Tag: article

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: The Grisly Miglin Murder

And now for something completely different. The first two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace centered largely on the fashion designer and his murderer in Miami. But for the third episode, the entire Versace storyline disappears.

Instead, “A Random Killing” goes back to Andrew’s two previous murders, starting in Chicago. It feels rather disjointed from the first two episodes, with a new setting and new major characters, primarily Judith Light and Mike Farrell as the Miglins. Really though, the entire episode feels like a showcase for Light, who is mesmerizing in every scene and, by far, the best thing about the entire series so far.

Meet Marilyn Miglin

The episode starts in May 1997 in Canada where Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) is on a home-shopping network. She’s a cosmetics magnate, the Queen of Perfume, a confident and strong woman. When she returns home to Chicago her husband Lee (Mike Farrell) doesn’t pick her up from the airport.

At their home she senses that something is wrong and some neighbors arrive to investigate. Marilyn waits, stone-faced, as the neighbors and cops search the house. When the cop and a neighbor go into the garage, a car is missing and we hear the neighbor scream. Marilyn, sitting inside, whispers to herself “I knew it.” It’s immediately clear that this is a woman who is always in control.

The show jumps to a week earlier, with Marilyn and Lee Miglin at a political fundraiser. They are the ultimate power couple: he’s a real estate tycoon and she’s a cosmetics queen, the charming, driving force behind their partnership.

Lee and Andrew

After Marilyn leaves for her Canada trip, Andrew Cunanan visits the Miglin home. Lee is deeply religious and a closeted homosexual, a painful combination for him as he’s plagued with shame. But he can’t resist the allure of Andrew, the charming, attractive young gay escort. The two obviously have a history together, but the show doesn’t explain it.

That’s going to be an ongoing theme over the series: introducing new characters who have a rich and detailed history with Andrew, but not actually explaining it until a few episodes later. Get used to it.

Andrew almost shoots Lee, but first the old man wants to show him blueprints for the Sky Needle, which he plans on being the tallest building in the world. Lee fantasizes about going to the top and having none of the tourists know that he built it. Obviously this offends Andrew, whose greatest fear in life is being invisible.

Andrew’s indignation triggers him to take control, calling out Lee for trying to impress him and pointing out that their relationship isn’t real, it’s just a business transaction, although Andrew loves making Lee believe that it could be real.

Andrew’s Third Murder

Andrew takes Lee to the garage and says “I’m in control now.” He shoves a glove in Lee’s mouth and then proceeds to tape up Lee’s entire head, which seems to be his M.O. Their kinky S&M games get very disturbing as Andrew ties up his legs and starts choking him. Andrew punches him in the face and brags about how he’s already killed two people who were very close to him.

It turns into a serial killer monologue as Andrew explains that after he kills Lee, he’s going to dress him in women’s panties and leave gay porn around the body so he will be disgraced in death. The murder is then shown. The whole scene is uncomfortable, especially when you stop to think that this is based on a true story and Lee Miglin was a real person who was actually murdered. It makes the graphic nature of these scenes unpleasant to watch.

The Police Investigation

We’re back to after the body was discovered. Marilyn is in full spin-mode, explaining to the superintendent of police that it was clearly a robbery. She emphasizes that the culprit stole unusual gold coins which should be easy to trace if anyone tries to pawn them (well, maybe not so easy given how we saw that unfold in the first two episodes). Marilyn tells the story the way she wants it to be, making it very clear that she will not allow any potentially scandalous details to get out.

Just like when Donatella said that she wouldn’t let Andrew kill her brother twice by having the press invade his personal life, Marilyn insists that she won’t allow the killer to take away her good name. Sadly, this idea probably contributes to why Andrew could stay free for so long, because the actual details of his crimes were covered up to hide the shame of being a closeted homosexual back in the late ‘90s. We also get random factual details, like Lee and Marilyn’s son being an aspiring actor who was in the Harrison Ford movie Air Force One.

The cops find the car Andrew left behind, reported stolen from Minnesota and connected to someone named Jeff Trail (that’s a tease for next week’s episode). Also, the new car Andrew stole from Lee has a phone that automatically tuned on when the car was started, so the police can ping it and track him.

Andrew’s Fourth Murder

They figure out he’s going to New York City, where we see Andrew visit a Versace store, the only real connection to the designer in the whole episode. Unfortunately, a radio news show reports about the police using the car phone to track the killer, which has to be some of the most irresponsible journalism ever. And of course Andrew hears it.

Andrew ditches the car in New Jersey after following a man to a cemetery. He takes the man hostage and kills him. Ironically, this one actually is a random killing and this poor man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Andrew takes his red pick-up truck (the one we’ve seen Andrew take to Miami in the first two episodes) and heads to Miami, ending right where the second episode started with him.

Marilyn Goes Back to Work

The episode ends as it began, with Marilyn Miglin on the home-shopping channel, this time after the news of her husband’s death. She delivers a powerful, emotional speech about how her husband believed in her dreams and treated her like an equal. It’s about the fifth or sixth scene that is just a beautiful acting showcase for Judith Light, whose performance alones makes this entire episode worth it.

How did you feel about the Miglin storyline?

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: The Grisly Miglin Murder

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ recap: Lee Miglin’s terrible ending

We gave it an A

It’s a Versace episode without Versace. Week three takes us back a few months before Cunanan’s most high profile murder to his second-most high profile murder: that of wealthy Chicago real-estate developer Lee Miglin.

