Finn Wittrock’s appearance on Wednesday’s American Crime Story: Versace was over as quickly as it began. (Don’t worry, we’ll see him again next week.)
This week’s installment — the second in a row to be completely devoid of all things, you know, Versace — turned back the clock yet again, this time to a week before Andrew Cunanan drove to Chicago and killed Lee Miglin.
At this point, he was living with a handsome young architect named David Madson — played by Cody Fern, the latest in a series of phenomenal guest stars — but we quickly learned there was trouble in paradise. In fact, David had recently turned down Andrew’s marriage proposal, leading him to suspect that David was in love with a guy named Jeff, played by Wittrock. To be fair, David and Jeff did have feelings for one another, but I hardly think Jeff deserved to be bludgeoned to death with a hammer and rolled up in a carpet.
Yet that’s exactly what Andrew did, planning out the whole evening so that David would appear to be the one who let Jeff into his apartment. “They’re not going to see two victims,” Andrew argued when David tried to call the police. “They’re going to see two suspects.” And when that didn’t work, Andrew resorted to Plan B, letting his gun do the talking.
Andrew had essentially taken David captive at this point, forcing him into the life of a fugitive on the run. But they never made it to Mexico, no sir. After David attempted to steer their truck off the road, Andrew pulled over, giving David a head start before pumping his chest full of lead. Tragic as it was, though, there was something beautiful about the portrayal of David’s death; in his final moments, he imagined entering a cabin and seeing his father, finally connecting to a man with whom he’d had a complicated relationship in life. (Andrew cradling David’s corpse, on the other hand, was notably less beautiful.)
Prior to his murder, David gave Andrew the full dressing down audiences have been waiting for, telling him that his entire life is a lie, an act, which is why no one would ever truly get close to him. The two also had an honest — as honest Andrew could be, anyway — conversation about shame, which David thought he might fear even more than death.
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‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 4: Feline Intuition
By now, it seems clear that the most compelling characters in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” are neither the slain fashion designer, shot to death outside his Miami Beach mansion in 1997, nor Andrew Cunanan, the psychopath who killed him.
Instead, that distinction belongs to more transient characters: in Episode 3, Marilyn Miglin, the widow of a Chicago real-estate developer whom Cunanan murdered; and now in Episode 4, David Madson, a semi-closeted Minneapolis architect who has the misfortune of attracting Cunanan’s amorous attention.
Unlike “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” this second season of “American Crime Story” lacks larger-than-life characters like Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochran, with their operatic personalities, ambitions and clashes. Cunanan’s homicidal outburst captured headlines, but largely because of the fame of his final victim. His earlier victims remained mostly obscure.
As “Versace” moves backward in time, it attempts to draw out those victims’ lives — and in the case of Miglin’s husband and Madson, their closeted sexuality is a unifying theme. Whether the portrayals are accurate is for others to decide — several relatives of Cunanan’s victims have criticized the series and “Vulgar Favors,” the book by Maureen Orth on which it is based. But I admit, almost grudgingly, that it has worked powerfully as a narrative frame for portraying the victims, even if their killer’s motivations remain a mystery so far.
Just as Judith Light, portraying a widow in denial about her husband’s homosexuality, was the breakout star of the last episode, so Cody Fern, as David Madson, stands out in this one. His journey of self-discovery is both literal — Andrew coerces David into joining him on a road trip after killing David’s secret lover — and symbolic. David realizes who he is, and what he is running from, only when it is too late. It is the stuff of tragedy.
The episode begins in Madson’s warehouse-size loft apartment, which is lined with gray-metal shelves. David and Andrew have been bickering, and while their relationship isn’t exactly explained, a romance gone sour is implied. The buzzer rings; downstairs is a man named Jeff, whom Andrew has asked over, much to David’s irritation.
Andrew sends David downstairs to let him in. In the lobby and elevator, we learn a lot:
• David tells Jeff that Andrew proposed marriage, calling David “the man of his dreams” and “his last chance at happiness.”
• David says that he declined, noting that gay marriage isn’t legal, but that Andrew thinks Jeff is “the reason I said no.” Jeff is surprised that Andrew knows that Jeff and David have been together. “He has this feline intuition,” David says.
• Jeff says that Andrew took a gun from Jeff’s apartment, and that he has come to get it back.
As we are processing all this, the two men enter the apartment, and what happens next is a murder with a claw hammer too vicious and grisly for me to watch.
Terrified and stricken, David seems to go numb. He asks why Andrew killed Jeff; Andrew replies, “I lost control.”
David calls 911, but Andrew compels him to hang up by saying that if the police arrive, they will both go to prison, disingenuously eliding the fact that it was he who set all this in motion. He goes on to argue that homophobia makes justice impossible anyway. “When the police open the door they’ll see two suspects, not two victims,” he says. And when David insists he is no killer, Andrew replies: “They won’t believe you. They hate us, David, they’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.”
