Behind 21st Century Fox’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace is a dark tale of tragedy and psychotic violence.
Andrew Cunanan was a serial killer who, after beating a former US Naval Officer to death with a claw hammer, and stabbing victim Lee Miglin 20 times with a screwdriver, shot Gianni Versace on the doorstep of his Miami beach mansion.
The show first aired on the last day of February on BBC Two, and is the second in the series following on from The People Vs OJ Simpson.
American Crime Story is a hypnotic watch, depicting real life crimes in the airbrushed universe of American TV.
It sounds like an ideal combination, and it almost is, watching superstars including Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace, on the small screen in sets dripping with expense.
However problems lie within American Crime Story. One of them being that, in approaching stories that are incredibly sensitive to certain people (impending lawsuits and all the rest of it) the show is almost tied having to play it incredibly straightforward in nature.
By the end of OJ it felt like the veneer of drama was starting to fade away. Replaced by a systemic approach to bullet pointing all the facts, safely tying all the loose ends, and then the viewer starts resentfully realising he/she has just spent ten hours of their life watching a ‘did he/didn’t he’ murder mystery in which everyone knows the conclusion.
This shouldn’t deter the viewer. The show still nestles exceptionally the essence of its entertainment- the common person’s fascination with murder. And there’s not so much ‘did he/didn’t he’ in Versace’s murder. We watch Cunanan kill him in the opening scene.
It’s also worth watching for the performances of Darren Criss (Cunanan) and Ricky Martin (Versace’s forsaken lover Antonio D’Amico). Martin is a powerful performer if a little hammy. While Criss plays the disturbed Cunanan with an emotionally naive, child-like demeanour that is inclemently spine chilling.
American Crime Story: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace
9pm, BBC Two
As this astonishing series nears its end, it gets even more brain scrambling. It’s the penultimate episode, and the backwards-running structure stretches back to its furthest points, to offer two parallel, contrasting portraits of childhood, in two different timeframes. In 1957, we glimpse the young Gianni Versace, aged 10 or so, and encouraged by his dressmaker mother to follow his heart and learn about and designing clothes, despite the taunts of other kids and disapproval of his teachers. Flipping forward to 1980 comes a fuller and more unsettling picture of Andrew Cunanan around the same age – singled out for special treatment and pressurised to succeed by his father, Modesto, a stockbroker with big dreams, and given to making big exaggerations about himself. As Cunanan becomes a young man, however, the house of cards Modesto has built begins to collapse. Darren Criss’s performance as Cunanan is extraordinary again, while the casting of the child actor playing young Cunanan (Edouard Holdener) is spooky.
This isn’t the first time “Watch What Happens Live! with Andy Cohen” has shot in Los Angeles, but there was something different Monday night about the Bravo talk show’s broadcast at the historic Wiltern theater. Oh, right. It was the rows of Television Academy Emmy voting members invited to catch the festivities first hand.
[…] As for the night’s episode, Cohen’s guests were two other Emmy contenders, “This Is Us‘” Milo Ventimiglia and “The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s“ Ricky Martin (who Cohen repeatedly reminded us also has a current Las Vegas residency). Word was having the two potential acting nominees on hand wasn’t planned for an audience partially filled with Television Academy voters, but it didn’t hurt FX’s campaigns that Darren Criss, also from “Versace,” stopped by at the end of the half hour to take shots with Cohen and his guests (Oh, drinking is also a big part of the ‘WWHL’ experience). Viewers learned that Ventimiglia is sort of a bad interview (the large audience might have hurt) and Martin is pretty blunt (he chastised himself for not coming out during a notorious Barbara Walters interview in 2010). The sound also was problematic (the audience often had problems hearing what was being said on stage), but a lesson learned when figuring out where to film the next time around. Other guests this week in LA include the entire cast of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” Anna Faris and Snoop Dogg, among others.
Ryan Murphy is one of the hottest names in TV, and he’s behind a few of the top anthology series. American Crime Story tells a different true crime story each season, and the first two seasons have been unreal. The first season, which focused on the murder trial of OJ Simpson, received universal acclaim and basically won every award. Sarah Paulson was amazing as prosecutor Marcia Clark, and the entire supporting cast was just great. The recent second season told the story of Gianni Versace‘s murder, and it was also pretty strong.
[…] LB: Speaking of substance, you are about to start shooting the fifth season of Transparent.
JL: It’s going to be later than planned. I also just finished working with [writer, producer, and director] Ryan Murphy on The Assassination of Gianni Versace …
LB: And people are dying over it, asking to change the Emmy categories so you can get the guest actress nomination. You’ve always received a lot of attention, but how does it feel when you get this confluence of great reviews?