It takes some time before this episode even gets to Cunanan. Instead, we’re given a brief slice-of-life picture of the marriage between Lee and his wife Marilyn, a Home Shopping Network star. Marilyn returns home from a trip to promote her perfume on television to find that her husband isn’t at the airport to pick her up. And so instead she takes a cab, and returns home to eerie silence and the unmistakable sense that something isn’t right. The house is set like a stage, with creepy tableaus — ice cream melting on the counter, a hunk of deli meat in Lee’s office, stabbed with a knife. Marilyn enlists the neighbors and calls the police, who tell her what she already knew. Lee is dead.

Flashback to a week earlier, when Lee and Marilyn were at a fundraiser for Illinois governor Jim Edgar. Marilyn’s speech introducing her husband as a guest of honor gives us a clear picture of who he was and sort of relationship they had. He was wealthy and powerful. He and Marilyn were a partnership, working together to grow their individual careers. “Without a hint of cynicism, my Lee is the American dream,” Marilyn says to the full banquet hall.

Of course, the façade falls when they return home, but only slightly. This isn’t a marriage of convenience, but it’s not one of passion either. Not long after Marilyn leaves town for her television appearance, Lee invites over a certain young male escort: Andrew Cunanan. From their interactions, it’s obvious the two men have had a relationship for a while — Lee mentions that he’s wanted to show Cunanan his plans for the “Sky Needle” building for some time, and Cunanan kisses him deeply enough for Lee to be able to pretend that theirs isn’t just a financial transaction.

It’s at the Miglin house that we get see one of Cunanan’s most distinctive habits return: He loves to eat with his prey, stuffing his face with no regard for whether they’re eating too or whether they’re comfortable. It’s a disruption of social patterns (food is something to be shared, enjoyed together), almost an act of aggression on Cunanan’s part.

The real aggression comes a few moments later, when the men move to the garage and Cunanan initiates the most disturbing sequence we’ve seen on the show thus far. The interaction begins with the cadence of a consensual BDSM encounter until it becomes terrifyingly obvious that Cunanan has something awful in mind. When Miglin is fully bound, with duct tape around his face and cords around his ankles, Cunanan punches him hard enough in the face to break his nose and reveals that he’s killed two men already, and that he’s planning on killing him as well, leaving his body in women’s underwear, surrounded by gay porn. “What terrifies you more, death or being disgraced?”

Cunanan crushes Miglin’s ribs with a bag of concrete and stabs him with a gardening tool. He tears up the drawing of Miglin’s dream architecture project — the Sky Needle, 500 feet taller than the Sears Tower — and burns it at the altar where Miglin had prayed earlier that day. He leaves the meat with the knife in the study. He seems to spend the night.

The police arrive when Marilyn calls, and when they find the body, they understand that the situation surrounding the murder makes the case more sensitive than most. Marilyn — stoic and dry eyed in her interactions with the police, graciously bringing them free sandwiches — bears no anger when she hears that her husband was found surrounded by gay porn. It clearly belonged to the murderer. “That’s all I’ll allow that man to steal from me,” Marilyn says. “I won’t let him steal my good name. Our good name.” She and her awkward milquetoast son (a Hollywood actor, she brags) are staunch in their approach that this was just a random killing, and that Andrew Cunanan had no relationship with her husband aside from being the stranger who took his life.

The police traced an abandoned car a few blocks away to Cunanan, already wanted for two other murders, and because he stole a car from Miglin that had an attached phone, they are able to trace his movements and see that he’s making his way to New York. At least, they’re able to trace him until that strategy leaks to the paper. Cunanan hears from a news story on the radio, while driving Lee Miglin’s car, that the police are tracking the suspect through Lee Miglin’s cell phone. He snaps off the car’s antenna, but he knows that’s not enough. He need to swap out cars.

Cunanan pulls into a rest stop and watches for victims, waiting until he sees a man driving a red pickup truck. When the man starts driving away, Cunanan follows him, shadowing him through a graveyard as if the scene weren’t ominous enough. Finally, the man goes into his home, and Cunanan follows with a gun drawn. “Stay calm,” Cunanan says. “No one’s going to get hurt. I’m here to steal your truck.”

The man is terrified, and polite. He shows Cunanan the car keys and walks down to the basement to let Cunanan lock him downstairs. He gets on his knees when Cunanan asks, and he’s telling him about his wife and their son when Cunanan shoots him, point blank, in the head.

If any viewer had any sympathy or affection for Cunanan up until this point, this episode stripped that away entirely. He is terrifying and merciless, but not just merciless — cruel. The final moments of the episode are given back to Marilyn Miglin, back on the air, talking about how much her husband meant to her. Maybe she’s just speaking to the cameras, maybe their entire marriage had been something for appearances, but when she talks about their partnership of 38 years, it comes across as heartbreakingly genuine. There are many kinds of marriages. Theirs might have had secrets, but it would be flippant to dismiss decades of friendship and affection for Lee’s brief and fatal fling with Cunanan. Cunanan isn’t anyone’s partner. He is a taker. He takes food, and cars, and reputations. He takes lives. He is someone who consumes and never gives anything back.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ recap: Lee Miglin’s terrible ending

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 3 Spotlights Andrew Cunanan’s Less Famous Victims

One of the most surprising things about The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is how much time the show is spending not just with Andrew Cunanan, but with his less famous victims. Prior to murdering Versace, Cunanan had already killed four men in a killing spree spanning several states, and this week’s episode (in-keeping with the show’s reverse Cunanan chronology) centers on his third victim, Lee Miglin, and briefly on his fourth, William Reese.

