing. Elizabeth is all “oh no you di’in’t,” but he says he did, and it was embarrassing when Gianni “established himself as, y’know. Versace.”
Phil is continuing to make “girl, please” faces as Cunanan, helping himself to breakfastry, says grandly that he’s not a fan of Versace’s clothes – “so…bright, it’s too much” – and Elizabeth has to mouth “stop it” at her husband as Cunanan proposes that “Armani designs clothes for wives, I think Versace designs clothes for sluts and don’t you look at me like that.” Remember that phrasing, too. Cunanan hops up on the counter with his cereal and snots, “Please, I know the score. Lecherous fagon the prowl.” Phil didn’t know Versace was gay, because apparently Phil is Amish, and Elizabeth scolds Cunanan for the slur. He snots through a mouthful of cereal, “What are we supposed to call them?”, adding that “homosexual” sounds too scientific, and anyway, he’s totally fine with it, which is why he agreed to a date with Versace. The Cotes exchange another “ohhhh-kay” look – apparently, they don’t know he’s gay either, although he’s been using the queenliest locutions outside Buckingham Palace during the entire scene, so maybe they’ve just agreed between them not to call him on his BS? It’s not like that wasn’t a running theme with his friends in his actual life – as Cunanan is rinsing out his cereal bowl and waxing lofty about Capriccio being a “minor work,” and Elizabeth confirms that Cunanan accepted. “My dear, sweet Lizzie,” Cunanan says, sounding almost angry with her, of course he said yes.
It’s at this point that I’d decide the fun was over and change the locks if I were Lizzie, but hindsight is etc.
Cunanan, Cunanan’s ridiculous spectacles,
his friend, and the friend’s wretched color-block sweater are walking in the Berkeley faculty courtyard as Cunanan relays this same tale to the friend. “But is it real?” the friend blunts hilariously. Cunanan’s like, uhhhhhh, and the friend notes that the other day he heard Cunanan say he was half-Jewish. “Well, that’s…complicated!” It isn’t, Friend says. “You were an altar boy. We spoke about…what happened to you.” What does it matter what I said, Cunanan snorts. It matters, Friend protests. Only if they know it isn’t true, Cunanan says. “But you know,” Friend points out. Hurt, Cunanan says he thought Friend would be happy about it. Happy about a date with Versace?, Friend incredulouses: “You can’t even tell people you’re gay!” Cunanan babbles that he does so tell people, all the time, but Friend interrupts, “You tell gay people you’re gay, and straight people you’re straight.” Busted, Cunanan quickly recovers with, “I tell people what they need to hear.” He starts to walk off, but the friend doesn’t know how he’s supposed to act: “Do I pretend to know the person you’re pretending to be? I can’t keep up! Every time I feel like I’m getting close to you you say you’re someone else.” He takes Cunanan’s hand, saying he knows he’s not impressive, but he’s nice, smart, and kind. Cunanan is utterly unmoved by this – in fact, almost disgusted – and pulls his hand away, thenmakes eye contact to swear up and down that he really does have a date with Gianni Versace, honest ‘n’ truly. Friend gives up: “I’m pleased for you.” “Good,” Cunanan smugs.
Cunanan studies Gianni’s various residences, in magazines laid out with compulsive neatness on the carpet. He gets up to survey the sad Cosby-sweater and worn-jeans contents of his closet…
…then goes shopping in Phil’s closet instead, naked.
Gianni does a fitting for one of the singers and talks about how the most important part of a dress is the look on the wearer’s face, and how he learned that from his mother, who had a little dress shop in Calabri. As he talks about how his clothes “will serve you,” the singer relaxes and starts to look happier with her gown.
Elizabeth comes home to find Cunanan helping himself to Phil’s clothes as Lisa Stansfield echoes through the house. She and her giant 1990 belt buckle lean in the closet doorway and snap, “You should have asked.” Cunanan doesn’t acknowledge this until he can arrange his face in a suitably pitiable way, then doesn’t apologize, just grunts, “I have nothing.” As he knew she would, she softens: “You look very nice.” He was going for “impressive.” Elizabeth fastens what looks like a gold Rolex onto Cunanan’s wrist to help with that as he unconvincingly objects, then murmurs, “I love you.” “You are rrrridiculous,” she tells him, maternally, but he’s pleased with what he sees in the mirror.