Queer people have a term for such self-serving cynicism: Chutzpah.
As he’s forced to flee with Andrew, David comes to see the journey as a symbol for a life of evasion: “I’m playing over everything the police are going to find out about me, and I realize I’ve been doing this my whole life: playing over and over the moment that people found out about me.” On the road later, he adds: “Was I really afraid, when I got in this car with you, that you were going to kill me? Or was I afraid of the disgrace, the shame of it all. Is that what I’m running from?”
In David’s hometown, Barron, Wis., his stunned parents learn from the Minneapolis detectives that a stranger named Jeffrey Trail was murdered in David’s home, with 27 blows from David’s steel claw hammer. The detectives tell them about another stranger, named Andrew Cunanan, whose friends in San Francisco have described as reliable, intelligent, generous. David’s father insists his son is innocent.
“I can see with certainty, there’s a great deal you don’t know about your son,” the detective says. But as we soon learn in a heart-wrenching scene, he probably knows more than the detective assumes.
In one of several flashbacks, David is shown speaking with his dad in the garage. It’s a workingman’s garage (in an earlier flashback, the two of them had gone hunting), and David has graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, at the top of his class. He tells his father he is gay.
“I won’t lie and say that it doesn’t make a difference,” the father responds. “You know what I believe. And maybe this isn’t what you wanted to hear. Maybe you wanted to be told I don’t have a problem with it. I can’t say that. But what I can say is I love you more than I love my own life.”
It is a bittersweet moment, one that in its overall contours many lesbian and gay people may recognize. That someone with reasonably tolerant parents in the mid-1980s could nonetheless feel such shame and self-loathing says a lot, by implication, about those who lacked such emotional support.
We get another look at how crushing that shame and self-loathing might be, when Andrew and David stop at a roadside bar. As David ponders escaping from the bathroom, Andrew is brought to tears by a singer’s rendition of the Cars’ 1984 song “Drive,” a rare moment of true emotional vulnerability from him, his pain brimming to the surface. David, whether because he feels he can’t escape or won’t be believed, forgoes the chance to save his own life and returns to the table with Andrew. Perhaps their need for human connection is mutual.
In a diner the next day, David recalls how Andrew dazzled him when they met at a bar in San Francisco, a year and a half earlier. “What’s this man going to see in me, a small-town boy?” he remembers thinking. They ended up in a $1,000-a-night room at the Mandarin Oriental. David continues:
I remember thinking: How hard do I have to work to live like him, like Andrew? ’Cause I’ll do it. Except it was all a lie. You’ve never worked for anything. It was an act. Is that why you killed Jeff? You loved him. It was so obvious. But he figured you out in the end, didn’t he? It took him a few years but he finally saw the real you, and you killed him for it.
Andrew tries to change the subject, promising David that they’ll lead a glamorous life in Mexico. He can’t stop lying.
Back in the car, David arrives at a further, belated discovery — that Jeff was set up, that Andrew planned all along to kill him in David’s presence. “Why are you always talking about the past?” an enraged Andrew asks. “We had a plan. We had a future.”
They pull over. David’s fate is sealed.
Episode 3 argued that denial could be a tool of survival. Episode 4 points out that recognition — of oneself, of the true character of others — can exact a lethal price.
‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 4: Feline Intuition
American Crime Story jumps back to Andrew Cunanan’s first murder
“House By The Lake” B+
There’s a surrealness to “House By The Lake” that manages to heighten the creepiness—and trust me, this episode is plenty creepy. From the bizarre opening advertisement for Minneapolis to that strange dream sequence toward the end, “House By The Lake” plays around with reality, all while remaining completely unsettling as we watch the cruel control Andrew has over the people in his life.
In “House By The Lake,” we see how the series is a character study that examines Andrew—without providing easy answers—and how it does so without erasing or justifying the horrible things Cunanan did. It takes place a week before Lee Miglin’s murder and introduces us to Andrew’s first two victims: Jeff Trail and David Madson. Andrew and David had once been in a relationship—some reports said that Andrew frequently claimed David was the love of his life—though they were broken up at the time of his murder. Post-Minneapolis ad, the episode is immediately tense and awkward: It begins the day after Andrew proposed to David and was turned down. When David, who goes downstairs to let Jeff in, explains this, he recounts that Andrew “said I was the man of his dreams, his last chance at happiness.” (It’s easy to think back to Andrew telling Ronnie that the “love of his life” died, though under different circumstances.)
Jeff’s murder is quick and brutal: Andrew slams the door shut the moment Jeff walks in and begins bludgeoning him with a hammer—27 hits. By the end, there’s blood on the floor, walls, all over Andrew, and even some on David who can’t do anything but stare, horrified. The dog barks the whole time. What’s arguably more chilling (and “chilling” is indeed the word of the episode) is Andrew’s calmness afterward, seamlessly switching from murdering to mothering. “Arm’s up,” he instructs David, the way you do with a child, taking off David’s shirt and putting him into the shower to clean off the blood. Even this feels surreal.