“A Random Killing” commits so thoroughly to fleshing out the character of Miglin (Mike Farrell)—a Chicago real estate tycoon whose ties to Cunanan remain ambiguous to this day—that Gianni Versace and his family don’t appear in the episode at all. Let’s get into five talking points from tonight’s hour.

1) Cunanan’s breath-play antics last week were a callback to his third murder.

Remember the nameless elderly man Cunanan seduced and then very nearly smothered with masking tape in last week’s episode? Of course you do. That startling sequence makes a lot more sense in light of this episode, which takes place several weeks prior and sees Cunanan murdering Miglin in a very similar fashion. In real life, it was never proven whether Miglin and Cunanan knew each other prior to the murder (the FBI considers it likely they did, which the Miglin family staunchly denies), but in the show, Miglin’s depicted as a deeply closeted regular client of Cunanan’s—and a pretty heartbreaking character in his own right.

2) Cunanan’s self-loathing emerges in his cruelty to Miglin.

Though the murder itself was brutal—a police officer notes that every one of Miglin’s ribs was broken—it’s the viciousness of Cunanan’s words that really stand out in this episode. Despite knowing theirs is purely a business relationship, Miglin seems quietly besotted with Cunanan, who in turns seems repulsed. Miglin is touchingly eager to tell Cunanan about his plans to build a 125-story tower (the tallest in the world) in Chicago and name it The Sky Needle. “I’ve wanted to share this with you for a long time,” he tells Cunanan, who all but sneers in his face, mocking both Miglin’s ambitions and his clear emotional investment in their relationship.

Later, when Cunanan brutally kills Miglin and leaves his body to be found in a deliberately humiliating fashion—wearing women’s underwear and surrounded by gay porn—I was reminded of the scene early in Episode 1, when Cunanan claims to be straight and casually throws out the F-word (“I mean, what are we supposed to call them? Homosexuals sounds so scientific.”) He doesn’t just want Miglin dead—he wants him outed and humiliated, remembered as “a pansy.” There’s so much internalized homophobia in Cunanan, and it almost feels like Miglin seals his fate when he admits to having real feelings for him—moments before Cunanan calmly confesses that he’s already “killed two people who were very close to me.”

3) The tower conversation tells you everything you need to know about Cunanan’s worldview.

Miglin is excited about the Sky Needle because he imagines families visiting together and children thrilled to ascend the tallest tower in the world. Cunanan, though, hones in on the fact that the hypothetical tower would loom over the Sears Tower, “so you can look down on the Sears Tower Observation Deck.” To Cunanan, there’s nothing more powerful than the idea of looking down on people.

The contrast between these two worldviews really comes into focus, though, when Miglin describes his fantasy of being able to visit his tower and “just roam among people, unannounced. They wouldn’t know who I was!” But the notion of being anonymous is so galling to Cunanan that he flies into a sudden rage, affronted by Miglin’s insistence that the tower is not about him. “Of course it’s about you—it’s the Lee Miglin Tower!” To Cunanan, there is no value in building anything for any reason other than putting your name on it.

4) Did a local radio station really scupper the Illinois police’s investigation of Cunanan?

Miglin is an immensely powerful figure in the community, and as such the police are all over this case, managing to track Cunanan for some time using the car phone in the Lexus he stole from Miglin. But when a local radio station runs a news item giving that information away, Cunanan is able to ditch the car—claiming his fourth victim in the process—and evade justice for another two months.

Apparently, this happened in real life, too. Here’s how it went down, according to Maureen Orth’s Vanity Fair article “The Killer’s Trail” (her book Vulgar Favors is the source material for this season of American Crime Story):

An activated car phone in [Miglin’s] Lexus was used three times the following week in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia police confirmed a news report of the attempted phone calls, angering Chisago County sheriff Randall Schwegman, who told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Everyone who was working on [the case] was outraged. Once he heard that, he’d have been a fool to use a phone after that.”

5) William Reese is the only victim not to have an episode to himself.

But he does get a death scene that’s surprisingly affective for its brevity. Unlike Cunanan’s other victims, there was no apparent personal connection between Cunanan and Reese, and investigators concluded he was killed solely for his truck. After giving Cunanan his keys, Reese calmly and politely begs for his life before being shot execution-style in the back of the head.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 3 Spotlights Andrew Cunanan’s Less Famous Victims

’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Explores ’A Random Killing’

A review of tonight’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story coming up just as soon as I have a role in Air Force One…

Despite the impressive performance by a nearly unrecognizable Max Greenfield, Versace episode two was so focused on Andrew Cunanan’s various sociopathic tics that I was nearly ready to cut bait on the whole season right there. Instead, I moved on to “A Random Killing,” and it was there that the strengths of Tom Rob Smith’s approach to the story started to outweigh its weaknesses.

Cunanan himself remains a bit too one-note, despite good work by Darren Criss, and despite all the different guises he adopts. But in journeying backwards through his life, and through the murder spree he committed on his way to committing this season’s central crime, Versace in turn gets to explore the lives of his other victims, and to understand some of the forces that both put them next to Cunanan and inspired him to kill them.

The title refers to the Miglin family’s public stance on why Cunanan killed real estate tycoon Lee Miglin(*) — to this day, they insist Lee and Cunanan never met — though the episode instead applies it to its other murder, of caretaker William Reese, who had the bad luck to be driving a truck Cunanan wanted to steal after he realized law-enforcement could track the phone in Lee’s car.

(*) Lee is played by Mike Farrell, best known for his long stint on M*A*S*H as easygoing, mustachioed Army doc B.J. Hunnicutt, and whose environmental work inspired one of my favorite random Simpsons jokes.