The opera. Men in tuxedoes give Cunanan the eye, either because he’s an out-of-place striver who’s not in a tux or because they think he’s hot. Not in that poly-barf necktie, he isn’t. Still, he’s feeling himself, and nicks a pair of opera glasses another attendee left on the bar. He’s using them to look at the audience, mostly, though when a cutie across the room makes binocul-eye contact, Cunanan drops the glasses pointedly. Pan over the soloist to Cunanan, watching something raptly – possibly Gianni, whom we cut to next, watching his dress anxiously – and then back to Cunanan, performatively dabbing his eyes and then looking around at his opulent surroundings.
Gianni opens champagne after the opera while Cunanan wanders the stage, touching the harp and various cut-glass props like a child, then stepping into the spotlight and somberly bowing, eyes closed. Gianni, amused: “Did you enjoy it?” Cunanan loved it; it inspired him. They clink glasses as Gianni asks if Cunanan is creative. “Yes, very much,” Cunanan says, which is kind of an off answer, but as we’re about to see, he is, in his way; he delivers a monologue about picking pineapples on his father’s plantation, and how his father was in the military and used to fly Imelda Marcos’s plane, and now runs his businesses from abroad with a young boyfriend as a chauffeur (his father was Filipino and did leave the family; everything else is a lie). He’s going to write a novel about it! Gianni doesn’t seem entirely to believe this rehearsed-sounding aria of try-hard, but is at least amused by it. Then they talk about family; it’s everything to Gianni, who made his first dress for Donatella: “Maybe every dress I make is for her.” “That makes me want to cry,” Cunanan says. It makes Gianni smile, so Cunanan hastily adjusts with, “Yes, that too of course.” Gianni talks about the logo of his company, that it comes from his childhood, and his hope that people will get to know him through his clothes. Maybe people will get to know Cunanan through his novel in that same way. A strange observation from a man who barely knows Cunanan; I mean, not that this scene even took place, really, but it just lands as something the writers wanted to accomplish with the scene and isn’t organic.
Anyway, Cunanan wonders if he shouldn’t have a more “literary” pseudonym like “DeSilva” – one of Cunanan’s pseudonyms IRL – but Gianni says no, he should be proud of his name. But Cunanan’s already moved on to enthusing that “when” a movie is made of his novel, Gianni has to “do the clothes.” Did Gianni know Imelda had three thousand pairs of shoes? Everyone knows this, but Gianni merely flirts that he doesn’t design shoes…but he could try, for Cunanan’s movie. Cunanan, enthralled: “I am so happy right now.” He should be, Gianni coos; he’s handsome, clever – here he plucks a stray eyelash from Cunanan’s cheekbone – and he’ll be someone really special one day. Cunanan blows the lash, timed with a gunshot on the soundtrack…
…and we’re back to the day of the murder. Antonio hears the shots from inside. Outside, Cunanan cocks his head Starman-ily at the dove he’s accidentally shot, twitching in its death throes, and Gianni’s fingers also twitching in that same way. A God’s-eye shot of Gianni’s blood pooling beneath his head cuts to Antonio’s hitting partner coming out the front gate and giving chase to Cunanan, who runs for a while and then stops and draws down on the hitting partner to back him off. Antonio bellows for help.
A patrol car pulls up. Antonio begs for an ambulance while looky-loos gather across the street.
Cunanan flees into a parking garage, to a red pickup. He jumps in, clutches the wheel, rubs his temples, and emits a very odd – and flawlessly observed by Criss – laugh/yell that seems celebratory, but is punctuated by ricti of terror. As he’s deep-breathing himself under control, sirens take us into commercial.
Miami detectives José Zúñiga and Luke Wheeler (fine: Will Chase) are briefed on the victim as Antonio continues to sob for an ambulance. As they look stricken by the celebrity aspect of the crime, a long-hair in madras shorts and a fanny pack sprints to his car parked nearby to retrieve a Polaroid camera (kids, ask your grandparents).
A blood-spattered Antonio and the house staff watch in horror as Gianni is bundled onto a gurney, his magazines still scattered on the steps, his housekeys still dangling from the lock.
The Polaroid guy gets a shot of Gianni going into the ambulance.
Uniforms get the BOLO for Cunanan – grey shirt, red cap – and spot him in a red shirt on the upper level of the parking structure.
The ambulance pulls up to the hospital, trailed by news crews, and Gianni is rushed inside.
Cops come upon a red-shirted guy whose face we don’t see trying to break into a Ford Taurus, and give chase.
The trauma team hurries Gianni past an African-American doctor, who looks taken aback, for reasons we won’t investigate further until the next episode.
The red-shirt suspect (heh) is tackled; it is not Cunanan. Cunanan, who has paired his red polo with red acid-wash jeans that I actually kind of want, but that are not indicated for staying under the radar after shooting a fashion icon, is fleeing the garage from a different staircase (or is possibly in a different garage entirely).
