The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story | Season 2: World Premiere | FX | 12 March 2018
Tag: brad simpson
Inside ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s’ Story of High Fashion, Homicide and HIV
Are you watching The Assassination of Gianni Versace on FX? The series is the second in the American Crime Story anthology, the folks who brought you The People versus OJ Simpson. It’s based on the book Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth about Andrew Cunanan’s murderous spree in 1997 that ended in the shooting of the famous designer on the steps of his Miami mansion.
With openly gay Hollywood producer Ryan Murphy (executive producer, known for creating Nip/Tuck, Glee, Feud, and American Horror Story, among others) at the helm, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is sensational. Truly, it causes all the sensations. It’s super gay. It’s got fabulous ‘90s Versace fashions. It’s violent, bloody, and disturbing. It’s a little bit sexy (as sexy as you can be in a series about a spree killer) with a soupcon of nudity and a smidge of S&M. There are drugs, nightclubs, models, and hot military guys. It’s got an amazing cast, starring Darren Criss as Cunanan, Penelope Cruz savagely portraying Donatella Versace, Ricky Martin as Versace’s partner Antonio, and Edgar Ramirez – who looks and acts so much like the real Versace that it’s spooky – and featuring performers such as Judith Light, Mike Farrell, Finn Wittrock, and Broadway’s Annaleigh Ashford. The plot contrasts the pampered opulence of Versace’s privileged life with the underbelly creepiness of Cunanan and his development from a pathetic, disillusioned liar into a deranged, notorious killer. It’s fantastic, delicious television.
The show also includes a very powerful HIV storyline. Gianni Versace is revealed as being HIV positive at a time in history when homophobia and AIDS panic were rampant. Not only is Versace portrayed as HIV positive, he is shown to be at times so weak from advanced sickness that he needs help even to walk. Then, in later scenes, he’s shown to be recovered after (presumably) being put on antiretroviral therapy, which became available in the mid-1990s.
After his recovery, Versace decides to use his new lease on life not only to continue creating fashions but also to come out as gay at a time when not many celebrities were brave enough to do so.
“I was sick, but I didn’t die,” he says in Episode 5 of the show. “I have a second chance. It’s a miracle that I’m alive. And yet, I ask myself every day, what have I done to deserve this? Why am I still here? To be afraid? No. I’m alive, and I must use it.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace might be the first major media movie or television show to present a person sick with advanced HIV infection and then recovered and vibrant due to the miracle of HIV medications. This is an amazing and important landmark for HIV in film/television, and the storyline is told with a lot of respect for those of us living with the virus. By exploring other aspects of the AIDS crisis and its implications in the aftermath of Versace’s murder, the series shows in living color what it was like to be living in the good ol’ bad ol’ ’90s.
I had a phone conversation with award-winning executive producer Brad Simpson and screenwriter and author Tom Rob Smith about the production, the creative process, and the decision to use HIV in the storyline.
Charles Sanchez: Why do you think it’s important to tell this story about Andrew Cunanan and Gianni Versace at this time?
Brad Simpson: This story, in a lot of ways, was a journey through the politics of gay identity and what it meant to be out in the 1990s. The 1990s being this volatile time – even though it’s still volatile for a lot of people – of the Defense of Marriage Act, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and celebrities starting to come out, and the sort of shift and also the transformation with AIDS drugs that happened and a generation of activists who’d been politicized by the AIDS crisis, all intersecting in this decade – and it felt like, you know, for us, true crime is bigger than just a murder. It really felt to us like there was something to be said about the 1990s and about where we are today, by telling this story.
Tom Rob Smith: [Cunanan] is very unusual. One of the things we’ve confronted is that people are talking about him as being a serial killer, and that’s just simply not the case. This is someone who didn’t have a pathology of violence. He wasn’t committing arson or sexual assault, all of the early warning signals that you have with lots of serial killers. This is someone that, if you had jumped back and met him at age 20, and said, “You’re going to be a killer,” he would have found it impossible to believe. Exploring him presents lots of challenges, and … it was very interesting to contrast [Versace] as someone who creates, as someone who is curious about the world, and someone who experienced intolerance and managed to navigate around it, with Cunanan, who just seemed to be defeated by it.