What resonates the most in this episode is watching Andrew post-murder—by all accounts, the first time he’s killed someone—with his stoic actions and conversations. When David understandable asks if Andrew is going to kill him, too, Andrew seems surprised with the question, as if it’s something totally absurd to ask a man you just witnessed murder another man. He dismisses the murder with “I lost control.” Andrew also tests his manipulation skills, attempting to guilt David out of calling the cops (and with a healthy dose of passive-aggression thrown in the mix too). “What will happen to you?” he asks with faux-concern. “I’ll tell them you had nothing to do with it, but what are they going to believe?” After all, Andrew explains, it is David’s apartment, and it was David who let him up. When that doesn’t work, Andrew calmly pulls out a gun but the threat is only visual, not verbalized, and Andrew doesn’t let up his original argument. “I can’t allow you to go to jail. I can’t allow this to destroy your life.”
Later, Andrew switches up the argument for not going to the cops: “They hate us, David. They’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.” I went into Assassination with the assumption that it was going to be a stealth examination on homophobia and gay culture in the ‘90s, similar to how The People vs O.J. Simpson was successfully built around race. The further we go (back) in this story, it’s slowly starting to appear that that’s the case. Even when in imminent danger—forced on the run with a gun-wielding murderer—David’s concerns are about how he was outed, even about his activities (Andrew left BDSM toys and magazines on the bed) and worries about everything the police will uncover about him. Will his parents still be able to live in the same town? Will people still frequent his dad’s shop? Throughout, we get glimpses of David’s internal struggle about coming out: the dreams he has about his father, explicitly wondering aloud “Was I afraid of the disgrace? The shame of it all?” (echoing Andrew’s future murder of Lee Miglin, asking if he’s more afraid of death of disgrace), and then that devastating bait-and-switch in the titular house by the lake where David finds a calm acceptance for only a false moment.
The episode also goes back to the flawed police investigation, which was a trend no matter what city the murder was in. When the building manager lets two detectives into David’s apartment, they do a quick run through of the crime scene where a body is wrapped up in a couch and pushed aside. Immediately, they assume it’s David’s body because it’s his apartment, his wallet on the counter, and his coworker who first sounded the alarm because he hadn’t been at work. Because of the scene on the bed, the police too-quickly chalk it up as some gay hookup gone wrong (“They do what they do, this extreme stuff, David ends up in the rug” Detective Tichtich says). And when they learn about dark-haired Andrew staying with David, Tichtich finally realizes that it isn’t blonde-haired David in the rug so now they assume that it was David who killed Andrew. This mix-up, compounded with the fact that the police then leave the crime scene to instead wait for a warrant, and that they don’t properly ID the body until it’s in the morgue, is so frustrating to watch. (And, if I remember correctly from Orth’s book, it was days before any of this got sorted out.)
But back to Andrew and David, where everything still feels unreal and terrifying: David with his hands out of the window to feel the air; Andrew singing along to “Pump Up The Jam” as if it’s nothing more than a carefree road trip with a friend, or a lover. He even says “I’m so glad you decided to come with me” as if David ever had a choice in the trip or his ultimate fate. Maybe David does, just a bit, because after he smashes a bathroom window to escape, he aborts his plans and returns to Andrew. Or maybe David just knows that he can’t escape—that Andrew would’ve somehow found him—or maybe he just isn’t sure if he wants to return and face everything. (Though he does try again later, but, well.)
“House By The Lake” is bookended by murders—Jeff during the cold open and David during the last few minutes—but we only see Andrew break down once, curiously while watching an acoustic cover of The Cars’ “Drive” (“You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong / Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?”), before reaching out to grip David’s hands. But Andrew does “lose control” again after an argument in the car, pulling over to point a gun at the man he supposedly loves. Andrew shoots him once in the back, as he’s running, and the second point-blank through the eye. He cuddles with David’s body, as if trying to recreate a past moment the two shared, before walking away and heading to Chicago, where Lee Miglin lives.
- Darren Criss has been getting immense praise for his portrayal this season and this episode really showcases his talent, putting in a performance that is truly haunting from his even speech to his lingering stares.
- At least a TV series finally resisted the urge to kill a dog! (Though we still got a dead animal which is probably my least favorite trend in media right now.)
- The backwards formula is finally working for me now that it’s less convoluted and because we’re learning more about the victims (and it’s interesting to see the beginning pieces, such as Andrew’s references to visiting Lee Miglin). David’s flashbacks were a highlight, and hopefully next week we’ll learn more about who Jeff Trail was.
- So, the Versace family sure has disappeared, huh?
