Tag: february 2018

ACS: Versace Writer Tom Rob Smith on Andrew Cunanan’s ‘Horrific’ Homophobia

Midway through its season, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story pivots away from its title character. The series takes the death of the famed fashion designer as a jumping-off point, leaving Miami behind and working backward through Andrew Cunanan’s nationwide killing spree. According to writer Tom Rob Smith, who adapted Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors into the series, that structure mimics the process of his research into that grisly story. Cunanan killed four other men before Versace, but he got famous because he killed a celebrity. ACS: Versace starts with Cunanan’s infamy, then peels back his lies to get at who he really was. Smith, who has experience writing crime TV like London Spy as well as crime novels, talked to Vulture about the Versace family’s condemnation of the series, Cunanan’s racial identity, and how he approached writing true crime for the first time.

After the first few episodes, the show shifts away from the Versaces and works backward through Cunanan’s killing spree. How did you arrive at that structure?
It really came about from the nature of the story itself and our understanding of it. Before Maureen Orth’s book was sent to me, I didn’t really know anything about Andrew Cunanan. I just knew the murder of Versace. It feels like that’s true for most people. We thought, “Can you really go from O.J., which is one of the biggest criminal cases the country’s ever seen, to Andrew Cunanan growing up in San Diego with his dad?” You have to start with that thing that everyone knows, which is the Versace murder, and say, “We’re now telling you the story that you don’t know.” The backwards movement came from thinking about our understanding of the story and how people would react to it. There was no sense of, “This would be an interesting device.” There was no desire to do something for the sake of it.

There are huge advantages to this kind of story, because if he was plotting to kill Versace from age, I don’t know, 17, then you could jump in at any point. But it’s an evolution. If you had met Andrew and spoken to him when he was 18, 19, 20, and said, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to become a killer,” he would’ve found that outlandish. He certainly didn’t have any violence in his life that would’ve been a signal — you know, lots of killers are arsonists, they kill animals, or they have sexual assault. The things that are significant in the early part of his life, you only really understand as being significant when you go backwards.

The episodes almost become vignettes about Cunanan’s other victims . How did you approach those side stories?
I don’t see them necessarily as side stories. Once Andrew becomes a killer, he, to me, is no longer the protagonist of the episode. He’s a force of destruction, but the heroic people are the people he’s coming up against: Jeff [Trail], David [Madson], and Lee [Miglin]. They become the focus because he doesn’t kill people by accident. They symbolize something that’s missing from his own life, whether it’s love, friendship, honor, ambition, or success. He’s cutting a path through all of the things he failed to achieve.

It seems like Andrew is motivated by jealousy toward these men, who can be open about their sexuality because of fame or power, or their friendships, in the case of David and Jeff.
If you’re looking at the battle of episode four between these two characters, Andrew is saying, “The world hates us, therefore we have every right to be hateful,” and David is saying, “Well, you might be right, but they’re wrong to hate us and I’m going to cling on to that.” He doesn’t submit to that level of pathology. I think the pathology of Andrew is that he is, without question, the most homophobic character in this story, even though he’s gay.

This character soaks up the homophobia of society and embodies it more viciously and more lethally than anyone else. When he kills Lee Miglin, he becomes the most horrific, homophobic bully that you could imagine. He’s saying, “I’m going to out you, I’m going to shame you. I’m not just going to kill you, I’m gonna attack your reputation.” All of the shaming that he pours onto Lee with the pornography is extreme homophobia.

That’s also the battle of both Marilyn Miglin and Donatella, not just dealing with the loss of someone they love very much, but saying, “I’m not gonna allow this killer to attack their legacy.” What a terrible world it is that, whether it’s having HIV/AIDS or being gay, these things were seen as a direct attack on their legacy and could shame them and destroy their reputation.

Speaking of legacies, the Versace family has said that the show isn’t a fair representation. Were you surprised by that?
Their statements were pretty consistent with the statements that they released with the publication of Maureen’s book, so we weren’t surprised in that sense. Look, I think it’s a complicated thing writing about people’s lives. I’ve never done true crime before. I’ve never dramatized real people. I think our approach as a group was to say, “We want to contrast the destructive force with what is great about the people that he destroyed.” We were coming very much from a position of love and admiration for those characters.

The show, based on Maureen Orth’s reporting, depicts that Versace was HIV-positive at the time of his death. Why did you decide to include that detail?
We’re taking Maureen’s book and her sources and her research. If I, as someone who had no counter-research, looked and it and thought, “I’m gonna ignore the HIV/AIDS story,” I mean, why? Was I doing it because I thought there was something wrong? Was I doing it because I thought the stigma held up? I completely disagree with the stigma.

Not just that, I thought there was something remarkable in his love for life — this very specific case of, “I’m coming close to death, and I’m gonna fight this illness and cling on until I can survive.” He comes back from the illness and he carries on creating, I found that very inspirational. Furthermore, the interesting and sad thing about HIV/AIDS is that no one really paid it attention in the media and society until celebrities were killed. This is a story about gay men dying and it not really making the news until a celebrity is killed. You know, Andrew himself was accused, and the press was saying, “He’s a killer, he must have AIDS, he must be full of fury.” And actually it was the reverse. The killer wasn’t suffering from AIDS, and this great genius of the fashion world was living with HIV/AIDS. It was the exact reverse of the prejudice, and that struck as powerful as well.

The way the story is structured, we don’t get to Cunanan’s childhood and his relationship with his father until later in the series. In that episode, you discuss his racial identity, the fact that his father was an immigrant from the Philippines, and the prejudice against Asian-Americans that’s especially prevalent among gay men. How much did you see that as part of Cunanan’s motivation?
I think it’s a big part. It’s interesting that he excludes his own racial identity, which is why you don’t get to it until a later part of the episodes, because he lies about it. He would say he’s from Portugal, he would say he’s from Israel, he would never tell people his heritage was Philippine-Italian. He just wouldn’t.