Simpson: Gianni Versace was one of the few people who were celebrities who were out [as gay] in the 1990s. It was actually shocking to us. We went back to make a list of who was out pre-Ellen [DeGeneres] coming out, and the list is 5, 6, 7 famous people? No fashion designers.
I think this is a show that only Ryan Murphy could get on the air. Because I like to think that we’re incredibly advanced, but the show is deeply gay and touches on things that you haven’t seen dealt with on TV before. There’s a freedom that Ryan’s success gives to allow us to tell a story like this.
Sanchez: Speaking of things we’ve never seen before, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen [on film], from an HIV standpoint, a person with HIV, sick and near death, turning around and becoming miraculously better through medications. What was the process of deciding how to tell that part of the story?
Smith: The reason we told that … it was just very powerful that Versace was very sick in ’93-’94 when his symptoms became severe, and it’s debated by the family, so I should put it in as a caveat that the family, they dispute this, but …
Sanchez: I believe in the book it says that, publicly, he had cancer.
Smith: Yeah, that’s right. I think they say “ear cancer,” and we know that is infamous [as code for HIV]. But we do know that he was very sick in ’93-’94, that he was on the brink of death, that is uncontested, and we know that he was refusing to submit to this illness. And that he would walk, still, when he was very sick, from his house in Miami to that news kiosk; he would go with Antonio [his partner], and he’d be so weak that Antonio would have to carry the magazines back. I thought it was a remarkably powerful structure [for the script] to have that walk contrasted with the walk when he’s then fully recovered. And he is then, in ’97 [when he’s shot], walking to that newsstand, not needing anyone’s help. He’s full of the joy of life in many ways. This medication gave him a rejuvenation.
And it was a great life force, you know, [Versace] was saying: “I want to live, I have so much more to give. I have so much more work, but also in terms of the people I love, my grandchildren, my family. I’m going to cling on to life for as long as I can.” And this new wave of medication came along, and he was saved.
Simpson: There’s something bittersweet about the fact that he thought he was going to die and had been given this new lease on life. There was this generation of men who thought they had a death sentence and then were slowly realizing maybe they didn’t. He was starting to create again, and right at that moment, his life was taken away.
There were rumors that ran at the time, the hysteria after Versace was killed, there were these rumors spread by the media and some nefarious friends of Andrew that Versace gave Andrew AIDS and this was a revenge murder, and this is a widely held belief that is actually still held by a lot of people. It was revealed in Andrew’s autopsy that he was actually HIV negative. It was a narrative that was out there and one that we wanted to correct with the show: The evil murderer was actually not the one who had AIDS; it was the victim.
Sanchez: What do you think the responsibility of the media and artists of your caliber is in telling stories about HIV in the modern world?
Smith: It’s hard to come up with a generalized formula for it. I think you have to react to the nature of the period and the people involved. In the ’80s, the stories were horrific. It’s very hard to go into the ’80s and find stories that weren’t heartbreaking. And so, if you were telling that story, I don’t see how you could put a demand that somehow people be upbeat about it.
The responsibility just comes from looking at the truth of it and not landing on what appears to be an easy explanation. I think that’s both wrong and offensive.
Simpson: Ryan, you know, obviously did The Normal Heart. We had a lot of conversation in terms of how to portray the AIDS-related illnesses. We’re adapting Maureen’s book, and this is her position that, you know, [Versace] was positive. We felt that to not portray that would be to play into the stigma that still surrounds HIV to this day.
Sanchez: Speaking of stigma, I wanted to ask you about that. You and Nina Jacobson [Simpson’s producing partner] were on NPR at the end of January, and you both stated [while talking about the series] that HIV stigma was no longer prevalent. Then, two prominent HIV bloggers [Josh Robbins and Mark S. King] called you out on it on social media. I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about it.
Simpson: Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, I feel horrible about it. On radio, unlike an interview like this, you’re like racing through it and trying to be compact in your answers. I did not say want I meant to say. That’s not an excuse; it’s just an explanation.