American Crime Story jumps back to Andrew Cunanan’s first murder
American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson
At this point TV viewers tuning in to Season 2 of American Crime Story will have sensed that something’s up. Promotional materials promised a glitzy, pulpy dive into the high-fashion world of the Versace family and a grisly murder in sunny Miami. But after two episodes with nary a Versace in sight (don’t worry, they’ll be back), audiences must have realized that producer Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith actually had a different—and, in my opinion, better—show in mind. The star of Episode 4 is not any of the A-list names like Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin, and Darren Criss or even one of Ryan Murphy’s regular players like Finn Wittrock. Instead, the breakout here (and, perhaps, of the series) is 30 year-old Australian newcomer Cody Fern playing Andrew Cunanan’s second, most personal, and misunderstood victim: David Madson.
Speaking with Vanity Fair’s podcast Still Watching: Versace, Fern admits that this episode and American Crime Story as a whole represent a bait and switch in order to get audiences to care about Cunanan’s less famous victims and the plight of gay men, more broadly, in the 90s. In this episode specifically, Fern and Smith are determined to redeem Madson who was, for so long, erroneously accused of being Cunanan’s accomplice rather than an innocent casualty.
Last month at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, when asked about the slightly deceptive title The Assassination of Gianni Versace, both Ryan Murphy and Tom Rob Smith were quick to defend it. The People vs. O.J. Simpson, they pointed out, wasn’t a show primarily about O.J. Of course, they’re right. Along with a searing look at racism, sexism, and the rise of reality TV in the 90s, the main takeaway from American Crime Story’s first season was the redemption of maligned prosecutor Marcia Clark.
Madson, of course, is not nearly as well-known as Clark and that, Fern argues, is what makes Season 2 even more extraordinary. “Everyone was ready for this to be a huge, splashy, fashion drama,” Fern tells Still Watching “but [Ryan Murphy] really honors the victims who came before. Four people who aren’t fashion designers but who had a family and were loved and were brought into the sordid world of Andrew Cunanan and went down because of it. [Their] stories are equally as vital as Gianni Versace’s. For Ryan to really focus on those stories is incredibly brave and does great justice to those people.”
Madson’s mysterious role in Cunanan’s murder spree baffled law enforcement for over a year (and beyond). Why would an innocent man go on the run with a killer and stay with him for six days? For a detailed breakdown of the main clues and theories swirling around Madson’s role at the time, you can go here. But for Smith and Fern, Madson’s driving concern in his final days was clear: internalized gay shame. It’s true that American Crime Story had to do a lot more theorizing than usual in this episode—with both Cunanan and Madson dead there is no way to know exactly what happened on their six-day journey. (We do know, however, that Aimee Mann never serenaded them in a Minnesota dive bar.) Smith tells Still Watching: Versace: “There’s a dilemma [with this episode]. You are, ultimately, joining dots rather than dealing with transcribed or videotaped evidence. I tried sticking to the fundamental truth which was that a) Andrew was a liar and was trapping David and b) David was full of love and ambition and wasn’t involved in the killing in any way.”
Fern admits those six days on the run were the most fascinating to him. “What the series deals with is not only how the police bungled the investigation because of homophobia at the time, but also this internalized of gay shame. David is dealing with a shame that’s been following him around his whole life.” As the show depicts, Madson was out to both his immediate family and his Minneapolis friends and co-workers, but what the episode theorizes is that he wasn’t ready to to be out to an entire world of strangers.
Smith calls David the hero of Episode 4 and used his own life experience as a gay man to extrapolate what Madson might have been feeling. He tells Still Watching:
Andrew’s cleverness is that he plays on a very deep-seated fear which we’ve always felt as gay men and women that if somehow you open the door to our private lives, everyone looking in is going to be shocked and appalled and we’ll be disgraced and exiled. Now, suddenly, by killing Jeffrey in that apartment that lingering nightmare becomes true because David knows that if he opens the door to that apartment the world is going to be shocked and appalled. They’ll think he was involved somehow. It’s going to be very hard for David to extricate himself from the trap that Andrew’s sprung around him.
Smith’s efforts to redeem Madson entirely in the span of an hour may have resulted in a bit of white-washing of this particular character. The real Madson was a bit older than Fern (and a good deal older than the baby-faced Fern looks here). According to Maureen Orth’s well-researched book Vulgar Favors, Madson was a beloved but forcefully charismatic person who dated a good deal and was hardly the Midwestern babe in the woods this series would sometimes have him be.
Neither Fern nor anyone in the cast reached out to the surviving family members of Cunanan’s victims while filming the series—though Ricky Martin, at least, has since been in contact with Versace’s life partner Antonio D’Amico. It was conscious choice they made as a group out of sensitivity to such a great loss. However, the Madson family, specifically, was at the forefront of Fern and Smith’s minds as they constructed this episode. “There was a cloud of suspicion over David,” Smith explains. “The police declared him to be the killer at first and the parents really struggled to clear his name. Such a gross injustice.” Episode 4 of American Crime Story rescues Madson not only from ignominy, but from anonymity as well. Anyone watching this episode and Fern’s irresistibly vulnerable performance won’t soon forget Andrew Cunanan’s second victim—even if he didn’t have a name you’d find on a fashion label.