The bulk of the action is in Chicago, depicting not only the murder of Lee in all its macabre details — including the ham Cunanan left sitting out — but the extremely comfortable closeted lifestyle Lee had arranged for himself. His relationship with Marilyn — played spectacularly by Judith Light, who checks so many of Ryan Murphy’s usual casting boxes, it’s a wonder this is the first time they’ve worked together — is presented mostly as a business arrangement. She feels affection for him, and he for her, but there’s a remove even when they’re speaking sweetly to each other, and when Lee’s body is found, Marilyn’s first response is to whisper, between quivering lips, “I knew it.”

That the closeted Lee was a wealthy, powerful, and very public figure in the ’90s made him extra-vulnerable to the approach of a manipulator like Cunanan. And Cunanan, in turn, finds great cause to resent this man who can enjoy all the trappings of a socially acceptable hetero lifestyle and also hook up with guys like him when nobody’s watching too closely. Having already committed two other murders (alluded to here, to be depicted in future episodes), he no longer has any reason to hold in his envious rage, and the type of sex games he likes to play — which we also saw with the tourist he nearly suffocated in episode two — give him complete control to do whatever he wants to potential victims. He doesn’t just want to kill Lee: he wants to out him, and he wants Lee to understand this right before he dies, when he’s helpless to do or say anything to prevent it.

The aftermath of the horrific crime continues to show the many ways that law-enforcement bungled the Cunanan manhunt, in large part because they underestimated the ongoing threat a gay killer posed. Even if they’d been dismissive of his earlier victims, the Miglin family was well-connected enough that the search should have been nowhere as laid-back as it was; instead, they gave him enough rope, and didn’t keep a tight enough hold on the news about the car phone, that he was able to slip away again and murder William Reese in the process.

It’s all maddening and ugly. And for this week, anyway, it lived up to the potential of all the tools Murphy, Smith, and company have given themselves for the project.

I’ll check back in a few weeks. In the meantime, how’s everybody feeling about Versace so far?

’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Explores ’A Random Killing’

Can Judith Light Pull Off a ‘Versace’ Nomination? – Awards Daily

Tonight’s episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story features some of the best work in Judith Light’s storied career. A Daytime Emmy award winner, Light surprisingly has yet to win a Primetime Emmy Award. Last year’s supporting nomination for Transparent, her second for the series, felt like a winner. Her cruise-ship performance of “Hand In My Pocket” elevated the often depressing series into a moment of light (pun intended). Yet, in a highly political year, it was hard to stop the Kate McKinnon Saturday Night Live train. McKinnon went home victorious for her second consecutive win.

But Versace may change that next fall.

Tonight’s episode, “A Random Killing,” documents the high profile murder of Chicago real estate tycoon Lee Miglin. Judith Light plays his wife, Marilyn Miglin, a cosmetics maven popularly featured on home shopping television. Light digs into Marilyn Miglin with a performance you’ve really not seen from her. Light radiates warmth and compassion in her best performances. That’s certainly true of her Emmy-nominated work as Shelly Pfefferman in Transparent, even if it is slightly suffocating at times. She’s the uber-mom, something she hasn’t quite shaken since Who’s The Boss.

Versace shakes that up. Significantly.

Light bottles up Marilyn Miglin with an icy performance. Granted, she’s just discovered that her husband was murdered, potentially in a gay sex scandal. The circumstances don’t exactly scream “warmth and compassion.” Instead, she gives us quite grief, stoic dignity, and two scenes of eventual release. Along with Darren Criss’s Andrew Cunanan, she anchors the episode, arguably dominating it against the more extravagant Criss performance. We haven’t seen a Judith Light like this in a very long time. She’s absolutely fantastic in the role, easily deserving of Emmy attention.

Will It Happen?

But there are two significant obstacles in her way.

First, she’ll undoubtedly compete against Penelope Cruz in the Supporting Actress in a Limited Series category. That is unless, for some strange reason, FX decides to campaign Cruz in the Lead Actress category. It would be a mistake to do that. She doesn’t have the screen time. This isn’t a Versace story. It’s all about Andrew Cunanan and the lives he ruined. So, Cruz will directly compete against Judith Light for one of six slots. Cruz has the meatier role and that intriguing accent, and she’s also quite good, particularly later in the season.

Which gives us Judith Light’s second major obstacle – she’s only in the single episode. Versace runs nine episodes, and Marilyn Miglin (based on the eight I’ve seen) only features in tonight’s outing. It would be difficult to see Light emerging from a bevy of supporting actresses with roughly 30 minutes of work. No matter how expert that work is, mind you. You could argue that she equates a supporting performance in a TV movie. Something like Michelle Pfeiffer in Wizard of Lies or, even better, Melissa Leo in All the Way. Leo, in particular, didn’t have as meaty of a role as Light in Versace despite the 2-hour running time. So, based on that logic, it’s entirely possible Judith Light gets in.

But What I Really Want…

The Television Academy actually needs to add two more categories. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s true. They need to add Outstanding Guest Actor/Actress in a Limited Series or the equivalent thereof. There are dozens of great little performances in Limited Series that simply don’t stand a chance when competing against the Sarah Paulson’s or Kathy Bates’s of the Ryan Murphy world. Remember that great Ian McShane performance as a murderous Santa Claus in Asylum? Or even Franka Potente as “Anne Frank” in the same season? Looking at the Ryan Murphy oeuvre alone, there are dozens of actors who would fit perfectly into the category.