JL: It’s so wild. It always feels good. I was at a Christmas party with Joan Rivers once, and we were having this lovely conversation, and she said, “I say yes to everything,” explaining that the world works out for you in certain ways when you say yes to things. And it’s true. That’s how a whole trajectory of things fell into place, including working with Ryan Murphy, which is something I’ve always wanted to do.
LB: And he’s so great with women who aren’t 12. I mean, Jessica [Lange], Kathy [Bates] …
JL: Exactly. We didn’t really know each other, and then, when he saw a play I did [Other Desert Cities] and the response to it, he just said, “OK, we’ll do things.” He was so incredibly gracious and kind.
LB: Isn’t it wonderful that one of the great things about getting older is the equity you own? There’s something about “You know me and my work, and you know that I’ll show up for you” …
JL: That is so brilliant and so true.
LB: Who do you find beautiful?
JL: The memory of my mother is very beautiful to me. My father, the same thing: really light, beautiful. We’re talking about soul beauty now. My husband has been so beautiful and present for me—you know, my publicist, my agents, my friends … All the people I worked with on The Assassination of Gianni Versace and Transparent. They are people who are there in the goodness of their being, not in their doing.
Ryan Murphy’s Versace: American Crime Story centres on the 1997 murder of Donatella Versace’s brother, designer Gianni Versace. After returning from a morning walk, the 50-year-old was shot dead on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. Cunanan wasn’t caught by police but killed himself nine days later while on a houseboat in Miami. In this season, Ricky Martin plays Antonio D’Amico, and he gets talking about stepping into the acting world, balancing home and work, and coming out. Excerpts.
Tell us about your association with Antonio We have spoken a lot, and obviously, he’s been incredibly helpful and so open in sharing his emotions regarding all this. I really needed to ask deep stuff because it’s challenging and the script is asking for it. So I just wanted to do justice to his love with Gianni. He was extremely open. He was very organised with everything that had to do with the empire. But at the end of the day when he was going to take a shower, he would take his clothes and he would leave a mess.That’s when Antonio comes in. He would help him to pick up the clothes that he left behind and it was very, it’s very much about caretaking.
What was it like playing the character Antonio, who loved Gianni so deeply? In the ’90s I was hiding my boyfriends. I was very egotistical, self-centred and I didn’t care what people who were open about their sexuality felt. But since it was about me, I needed to keep it quiet because in my head, I had this illusion that if I came out, everything was going to collapse. So when I did the scene, I could see Gianni’s side and Antonio’s side and me playing both because I’ve been in both situations. So it was beautiful not just to do it, but to be able to talk about this.When I came out, a lot of people around me, people that I loved, begged me not to do it. I did it because I had to, and then it was fantastic. But this is a story that brings a lot of themes to the table once again.
What have you learned about love after working on this show? That you’ve got to be loud, open and transparent. The control aspect that society brings into what a relationship must be — break it, erase it and see love as a white canvas that you can throw all the colours and the brush strokes you want.
You’ve stepped into the acting world. Do you feel reinvented by this? Literally, yes of course. But the most significant acting role dramatic role that I had up until today is my first one when I was 15 years old in a TV series that I did in Argentina because I had no life experiences when I was 15 years old.
How did you and your family deal with this transition of you becoming an actor? I was very happy that I was shooting those scenes in Miami because my husband or my kids weren’t with me. They bring out the best in me.There were very dark scenes and I needed to stay in that bubble. So, it was a week of being very methodical and living as Antonio. When I went back to the hotel, I would just cry. It took me time to decompress. It was very intense.
It’s also the title of a new Cinemax drama series, the second show this spring to follow a serial killer case reverse-chronologically. Had Cinemax been able to premiere Rellik timed to its initial launch on BBC One last fall, it would have looked like the tricky progenitor and Tom Rob Smith’s work on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story might have looked like an imitator, but instead American audiences are getting this one reverse-chronologically.
Actually, being able to watch Rellik and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story basically back-to-back is an illuminating look at the advantages and disadvantages of storytellers creating obstacles for themselves in constructing otherwise familiar genre stories. Rellik creators Harry and Jack Williams are no strangers to experimenting with formal complications after The Missing and Liar and they commit much more thoroughly and much more intriguingly to the Memento-like structure over the first five episodes of their six-episode drama. It’s novelist Smith, however, who found a way to make a gimmick structure pay off in terms of character development (even if he just made Andrew Cunnan into a half-Filipino Tom Ripley), while Rellik sells out its gimmick entirely with a finale that’s an exercise only in exposition and flimsy psychological motivation.