And as Fern points out, the reverse chronology of American Crime Story acts as another kind of redemption for David Madson. It’s no spoiler to say that Fern as Madson will return for a few more episodes as the season spools back in time and we learn how he and Cunanan first met and fell in love. “There was something nice about leaving this man, David Madson, with a moment of beauty rather than a moment of terror,” Fern explains to Still Watching. “The way we remember David in the series is not the way we see him in Episode 4.” Smith notes that by the end of this hour of television “there’s a sense of David being an inspirational figure rather than someone who people have forgotten.”
To find out more about the true story of David Madson and Andrew Cunanan, you can listen to the full interview with Smith and Fern as well as past guests Maureen Orth, Ricky Martin, Max Greenfield, and Judith Light by subscribing to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes air every Wednesday night.
American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson
American Crime Story: The Truth Behind that Surprising Musical Cameo
There has been a lot of talk during this season of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story about what is fact and what is fiction. The source material, Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors, was meticulously researched—but there are still gaps in the story of Andrew Cunanan, as well as areas in which the show’s creators took some artistic liberty (such as the fantastical onstage conversation between Cunanan and Gianni Versace in Episode 1).
But of all the tales American Crime Story has to tell this season, the six days Cunanan and David Madson spent on the road required the most artistic invention. With both men dead, neither Orth nor anyone else could uncover what, precisely, occurred during that harrowing trip from Madson’s Minneapolis loft to his final resting place. Wednesday’s episode, “House by the Lake,” leans into that challenge by delivering the most surreal installment of the series—punctuated, midway through, by the appearance of singer Aimee Mann. Film lovers may recognize her most immediately from her soundtrack work on 1999’s Magnolia, while music lovers know from her solo career and as lead singer of the 80s band ‘Til Tuesday. Here, though, Mann appears in a Minnesota dive bar, crooning out a classic 1984 hit from the Cars: “Drive.” In what is, writer Tom Rob Smith tells Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast, the most pivotal moment of the episode, Madson tries to escape out of a bathroom window as Cunanan listens, emotionally, to Mann croon. Producers Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall spoke with Vanity Fair about how Mann’s unsettling musical homage to David Lynch came about.
Vanity Fair: Where did the idea to include Aimee in this episode come from?
Brad Simpson: During the development, one of the things that [writer and executive producer] Tom [Rob Smith] and I talked about—because we had been watching some David Lynch stuff—is the use of music Lynch’s movies, and how well he uses pop music. Tom said, “I think I’m gonna try something like that for the show.” He’d come up with this idea that [Andrew and David] would stop at a roadside bar, and there would be somebody singing—a sort of woman who had a great voice. There was a backstory to her. Maybe she thought she could make it out of this area of this town, but life didn’t work out, and she’s got this sort of weathered, great voice and is stuck there.
We talked about who we could get to play this. Somebody who was first known in the 1980s, who had a strong voice and you could buy as somebody who would live in this landscape. When we went to Ryan [Murphy] for suggestions of who could it be, he instantly said, without a beat: “Aimee Mann. Send her the pages, tell her we’re gonna figure out the song, but it has to be her.”
Alexis Martin Woodall: Brad and I started brainstorming music … we knew we wanted it to be something that was very familiar, but that you hadn’t heard of in a while—so you could emotionally connect with it, but it felt fresh. I got really stuck on one that I was so excited about, [by] Phil Collins. [Aimee] called and said, “Look, I think this song is beautiful, but I don’t think that I’m gonna do justice to this song.” So she’d come back with “Drive,” and it was really funny, because Ryan has loved that song, Brad loves that song—
Simpson: It was a mix tape staple for me.
Woodall: So she recorded a demo for us and sent it our way, and I think right then Brad and I got really excited. Because a demo from Aimee Mann is a little piece of musical genius.
Simpson: I was the guy—I was the ‘Til Tuesday fan in high school.
Woodall: If you’d seen his haircut, you’d really know he was a ‘Til Tuesday fan. Brad and I went out with her producer Paul Bryan—who is a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly—to his studio on a Saturday morning. We all talked about what the goal was, which was that we play it under. It’s not a star turn. We don’t turn the light on and say: “Ladies and gentleman, Miss Aimee Mann!” We just let the actual atmosphere take over, and then you get that there’s someone really legit on stage. Within two hours, we had something that you and I were just kind of flawlessly excited about, right? It was fast.
Simpson: In that scene, David is reconciling himself to the fact that he’s trapped with Andrew, and Andrew has a moment where he thinks he has lost [David]… . The song itself, once you hear the lyrics—hopefully not in an on-the-nose way— the lyrics to “Drive” can really have that double meaning.
Yeah—the lyrics “you can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong” seem pretty appropriate here. I wanted to ask for your take on what Darren Criss is giving in that scene as he listens to the song. We see Andrew overwhelmed by emotion—what emotion do you think that is?