This year, Lena Dunham’s heavily buzzed performance as Valerie Solanas would be a shoe-in in such a category. In Versace, the Matt Bomer-directed “Creator/Destroyer” introduces us to Andrew Cunanan’s father, expertly rendered by Miss Saigon‘s Jon Jon Briones. He’d fit perfectly as a “Guest” performer. So would Judith Light.

I suppose there’s something weird about calling actors “Guests” in a Limited Series. Aren’t they really all “Guests” anyway? But there’s something to be said about a memorable performance given in a single episode or smaller arc. The Academy already tracks screen time percentages for Drama and Comedy guest performances, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to do the same for a Limited Series. There are lots of great actors giving great performances in very small packages. They need their own place to play.

Judith Light’s episode of Versace airs tonight at 10pm ET on FX.

Can Judith Light Pull Off a ‘Versace’ Nomination? – Awards Daily

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘Manhunt’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com

It’s getting better and better.

American Crime Story: Versace has released the second episode of the season entitled “Manhunt” and hoo boy, what a doozy. Seriously, we’re probably going to be having nightmarish flashbacks to Andrew dancing in his underwear to Phil Collins from now until the rest of eternity.

That being said, the season is getting better and better with every outing — and we’re only on episode two. What could possibly still be in store for us during the rest of the season?

The episode starts with Versace in the hospital, alive this time (they jump around in the timeline a lot, which can get a little confusing). We’re not told the exact reason why Versace has been brought to the hospital, but we know it’s for some sort of serious treatment. The obvious answer — and the one the show seems to be hinting at — is AIDS, but the Versace family has repeatedly said that Gianni Versace was HIV negative.

Nevertheless, Versace has some kind of life-threatening disease, and it’s got him in a real dour mood. He sits with both Antonio and Donatella, reflecting on how everything could have to lead up to this.

Antonio and Donatella seem to hate each other, by the way. Donatella seems perfectly fine with blaming every single thing that goes wrong in Gianni’s life on Antonio, as she won’t give him a single moment of respect.

That’s because she knows what’s up — Gianni loves Antonio. Antonio says he loves Gianni as well, but constantly brings home other men to sleep with. Gianni only goes along with it to keep Antonio around and happy. It’s somewhat of a toxic relationship, to say the least.

That’s why Donatella wastes no time in kicking Antonio to the curb after Gianni is murdered. Back in the present, she tells him that, now that Gianni is dead, there’s no need for the two of them to pretend anymore.

Versace’s funeral then follows. While he was shot in the face, the mortician actually does a pretty good job to make Gianni’s body look decent — making it all the more difficult for Donatella to look at. The body is then cremated and the ashes are put in a gold box.

Then we jump back to 1996. Again. Andrew is on the run (which can get confusing, because he’s on the run for murdering Lee Miglin at this point. Versace is still alive.) in a red pickup truck. He stops at Walmart to steal someone’s license plate, then has a pretty incredible scene in which he’s passionately singing “Gloria” while driving to Miami.

With a fake passport and an attitude that’s far too polite for someone who just murdered someone, he checks into a motel before promptly visiting Versace’s home. The door is locked, but we know Andrew has a gun in his backpack and his intentions are all too clear.

Back in the present, and the FBI are trying to figure out how this all happened. Cunanan had been a wanted suspect for some time now, but they’ve constantly paid him little mind as the FBI has tried to distance themselves from the Miami homosexual scene. Detective Lori Weider (Dascha Polanco) calls them out on this, as it looks like she’ll be the one leading the investigation from here on out.

Back in 1996, Andrew makes a new friend — Ronnie (Max Greenfield. Yes, that’s Schmidt from New Girl, but this role is COMPLETELY different and we love it). Ronnie is somewhat of an odd character. Despite being HIV-positive, he’s rather clingy — which is why he latches on to Andrew so fast.

Andrew doesn’t necessarily mind, but he can’t have Ronnie following him everywhere he goes. Especially when he’s up to such shady stuff — which brings on the most memorable scene of the season thus far. Andrew has a habit of being an escort for older, wealthy men. He scores a new customer and is brought back to the man’s hotel room, which is when the man says that “he can be submissive.”

Cue the duct tape. Cunanan wraps it around the man’s entire face — to the point where he can’t breathe. The man struggles and begs to be cut loose, but Andrew begins performing a dance routine — while being practically naked the whole time — and tells him to “Accept.” Eventually, Andrew cuts him lose, but the man is obviously pretty shaken by the whole thing (can you blame him???).

Cut back to Versace. He spends some time arguing with Donatella arguing over the size of his models and certain kinds of dresses. Later, we see him with Antonio — who is finally coming around to commitment. It all eventually leads to Antonio saying he wants to marry Gianni, FINALLY.

Ronnie and Andrew aren’t having the same kind of connection, though (although, to Ronnie’s credit, he seems to think they are). While sitting in a hotel room, Ronnie opens up and asks Andrew if he wants to open a florist shop. Andrew clearly isn’t interested. He’s got bigger plans for his life.

He blows by Ronnie, headed to a pawn shop to sell a gold coin he stole from the duct tape man (that poor, poor guy). While walking by Versace’s house, he spies him leaving to a nightclub and realizes this is his chance. He grabs his gun and heads after him, only after first being recognized from America’s Most Wanted by a gas station employee.

Versace and Cunanan don’t end up seeing each other at the club. Instead, a man slyly approaches Cunanan, hoping to buy him a drink. He asks Andrew who he is, and after a lengthy response in which he rattles off every profession imaginable, Cunanan finally says, “I’m the person least likely to be forgotten.”