The trauma team works on Gianni, although based on that upsetting facial wound, there’s probably little point. A nurse cuts off his t-shirt, bisecting the Versace brand symbol on the front. I think I get it.
Outside the estate, Polaroid Dude is starting the bidding of “the only photo of Versace” at thirty grand.
As the worried doctor looks on, the trauma team calls it. They disperse; the last nurse out covers Gianni with a spattered sheet. The camera slowly pans out to take in the mess left behind, the grubby scuffed walls and crooked switchplate in the hallway.
Cunanan grabs a cab as, in the atrium, Antonio is told (I assume) by a security guard that Gianni didn’t make it. The detectives look on, and Det. Zúñiga is shocked to learn from Det. Wheeler that Antonio is Gianni’s boyfriend, like, is it your first day in Miami, Det. Zúñiga? As Antonio weeps, one of the autograph-seekers from earlier ducks under the barrier to soak a page from a Versace Voguespread in the blood on the steps. She and her husband carefully preserve the page in plastic. Consider celebrity culture indicted, show, jeez.
Cunanan heads into a schmancy, glass-brick-tastic hotel and into the restroom, where he gazes at himself in the mirror and splashes water on his face. As he’s leaving, he pauses at the bar to look at TV coverage of the shooting – and to give us a good look at those jeans.
When a woman in front of him covers her mouth in horror, he studies her response with that Starman curious head-cock again, then imitates it, but under his hand, he’s smiling. This really is a fantastic, simultaneously chilling and slappable performance by Darren Criss.
As MPD runs the VIN on the red pickup and finds that it was stolen from a William Reese – in whose murder Cunanan is a listed suspect – the FBI brass are first confusing Gianni Versace with Liberace, then with Jordache, then scrambling to figure out how to make it not their fault that a guy they’ve had on the Most Wanted list for some time killed a headline name. In Miami, Agents Gruber and Evans (a.k.a. Stan from Mad Men) half-walk, half-cringe into the estate. Agent Stan briefs the local detectives on Cunanan; Det. Lori Wieder is particularly unimpressed to hear that the FBI may have known Cunanan was in the area. She’s even less impressed when Agent Stan shows them a trunkful of Most Wanted posters with Cunanan on them as he says Cunanan’s now killed five people. Det. Luke Wheeler asks how many of those fliers actually went out. Agent Stan doesn’t respond. Det. Lori is a bitch about it: “How many have gone out, Agent Evans?” Then she stalks off. Not sure what the implication is here – that they didn’t make the cases a priority because the victims were gay? Wouldn’t surprise me given what we see shortly, but we’ll get to that.
First, a press conference about the shooting, which goes to voice-over as we see the ruined face of Gianni, then a plane door opening, but shot from below so it looks like a morgue drawer opening. Santo and Donatella exit the plane; even in mourning, she’s in full battle regalia, leather suit and heels. Technicians collect evidence from Gianni’s body, and from the dove Cunanan also shot, as the police spokesman describes Cunanan as “armed and extremely dangerous” and Donatella semi-staggers through the glare of flashbulbs and up the bloodstained steps of the estate. She greets the staff, which is again lined up quite formally, with the same warmth her brother had earlier.
Det. Luke is asking clumsily what Antonio’s “involvement” was with Gianni – was he the person who procured dancers and models for Gianni? Antonio looks ill and says he was “his partner, not his pimp.” Det. Luke is like, this is a police investigation, we need to know what’s what and the staff already told me the deal with the extracurriculars, so…what does Antonio mean by “partner,” exactly? “What do I mean?”, Antonio repeats, apparently as puzzled as I am that a Miami detective wouldn’t get it with this, even in 1997, but Det. Luke finally figures out he might get further on his own, and asks Dets. Lori and Zúñiga to excuse them. Gee, hard to believe Antonio doesn’t feel comfortable with Det. Lori there!