It’s interesting to unpick the lies and say, “There’s a racial identity that he is running from.” His dad was running from [it], but his dad didn’t lie about it. His dad was very much like, “I’m gonna be the quintessential American. I’ve come to this country, I was in Navy, and now I’m serving in Merrill Lynch. I’m gonna earn money. I’m gonna buy the house. I’m gonna live the American Dream.” His dad was telling him, “I can only go so far, you’re gonna go the last stretch because you were born in America.”

I went to San Diego and I went to [Andrew’s] house and I went to his school, and it’s very interesting that he lived in an a city which had a very mixed, diverse population — I think it has one of the highest Philippine-American populations in the country — and he then gets sent to this school in La Jolla which is very white. He is being taught, whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, that being pushed up the ladder is being pushed away from this racial identity. Once he is in his 20s, he feels like he’s left that behind. That’s the reason it becomes much more prominent at the end of the series. You’re dealing with something he’s leaving behind.

You said this is your first time writing a true-crime story. You wrote London Spy and crime novels, but how does the approach change when you’re constructing something based on fact? How much freedom you have?
My guiding principle is that I have no freedom to tell some version that I feel to be fundamentally wrong, but where I do think there is freedom is trying to construct a scene that you absolutely admit wouldn’t have happened in that way but tells a bigger truth.

With all of the outlines, I tried to start with, “Just literally put down the truth,” and then you look at it and think, “Okay, we’re going to have a gap here, we’re going to have to project into what happened.”You can’t present uncertainty in a dramatization. Maureen can say, “Look, this might have happened.” You have to show people a version. This is our interpretation of the fragments of truth that we have.

Antonio [D’Amico] came out and said that he didn’t pick up Gianni’s body when it was on the steps, that he was just in shock. We thought he did because we read that he had blood on his clothes. Even looking at it now, even knowing the truth, we want the audience to feel that this is one of the key relationships in the show and how terrible it is and what a sense of grief. Sometimes you sidestep the details in order to try and communicate a bigger truth. That was our approach.

You worked with Ryan Murphy and the other ACS producers to develop this story. How did those conversations go?
It was just endless discussions. Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson were the people I was working with most intensely. Once we had figured something out, we took it to Ryan and there would be a second wave of intensive discussion and changes. There were amazing researchers and [production] execs, so it was a team of people in those conversations.

Do you have any memories of Versace’s killing?
No, it was just that Miami murder and the houseboat siege. What was interesting is that I didn’t have any sense that it had any significance and why that is, why there are some stories we give great scrutiny to and others we don’t. There were a lots of people going, “Oh, he just wanted fame,” and I’m like, “Is it as simple as that?” If this is a man who obsessed with fame, why did he kill himself in the houseboat when he would have had the most extraordinary amount of coverage at the trial?

There must have been a process of things going very wrong. This must have been a story that speaks to wider feelings than just someone who was crazy, because clearly he wasn’t crazy when he was a kid. He was an articulate and thoughtful young man. How did that person end up doing these really horrific things? I think it talks about one of the biggest things today, which is the process by which someone can be so full of hate that they destroy things.

You seem interested in understanding all the ways the world broke him, in a way.
Yes, and that sense that we’re all surrounded by prejudices and injustices. Some of them we feel much more strongly than others. Some people have the most awful upbringings, some people have experienced more homophobia than Andrew and haven’t reacted like him, but he is very much a sponge for that. For whatever reason, he can’t overcome the hatred of the world, so it breaks him. It doesn’t break anyone else — it doesn’t break Jeff, it doesn’t break David, it doesn’t break Versace, it doesn’t break the other gay men in San Diego, but it breaks him and he then absorbs it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

ACS: Versace Writer Tom Rob Smith on Andrew Cunanan’s ‘Horrific’ Homophobia

American Crime Story Review: The Horror of Homophobia

Rating: 9.0

And now we know where he got the gun.

It’s interesting, going backward. I mean, we all do it sometimes; life isn’t linear, as much as we’re trained to expect it to be. But in a TV or film narrative the convention of starting at the end and heading back, not to the beginning and forward again, but to the previous step, the one before that, the thing that happens the week before—that trick seems to inject a level of horror born of its own banality. The quotidian-ness of psychopathy might be its scariest feature. By this point it’s clear that we’re building backward to a horrifying back story about Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). I found myself wondering if we were supposed to be developing a strange pity for him, for whatever happened to him to make him what he is. I have concluded that we are not—let’s see if I still feel that way by the end.

If last week’s episode was in some ways the most artistically interesting episode we’ve seen so far, this one’s definitely the biggest kick to the gut. We open in the apartment of David Madson (Cody Fern), a young architect. He seems to have fallen into a boyfriend situation with Andrew, but there’s a third guy, Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), who seems to have been involved with both of them (and been duly creeped out by Andrew). “I don’t feel sorry for him,” Jeff insists on the way up to the apartment with David.

“Then why are you here?”

“He took something from my apartment.”

“What?”

“My gun.”

Jeff’s bludgeoned to death with a hammer the minute he walks in, and the shocked and terrified David can’t quite get away. Andrew proposes a “road trip” to start a new life in Mexico. David seems to know he’s probably not going to survive this, but he’s determined to try.