We talked about this a lot in terms of how to talk about Versace’s HIV status. One of the conversations we had, we felt that were we to ignore our belief in that status and Maureen’s beliefs on that status, then we would be playing into the very stigma that we’re all trying to get rid of, that we would be reifying the stigma and shame of living with HIV by denying that part of a character. What I meant to say was that we didn’t want to play into the stigma of having HIV. What I ended up saying was that there is no stigma to having HIV today. I don’t believe that at all!
I’m not going to pretend that I know what it’s like to live with HIV or how complicated it is to decide how public to be about your status with partners, with friends, with family, or how to navigate the health care system. That’s something that I can’t know, that I can only hear about. But obviously, or maybe not obviously, I’m sorry that I misspoke, and I regret it. Of course, I know that there’s a large and unfortunate stigma to having HIV, still, in so many ways.
Smith: One of the reasons we wanted to do this [show] is to attack the stigma. This stigma is so wrong, and it’s so corrosive. It still exists today; we’re not just talking about something that is historic. We talk [on the show] about the idea that you could build a company that’s worth billions of dollars, be a fashion icon, and that it could be reduced to having no value simply by the factor of an HIV diagnosis. That isn’t an exaggeration. It seems to me to be a real injustice.
Yet, when you look at Gianni Versace’s words, you know, to me it was code. I can’t declare for sure what he was saying, but when he says in the ’90s after he recovers from the most severe symptoms, “I’m not going to live my life filled with regret and shame anymore,” to me, that’s him saying: “I’ve recovered, and I’m not just recovered physically. I’m not going to walk around feeling terrible anymore. I’m going to live; I’m going to love.” And I found that very powerful, and I really wanted to capture that.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Inside ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s’ Story of High Fashion, Homicide and HIV
Inside Look: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell | There’s a story in their secrets. Go behind the scenes with the cast and crew for a look at 90’s prejudice against gays. | 21 February 2018
Inside Look: Miami | Everything was happening in 1990’s Miami. Get an inside look at the setting of The Assassination of Gianni Versace with the cast and crew. | 9 February 2018
The New Girl loft was the scene of a murder on last night’s American Crime Story
No episode of The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story has started where the last one leaves off. Narratively or geographically: Every week, the show takes a step back in time to further peel away the layers of the personal and cultural pressures that forged serial killer Andrew Cunanan (and, to a lesser extent—in that we haven’t seen him since episode two—the victim whose name is in the show’s title). Cunanan shoots Versace on the steps of his Miami villa in the cold open of the premiere episode; when the second episode, “Manhunt,” picks up, the murderer hasn’t even arrived in Miami yet.
It works to disorienting effect, but the show employs some clever tricks as well as some tried and true devices to prevent viewers from getting totally lost. “A Random Killing” opens in Toronto, introducing fragrance magnate Marilyn Miglin in the midst of a home-shopping segment. When the modern aspect ratio has been restored and Marilyn’s trying to contact her husband, Lee, on an airport payphone, onscreen text informs us she’s in Chicago. Last night’s episode, “House By The Lake,” begins with a corny sales pitch for one of the Twin Cities. But I’m not buying it. The chyron after the star wipe might read “Minneapolis, Minnesota,” but that’s definitely the neighborhood occupied by a Los Angeles educator and her knucklehead roommates. I’ve stood across the street from that building, yakking at a camera. I’d recognize that sculpture hanging above the doorway anywhere. That’s the New Girl loft.
Two shows, different as night and Jess Day, choosing the same, relatively nondescript converted industrial space as a shooting location. Sitcom establishing shot as murder scene. New Girl films on the 20th Century Fox lot, but footage of 837 Traction Avenue has set the scene for nearly every (if not every) episode of the show that’s aired since 2011. It’s central to the premise of the entire show, in which Jess moves into the building with three strangers after she finds her boyfriend sleeping with another woman in the pilot. But take a different approach to framing the building, and, voilà: It becomes David Madson’s loft in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the body of Jeffrey Trail was discovered in late April of 1997.
Asked how the production settled on that location, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson said, “We were looking for an area that matches the loft district [where] David lived in Minneapolis—without the L.A. skyline. We worked off of the actual photos the location and art department chose.”