And if it looks like she’s giving Antonio a particularly frosty glare there, that’s literally always her face. Anyway, Det. Luke tells Antonio after the others have gone that he’s on Antonio’s side; he’s just trying to get the lay of the land (as it were) (he is classy enough not to use that phrase; I am not). Antonio clarifies that “partner” means “companion,” but Det. Luke is still confused about Antonio’s bringing home “other men…for him?” And would Antonio Do It with them too, with Gianni there? Antonio:
Well, really. I get that the show feels obliged to explain to some viewers that relationships that didn’t obey traditional heteronormative parameters faced an uphill battle vis-à-vis the judgments of society and specifically law enforcement in 1997 (and do still, no doubt, in some places), but I also feel like it’s maybe a little proud of itself for knowing better now, when really it just makes Det. Luke look naïve and unprepared. This continues with Det. Luke asking if sometimes Gianni wouldn’t join in himself…? Antonio cuts a hopeless he’ll-never-get-it side-eye and says it was whatever Gianni wanted. So did these other men “consider themselves Gianni’s partner too?” What’s the difference? “Fifteen years!” Antonio snaps. Det. Luke concedes that that’s “a good length of time,” and asks if Antonio can get him the names. Antonio can find them, yes. Were they paid? Sometimes, but usually “they just fell for him. He was a genius,” Antonio goes on, bereft. “He cast a spell.” Was Antonio paid? “Was I paid! Was I paid to love him!” Det. Luke backs off, saying this is “new to” him – no shit – and he’s just trying to clarify. Antonio responds that he’s trying to help, but he didn’t see the shooter, and before he can summon the strength to answer Det. Luke’s question as to whether one of their seemingly standard tricks might be responsible, Donatella comes into the study. Antonio gets up and, his face collapsing, extends his hand towards her and Santo. She flinches, looks down, and murmurs, “Get him out of here.” So that relationship seems cozy?
It’s possible she meant Det. Luke, as the next shot is the cops filing out the front gates, but inside, as Antonio weeps on the settee, Donatella helps herself to a cigarette from a gold box and sighs, “That’s not what I need from you right now.” She demands to know what Antonio told the police – “about my brother’s life” – while almost unconsciously correcting the position of a Greek bust Det. Luke had futzed with and moved in the previous scene. Nice bit of blocking there. Antonio sighs that they’ll “find out” everything anyway, and she asks what there is to find out, then says, “Nothing was ever asked of you, except to take care of him – and you couldn’t even do that.” She sits next to Santo and tells Antonio he’s not to speak to anyone about Gianni without consulting her first.
Antonio, through tears, regards her with an expression suggesting he was foolish to have hoped for a more compassionate reaction from her; gets up; and slumps out of the room to start washing Gianni’s blood from his arms.
But he hears Donatella and Santo going down the hall to another meeting area, so he follows them. Donatella makes eye contact with him, then closes the heavy doors against Antonio without a word. Inside, they’re meeting with men I assume are lawyers or board members, and Donatella begins by saying it’s crazy to talk about business right now. She seems to be hoping they’ll contradict or whatever-you-think-best her, but they just stare at her, so she finishes dabbing her eyes and gets down to it: her brother is dead, and the press and the police will “rake through” his life and bring up “every rumor, every indiscretion” – to find the killer, but to judge Gianni, too. “First people weep, then they whisper.” She goes on to extol Gianni’s rise from a small Milanese shop with a single rack of clothes to “all this,” adding that he was “a creator, he was a collector – he was a genius” – and his company meant everything to him. As long as the company is alive, her brother is alive: “I will not allow that man, that…nobody, to kill my brother twice.”
A family spokesperson announces that nobody in the family knew or had any contact with Cunanan, footage Pawn Star Cathy Moriarty freezes when she sees his mugshot on TV. At her pawn shop, she tells Dets. Zúñiga and Bitchface that she did everything by the book when he came in with the gold coin: got his ID, handed in the paperwork to Miami PD, the works (this system did and does exist in order to flag stolen goods, but Miami hadn’t computerized theirs as of ’97, which means Cunanan was cocky enough to get himself caught hocking stolen property, but the paperwork hadn’t been processed yet – in case you’re wondering why we’re seeing this). Bitchface stalks outside and says into her radio that they have an address on Cunanan, and can anyone do this job besides her? That last part may have been silent.
Donatella expositions to us and some bankers that Gianni was excited to be the first Italian designer on both the Milanese stock exchange and the NYSE; it’s why he was in the U.S., to sign the papers with Morgan Stanley. Santo notes that Gianni would have wanted them to go ahead with the IPO, and if they don’t, they can’t try again for many years, but Donatella isn’t hearing it; listing the company means putting it in the hands of strangers, and “now is not the time for strangers; now is the time for family.” Santo makes a “why’d you pretend to ask me, then” face that I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a bunch. Donatella tells the banker types to tell Morgan Stanley that they’ll remain a privately held company – “a family company.” She goes to the balcony of the pool area and looks out, surveying what is now her domain much as Gianni did in the beginning of the episode.