[…] What shows like Rellik and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story are doing is acknowledging the entrenchment of crime investigation structure developed over decades of TV procedurals. The extra step that Gianni Versace only sometimes took and that Rellik rarely takes is progressing beyond cleverness into narrative rewards. The title itself reflects a series with an “Aren’t we cute?” indulgence that doesn’t deepen after you’ve said, “Yeah, I get it.”
The charts below reflect how THR’s awards columnist Scott Feinberg believes the Emmy standings would look if voting ended today. They are formulated using a combination of personal impressions (from sampling many programs), historical considerations (how other shows with similar pedigrees have resonated), precursor awards (some groups have historically correlated with the TV Academy more than others) and consultations with industry insiders (including voters, content creators, awards strategists and fellow members of the press).
Last year American Crime Story found critical and popular acclaim under the helm of Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson and Ryan Murphy with account of “The People Vs O J Simpson”. They are back now with season two, which has recently finished its run in the US and midway through its UK stint, to provide us with another account of a uniquely and peculiarly American crime story. This season’s tale recounts the horrific and mysterious assassination of Gianni Versace.
Gianni Versace was shot on the steps of his Miami home on 15 July 1997 by Andrew Cunanan who had in the three months prior murdered four other men. The show examines why Cunanan decided to shoot Versace that day. This question is shrouded in a haze of ambiguity and we will never get an objective answer from the killer himself. However, from second-hand accounts and Maureen Orth’s controversial book on the matter, the show runners piece together a plausible account of Cunanan’s descent into evil. However, this is not the only story that the show tells. In its portrayal of these particular crimes the show exposes certain narratives that governed American society in the ‘90s and arguably still today. Just as “The People Vs O J Simpson” exposed America’s attitudes to race and class, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” examines homophobia, mental illness and our relationship with success and fame. These are issues that are universal yet also particularly American. The show has its faults but the discussions it raises and the exceptional performances of its main cast mean it is still a compelling watch.
The narrative structure of the season is daring and sometimes this is effective and other times it falters. One of the strongest criticisms of this season is that for a show with Gianni Versace in the title, said titular character does not feature as much as you might expect. I myself was disappointed by the absence of the Versaces in many episodes. The sheer fabulous vision and voice of Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace leaves an unfillable void whenever the show leaves their side. The show is far more about Cunanan’s history than it is Versace’s, and it is probable that the title was a decision made for the sole purpose of bringing in more viewers. However, perhaps there is a deeper, less cynical reading of this decision. Even though Versace’s role in the show is relatively small, that name and all it has come to represent is critical in the show. Cunanan is possessed by fame, success and glamour. He clamours after these images of people he ought to be and people he thinks he deserves to be. It also mirrors the reaction of the time. A celebrity being murdered brings the world shuddering to a halt whereas the murder of four unknown gay men barely has us feather the brakes. Fame and image are two notions that still have an immeasurable impact on how we live our lives and thus makes for valuable discussion in this show. Many of the episodes are dedicated to unpicking the tragic ends of Cunanan’s other victims. We are also given an insight into the stories of these people and the challenges that marked their lives independent of their tragic ends.
The season is also an exploration of homophobia in the ‘90s and a troubling picture is painted that draws parallels with today. Antonio, Versace’s partner, is subjected to many violations and microaggressions throughout the season. It is a nuanced portrayal of a homophobic society that is not necessarily explicitly egregious to gay men but does so much to deny them equal rights that they are left floating in an ether knowing that there are no safety nets beneath them. One of the most harrowing concepts to come to terms with in the season is that Antonio’s grief is never validated and so he has a crucial part of his personhood slowly chipped away by the people around him.
As well as encapsulating pertinent issues of the time and forcing us to reflect on their relevance today, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” also boasts some amazing cinematography and a brilliant soundtrack. Dreamlike sequences with saturated colours help to convey visually the subjectivity of Cunanan’s narrative. The musical choices help to immerse the viewer in the time period and play into the sometimes melodramatic tones of the season. The narrative arc is ambitious. Beginning and ending with Cunanan’s final crime and in the in-between taking us all the way back to his childhood and back again. Branching off from this are the stories of Cunanan’s victims and their families. At times this vision does not pay off and certain important moments lose their power; however, this weaving allows the show to encompass more issues that make it America’s crime story and not just Cunanan’s. It is also refreshing to see a show break away from formulaic ways of storytelling.
“American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” provides us much to unpack in its nine episodes and each is well-crafted with excellent performances. The show presents itself as an object for reflection and it is worthy of our attention.
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