Since first watching the Assassination Of Gianni Versace screeners in early January, I’ve been chuckling to myself at the coincidence. (There’s the added wrinkle of Max Greenfield being a cast member on both Versace and New Girl.) But my heart also breaks a little at the implication: Even after surviving to seven seasons and picking up a handful of award nominations, New Girl’s impact on the TV landscape is minimal enough that it can’t stake a firm claim to one of its most recognizable and identifiable images. Establishing shots are calling cards, pins dropped in a map that say, “The Friends live on this corner,” or, “This is the Conner family home.” If your show reaches a certain level of prominence or prestige, it’ll be associated with these real-life structures for as long as they’re left standing. You’re not going to see an HBO crime drama set up shop in New York and use Tom’s Restaurant as a recurring setting—at least not without some sort of wink toward Seinfeld.
That sense of place, and a show’s relationship with it, are some aspects of what media scholar and A.V. Club contributor Myles McNutt has written about as “spatial capital,” so I reached out to him about the New Girl loft showing up on Versace: “Any location carries spatial capital: This includes its proximity to the studio where the production is based, its similarity to the location being represented, and—important in this case—what other projects the location has appeared in. I would have personally felt that ‘appearing in an establishing shot every time New Girl returns to the loft’ would be significant enough to raise questions about this location, but maybe they never saw the show, or felt its linear ratings were so low few would be forced to confront the intertextual confusion.”
And while such overlap has always been a reality for Los Angeles, the migration of TV production from L.A. to smaller production hubs like Vancouver and Atlanta has extended this challenge elsewhere. “With all of the genre shows shot in Vancouver,” McNutt said, “it’s inevitable they will be shooting in locations where other shows have shot before—the question is how the shows negotiate this intertextuality, if they’re even aware of it.”
You can see such a negotiation in action in “House By The Lake.” The twilight, the low camera angle, the ominously steady zoom: It’s the New Girl loft, but there’s no merriment, no will-they/won’t-they shenanigans, and no games of True American going on behind those walls. That’s a future crime scene right there.
Even when New Girl uses a nocturnal establishing shot, 837 Traction still looks homier and more inviting than it does on The Assassination Of Gianni Versace. There are lights on upstairs, and the windows are open, as if to shout out to the world, “This is a place where six weirdos in their 30s have been gradually learning the things they should’ve learned in their 20s!”
Then again, if you’re Myles McNutt, you’re pretty sure somebody’s getting killed in that loft, no matter what show it’s on.
The New Girl loft was the scene of a murder on last night’s American Crime Story
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
David Furnish ‘Deeply Dissapointed’ By ‘Completely Inaccurate’ HIV Comments From ‘Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Producer
David Furnish is taking issue with some remarks made by Brad Simpson, an executive producer on FX drama “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” regarding the choice to depict the slain fashion designer as HIV-positive in the fact-based series (whether Versace was or wasn’t HIV-positive isn’t known).
During an interview with NPR on Wednesday, Simpson commented on the creative decision to depict Versace as carrying the HIV virus.
“This was a time in which HIV was still a death sentence,” said Simpson, “it was killing thousands and thousands of gay men, and we personally don’t think there’s any stigma anymore to having HIV.”
Upon hearing Simpson’s comments, David Furnish felt compelled to issue a statement in his capacity as chairman of the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
“I was deeply disappointed by comments made by Brad Simpson, which were completely inaccurate and ignore the real-life experience of millions of people living with HIV today. HIV stigma is not only real, it is severe. In fact, today the primary barrier to ending the AIDS epidemic continues to be widespread stigma and discrimination against people living with or perceived to be living with HIV/AIDS,” begins the statement from Furnish, who has been John’s partner for two decades (they wed in 2014).
“It’s because of stigma that people are hesitant or fearful to be tested, to discuss their HIV diagnosis with their doctor or pharmacist, to reveal their HIV-positive status to family and friends, or to seek treatment and services. It’s because of stigma that there are still laws on the books in many states that criminalize HIV-positive people for having consensual sex — even when no HIV transmission takes place,” his statement continues.
“Mr. Simpson should use his platform to help end the stigma and ignorance that persist on this issue,” Furnish concludes. “Instead, sadly, he is perpetuating it. At the very least, he should apologize. But more importantly, he should educate himself and join the critical work of ending the stigma and discrimination that targets all people affected by the epidemic.”
