Within seconds of meeting Darren Criss, you can tell that his mother raised him right. He has a firm handshake, repeats everyone’s name, and looks them right in the eye. He has the casual affability of a Cub Scout troop leader or someone sitting next to you in the back row of a SoulCycle class. He hands out compliments like full-sized candy bars. In a room full of people, waiting to take his picture and ask him questions, he seems most excited to talk to a fifth grader about the minutia of Harry Potter mythology.
This wouldn’t be so odd except that all of these people are waiting to ask him questions about playing a serial killer. Criss’s latest role is Andrew Cunanan, an openly-gay escort turned spree murderer whose last crime before he killed himself is the titular one in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which premiered on Wednesday night. Watching Criss bound around this hotel room would be normal for a 30-year-old actor on the rise if we all hadn’t watched the second episode of the series, where he dances around a Miami hotel room in his underwear torturing a man to the point of suffocation while Phil Collins’s “Easy Lover” blasts in the background.
But maybe Darren, the precocious star next door, and Andrew, the precocious killer next door, aren’t so far apart after all. “Of the many things that break my heart about Andrew is that after this all came out, and friends and loved ones of his found out about it, they were mortified. They couldn’t believe it,” Criss says. “Andrew was a very bright, affable, lovable guy. He had so much promise, and you wonder a little, then, how does a kid with all this go down such a destructive path.”
Tag: january 2018
A powerful dramatisation of the murder of Gianni Versace
The 20th century may be considered America’s greatest, but gay men had a miserable time. Sodomy was a felony in every state until 1962, and it remained illegal in 13 states until 2003. Gay men were sacked from jobs in government and left to die in an epidemic many considered a punishment for their “sinful” behaviour. They were hounded out of bars, the only public places they could be themselves. They were beaten and arrested by gangs of untouchable police (the same tactics are used today in many of the 72 countries that continue to criminalise homosexuality). In short, gay men were kept out of the portrait of American society.
Towards the end of the century, however, times were changing. The picture of acceptable America had expanded to include, even celebrate, some gay men. In particular Gianni Versace, a fashion designer from Italy, was able to let gay stigma slip like a silk gown to the floor. He had grown a business from a single boutique in Milan to a global fashion label—an Italian-American dream. He had good looks, money and a palace with an ocean view in Miami. Tourists stopped outside to snap photos to say they had stood where the great man lived.
But on the morning of July 15th 1997, as Versace returned from his morning walk, Andrew Cunanan approached him on the steps of his mansion and shot him in the head with a semi-automatic pistol. The murder was a sensation, and the tragic story is now portrayed in “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace”. Like the previous season, which dramatised the racially charged trial of O.J. Simpson, an NFL player accused of two counts of murder, the show takes on cultural issues. It explores the standing of gay men in America through the twisted pathology of Cunanan, who killed five men on a three-month spree in 1997, including men who, like himself, had sex with other men. The series was written by Tom Rob Smith, based on a book by Maureen Orth, a journalist, and some creative liberties have inevitably been taken (the Versace family have distanced themselves from the show, calling it a “work of fiction”). By probing Cunanan’s sense of entitlement but also the stigma around his sexuality, the story shows how America’s prejudices endured despite the giddy heights of a few golden boys such as Versace.
What makes the show terribly watchable is seeing Cunanan’s rage form (Darren Criss’s thrilling performance, pictured, both seduces and terrifies the viewer). As something of a nobody, Cunanan is drawn to the idea of power, and the powerful; he wastes no time in penetrating loftier circles. One victim was the traditional picture of American success: a real-estate tycoon, married with a son, living in a big house. Cunanan achieves his own kind of success, of course—but only by committing horrific crimes. He doesn’t have the cynicism of Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho”, but he similarly penetrates the glassy penthouses of capitalism and hacks their residents to death.
Cunanan’s crimes are also seemingly designed to subvert traditional family values. It is not just that he sleeps with and murders married men. In one episode he murders a love rival, claims the boyfriend and then pops out to walk the dog with him. In trying to appear normal despite having left a body bleeding out at home, their stroll becomes an unnerving parody of a domestic situation gay men were often denied. Before he kills Versace in the show, Cunanan boasts of men who have proposed to him. He is delusional—the stories are probably lies, but even if they are true he does not acknowledge that gay marriage is legally impossible.
These different spheres of private experience are evident again when Donatella Versace bitterly asks Antonio, Gianni’s bereaved partner, what he gave her brother. “Stability? Safety? Children?” she spits. “You’ve given him nothing.” With far more grace than Donatella—who is supposed to be the one with style and elegance—Antonio says: “We’re not allowed.” Nor do police officers understand the sanctity of the relationship. When Antonio describes how other partners were occasionally welcome, one cop cocks an eyebrow. If being gay doesn’t throw the cop’s suspicion on Antonio, being promiscuous does.