Simpson: When Tom was writing it, I think he wanted to have two things going on. It’s a turning point in the episode. For David, he’s looking out the window of the bathroom and realizing that he’s trapped with Andrew. Maybe he could climb through the window and maybe he couldn’t, but he returns to Andrew. One of the things that’s happening for Andrew in that scene—and it’s one of the few times so far that we’ve seen any real emotion—the way Dan Minahan directed [Darren] to play it, and the way that Tom had written it, was the idea of: you’re watching the singer, David’s gone to the bathroom, and you’re feeling this sense of loss. You think he may have escaped. But either way, there’s an undercurrent of dread that you may have lost him no matter what. Darren wanted to get psyched up and do it in one take—you know, the slow push in that ends with him crying. And we gave him the space that he needed, and just did the long, slow push into the tear, and then he follows up with such joy.
This episode, which happens to be my favorite of the season, has these great surreal qualities, invoking shows like Twin Peaks or The Leftovers. I think the presence of someone as famous as Aimee Mann—even though she’s playing a character—in a random Minnesota dive bar really delivers a disorienting shock.
Simpson: And that is the David Lynch. When we were developing [the season], we talked about different episodes in terms of movies… . There’s a later episode which has nods to American Gigolo. David Lynch had made Wild at Heart, he made The Straight Story, he’s made movies about people moving across the country, he’s made movies about people who exist in the margins… . We talked about the way Lynch used Julee Cruise for the songs in Twin Peaks, the way that he used Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet, and the idea was to reconfigure a pop song much in the same way Lynch does… . We love Aimee Mann, but I think obviously there’s gonna be a whole group of people [unfamiliar with her] for whom it’s just, “Oh my God, that’s somebody with a beautiful voice.”
Woodall: Yeah. Totally anonymous.
You’re right. Not everyone is going to expect frogs to come falling out of the sky when Aimee Mann starts singing. Between this moment and “Pump up the Jam,” this is a great episode for music.
Woodall: I’ve always said that Andrew Cunanan’s favorite songs on shuffle is what we’re doing in the series. He would’ve been 15 in 1984, and there was a really cool darkness in that time period in the New Wave… . What would he have been listening to? What was popular when he fell in love with David? What was popular when he met Versace?
American Crime Story: The Truth Behind that Surprising Musical Cameo
TV ready to unleash array of LGBT themes, characters
Malcolm Venable, TVGuide.com, senior editor, West Coast
“Versace” is essential television. Lush, vivid, intensely terrifying and relevant for its messages. Great performances from Judith Light, Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez but Darren Criss is life-changing. And, surprise: don’t expect much Versace. It’s about Andrew Cunanan.
‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘A Random Killing’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com
“Just think of the little red light as the man you love.”
Well, the third episode of American Crime Story: Versace — entitled “A Random Killing” — made it official: we really, really hate Andrew (even though we still can’t take our eyes off of him).
Also, give Judith Light all of the Emmy nominations for this episode. Every single one.
Everything that happens in “A Random Killing” takes place before the death of Gianna Versace. This episode focuses on Andrew’s interactions and eventual murder of a wealthy Chicago real-estate designer named Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell).
We don’t start with Andrew, though. We begin by looking at the marriage between Lee and his wife Marilyn (Light), — the Home Shopping Network and perfume saleswoman. Yes, this is a real person, and this is what she looks like in real life:
Marilyn returns home one fateful eve, only to realize that her husband is nowhere to be seen. In fact, the instant Marilyn steps foot in the house, she knows something is wrong — there’s ice cream melting on a counter, and a random chuck on deli meat sitting out with a knife in it. She calls the cops, but she already knows the truth: Lee is dead.
It’s her calm yet sorrowful reaction that gets us, though. The soft whisper of “I Knew it” from Light is enough for an Emmy alone. But it only gets better from there…
We flashback to a week earlier. Lee is receiving some kind of award, seemingly for his work in architecture or whatnot, which shows him to be a wealthy and proud man. Lee and Marilyn return home that night, with Marilyn telling her husband she has to leave town for work.
Enter Andrew — the male escort whom Lee is clearly ashamed of, yet can’t seem to say no to. Andrew happens to be in town that night, and Lee wastes no time in inviting him over.
Early on, it’s clear the two have had sexual interactions before. Lee is hoping this will turn into more of a relationship — which is why he makes an effort to show Andrew a new building he’s designing; one that will be right next to the SEARS Tower and be even taller.
Andrew couldn’t be any less interested. Clearly, Lee is just trying to show off and that’s not what he’s here for.
Apparently Andrew isn’t actually here for sex either, as their romantic encounter soon takes a deadly turn. Andrew leads Lee into the garage, stuffs a glove into his mouth and ties him up in tape like we’ve seen him do before. Once Lee is powerless, Andrew punches him in the face confesses all to him — he’s killed two men before and he’s going to kill Lee next.