And that’s how you end an episode.

Catch American Crime Story: Versace every Wednesday night on FX, and check out our other recaps by clicking here.

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘Manhunt’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com

How “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Uses Dance Pop to Craft a Gay American Psycho | Pitchfork

Note: This article contains light spoilers.

There are plenty of murders in FX’s “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” but no one dies in the most terrifying scene that has aired so far. Midway through the second episode, gay-hustler-turned-serial-killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) picks up an older man at the beach. As they enter the john’s spacious hotel room, Andrew asks how many people he employs. “Five thousand, globally,” the guy admits, but hastens to add, “I can be submissive.” So Andrew covers his face in duct tape, hissing, “You’re helpless. Accept it.” Then he turns up the stereo and dances in his orange bikini-cut swimsuit to “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey until his mark stops struggling. At the last second, he pokes a hole in the tape.

The scene is chilling for many reasons. There’s the painful suspense of waiting to find out if Andrew will let the john die. (Because the season unfolds in reverse-chronological order, we’ve already seen him kill Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) in the premier; we know he’s capable of it.) There’s the sadistic pleasure Andrew, who spends his days smoking crack in a $29.99-a-night Miami Beach motel room, takes in dominating a powerful businessman. And creepiest of all is Criss’ body language as he gyrates, his face frozen in determination while his arms flail. This is the moment we realize exactly how unhinged Andrew Cunanan is.

“Easy Lover” is a brilliant sync: a disconcertingly upbeat soundtrack to a man’s suffocation, with a touch of lyrical irony given Andrew’s line of work. But perhaps the most striking thing about using a Phil Collins song in this context is what the reference brings to mind: American Psycho, the Mary Harron film based on Bret Easton Ellis’ novel. Set in the 1980s, American Psycho finds yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman frequently extolling the virtues of his favorite soft rock hits. He turns on the stereo when he’s feeling great, which is mostly when he’s toying with a victim. In one scene, he plays Genesis’ “In Too Deep” and extemporizes on Collins’ career before he fucks and slaughters two prostitutes. Andrew’s encounter inverts the roles of sex worker and john, adding another layer of queerness to this tale of a gay man who preys on other gay men. “Versace” is using music to frame its subject as an explicitly gay variation on the American Psycho archetype.

Thankfully, for those of us who have no desire to revisit “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” or “Walking on Sunshine,” the show doesn’t overstate its case by cutting in additional Bateman murder jams. While the music of American Psycho captures the banality of Reagan-era capitalist evil, it’s the female-fronted house and dance-pop tracks that would’ve played in a typical ‘90s gay bar that suffuse this season of “American Crime Story.” Released the same year Cunanan turned violent, 1997, Jocelyn Enriquez’s egregiously overplayed “A Little Bit of Ecstasy” blasts as Gianni and his partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin), arrive at the club for yet another hedonistic night out, and soon decide to leave because they’d rather be alone together. Later, Andrew dances to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” and Lisa Stansfield’s “This Is the Right Time” at the same venue as he prowls for victims, clients, hookups, or all of the above.

Like the disco that soundtracked the sexually fluid nightlife of the 1970s, the songs selected by music supervisor Amanda Krieg Thomas layer mantras of pleasure over beats that thump like an overexerted heart. Their appeal in the context of a gay club in the mid-‘90s isn’t hard to grasp: This is the only public place where queer men can express their desires without fear, and the music heightens that temporary sense of invincibility. The only threat in a room like this is AIDS—until Andrew appears. As soon as he enters the frame, all you can hear in these otherwise liberating hits is artifice, recklessness, and caprice.

Outside the club, the pop songs Andrew loves can sound even darker. In a flashback from the premiere, Stansfield’s “All Around the World” plays as a younger Andrew tries on expensive suits owned by his rich friend Lizzie’s (Annaleigh Ashford) husband. While she scolds him for raiding the closet and he reminds her, “I have nothing,” the song emphasizes the disconnect between his worldly pretensions and his parasitic lifestyle. The first time we see him in episode two, Andrew is a fugitive speeding toward Versace’s part-time home, Miami Beach, in a stolen truck. After catching a radio news report about himself, he finds a station playing Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”cranks up the volume, and screams along with abandon. As high on his own notoriety as Patrick Bateman was on frivolous bloodshed, Andrew is celebrating the murders of men—three of them gay—with an iconic gay disco anthem.

There is a crucial difference between the American Psycho approach to music and the way “Versace” uses it, though. Bateman is a caricature of vain, ruthless, materialistic finance bros—a monster brought to life by a dominant culture that elevated those destructive traits. His affinity for Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News is an indictment of those artists. (Ellis agreed: “I ended up feeling bad for Bateman’s loving attention toward the band [Huey Lewis], which, in itself is this kind of criticism of the culture,” he told* Billboard.) Their songs are just another blandly sinister accessory to Bateman’s vapid existence, like his tanning bed and his embossed, bone-colored business cards.

As interpreted by this season’s writer, Tom Rob Smith, Andrew Cunanan is less a reflection of gay culture than a plague on it. If the john he nearly kills before going after Versace hadn’t been closeted, it’s quite possible Andrew would have been caught before he killed the fashion icon. When Andrew leaves the hotel room, the traumatized businessman slips on a wedding ring, calls 911, then thinks better of it and hangs up. Andrew’s earlier victims, who we’ll meet later in the season, are also casualties of the closet. In that sense, Andrew is the personification of society’s homophobia, which he uses to isolate and manipulate his targets, as well as HIV, which can turn sex deadly. In Miami Beach, he hides from the FBI in plain sight, buying neon tank tops and Speedos to blend in with the throngs of innocent gay vacationers. Music is one more layer of camouflage. Andrew’s grotesque enjoyment of “Gloria” isn’t a criticism of the song—it’s a perversion of its liberating meaning, and a threat to the culture that cherishes it.