I don’t know, I remember the ’90s pretty clearly and even spent a brief portion of that decade in Minnesota, and in my memory there was not really this level of shock and shame and secrecy around being gay, though for sure I knew plenty of people for whom coming out to their parents was an ordeal. I think there’s a little poetic license being taken to heighten the homophobia in the series and this episode especially. But it doesn’t lessen the truth of the situation at all: It does what poetic license should do and makes poetry of the thing. Here, though it’s been hinted at, toyed with, before, is where homophobia, shame, and sociopathy become dazzlingly and horribly entwined. The episode is relentless in its casual brutality, from David’s flashback of stroking the bill of a duck his dad’s just shot on a father-son hunting trip (as barely depicted as it is, David’s relationship with his father is heartrending) to the gloriously bleak appearance of Aimee Mann in a roadside bar, to the obvious fear David and Jeff feel toward Andrew and its inextricability from a feeling of needing to stick together. As Cunanan drags David through a rest stop parking lot, David sees a woman watching them, arms around each other, and exclaims, “She knows who I am! Why else would she be looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like she hates me.”

Cunanan doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. The actual crime of murder and the social crime of being queer have suddenly become linked. It’s horrible to watch. Good-natured, hard-working David doesn’t even see it; he’s (understandably) consumed by the fact that he’s been abducted by a man who’s just committed a murder and could easily kill him as well. The look on Cunanan’s face is a little different. And it speaks volumes. He knows what the woman is reacting to, and you get a sense for just a minute that, in his own mind, this somehow confirms, justifies, indemnifies his actions—in society’s eyes he’s already a frightening aberration, right?

It’s the notion that they are both already condemned for being gay that Cunanan uses to manipulate and coerce David from frying pan to fire. David tries to get away, fails. Tries, fails. Tells Andrew he was briefly fooled by his lies, but sees him for what he is. Enrages him. Begs for his life.

Fails.

Meanwhile, the casually creepy homophobia that infiltrates the police investigations into all of the Cunanan killings is brought into the sharpest focus we’ve seen since the interrogation of Versace’s partner in the first episode. The minute the cops learn David’s gay, they start acting “different.” Despite eyewitness accounts from friendly neighbors who could tell something was going on, the immediate assumption when they learn that David is blond, unlike the body in the living room, is that David has killed Andrew. It takes a remarkably long time for them to get that there’s a third man involved, and it’s all full of subtle hints that gay porn and sex toys found in the apartment somehow have something significant to do with the murder. When questioning David’s distraught parents, the detective smugly informs them, “Oh, trust me, there’s a lot you don’t know about your son.” The way the scene is juxtaposed with a flashback of David showing his dad his architecture school award and then coming out to him is all the more bittersweet and all the more enraging for it. Two things are beginning to swim into focus. The people Andrew Cunanan targets do have something in common. They are makers of one sort of another, creators of real, actual, tangible things. And they have a particular kind of earned self-acceptance that he will never have. He knows he will never have it, and the only thing he can come up with to do about it is destroy it.

He shoots David in the back as David tries to run away. We re-enter his memory of that father-son hunting trip, only now his father is handing the cup of coffee to the adult David. Same cabin, same clothes, same smile. It’s the last thing David sees before Andrew shoots him again, in the face. Andrew seems to have a proclivity for mutilating people’s faces. Then he snuggles up to David’s body, lying with him in the grass for a few minutes before getting up and back into the car.

Next stop: Chicago.

American Crime Story Review: The Horror of Homophobia

Versace: Why David Madson Didn’t Try to Escape Cunanan

Wednesday’s episode of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace flashes back to the disturbing start of Andrew Cunanan’s multi-city murder spree—when Cunanan killed two friends, Jeff Trail and David Madson, in Minnesota. Because there were no witnesses to the crimes—and everyone involved is dead— there is no way to know exactly what transpired in April 1997 inside Madson’s apartment, where Trail was found murdered, or on the drive approximately 60 miles north to Rush City in May, where Madson was found dead.

“Tom Rob Smith, the writer, had to invent a lot of what had happened based on what we knew from the crime scene and we knew about Andrew and David,” American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson explained on Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast this week. “We know there was this murder and then we know they were in a car together, and we know that David begged for his life at the end, but we had to fill in what might have happened during that time.”

The puzzling sequence of events has always left one burning question—why didn’t David Madson escape in the days after Trail’s murder? In June 1997, Newsweek plainly stated that “Madson’s role remains hard to figure out. He apparently made no effort to leave.” Even more confounding, “neighbors saw the two men walking Madson’s dog the day after Trail’s murder.”

Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth addressed this mystery in her 1997 reportfor this magazine. Gregg McCrary, senior consultant of the Threat Assessment Group and former supervisory special agent of the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, said that Cunanan’s influence over Madson was “to a degree Stockholm syndrome,” explaining, “these sexually sadistic offenders have that ability to control people—not necessarily physical control. Many times it’s just out of fear.”

“They have a sixth sense of who they can manipulate and control,” McCrary said. “Their interpersonal skills are so strong, and their ability to target these victims, to understand their needs, to meet these needs and fulfill them, are so developed that in return these victims always feel obligated.”

Even before Trail’s murder, Cunanan had given Madson reason to fear him—claiming to have connections to the mob and “bragg[ing] about getting someone killed the day the person left prison, because he had ratted on a friend of Andrew’s.” Cunanan and Madson had met in a San Francisco bar in 1995, when Cunanan spotted the handsome architect and sent him a drink. Orth reported that the relationship escalated over the next year, but cooled off in the fall of 1996 when Madson suspected Cunanan of what Newsweek called “shady dealings.”

When Cunanan flew to Minneapolis, friends of Madson’s said the architect seemedunhappy about picking Cunanan up at the airport. Another friend told People that Cunanan was still besotted with Madson. Madson, on the other hand, “thought Andrew was a little shady, secretive…David didn’t want to be alone with him.” According to Orth, however, Madson was “a peacemaker who avoided confrontation” and “wanted to save people”—personality traits that also help explain why Madson acted the way he did.

“Those six days where David was with Andrew was the most fascinating part of this story to me because, I mean, what do you do as a human essentially being kidnapped after seeing something like that?” Cody Fern, who played Madson, told Still Watching. “How do you get through six days?”