Perhaps the most important influence on Cunanan’s behaviour is his sexuality. Cunanan does not always deny that he sleeps with men (“I tell people what they want to hear,” he informs a friend), but he is clearly troubled by the dominance of heterosexuality and the shame of his own sexual subversions. “I want the world to know you’re a sissy,” he hisses at one married man he sells sex to. His sexual practices are of the dangerous and kinky kind that exemplified moral panics towards gay people. While Cunanan was on the run, the press speculated that his rampage was a reaction against being diagnosed as HIV-positive (he was not). Nineteen years later, in the aftermath of the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando by Omar Mateen, the press speculated that his motive, too, was revenge for discovering that a male partner had HIV.
Cunanan did not choose to rage on behalf of the gay men beaten by police, those made homeless by their families or those failed by the government. It is thought he suffered from a personality disorder, but Mr Smith knows that the 20th century’s treatment of gay men provided the parameters for its expression. This eight-part series is as unsettling as it is alluring; in considering the overlapping spheres of disenfranchisement and violence, “American Crime Story” acts as a warning.
Fans are loving The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s cast
What Are We Getting Out of Prestige True Crime?
This much has already been said about The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which premiered on FX on Wednesday night: It is notreally about Gianni Versace. It’s not even predominantly about the aftermath of his assassination. Instead, the show should be named after the magazine article from which it came: “The Killer’s Trail” by Maureen Orth, published in Vanity Fair in 1997 (and which became her book Vulgar Favors). “The Killer’s Trail” would be the most literal descriptor for Versace: ACS, an unrelenting, nearly murder-an-episode, sleek slaughterfest that is actually about Andrew Cunanan, Versace’s murderer.
Ryan Murphy’s latest American Crime Story installment does begin with Gianni Versace, who was gunned down by Cunanan in front of his Miami mansion in 1997. But the anthology series is much more about the four murders committed by Cunanan in the two months he spent on the run preceding that act. Cunanan—an equal parts charismatic and off-putting poseur who crafted outlandish stories about himself and his family for the better part of his life; a gay man who traveled in some of the highest and lowest echelons of closeted, clandestine, and out society during the years of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—is a fascinating, gruesome figure. Orth had plenty of material for her exhaustive book about him. So why is this show named for Versace?
I’m willing to posit that it’s because, along with a recent crop of similar television shows and films we could call “prestige true crime,” ACS: Versace doesn’t want to admit what it really is. For one thing, like its predecessor The People v. O.J. Simpson, the show arrives amid a glut of ’90s nostalgia, glammed-up with Day-Glo fashion, questionable hairstyles, and beloved dance beats, as if to staunch the spilled blood with spandex and hairspray. Content creators, we’ll call them, since these productions are available streaming, airing weekly, or playing at the movie theater, have struck gold with crime stories from the ’90s, catering to millennials who were too young to really understand them, and to those older who are eager to relive the era they personified. ACS: Versace is part of the explosion of a centuries-old genre that used to be synonymous with trash, or pulp, and has now, by trend and circumstance, been elevated to prestige entertainment, where it bleeds onto our screens small and large.
True crime has always been about details, about feeding a streak of voyeurism with any and all facts about a past case (think of all the Murderpedia-type sites online, and their Reddit offshoots for discussing endless theories and motives). Of course, the more unbelievable the details the better, which means that the most notorious crimes catch the most attention. Serial killers, like Cunanan, provide multiple crime scenes and victims to pore over; sensational incidents with no resolution, like the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, can provide fixation forever; and crimes involving attractive young women, like Amanda Knox’s indictment, imprisonment, and release for the slaying of Meredith Kercher, invite ample opportunities for lurid dime-store analysis.
It’s not difficult to see why Andrew Cunanan’s story gripped the country in 1997, when he ended his murder spree by shooting Versace and, eventually, himself in the head, and why it would titillate any true crime fan today. ACS: Versace does nearly the deepest dive it possibly could on the murderer’s life over eight episodes: from his childhood in La Jolla, California, with a grifter father who left his wife and four children destitute when his job as a stockbroker turned to embezzling; through years drifting through gay scenes in San Francisco and San Diego, where he cultivated a series of older men who paid for a lavish if precarious lifestyle, and eventually—whether due to being dumped by his last rich boyfriend, or the fact that two of his former friends moved away to the same city (and thus on without him)—to his development into a homicidal sociopath. He traveled to Minneapolis and killed his old friends there, followed by another wealthy older gentleman in Chicago, a cemetery caretaker whose car he needed in New Jersey, and, finally, Versace in Miami; but not before living there, undetected by police for weeks, watching his name appear in headlines all over the world.