How “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Uses Dance Pop to Craft a Gay American Psycho | Pitchfork

Darren Criss commits ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ – ONTVtoday

dcriss-archive:

Q: What is it like for you to play Andrew Cunanan, the person who committed the crime, in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”?

A: It’s been probably one of the most exhilarating characters that I’ve spent time with, because he is so all over the place, and he’s capable of truly great things. (There’s been talk) about the sort of similarities between somebody like Gianni and someone like Andrew. And on paper, you go, “No, that’s insane. You know, you can’t possibly compare the two.” And of course, in many ways, they’re very different men.

But I think we try to find as many common denominators not only between these two men, who had different levels of brilliance that were guided in very different ways, but we hopefully find the common denominators between the people watching. I think when (they’re) watching Andrew, my goal is to have people really exercise their sense of empathy – because from the get-go, we all know that he’s capable of something truly horrendous, and there’s no debate about that. However, I really hope that we can find that we all have more things in common with some of the worst people we can think of, than we do differences. Those differences are small, but huge in content.

Q: Did you have much rehearsal time?

A: The pace (of making television) is breakneck. Penelope (co-star Cruz) was telling me how there is a different pace, and for me, I’m numb to it. I’ve been doing it for a while now, and my mind is calibrated to that way of working. She was like, “You really have to be prepared, and you just get thrown right into it.”

And that is a logistical truth. We really do have to just get on in there. It would have been a luxury for all of us to have gotten together. I don’t have much with these (other actors), I think for obvious reasons.

Darren Criss commits ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ – ONTVtoday

Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?

One of Hollywood’s most time-honored traditions is praising actors in recognition of the physical transformation required for certain roles. The awards come flooding in, as do vague references to Stanislavski’s method, and the clickbaity headlines set the internet ablaze: Matthew McConaughey packs on 40lb for his turn as a gold-miner! Christian Bale ate a single can of tuna a day for The Machinist! Cameron Diaz uglies up in Being John Malkovich!

Watching the spectacle of celebrity mutation excites us both as gossip-mongers and moviegoers, since we appreciate dedication to craft as much as we do a grainy on-set photo of Matthew McConaughey cradling his pot-belly like a stray dog he’s just encountered.

But just as often as these good-looking people make themselves less so in the name of art, actors are cast as substantially less attractive real-life people and don’t undergo the same bodily metamorphosis. CGI, hair and makeup go a long way, but for every Charlize Theron-as-Aileen Wuornos or Robert De Niro-as-Jake LaMotta, there are times where we’re asked to accept a character as “ugly” because their hair is frizzy or their teeth imperfect. But let’s face it: sometimes, by no fault of their own, actors are simply too attractive for the role.

This came to mind when the former Disney Channel star Ross Lynch playedJeffrey Dahmer last year, and when Zac Efron was cast as Ted Bundy in an upcoming biopic, and when Margot Robbie channeled Tonya Harding, and, most recently, as Taylor Kitsch and Darren Criss appear, respectively, in the new seriesWaco as Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, and as serial killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.

In Waco, Kitsch tries to expunge himself of Friday Night Lights heartthrob Tim Riggins to play Koresh, pseudo-prophet, alleged sexual abuser, and leader of the Branch Davidian religious movement. Kitsch plays the part formidably, but you can’t help but wonder how Waco would look if the camera weren’t so enamored by its lead, who broods and smizes so frequently it’s as if he’s been conditioned to play up his looks. Then you remember it’s Kitsch, and he probably has been.

Although he shares something of a resemblance to Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss’s performance in Versace is similarly gratuitous in the way only an excessively handsome person could make it, and the end result is a particularly doe-eyed brand of menace. I’ll hold off on any pre-emptive judgment of Efron’s turn in the new Joe Berlinger-directed Bundy biopic, but I’m not optimistic about that one, either.

Hollywood is of course a business, one that’s in the business of prettification; often, our enjoyment of its product is incumbent on our suspension of disbelief. But that becomes more difficult with biopics, particularly those concerning subjects of ill repute. When serial killers and cult leaders and disgraced figure skaters are made more attractive – read: packaged for box office consumption – than they really were, is something lost in the process? Are the films forcing upon us a redemptive arc that hasn’t been earned?

First, let’s look at the scholarship: there are, to put it mildly, competing schools of thought among academics about the conflation of beauty with evil. In a 1998 essay, the philosopher Mary Devereaux looked at the case of Leni Reifenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will, regarded by most cineastes as one of the most important, visually engrossing films ever made and, also, a heinous lionization of Adolf Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies (pardon the obeisance to Godwin’s Law).

Devereaux argued that the film’s valuable insofar as it makes you question the Platonic notion that beauty and moral goodness proceed from one another.

“Indeed, one of the most shocking things about Triumph of the Will is that it so clearly demonstrates that beauty and goodness can come apart,” she wrote, “not just in the relatively simple sense that moral and aesthetic evaluation may diverge, but in the more frightening sense that it is possible for art to render evil beautiful.” Some scholars are purists, and others still feel that the moral can’t be divorced from the aesthetic, and that the gussying up of reprehensible people amounts to a reappraisal, a muddying of the ethical waters.