Smith said that one eyewitness offered context about the duo’s relationship in the days after Trail’s murder: “An eyewitness saw the two of them walking together and David had been crying and Andrew was chatting at him really quickly. So that really gave the sense of one person who’s distraught and one person who is trying to cajole them into going on the run together.”

Fern said that, to prepare for the role, he read over 50 postcards and letters that Cunanan sent Madson—illustrating Cunanan’s eery detachment from reality. “Andrew would write to David when he was traveling or pretending to travel. He was in France or he was in Prague. The way he communicated through the letters it was very clear they had a special relationship. Not knowing everything that comes later it was the beginning of a beautiful love story.”

In “House By the Lake,” Smith scripts a scene where Madson actually gets the opportunity to escape. After Cunanan and Madson leave Minneapolis in Madson’s Jeep, they stop at a roadside bar and restaurant to get sustenance. Captor and hostage sit, listening to Aimee Mann perform live, and Madson eventually makes his way to the bathroom—where he finally gets a moment alone.

“The key image for me in the entire piece is when David Madson almost escapes,” said Smith. “He’s in the restroom of a bar and he looks out the window at the world and he sees the world passing him by. You’d think when you’ve been kidnapped by a killer that freedom is going to be a thing that’s incredibly exciting—you’re desperate to get to.”

But to Madson, the greatest tragedy of these final hours was that, as a gay man in the 1990s, the outside world does not offer a much better alternative. Smith explains:

“He looks out the window and thinks, ‘What am I escaping to? Disgrace? Hatred? There is no freedom.’ The world that is beyond this window that in every other thriller he would have climbed out of and run screaming for help—there is no help. The people coming to arrest Andrew Cunanan would also arrest him because there’s no way they would believe he had nothing to do with Jeffrey Trail’s death. ‘They’ll hate me like they hate him because they hated me before.’”

Months later, Jean Rosen, the owner of the Full Moon Bar & Restaurant where the real Cunanan and Madson ate lunch the afternoon of May 2, remembered seeing the men.

“Madson seemed jumpy. He looked over his shoulder every time the front door opened,” reported the L.A. Times. “But whatever he feared, it didn’t seem to be his companion.”

Versace: Why David Madson Didn’t Try to Escape Cunanan

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: Andrew Starts His Killing Spree

This is where it starts. In the first three episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace we’ve seen Andrew Cunanan murder three people. But in his entire spree, he killed a total of five. This episode, “House by the Lake,” reveals the start of Cunanan’s deadly rampage with his first two murders.

It’s also another chance to completely abandon the Versace storyline and introduce two brand-new characters, though one is very brief. Like with Lee Miglin last week, we meet these characters at the end of their lives, not knowing the full details of Andrew’s relationships with them.

The Murder of Jeff Trail

The episode opens on April 27, 1997, one week before the murder of Lee Miglin, in Minneapolis. We’re at the apartment of David Madson, a young architect who just landed a big opportunity at work. Andrew is there and David hopes they can stay friends, though it turns out Andrew recently asked David to marry him and got shot down.

A guy named Jeff shows up and Andrew is being more creepy than usual. David goes downstairs to let Jeff in and they talk about how Andrew blames him because David is really in love with Jeff, and it sounds like the two are indeed secretly hooking up.

Jeff is wary of Andrew, saying that he doesn’t trust him anymore and he only came over because Andrew stole his gun. When they enter the apartment, Andrew immediately bludgeons Jeff Trail to death with a hammer. That was sudden, and David is understandably freaked out and paralyzed with fear.

Andrew is a total psycho in this scene, hugging David and promising him that it’s all going to be OK as he ’s covered in blood and still holding the hammer.

The Apartment from Hell

What follows is a nightmarish scenario where David is basically held hostage in his apartment with a murderous sociopath. Andrew is eerily calm while David is scared for his life. David wants to call the police, but Andrew spins a tale about how the cops won’t believe that David had nothing to do with it because they hate gays and he’ll go to jail too for 10 years as an accomplice. David calls 911, but then hangs up because Andrew is very persuasive, mostly because he’s holding the gun.

David goes along with it out of pure self-preservation, trying to ensure that Andrew doesn’t kill him or anyone else. David keeps attempting to find a solution, but Andrew shoots them all down. When David’s co-worker comes to check on him, Andrew and David flee while the woman and the building’s super discovery Jeff’s dead body wrapped in a rug.

It’s a tense and thrilling section of the episode, filled with terror and dread, though since we don’t fully understand their relationship, it doesn’t quite work as a part of the whole series. At this point, American Crime Story season 2 is more of a loose sketch show with strong individual scenes, but not much of a coherent overall narrative.

The Police Investigation

The cops show up to investigate and at first they think David is the victim. The police immediately suspect that the killing was a result of some random gay hook-up involving deviant sex, because of their own biases about gay culture. They’re more preoccupied by the non-working buzzer in the building than the case itself.

David’s co-worker tells the cops that his friend Andrew was staying with him for the weekend and she didn’t trust him. When the cops take a closer look at the body and realize he has dark hair, not blond like David, they conclude that Andrew is the victim and David killed him. The cops are making a lot of sloppy assumptions in this case, which is certainly a theme throughout the series.

Eventually the cops figure out that the body is Jeff Trail, leading them to suspect that David and Andrew killed him together. They talk to David’s parents, and his dad is certain that his son couldn’t have done this.

David’s Memories

As Andrew and David drive away, David remembers a hunting trip with his dad, who was very supportive when David was upset by a duck being shot. We also see a flashback of David coming out to his dad, which is beautiful.

“Do you mind if I take a moment” is his dad’s response. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing.” He adds that he still has his beliefs and he does have a problem with it, but “I love you more than I love my own life.” It’s simple, but perfect.