Yet, despite having all the hallmarks of true crime, ACS: Versace’s showrunners, its marketing campaign, and the industry buzz surrounding it are trying to sell it as something bigger—instead of the low-down, dirty details, of which there is an abundance, Murphy et al want us to know that they are speaking to much larger issues in their work, primarily homophobia, even feminism, which Murphy has attached to Gianni’s sister Donatella Versace. This rhetoric has heightened as the Versace family has come out staunchly against the production, and Murphy, as well as stars Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin, have had to defend the show’s existence and its splashy rollout.
Screenwriter Tom Rob Smith has said ACS: Versace’s purpose is “supporting a bigger truth,” which is “celebrating Versace.” “We are exploring why he was a genius,” he told Variety, “why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered—both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.” This is true to the extent that the iconic designer is portrayed with empathy by Edgar Ramirez (though his estate disputes several details of the show, including his health status), but he is only central to the show in the first few episodes. In many of them, he barely features at all; one early, pivotal scene with Versace and Cunanan, a date at the San Francisco Opera, was the invention of screenwriters. Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s lover, Antonio D’Amico, told Vanity Fair, “We’re not making a photo; we’re making a painting. We add color, etc.” But compared to Cunanan, in an eerie and meticulous performance by Glee’s Darren Criss, whose sadistic murders are punishingly graphic, everyone else is shades of gray.
We don’t have to hold all creative works about real-life suffering to the standards of what would hurt or offend surviving family members, but after watching a fictional Cunanan—whose real-life counterpart craved perhaps nothing so much as the type of fame bestowed by a prestige TV series—sadistically torture and humiliate his victims in fine detail, it’s hard not to feel like maybe we should.
…
There is a difference between the hundreds of Investigation Discovery recreations or Lifetime Movie Channel films dedicated to unspeakably brutal crimes and American Crime Story: Versace; I, Tonya; the soapy The Menendez Murders and their ilk. One crop I’m writing about and the other I’m not, and probably would never. The marks of prestige—lots of money, lavish sets, tons of marketing, huge stars, discussions of America, fame, power, and sex, and, the big one, “the truth”—give these works weight that they don’t always deserve. And, wrapped up in all of it, we forget that there are people out there to whom some of these horrible events really happened, and who are not making money or winning awards for reliving them.
It’s getting difficult to separate these entertainers from the flocks of vultures they depict. The particularly despicable one that stuck out to me in ACS: Versace was a woman who, cordoned outside of the designer’s mansion where his body is lying on the steps, rips out one of his ads from a magazine. As she breaks the police line, you think she might be running up to place it beside Versace, as a kind of benediction; instead, she uses the paper to soak up his blood, holding it above her head like a trophy.
https://ia601504.us.archive.org/31/items/PPY3258978433/PPY3258978433.mp3?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
https://acsversace-news.tumblr.com/post/169854211014/audio_player_iframe/acsversace-news/tumblr_p2rhmydgJ01wcyxsb?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fia601504.us.archive.org%2F31%2Fitems%2FPPY3258978433%2FPPY3258978433.mp3
American Crime Story returns after a triumphant first season with an all-new mid-nineties crime, and Tara Ariano returns to discuss it, and whether, after 20 years, we should accept that sometimes there is no “why.” We’ll also be discussing whether Sarah’s the only one who thinks Édgar Ramirez as Versace looks AND sounds like Enrico Colantoni; if it’s appropriate to covet a character’s clothing if that character is a spree killer; and the question of The Nose in Penelope Cruz’s portrayal of Donatella.
In our Cold Case section, Sarah sits down with Chad Boushell – the unlucky Rob McKernan in the Bride Killa ep we looked at for Episode 39 – to ask what’s the hardest thing about playing the body, and the responsibility actors feel to real victims.
Let’s Talk About ’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace:’ Premiere
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story just finished airing its first episode. If you read the review I published on Monday, you know I had much more mixed feelings about this season than People v O.J. Simpson, so let’s get into a few specifics about the premiere, coming up just as soon as I work on my father’s pineapple plantation in the Phillipines…
“I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day.” –Gianni
Of the eight episodes FX gave critics in advance, “The Man Who Was Vogue” is the one that most closely resembles many of the things that people loved about the OJ season. Though Gianni Versace gets shot before the opening titles appear, the San Francisco flashback and the arrival of Donatella to deal with the aftermath of her brother’s murder keep the hour relatively balanced between the Versaces and Andrew Cunanan. There’s an abundance of garish real-life details, like the guy who tried to auction off a photo of Versace’s body on the gurney and the autograph hounds who scooped some of Versace’s blood into a bag. And via the manhunt for Cunanan and the interactions between the local cops and the FBI agents, we start to get a sense of how badly law-enforcement blew this one, just like the OJ prosecutors did.