Triumph of the Will is of course a loftier, more high-stakes case study than the ones at hand; Hollywood has so far stopped short of casting a preternatural beauty to play Hitler. But there’s something to be said about the industry’s insistence on endearing us to crummy people by making them sexy. If it’s not manipulative and cynical, it is disingenuous; these casting decisions are oriented around bankability, not believability.

In the best-case scenario, the performance, like Robbie’s in I, Tonya, is still gutsy and commendable, even as the film itself lazily deploys scrunchy hairbands and braces to sell its version of Harding (her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly also gets a not-insignificant sprucing up at the hands of the uber-handsome Sebastian Stan). At worst, they result in tone-deaf marketing, like how Jennifer Aniston, in Cake, was meant to be “ugly”.

“This isn’t about culling conventionally attractive people from your TV screens,” wrote Lindy West in a Jezebel piece called Why We Need More Ugly People on TV. “It’s not about telling you who you ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ find attractive. It’s about decoupling women’s value from their desirability, and embracing the idea that people are more complicated than that.”

Maybe this is why, when we talk about the lengths actors go for roles, the reverse facelifts they execute in the name of authenticity, we so readily wax poetic about their commitment and artistic zeal. Because, most of the time, studios are actually quite lazy in this regard. It’s a point of fact that when we watch a movie or television show the actors therein are considerably better-looking than us laymen. But Ted Bundy was no centerfold, and it seems just a bit unscrupulous to reimagine him as one.

Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?

Get Ready For Judith Light On Tonight’s ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Through two episodes, you may think you have a good idea of the story that The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is telling you. The tragic opulence of the Versace lifestyle, gay chameleon Andrew Cunanan moving through the gay underworld of Miami and beyond, Penelope Cruz as Donatella upholding the family legacy through grief and pride. Was Versace HIV positive? How well did he and Cunanan know each other? Did Donatella really hate Gianni’s longtime lover? Was the police investigation botched? These are all the questions that seem to be driving the show through two episodes. Well, starting tonight with episode 3, titled “A Random Killing,” The Assassination of Gianni Versace steps towards becoming the show that it’s really about. And it does so featuring one of the all-time best single-episode performances in a Ryan Murphy series from Tony- and Emmy-winning actress Judith Light.

“A Random Killing” steps away from the Versace story entirely, focusing on Andrew Cunanan’s encounters with Chicago real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin. If you know the Cunanan story, you know Miglin was his third victim, murdered in his Chicago home. Whether Miglin knew Cunanan before his death — whether the two were sexually involved leading up to and including the day of Miglin’s death — has been a point of speculation that has been vigorously denied by Miglin’s surviving family. Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith clearly have their own take on the story and don’t really mince words about it. But we also get the character of Marilyn Miglin, Lee’s wife and home-shopping cosmetics queen.

Marilyn, as played by Judith Light, is a quintessential Ryan Murphy character. She’s a perfectly put-together older woman who, by episode’s end, is holding her life together by the tips of her impeccably manicured fingernails. She keeps up appearances but she’s haunted by something she refuses to put a name to. In the real world, we can make up our own minds about whether Lee Miglin was gay or closeted or having sexual relationships with male escorts. In Murphy’s depiction of the story, Marilyn Miglin’s vehement denial of the circumstances of her husband’s life (and death) double as a vehement defense of her own life.

It’s also somewhat wild that it’s taken this long for Ryan Murphy to loop Judith Light into his stable of actors. She’s pretty much everything he tends to value in a performer: older actresses who haven’t been well served by the television (and movie, though Light has kept her career on TV and the stage for the most part) roles being offered to them. Light got nationally famous starring opposite Tony Danza on the ABC sitcom Who’s The Boss?, but before that, she was a two-time Daytime Emmy winner for the soap opera One Life to Live, where she played a character who, in her most notorious and well-remembered storyline, has a courtroom breakdown confessing her secret life as a prostitute.

In the years since Who’s The Boss?, Light’s career might have gone the way of many sitcom stars of the ’80s, but the fact that she held on, returned to her Broadway roots, won a couple of Tony Awards in the process, had that great role as a publishing matriarch on Ugly Betty, and has recently been such a strong presence on Transparent, it all adds up to the perfect Ryan Murphy muse: a steel-spined actress of a certain age who’s experienced the best and the worst of the entertainment industry and has come out on the other side. It’s all there in Light’s performance as Marilyn. She gets a monologue at the end of the episode that would make her a shoo-in for a Guest Actress Emmy Award, if only the guest-actress categories included limited series. Maybe it’s time they should, because between Robin Weigert’s brief but brilliant work as the therapist on Big Little Lies last year and Light’s work this year, there is some phenomenal acting that is slipping through the cracks.

And while Judith Light’s award-worthy acting is a big reason to tune in to tonight’s episode, you should also be there for when the series makes its pivot. It’s not that the Versace case ceases to matter, but it becomes less of the focal point of the show. Versace’s killing was the last in a string of murders. And while, in real life and on the show, it’s not easy to string one constant motivation for Cunanan’s actions throughout all five murders (rumors at the time that Cunanan had been diagnosed HIV-positive and was acting out of vengeance against men he’d slept with have been debunked), Murphy and Smith have done a good job laying the groundwork of a homophobic society. Starting tonight, we begin to see the insidious role that the closet plays in the Cunanan murders. Here’s where the show stops being a B-minus true-crime story and starts becoming an A-grade tragedy.

Get Ready For Judith Light On Tonight’s ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’