Road Trip

Back in 1997, Andrew explains that he knows a rich guy in Chicago named Lee Miglin, a close friend who he can get some money from so they can run off to Mexico together. David is still uneasy, reflecting on the possibility that he’s running away from the shame of being gay.

They stop at a bar and Andrew listens to a woman playing “Drive” by the Cars and he gets emotional, tearing up. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him? Because I don’t. He’s a psychotic, murderous monster and humanizing him feels wrong at this point.

The next day at a diner, David explains that they met a year and a half ago in San Francisco. Andrew seemed rich and sophisticated and David was so impressed with him. David’s just a small-town boy who was taken by Andrew’s lavish lifestyle. But now he realizes it was all a lie. He says that Jeff saw who Andrew really was and that’s why he killed him.

Andrew deflects and continues to ramble about how splendid their life in Mexico will be. As they drive away, David pushes harder that Andrew planned the murder all along. David has finally come out of his dazed, surreal stupor and gets angry. Andrew snaps, pulls the car over and forces David to his knees while he points the gun at him.

The Death of David Madson

Andrew, in full delusion, demands that David go along with his plan to live happily ever after in Mexico. David pleads for his life, pretending to go along with it, but Andrew doesn’t believe him. David implores him to stop this and go to the police.

“It’s not real,” David says.
“It could’ve been,” Andrew replies meekly.
“No, it couldn’t,” David adds.

Andrew turns around for a second and David runs for a shed as Andrew shoots at him. David reaches the shed, but it’s a memory of the hunting cabin he visited with his dad inside, offering him some coffee to recreate his happiest childhood moment.

In reality, Andrew shot David and he falls to the gound, gasping for air. Andrew walks over and shoots him again in the eye, killing David. It’s a tragic and somber way to end the episode.

Did you feel sorry for Andrew as he listened to the song at the bar?

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Recap: Andrew Starts His Killing Spree

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ recap: A series of terrible decisions

We gave it an A-

We’re continuing backwards through Andrew Cunanan’s past, now all the way back to Minneapolis, one week before the murder of Lee Miglin in Chicago.

Cunanan is a master at ingratiating himself to people, worming his way into their lives and becoming close to them before he flips and reveals his terrifying face beneath the mask. That seems to be the situation with architect David Madson, with whom Cunanan appears to share a slightly tense but intimate relationship.

David is on the phone with his company and learns that he’ll be able to give a big presentation. “I’m so happy for you,” Cunanan says with ice in his voice. Everything about his body language is sinister: the slight hunch in the shoulders, the rigidity with which his arms fall to his side. As an actor, Criss has mastered the inexplicably creepy mannerisms of a killer.

Cunanan is about to take the dog for a walk when the buzzer rings — it’s Jeff, and Cunanan tells David to go let him in. “Give you a chance to talk about me,” Cunanan says, bitterly jealous. And they do talk about him: David and Jeff have both gotten Cunanan’s number; they know he’s strange, and a liar. They laugh about him. Until they get back to the apartment and David hears the dog whining from where it’s tied to a table. Cunanan slams the door shut and brutally beats Jeff to death with a hammer, splattering the entire apartment in blood and leaving his face red with American Psycho splotches.

“It’s okay,” Cunanan says, cooing to the stunned David. Still in a daze, understandably, David allows himself to be led to the bathroom, to be showered, and to not fight too hard when Cunanan tells him not to call the police. He does it with the slime of a practiced manipulator: They’ll lock you up to, people hate us for being gay, your dad will have to turn you in if you tell him. And David — perhaps too stunned to think rationally, or too scared by the gun in Cunanan’s waistband, agrees. “No one else will get hurt as long as you’re by my side,” Cunanan says.

The police show up to the apartment after one of David’s coworkers comes with the landlady to be let in, knowing that David would never just not show up to work. By then, Cunanan and David are long gone, David terrified into complicity and Cunanan getting what he wanted all along: the two of them stuck together, partners in crime, without Jeff around to steal any affection.

The police make the logical assumption that it’s David’s body rolled into the rug and guess that — based on the gay pornography on the bed — he had had a romantic encounter that turned sour and the murderer split. A neighbor lets them know that he had a man staying with him that weekend, an “Andrew Cunaynin?” who had black hair, unlike David’s blond. And so the body becomes Cunanan in the policemen’s minds. They leave as soon as they realize that the corpse isn’t David: It means he’s still alive and they’re in his apartment without a search warrant. Everything they find could be inadmissible evidence in court. Eventually they come to the truth: They find Jeff’s wallet and realize the true identity of the body — but not until David and Cunanan have gotten a hefty head start on their twisted road trip.

This episode is called “The House by the Lake” because it’s what David fantasizes about — the place he went with his dad when he was younger. They drank coffee together. David’s dad tried to get him to help him hunt, but it terrified young David. “I never want you to be sad,” his dad says in the car as they leave, telling him it’s okay that he doesn’t like hunting. That relationship between David and his father is at the core of this episode, which could have been just a bloody procedural crime-style episode. We’re anchored around David — the way he came to terms with his sexuality and how rooted he is by his father’s perception of him. That’s where his mind goes when he and Cunanan are driving. He wonders how his parents will react when they find out what happens.

David is rightfully terrified by the way a woman glares at them in a parking lot, but Cunanan is unfazed. He correctly assesses that she’s looking at them “like she hates [them]” because they’re gay, not because their crime has been reported. Cunanan is the same cool, calculating manipulator he’s always been, at least until the two stop in a bar (where Aimee Mann is playing guitar, in a cameo). David says he needs to go to the bathroom and breaks the tiny window above the toilet seat, contemplating escape. Cunanan just sits at the table, listening to the live music until he finally breaks down into sobs, the most genuine emotion we’ve seen from him, as if his first murder was able to crack though his exoskeleton into whatever exists beneath.