Let’s Talk About ’The Assassination Of Gianni Versace:’ Premiere
The Assassination of Gianni Versace is Very Different From OJ
At the time it was announced that Ryan Murphy’s next project at FX would be The People v. O.J. Simpson, the pairing between creator and subject matter seemed like a surefire disaster in the making. The idea of matching Murphy’s interests and tendency toward gaudy excess with an infamous murder trial, and what the tabloid-y media storm surrounding it said about race, celebrity culture, and America in general, was enough to make even the most optimistic television viewer skeptical. Then the show premiered and proved its doubters wrong. It garnered critical acclaim, huge ratings for the network, won multiple Emmys, and turned Sterling K. Brown into a certified star. The result, then, was that, despite certain evidence to the contrary, Murphy’s television empire was indeed up to the task of creating a compelling drama from an incendiary and overexposed event in the country’s recent past.
The downside to proving Murphy’s naysayers wrong in this way was made evident by the unique challenge that arose with regard to deciding the topic of the anthology’s follow-up. The question of how to make a successful second season that was also about something and not just a synthesis of the high points achieved by The People v. O.J. was one that seemed to stymie the series to a certain degree. Which is why we’re all watching The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story instead of Katrina: American Crime Story.
To that end, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is fascinating for just how different a product it is than its predecessor. Those differences do, in some ways, make it inferior to The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. But, at the same time, the manner in which the new season succeeds is evidence of how the series can, with the help of the right creative people, continue to disprove its doubters and perhaps take even bigger swings with subsequent seasons, tackling similarly provocative stories and dramatizing them without first having to reassure its potential viewing audience that it has things under control.
The series offers a new sensation from the get-go; it’s one that speaks to the nature of the crime and the way in which the sensational aspects of the designer’s death and personal life were examined in the aftermath of the shooting outside his home in Miami. It also speaks to how, unlike O.J.,the story of Gianni Versace’s murder at the hands of spree killer Andrew Cunanan isn’t nearly as fixed in the country’s collective memory. As such, it doesn’t carry with it the same cultural caché. The Versace murder and subsequent manhunt for his killer didn’t unfold in real-time on our television screens in the same grossly captivating manner. There was an investigation certainly, but that transpired without creating indelible moments like the low-speed pursuit of a White Bronco driven by Al Cowlings or the circus-like atmosphere of Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom.
It is worth noting that, for the average viewer, there is probably going to be a dearth of recognizable characters in this story, too. Without an O.J. Simpson, Al Cowlings, Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, or Robert Kardashian to pin the audience’s attention to, the new season becomes entirely reliant on the victim. That’s to The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s benefit, as series writer Tom Rob Smith (London Spy) points out early on, the same was true when the investigation into the murder began: The name “Versace” was to many people the brand name associated with a brand of jeans instead of an admired, famous, wealthy, and out gay man in Miami, Florida in the late ‘90s.
After a somewhat muddled first episode directed by Murphy, the series begins a more successful examination of identity and, of all things, branding, primarily through a fascinatingly abstruse narrative structure that moves backwards and forwards in time. The series begins with the actual assassination, and, like O.J., that act of violence becomes the inciting incident of the main story. But, strangely enough, as plotted by Smith, it’s not the inciting incident of Cunanan’s interaction with Versace, nor is it the beginning of their individual narratives. Instead, it acts more like a crossroads where two divergent story lines briefly and tragically meet before continuing to fork in opposite directions.