The series, based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, has been met with resistance from Versace’s fashion house, which issued a statement declaring the events depicted in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” as “pure fiction.”
“The Versace family has not authorized nor has it in any way been involved in the TV series dedicated to the death of Gianni Versace,” reads the statement. “Since Versace has not authorized the book from which it is partially drawn and has not taken part in writing the script, this TV series must be considered a work of fiction.”
https://ia601506.us.archive.org/15/items/jan3hour1/January_31_2018_Hour_1.mp3?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
https://acsversace-news.tumblr.com/post/170352751769/audio_player_iframe/acsversace-news/tumblr_p3fs0kG1J71wcyxsb?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fia601506.us.archive.org%2F15%2Fitems%2Fjan3hour1%2FJanuary_31_2018_Hour_1.mp3
January 31, 2018: Hour 1 | Here & Now
Also, the latest season of FX’s “American Crime Story” focuses on the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, who was gunned down on the front steps of his home in Miami Beach, Florida, on July 15, 1997. The show’s executive producers join us to discuss “The Assassination of Gianni Versace."
Revisiting Chicago murder, FX series depicts Lee Miglin as gay, close to killer
Even at a time when the city routinely logged two or more homicides a day, this one stood out.
It occurred in the Gold Coast. The victim: Lee Miglin, a 72-year-old real estate tycoon. He’d been bound and tortured. His killer had stuck around long enough to eat and shave.
The 1997 murder was front-page news in the city — soon to be a global story, when investigators connected the dots of a cross-country killing spree that ended with the shooting of fashion idol Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion.
On Wednesday, murderer Andrew Cunanan’s Chicago stop comes into lurid focus in episode three of FX’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”
It portrays Miglin, played by Mike Farrell of “MASH” fame, as the loyal husband to cosmetics magnate Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light), but also a married man tormented by his secret gay life.
Early in the episode, just before Cunanan — a gay escort/con artist — shows up on Miglin’s doorstep, we see the real estate developer, his wife out of town, lighting a candle and falling to his knees before a Catholic altar in his basement.
“I try. I try,” he whispers, his quavering voice full of guilt.
The scene that follows — Miglin and Cunanan kiss, shortly before the escort leads the developer to the garage, ties him up, tortures him and kills him — remains controversial. Miglin’s family has vociferously denied he knew Cunanan or had any kind of relationship with him. The Miglins declined to comment for this story.
John Carpenter was a crime reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times at the time and a lead reporter on the story, one that took him to both coasts. From the start, Carpenter said, the murder was a “heater,” reporter parlance for a case that attracts a lot of media attention. After the initial reporter briefings, police released few details.
“We were getting sort of a general sense of what the murder was,” said Carpenter, now a freelance reporter in the Chicago area. “Then at some point fairly early on that shut down instantly.”
Was someone trying to protect the Miglins? Carpenter says he doesn’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise him. Miglin was both well-connected and well-liked, he said.
But if the attack was random, as police would later suggest, something didn’t make sense to reporters.
“To me, what everybody always felt was that it was clearly somebody who knew that Marilyn Miglin was away for the weekend,” Carpenter said. There also was no forced entry into the home, according to media reports.
Sun-Times editors were less interested in being able to run a “tawdry headline,” as they were in filling in the missing pieces to a widely read story, Carpenter said.
The FX series relies on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book “Vulgar Favors” for much of its source material.
“What specifically happened in the moments leading up to Lee Miglin’s death is known only by Andrew and Lee. This is true for almost all of Andrew’s victims,” Brad Simpson, the show’s executive producer, said in an emailed statement. “Our writer, Tom Rob Smith, had to dramatize what we believe happened that weekend starting from the established facts of the crime scene. Based on the evidence, we believe that Lee and Andrew did know each other, and Andrew’s attack, as with all his victims except for William Reese, was targeted and specific. We used Maureen Orth’s book and consultancy, as well as the FBI records and the statements from witnesses inside the records for research and background.”
Farrell, the actor who plays Miglin, told the Sun-Times his research for the character involved reading widely about the case.
“But what you have to deal with is what’s on the page, as an actor,” he said.