David, in his worst decision in a series of terrible decisions, returns to the table and touches Cunanan’s hand. We see in a flashback how he told his father he was gay. He falls asleep in the car, and when he wakes up, it’s as if they’re on a different world. The car is stopped in the woods; Cunanan seems to be gone, and David wanders without shoes. Until reality comes back, and Cunanan reappears from behind a tree, bearing his gun.

In a diner, David reminisces about the night he and Cunanan met with something akin to reverence: Cunanan had seemed so worldly and wealthy, outrageously popular and sophisticated. The two had stayed in an expensive hotel room, and David had told himself he would work as hard as he possibly could to be as successful as Cunanan had appeared to be. But it was all a lie, and David realizes that now. Cunanan never worked for anything. He was a skilled liar and manipulator and killed Jeff because he was in love with him and Jeff had seen what Cunanan really was. And here is David’s fatal mistake: He lets Cunanan know he sees it too.

The two drive in miserable tension for a while, while Cunanan repeats, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Their entire plan, the future he envisioned for them, required David’s love and respect. He has no use for this bitter and resentful man who sees him as a fraud.

“Why couldn’t you run away with me?” Cunanan asks when he’s out of the car, pointing a gun at David. “We had a future, David.” The past tense is essential there. David tries in vain to convince him that they still have a future, that he can lie and play the part Cunanan wants, but it’s too late. David runs, and Cunanan shoots him in the back.

David imagines making it to a shack in the field, opening the door, and finding his dad — they’re back in the house by the lake, and his dad is offering him a cup of coffee. But it’s just a fantasy. He’s lying on the ground, bleeding out, and Cunanan stands over him and shoots him in the face. Cunanan spoons David’s dead body for a while before getting back in the car.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ recap: A series of terrible decisions

Rest easy, American Crime Story fans, Cunanan didn’t kill that sweet dog

In the late spring of 1997, Andrew Cunanan kicked off a murder spree that would make international headlines. This week, American Crime Story stepped backwards in time yet again in order to show us the very start of that killing spree. It’s a terrifyingly tense episode that, at times, feels more like an installment of sister series American Horror Story than itself. Caution: Spoilers follow for episode “House By The Lake”.

The hour imagines the week of utter – yet mostly unknown – horror that young architect David Madson experienced after Andrew Cunanan mutilated and murdered their friend Jeffrey Trail. The first half hour of the episode plays like a bottle episode as Madson and Cunanan co-exist in an apartment as they navigate the grisly aftermath of the killing.

But the two men aren’t alone. Madson’s beloved pup Prints is with them too. As portrayed by American Crime Story, there’s a constant veil of dread that follows the poor pup whenever he’s on screen. The terror is executed so fully that, throughout the first half of the episode, I was more worried about the welfare of little Prints than either of the men on screen.

I’m clearly a dog person, y’all. And, to all my fellow animal lovers out there, I’m pleased to report that, in reality – as in the show – Cunanan didn’t harm Prints.

While the episode is a brutally tense high wire act between Cunanan (Darren Criss) and Madson (Cody Fern), most of their encounter is fictionalized. The story is based on Maureen Orth’s reporting in Vanity Fair, which quotes Todd Rivard of the Chicago County Sheriff’s Department as saying, “From Tuesday early a.m. till Saturday, it’s a big gray area.”

However, the presence and fate of the dog is actually one of the only things that’s based on solid fact. Just as portrayed in the episode, Madson and Cunanan were witnessed walking the dog several hours after Jeffrey Trail was murdered.  And when two of Madson’s co-workers came to check on him two days later, the dog was alive and well in the apartment, scratching at the door. Oddly enough, Orth notes that once the door was opened by the superintendent, there were “no feces or urine anywhere”, indicating not only that Cunanan and Madson had recently fled the scene, but that they were actively caring for the dog even while they remained in the apartment.

But the dog tale doesn’t end there. After Cunanan executed Madson in a grassy field outside of Rush Lake in the Minnesota area, he set out to Chicago and toward the murder of another man, Lee Miglin. American Crime Story showed us the horrors of that scene last week, but what they didn’t show was that Miglin had a dog, too. Orth says, “the dog, a Labrador named Honey, which had been there the whole time, was calm and unharmed.”

It’s not clear why Cunanan would have left these dogs alive while he heartlessly and violently concluded the lives of their humans. Perhaps his twisted love for Madson convinced him to care for Honey as the two of them had cared for Prints only a few disturbed days prior. Or maybe he had a deep bond with a dog in his childhood.  We’ll probably never know why, but we do know that no dogs were harmed in the making of Andrew Cunanan’s murder spree.

Rest easy, American Crime Story fans, Cunanan didn’t kill that sweet dog

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap: Hunting Season

Editor’s rating: ★★☆☆☆

For a show with “Gianni Versace” in its title, we sure haven’t seen a lot of Gianni Versace the past couple of weeks. This is the second episode in a row that totally drops the story of the fashion designer, his family, and the aftermath of his murder to examine the killing spree and motivations of his killer, Andrew Cunanan. Last week I was willing to take a diversion, mostly thanks to Judith Light playing Marilyn Miglin, but now I’m starting to miss Gianni.

Part of the allure of this series, at least based on the first two episodes, was the Versace of it all. The lush clothes, the ornate interiors, and the cadre of sexy half-naked boys running around made for some really great viewing. As did the parallels between Versace and his eventual killer, who both deal with issues of being gay in America but from different ends of the spectrum. But that show seems to be over. Instead, we’re looking at a brutal murder in a greige loft in Minneapolis. Where are all of the flowing silk dressing robes I was promised?!