Metro-Dade SWAT descends on the address Cunanan gave Cathy Moriarty. This event isn’t quite exciting enough for the locals to put pants on
but the music agrees it’s pretty intense as SWAT and the detectives charge up to a room in a grimy no-tell, boot open the door, flash-bang whoever’s inside, and find…not Cunanan, but Deputy Leo from Veronica Mars, nearly unrecognizably the worse for wear and denying that he knows Cunanan.
Cunanan himself, attired in all shades of yellow and a pair of Versace shades, stops at a newsstand to admire his handiwork on the front pages of newspapers around the world. The counter man stacks them up for him: “All of them?” Cunanan smirks. “All of them.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, on FX, opens with the act itself. We see the designer Gianni Versace leaving his Miami Beach mansion by the front gate to buy some magazines at a café down the street. We see the preppy-looking murderer, Andrew Cunanan, watching from a park across the street and then approaching the designer as he returns to the front steps. We see the gun, the look of bewilderment and horror on Versace’s face, and then the narrative of July 15, 1997 is set in motion.
The opening scene was taut enough, and visually accurate enough, to hold my interest. The fact that the producers were able to film inside the mansion (now a hotel) was a bonus. It lent the episode a documentary quality. In August of 1996, I spent a weekend visiting Donatella Versace and her family — husband, Paul Beck, and kids, Allegra and Daniel — at the mansion, for a profile of Donatella in Vanity Fair. So I recognized details of the Spanish-style house — the interior courtyard, the marble dining room where we had lunch and Donatella yakked on the phone with Elton John. Gianni was not there, but we spoke later about his sister and their relationship. And, of course, over the years I saw him during the shows in Milan, and on at least one occasion interviewed him at his palazzo in the Via Gesu.
On the morning of the murder — actually within an hour of it — Vanity Fair began receiving requests from media outlets to interview me about the family. The Donatella piece was in the June issue. At the same time, my colleague Maureen Orth, who had been reporting a story about a gay serial killer and whose book served as the basis for the show, had a hunch that Cunanan was the murderer. I met her in Miami to help with the reporting. Cunanan was still on the loose. It was a strange few days. The fashion industry had never known such a crime — and, as I wrote later, “The murder had thrown a weird light on a world people knew very little about.”
The curious thing about The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that, despite its assured opening, it feels like the people involved did not take the trouble to learn anything about him and his siblings, or their world. Twenty years has not brought more insight into his family dynamics, his sensibility, or into how an extremely creative individual might behave. It’s as though no one really cared to explore these qualities.
Instead, Gianni and his sister (you would hardly know there’s an older brother, Santo) are presented as cardboard figures who symbolize the most clichéd values: power, glamour, celebrity. For instance, the episode asks viewers to believe that Donatella (Penélope Cruz) could put aside her grief on the day of her brother’s murder and arrive via limo at the mansion’s bloodied front gate — before a crowd of news trucks and spectators — as if attending a red-carpet event. There was a back door to the house, but, hey, if she used that, you wouldn’t get to see her scowl and adjust her sunglasses.
Cruz is actually fascinating as Donatella. She totally sounds like her, without the staccato delivery. Ramírez physically resembles Gianni but lacks his authority — you felt Gianni’s presence in a room. And the few scenes that show Gianni at his craft are embarrassingly lame, as most fashion films are. They never properly convey a designer’s hand motions or obsessiveness. (I haven’t seen Phantom Thread, so I’m holding out hope.) Anyway, the guy who once scandalized Milan with his bondage dresses behaved far more decisively — and playfully — than what you see on the screen.
With Cruz, I often had the feeling that she was basing her portrayal on the later Donatella, the hard-boiled Donatella who emerged after Gianni’s death. The woman who I first met in 1996 was much less sure of herself. In a way, Gianni’s enormous talent and drive functioned as a protective shield for her, allowing her to be the little sister who flounced around with her big diamonds. Sure, Donatella was tough, they all screeched like cats at each other, but there was also a vulnerability about her then, and a sweetness. I remember her taking me around the house, showing me Gianni’s private quarters and the guest room where Jack Nicholson once slept. She took everything in stride, like someone who had nothing to lose.
It’s that innocence or naïveté that you don’t see in the show, which is too bad, since it would have contrasted with the horror of Gianni’s murder. Another thing missing is the family’s sense of humor and fun, captured in photographs from the ’80s and ’90s. They seemed to thoroughly enjoy their lives, over-the-top or not, and nothing was more emblematic of that spirit than the vivid fabric prints that decorated the mansion.
But you see almost nothing of that in the series. The mansion might have been the real thing, the scene of the crime, but it’s just a shell.
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