Why does he want to kill Lee? We’ll leave that one for the psychologist to figure out. His plan, though, is to dress Lee in women’s underwear and surround him with gay porn, so the world may know the truth about Lee. After all, Lee is clearly embarrassed about his little secret, which Andrew makes that pretty evident by asking him, “What terrifies you more, death or being disgraced?”
A few bags of concrete and garden tools later and Lee is dead. Andrew celebrates by burning Lee’s building plans and helping himself to that chunk of meat that was in the fridge — which he then leaves in Lee’s study. He’s long gone by the time Marilyn shows up.
Marilyn, however, is pretty unfazed by the crime scene. She has no initial reaction when told about the gay porn, saying that it clearly must have belonged to the murderer. As the scene goes on, it becomes more and more evident that she doesn’t actually believe that — suggesting that she knew her husband’s secret for some time and has already pieced together everything that’s happened. She’s inclined to keep it to herself, though, as she tells the police “I won’t let him steal my good name. Our good name.”
Speaking of the police, they’re not doing a great job at finding Andrew. They were tracking the car phone that was attached to the vehicle he was using, realizing that he was headed to New York, until a radio station accidentally announced this information on air. Andrew hears the story and immediately destroys the phone and ditches the car.
He pulls into a rest stop and sees a man driving a red pickup truck — the same truck we saw in the previous episodes. He follows him to his home, breaks in and eventually murders the truck’s owner in cold blood. That makes kill number four for Andrew, and that’s why we’re ready to declare him a monster.
Then, in the episodes final moments, we return to Marilyn. She’s back on air with her perfume, talking about what her husband meant to her. It’s an incredible scene that has a whole lot of social relevance, and Light sells every single second of it.
While this episode didn’t contain any footage of Versace itself, it gave some much needed backstory to Andrew — he’s a cruel, remorseless killer who has lost all of our sympathy. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so surprising that Versace would up dead.
Check out the new episode of American Crime Story: Versace on FX later tonight, and read our other American Crime Story recaps by clicking here.
‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘A Random Killing’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com
What is the Human Cost of True Crime Entertainment?
This past week on American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace we saw a depiction of the murder of James Miglin by Andrew Cunanan before he fled to Miami and murdered Versace. We saw Miglin and his wife at a political fundraiser, and later together at home in their beautiful house were a slight distance could be detected between the two despite their 38 years of marriage. We saw Mr. Miglin get a call from Andrew Cunanan, and plan a clandestine meeting while his wife would be out of town over the weekend for a work trip. We saw Cunanan and Miglin interact with each other, this meeting clearly not their first, and the push and pull of Miglin’s need to feel desired and admired by Andrew butting up against the clear financial incentives for Andrew. We saw Andrew Cunanan take Miglin into the garage, and murder him, before returning to make himself at home in the house for the rest of the night. Even bathing and sleeping in the Miglin’s room. Then, when the body is discovered, we see Marilyn Miglin insist that her husband was murdered by an intruder despite the police’s conviction that the crime was personal, and when they discover a car stolen from a previous crime parked around the corner and connect Andrew Cunanan to the murder, we see her leak information that will allow Cunanan to escape the police so the truth about her husband stays a secret. It was a complex, gripping hour of television. And almost none of it is based in fact.
James Lee Miglin was killed in May of 1997 in a brutal murder that was later linked to Andrew Cunanan. His wife was out of town on business that weekend. Cunanan’s jeep was parked around the corner from the crime scene. The killer did shower and stay in the house after the murder. However, there is no evidence to support an ongoing association between Miglin and Cunanan. There’s even less evidence that Miglin’s widow purposefully scuttled a police investigation to keep her husband’s affiliation with a known prostitute and murderer a secret. The entire narrative of the episode is editorialized in a way that FEELS true, and grimly satisfying, but very little of it is based in fact. The longer I watched the episode, the more uneasy I became with editorializing Miglin’s family this way. They are still alive, Marilyn still works on the Home Shopping Network as she has for the last 25 years. I wonder at the decision to depict her as someone who would be willing to let a killer, a man she knew had killed others, go free in order to keep a secret about her husband. I wonder it it WAS a secret, or if Cunanan had targeted Miglin for some reason the same way he targeted Versace. I wonder if she even would have been told how the police where intending to track Cunanan. Her actions in the show could be seen as leading directly to the murder of William Reese in Pennsylvania, who Cunanan killed for a new vehicle, and later to the murder of Versace in Miami. It’s a very unkind way to depict her and it’s based on supposition and, I guess, a desire to tell an interesting story with complex characters. But Marilyn Miglin isn’t a complex character, she’s an actual person, and this “story” is a horrible tragedy she and her family suffered through. The more I consider it, the sleazier it feels.