The other strange thing about the way ACS: Versace is unfolding, as I mentioned last week, is that we’re still only guessing at Andrew’s motivations. Just like in “A Random Killing,” we get to really humanize his victim — this time architect and former lover David Madson — while Andrew is once again seen as this vicious, calculating monster with a chip on his shoulder. That chip is easily the most interesting part. If we could understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, the action would seem a lot less murky. However, his victims certainly didn’t have that luxury and maybe that’s the point.

From what we can tell, Andrew kills David’s secret lover Jeff (the briefest of cameos by Ryan Murphy regular Finn Wittrock) because David refused to marry Andrew. He tells David that he was his “last chance at happiness” before he goes on his crime spree. David says he dismissed Andrew by telling him it is illegal to get married, a reality of gay life in 1997 that seems so odd and distant considering the state of gay civil rights in the 21st century.

Andrew is really trying to make a life with David, yet another of the many fictions of fabulousness he constantly spins, but David knows it’s impossible. Still, Andrew is strangely tender with him, washing Jeff’s blood off his body in the shower and then trying to comfort him. There’s even something sweet about the way that Andrew moves Jeff’s body on his own, only asking for David’s help when he absolutely needs it, a touch that is as scary as it is heartbreaking.

There does seem to be something about Andrew that is just aping emotion. We see it later in the car, when Andrew tries to get the party started by turning up “Pump up the Jam.” He doesn’t seem to realize how wildly inappropriate it is, or that Jeff would be mourning his dead friend. We also see it in Andrew’s menace, when insisting he walk the dog with David or when he’s ordering him around the house. It’s like he can’t see why David doesn’t love him. Maybe it’s because he’s so invested in believing these reveries that he creates for himself, where he’s a wealthy set designer from New York with a society family and famous friends. The only way Andrew can feel loved and wanted is if he feels superior.

What Andrew does understand is how police investigations work, or at least how the police completely fail to understand gay people. Andrew leaves all sorts of porn and sex toys out on David’s bed before they flee so that the cops will think it’s some sort of sex crime gone wrong. He knows that as soon as they find out this is a gay case, they’ll be distracted by their stereotypes and misinformation about gay life and he’ll have that much more of a jump on them. Andrew tells David that if he calls the police, they “won’t see two victims, they’ll see two suspects,” which is how Andrew gets him to go along with being on the lam. My one question is why does a man like David, who has a Twink Bottoms of Mykonos DVD, also have a copy of Bear Love magazine? Based on Andrew and Jeff, David very clearly has a type and it is not anyone who is hairy.

The cops certainly play their part according to plan, assuming that David must be the killer, just like Andrew said they would. They even go so far as to tell David’s parents that there are all sorts of things they don’t know about their son, effectively prosecuting him before he’s even been charged. All of this because he was known to be gay, so they just assume he’s up to all sorts of horrible business.

David’s relationship with his family is the truly heartbreaking part of this episode, even if it is played more than a little heavy-handed. Newcomer Cody Fern does an excellent job playing David, even though the stories about him going hunting with his father and his coming out feel like a mixed bag. On one hand, those are experiences that many gay men, especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, had with their fathers. But on the other hand, it’s so typical to be almost cliché.

The coming out scene is especially strange: David’s father says that he doesn’t like gay people or what they do, but he will always love his son. Is that supposed to make us angry at the father? Is it supposed to endear him to us? It’s certainly supposed to make it sadder when he eventually loses his son and never gets to tell him how proud he was of him, but he kind of already did that. Real life is never as neat and clean as a 60-minute television drama, but this is a 60-minute television drama. Adding those scenes had to serve some purpose other than just muddying the waters.

David’s murder, obviously, is tragic, but I wanted him to fight back so many times. I wanted him to escape when they were in the restaurant watching some sad girl in a shitty bar sing a slow song like this was True Detective season two. I wanted him to cause a scene in one of the many public places where Andrew wouldn’t be able to shoot him without a street full of witnesses. I wanted him to really escape into that cabin and have a chance of making it, instead of just imagining it while his ex-boyfriend shot him in the back. But none of that ever happened. Life isn’t so lucky for actual people as it is in most television dramas, especially when you’re a gay man in America in the ‘90s and the deck is stacked against you. That’s the tragedy of everyone in this series, but this week, I feel the worst for David.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap: Hunting Season

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Introduces the Unrequited Love of Andrew Cunanan’s Life

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is not generally interested in making us feel sorry for Andrew Cunanan. The reverse chronological structure of his storyline actually ensures the opposite; we begin with Cunanan at his most monstrous, at the tail end of his killing spree, and throughout the season gradually move backwards, to explore his descent and his origin story. But while tonight’s episode is bookended by Cunanan’s first and second murders—the first physically gruesome, the second psychologically so—it features Darren Criss’s most vulnerable performance yet.

The episode introduces Cunanan’s first two victims, Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern), whose murders were rooted in a long and complicated personal history with the killer. As with Miglin last week, much of what we see in this episode is speculation rather than confirmed fact, but it’s true that Cunanan considered Trail a very close friend, and Madson and Cunanan were exes—Cunanan called him “the love of my life,” and that intense unrequited love becomes the focus of tonight’s episode.

Here, six talking points from The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Episode 4, “House By The Lake.”

1) Cunanan, Trail and Madson share a very complicated history.

Though we won’t see the full backstory of this trio’s past until later in the season, the dialogue early in this episode gives us enough clues to piece the following together: Cunanan proposed to Madson recently, telling him he was “the man of his dreams, his last chance at happiness.” Madson said no, and Cunanan thinks Trail is the reason why. “Did you tell him that he’s the reason you said no?” Trail asks Madson of Cunanan, shadily but understandably—it’s clear this is a friendship of obligation at this point, and neither Trail nor Madson would be that sorry if they never saw Cunanan again. But Trail and Madson’s dialogue suggests that Cunanan is not wrong to be jealous of their relationship (“He knows about us.”)