Farrell said that while he’s sorry if his portrayal might cause additional pain for the surviving Miglins, he doesn’t feel any guilt.
He said it’s “too bad there is such antagonism” over Miglin’s possible motivations.
“To me, it’s a further manifestation of the horror of this whole thing. But part of [that] is a kind of inability or unwillingness to accept what I think is a very real and very natural part of this man’s life, and it’s one that’s really what the show is about — an inability to understand that some people have a different orientation and particularly then, and less now, there was an absolute unwillingness to accept and honor that orientation.”
Revisiting Chicago murder, FX series depicts Lee Miglin as gay, close to killer
‘American Crime Story’: FX’s Nina Jacobson And Brad Simpson Talk About The Challenges Of Creating Socially Conscious TV
At times it feels as though Ryan Murphy has an overwhelming number of shows, but there’s something special about American Crime Story. The first season of the anthology series, The People v. O.J. Simpson, swept the world by storm, dominating both critical conversations and achieving stellar ratings. For its second season, The Assassination of Gianni Versace may not be as all-encompassing as the first season of the show. However, there’s a sense of urgency, consciousness, and care about the portrayal of these real-life people baked into the DNA of Versace that makes this season a worthy sequel to the O.J. season of the show.
The creators of American Crime Story know the show’s reputation and strengths and are cautious about capturing the perfect balance of pulpy drama and socially conscious storytelling. As we’re in the middle of the first big show of 2018, Decider had the opportunity to Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, executive producers for American Crime Story and FX’s upcoming musical drama Pose. The duo discussed the importance of telling the Versace and Cunanan story, the challenges of Ryan Murphy’s brand of storytelling, what it’s like working with FX, and what’s going on with the Monica Lewinsky and Hurricane Katrina seasons of American Crime Story.
“The first thing that Ryan pulled for was that we shoot in Miami, which is hard to do on a basic cable TV show,” Simpson said when asked about The Assassination of Gianni Versace‘s gorgeous cinematography. To achieve the show’s highly stylized and bright look, the team brought in two directors of photography — Nelson Cragg, who also directed Episode 2 “Manhunt” and worked on the O.J. season, and Simon Dennis, who worked on six episodes of the series.
“There’s a consistency [to the look of the show], but the show is darker and less vivid as we go back in time and see some of the murders. But also Ryan really wanted pink to be a central color of the show,” he said. “It’s important metaphorically because the show is in many ways about being gay, and pink is associated with that, but also we thought it was important because it was a big color in Miami, and it plays throughout the show with very clean lines.”
Simpson also revealed that the team used American Gigolo and the original Miami Vice for inspiration. “We hope that people enjoy the look while also getting more and more unnerved by it,” Simpson said.
The real story of Andrew Cunanan‘s murder spree was fairly sensationalized. However, the team was careful to be sensitive to these victims’ stories and portray them as people first. “The only victim that people really knew anything about was Versace and we wanted — to the best of our abilities — to tell the story of these other lives that were lost and for them to not sort of be lost in the shuffle of the celebrity victim who was the final victim and the one that everybody knew about,” Jacobson said. The team wasn’t able to learn much about William Reese, the victim who was murdered for his truck. However, they were able to expound on the stories of three of Cunanan’s other victims —Lee Miglin, David Madsen, and Jeff Trail.
“They had such complex stories to be told,” she said. “So much of what they experienced, the themes of homophobia and shame, the policies of being out at that time [are relevant], and we actually felt that rather than sensationalizing those murders, we wanted to humanize those victims.”
Though FX’s series largely sticks to its source material, there is a key difference between Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. While Orth outlines police missteps and the media’s response to this case, Versace largely glosses these details. When asked why these elements were excluded, Jacobson pointed to editing.
“A lot of details from the book were in our script and were shot. And then through the editorial process we found that sort of where you wanted to be was you with the people who were the center of the story,” she said. “Part of it was the difficulty that, because it was this national manhunt with different states involved, there wasn’t necessarily one person or one character story that you could tell of somebody who was on the hunt, putting the clues together. So we didn’t feel as though we had as much character drama coming from the police investigation side.”