There’s been a resurgence in the true crime genre across all forms of media; television, movies, and podcasts are brimming with gruesome tales that are horrifying and compelling all at once. Perhaps with the onslaught there’s a bit of desensitization happening to us, and we’re losing sight of the fact that while these stories are presented as entertainment, we’re talking about tragedies that ripped apart people’s lives. Some of those people are still alive. Some of them choose to participate in these shows, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Wanting the world to know the story of their loved ones and that they were more than just victims is an entirely understandable impulse. But when the family doesn’t want to talk, the idea of finding an “angle” to make the story “compelling” feels deeply disrespectful to the victims and insulting to their families. We’re not owed a story about any crime, no matter how well publicized.
There are exactly two people who could have told us the details of the night of James Miglin’s murder and both of them are dead. We know what the outcome was, but we have no idea what the inciting incident could have been, what transpired during the time they were together, or what happened after. However Miglin’s family reacted to the crime is their business and not for us to judge. I’ve been enjoying this season of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace but this episode left a bad taste in my mouth and made me think long and hard about the concept of true crime entertainment.
NUNN ON ONE MOVIES Mike Farrell channels Chicagoan Miglin in Gianni Versace – Gay Lesbian Bi Trans News Archive – Windy City Times
Gay executive producer Ryan Murphy is on a roll with his second installment of FX’s American Crime Story. The first season’s The People v. O.J. Simpson was a critical success, earning many awards including an Emmy and Golden Globe for Sarah Paulson, who portrayed Marcia Clark.
This year’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace is based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History. The series examines Andrew Cunanan, played by actor Darren Criss in a possible career-making performance.
Mike Farrell is featured in one episode—titled “A Random Killing"—where he plays another victim of Cunanan: Chicago real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin, who is portrayed in this series as closeted. Farrell is most remembered for his character Captain B.J. Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H, but he has had a vast array of television appearances. His work started back at Lassie and moves forward to shows such as Providence and Desperate Housewives.
He has executive-produced two films—Patch Adams and Dominick and Eugene, the latter which earned Tom Hulce a Golden Globe nomination.
WCT: Did they come to you about this role in American Crime Story?
MF: Yes, they came to me. I was fascinated by this set of circumstances, and by the character. I had known very little about the story, but I thought it was really quite extraordinary. Ultimately it was an important story to tell. I was delighted to be a part of it.
WCT: Did you study up on Lee Miglin?
MF: You get the pages and they tell you what you need to know. I did some research. As you may know, there were some differing opinions on what happened and who he was etc.
He was not only complex to portray, [but] he was an important person and had a life that people need to better understand. Back then and certainly today, while there is more understanding there is some cloudiness.
WCT: Was this the first time you played a gay character?
MF: Yes.
WCT: Was this filmed in Chicago?
MF: We did some, but it was backup work. Most of my scenes were filmed in Los Angeles.
WCT: Was filming such a graphic scene a nightmare?
MF: It was weird, I will say. I don’t like being wrapped up like that.
WCT: How was it working with Darren Criss?
MF: He’s terrific. He’s really a nice young man and very talented. I confess to never having seen Glee. For someone that is relatively new to the business, he has a great presence, and had a good relationship with the crew. It was really fun to get to know him and see him work.
WCT: Even on television it is interesting to see his interpretation.
MF: I agree. It is an enormous task to pull off. From what I saw he really did a remarkable job.
WCT: Did you know Judith Light [who plays Lee’s wife, Marilyn] before this?
MF: We had never met before. I had been an admirer of Judith for a long time, so it was thrilling to get to work with her and meet her.
WCT: She’s worked with the LGBT community for many years. Have you?
MF: Oh sure. In the ‘70s, I was involved in a campaign out here in the early days when the Briggs Initiative was on the ballot to keep gay people from teaching. It was just awful.
The community needed someone who was straight to stand up. I became a spokesperson for the No on Proposition 6 campaign.
Ever since then I have had many friends in the community and have done a lot of work in support.
As Queer Eye gets a reboot, television enjoys a wealth of gay perspectives
Last November, Glaad released the results of its annual inquiry into LGBTQ representation on TV, finding that the number of queer characters increased to all-time highs across broadcast, cable and streaming series. On broadcast television, there are now 86 regular or recurring characters identifying as gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual or transexual, a lowly but ascendant 6.4%; on cable, there are 173, and on streaming services, 70. Predictably, these characters remain overwhelmingly male, white, and cis-gendered. While the study didn’t account for series premiering in 2018 or currently in development, many of them should make the breakdown of queer representation more equitable across racial and ethnic lines.
The year started with Ryan Murphy’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the second installment of his American Crime Story anthology series. We justifiably expected the show to focus on its titular couturier but it ended up doing something different and more interesting, charting a vast spectrum of queer experiences in the post-Aids 90s through the lens of Andrew Cunanan, Versace’s admirer-cum-assassin and the killer of four other men, three of whom were gay. In a series of bottle episodes the show zeroes in on the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and Versace’s own public coming-out in a way that seems novel and historically sound.
As Queer Eye gets a reboot, television enjoys a wealth of gay perspectives
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