There’s also been some kind of bitter recent argument between Cunanan and Madson, and while Madson tries to apologize, Cunanan seems disinterested and just emotionally off, and that’s before it turns out that he’s invited Trail over unannounced. Madson is irritated—but not for long, because within a few minutes he’s watching in numb terror as Cunanan beats Trail to death with a claw hammer.

2) What happened in the six days between Trail’s murder and the discovery of Madson’s body is a huge question mark.

As this episode shows, investigators had good reason to assume that Madson and Cunanan had conspired together to kill Trail, and that Madson went on the run willingly with Cunanan. This is one of the big gaps in the known facts, and so ACS writer Tom Rob Smith has to decide on a narrative: that Cunanan coerced Madson into joining him on the run by convincing him the police would never believe he’s innocent—basically, his life will be ruined if he stays behind. “I can’t allow that to happen, David,” Cunanan says, his voice breaking with faux-emotion. “I can’t allow this to destroy your life.”

It works. Even though people are now seeing through the elaborate lies that used to work for him, and he’s getting sloppy in his manic, violent state, Cunanan is still a masterful emotional manipulator. He also uses the homophobia of the period as a tool to persuade Madson that he can’t trust the police: “They hate us, David. They’ve always hated us. You’re a fag.” And there’s a lick of truth here; the local police are indeed shown jumping to a lot of conclusions about Madson’s “lifestyle,” and by extension, his culpability, when they discover he’s gay.

3) Cunanan is disturbingly emotionless throughout most of this episode—with two striking exceptions.

Even though these are his first murders, Cunanan is completely impassive after killing both Trail and Madson, despite considering the first to be “his brother” and the second “the love of his life.“ It’s textbook sociopathic behavior, which makes the two scenes in which he unravels all the more powerful.

A day or two into their terrifying road trip, Cunanan and Madson pull into a roadside bar where Aimee Mann is singing a mournful cover of The Cars’ "Drive,” because why not? (What a delightful, unexpected cameo this was.) Madson goes to the bathroom, leaving Cunanan alone to watch the song and take in its lyrics: “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong / Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?” In a 90-second unbroken take, the camera slowly pulls in on Darren Criss’ face as Cunanan starts to cry, seemingly understanding for a brief moment that Madson may not be coming back.

Though Madson does consider trying to escape through the bathroom window, he does ultimately come back, and for a moment I feel like pure garbage because there’s a tiny part of me that is like “Yay! He came back!” That feeling did not last long.

The second showing of emotion from Cunanan is much scarier, and ends with him spiraling into a murderous rage. Madson finally reaches his breaking point with Cunanan’s delusions, and sharply cuts dead any possibility of their future together. Which is… understandable, but not the right move when you know you’re with a violent lunatic currently in possession of his last murder victim’s gun, David!

4) David Madson gets just enough backstory to make his murder genuinely upsetting.

Madson’s first scene introduces him as an ambitious young architect, elated by the news that he’s just been given a huge opportunity at work. Cunanan, staying at his apartment, immediately kills the mood with a dead-eyed, flat-voiced “I’m so happy for you!”

Later on the road, as Madson is looking back on his life in flashes—maybe because he subconsciously knows he doesn’t have long to live—he remembers coming out to his father, whose reaction lands in a very subtle, complex middle ground. He’s not thrilled, but he doesn’t reject his son, either, and though the scene’s not idyllic, it’s still touching. “I won’t lie and say that it doesn’t make a difference,” Madson’s father says. “You know what I believe… You wanted to be told I don’t have a problem with that. I can’t say that. But what I can say is that I love you more than I love my own life.” This becomes even more affecting in the episodes final moments, when a dying Trail has a vision of running to safety inside a lakeside cabin, where his father is waiting for him.

5) Dogs always know what’s up.

Poor Prints! And props to that doggo actor for his impressive dramatic whimpering. I knew from the source material that a neighbor really did see Cunanan and Madson walking the dog, and by extension, that the dog did not end up dead, but that did not reduce my stress level even slightly when Cunanan calmly announced he was “taking Prints for a walk.” Even before the murder, this is not a guy I would leave alone with my pet.

6) Cunanan is living out a delusional romantic fantasy with Madson.

And it’s chilling to watch. From the moment of the murder onwards, Cunanan slips into the role of a supportive, loving boyfriend, holding the traumatized Madson close and telling him “It’s all gonna be okay” while literally spattered with Trail’s blood. Almost as bad as committing a grisly murder is using that grisly murder as a reason to get naked in the shower with the ex you never got over, amirite?

Cunanan tries to pretend he’s being realistic about what the future holds for him and Madson once they get across the border to Mexico. “I know you probably want to part ways once we get there. I respect that,” Cunana tells him. “But we make such a great team, and the truth is, we have no one else.” And it seems for a while like Madson might actually be coming around to Cunanan’s rose-tinted view—over breakfast, the pair reminisce about the night they met in San Francisco. Cunanan sent a drink over to Madson, inviting him to join his high-society circle, and brought him back to his suite at the Mandarin Oriental. “I thought, what’s this guy gonna see in me?” Madson admits, before his tone shifts. He goes on to recall how he realized the truth: “You’ve never worked for anything. It was all an act.” And that line in the trailer—“You can’t do it, can you? Stop.”—was not about murder, as it turns out, but lying. That’s Cunanan’s real compulsion.

After being so eerily dispassionate through the episode, Cunanan finally flips out when Madson needles him one time too many, pulling the car over and pulling out the gun while screaming, “We had a future, David!” And though Madson, terrified, tries to walk his rejection back, it’s too late. Cunanan shoots him dead, then curls up tenderly with his body for a while. Though I’ve been getting Talented Mr. Ripley vibes from Cunanan throughout the series, this is the most overt homage yet.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Introduces the Unrequited Love of Andrew Cunanan’s Life