Just as The People v. O.J. Simpson was just as much about race relations as it was about national scandal, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is equally about these horrific murders as it is about homophobia and what it was like to be gay during this time. The Versace season is one of the best forms of socially conscious television, a brand Murphy has perfected. However, there are challenges that come with creating TV this way.
“I think the central thing is that you can’t start with the issues, you know? We like a good page turner, in terms of our movies, in terms of our TV shows. Ryan understands, and in a weird way he’s sort of been able to cloak shows that actually have a lot of radical change under just really good storytelling,” Simpson said. “I think Glee did a lot of hurrying up the acceptance among millennials and teaching their parents about difference and homosexuality.”
Simpson admitted that when Murphy first presented the Versace story to them, they weren’t very familiar with all of Cunanan’s murders and didn’t fully see the larger meaning. “As we got into it we realized this is a show about what it was like to be gay during this incredibly complicated time in America. People were trying to come out of the closet across the country, and half the people were trying to shove them back into that closet,” he said. “We’re able to tell that story because it’s a really griping story about this really griping thriller. And I think that’s the secret sauce for Ryan and what we’re interested in too. This sort of literary pulp is compulsive, but it has something to say.”
Simpson expects Pose, FX’s 1980s musical that currently has the largest transgender cast ever announced for a scripted series, to have that same balance. “What Ryan’s doing essentially is telling a musical about people’s hopes and dreams. I think that’s the reason an audience is going to connect to it,” he said. “That’s exactly what makes for compelling TV.”
Jacobson also explained how timeliness has effected both seasons of American Crime Story. “So many of the cases of black deaths at the hands of police were unfolding just right when we were writing and producing O.J., so it felt incredibly immediate even though it was a period piece,” she said. “[Versace] too is a period piece, but this was a time when I was coming out.”
“Versace is the first, really the first major designer to come out not because he was visibly ill with AIDs, which the only other out designers were dead. They had come out because they were visibly ill, and that was the final image that people had of them,” Jacobson said. “Ellen wasn’t out yet. Elton John was out, but very few other celebrities were. And certainly I would say I remember few women were out at that time and how few role models there were. You tend to tell stories that you identify with, that speak to you in a way that moves you, and for us this was a story that moved us.”
Speaking of timely stories, when asked if there had been any talks about moving up the Monica Lewinsky season of American Crime Story in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Simpson those conversations have happened, though nothing is official yet.
“I think we’re kind of glad that we didn’t do Monica right after O.J. I think that this conversation [in Hollywood about sexual misconduct] will inform how we do it. I think that it will inform our perspective on it in a way that’s probably good and cause us to explore issues of consent and what it means to be in a relationship with a powerful man and a younger woman that maybe wouldn’t have been as nuanced before this conversation,” he said. “We might have focused more on the politics. But all of these [shows], we handcraft them … the reason we haven’t been rushing things on the air and pressed pause on Katrina is because we want them all to have resonance.”
As for Katrina, the Five Days at Memorial season is still happening, but there are no official developments yet. “We have a writer working on it,” Simpson said. “We decided to stop announcing when we’ll in production on things because we’ll be in production when the scripts come in, right? We’re hopeful that this new approach is going to be the right one.”
For FX’s part, from Donald Glover to Noah Hawley, the network has been outspoken about allowing its creators to take their time when it comes to producing quality seasons of new shows. “We put a lot of work into a few things, and they’re appreciative of that. They only make pilots that they think they want to program, and they’re not throwing things against the wall,” Simpson said. “I think it’s the smartest group of people working in TV. And it’s been great because our first couple of seasons of working on TV and working with Ryan, who’s also been a great mentor to us, has also coincided with John Landgraf’s team really getting recognized for what they do. As we watch shows like The Americans and Atlanta get noticed along with our shows, we feel like we’re in great company.”
As for FX’s future, the executive producers seemed optimistic about that as well. When asked how she thought Disney’s acquisition of Fox might effect FX, Jacobson said her former employer likely bought Fox because of its content. “It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, and a lot has changed since I’ve worked there,” she said. “The offerings, I think, from Fox and FX are quite different, and I would assume that … they want those differences in terms of launching Hulu as a major competitor to Netflix and Amazon. But I have to assume they bought Fox because they see the talent that’s there and the library of great shows, and they want some of the differentiation.”
ACS news 