The almost dreamlike composition of the narrative affords the series the room it needs to breathe. That’s especially true since, at the end of the first episode, you may well be left wondering how in the hell The Assassination of Gianni Versace plans to stretch this story out for another eight hours. The plan, it seems, is to move back and forth between the past and present of several of individuals, including Cunanan, Gianni Versace and his sister Donatella, his lover Antonio D’Amico, and the police and FBI in the midst of a manhunt. Those individuals are brought to life through some terrific performances; in particular Darren Criss’ standout role as Cunanan and Penelope Cruz’ tremendous performance as Donatella Versace. Édgar Ramírez is also strong as Gianni, disappearing almost entirely into the role with the help of some thinning hair and makeup.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is a remarkably different follow-up to one of FX’s most successful productions, one that, given how different the crime, its victim, perpetrator, and those impacted are, feels appropriate. Though it doesn’t seem to know exactly what it is and what it’s trying to say beyond the circumstances of the crime in question during its first hour, it does develop into something far more intricate and interesting as the series moves forward.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace is Very Different From OJ
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking the Season Premiere
The second season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series, titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, explores the titular designer’s brutal 1997 murder at the hands of serial killer Andrew Cunanan. We’re walking through all nine episodes with Miami Herald editorial board member Luisa Yanez — who reported on the crime and its aftermath over several years for the Sun-Sentinel’s Miami bureau — in an effort to identify what ACS: Versace handles with care versus when it deviates from documented fact and common perception. The intention here is less to debunk an explicitly dramatized version of true events than to help viewers piece together a holistic picture of the circumstances surrounding Versace’s murder. In other words, these weekly digests are best considered supplements to each episode rather than counterarguments. Below are Yanez’s insights into the veracity and potency of events and characterizations presented in episode one, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue.”
What They Got Right
Miami Beach circa 1997
“The look and the placing of the time is accurate,” Yanez says, referencing Ryan Murphy’s time as a writer for Miami Herald. “I’m sure he would have been careful to make everything true. You can always tell when there’s a scene shot in Florida because the sun is so bright. You could tell it was a Miami Beach production, which it was.”Versace’s final morning (and that dead bird)
“I was waiting to see people going the wrong way on the street,” Yanez says of Versace’s final walk into town, but it all scans as authentic. “From somebody asking him for his autograph and him denying it to the bird that dies along with him.” That bird, she adds, “sparked a panic that this was a Mafia from Sicily hit,” though it turned out to be “a freak, accidental thing.” Yanez also still recalls how the “puddle of dried blood remained there for days” from Versace’s wounds. If there was any discrepancy, it’s that she remembers him purchasing the European Vogue, not its American counterpart, at News Café.The initial manhunt
“Because Cunanan had been killing people along the way, they very quickly identified him as a suspect,” Yanez says. “Here you see the police chasing somebody in a red polo shirt, and it turns out it’s not Cunanan, but that happened a lot. Many men who looked like Cunanan were all of a sudden rounded up. And [Cunanan] managed to escape. For the next 15 days, this community was in a total panic. In fact, there’s a reporter who was stopped because he looked like Cunanan and he was taken into custody for a couple of hours.”The pawn-shop tip
“This was my big scoop,” Yanez shares of her encounter with pawn-shop clerk Vivian Oliva. “We’d just spent the day chasing leads, and one of them was that [Cunanan] had pawned a coin he’d taken from one of his murder victims up north, and he had used his real name and address on the pawn form. I stayed around and talked to the lady, and she says, ‘I hope I didn’t do anything wrong.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she says, ‘Well, I sent those forms to the police department.’ Immediately, I realized this was a week before Versace was killed, so that became a big fiasco for the Miami Beach Police Department because that form just sat on a detective’s desk. That pawn-shop lady is significant, and I’m glad to see they featured [her] in episode one.” Although, Yanez does clarify that the real-life Oliva, unlike actress Cathy Moriarty, is Cuban.The arrival of Donatella
“Once Donatella arrived, Antonio [D’Amico] became a little bit of a bad guy,” Yanez says. “She took over, and he became a guy in the house. I know he was interviewed by the police, but when Donatella gets here, the family takes over and Antonio falls into the background.”The delayed IPO
“We had reporters assigned to Cunanan and Versace himself and then to his company,” Yanez explains. “It was a delicate time for the company. That came out when we started looking into Versace’s business thinking this was a Mafia [hit], looking for that angle.”Cunanan’s never-ending lies
Whether waxing on about his father’s pineapple plantations or aspirations as a novelist, Cunanan was notorious as a grand fabricator. (In truth, his father was living far from luxury in the Philippines.) “That’s the thing with Cunanan,” Yanez says. “He would make these stories up about his life, and as we found out later, half of it was a lie. He made it so difficult to get a grasp of who he was.”What They Took Liberties With
The meeting between Cunanan and Versace
Yanez is generally lauding of Maureen Orth’s reporting for Vanity Fair, which led to her 1999 book Vulgar Favors, the primary source material for Assassination: ACS. But on the question of whether Cunanan and Versace became acquainted in 1990 in San Francisco and over post-opera drinks in Paris, she is somewhat equivocal. “[Orth] managed to find that they did have a past,” Yanez says. “That was the only explanation as to, ‘Why did you pick Versace?’” As far as the veracity of Orth’s account, Yanez affirms she has “no dispute, except that Orth is the only one who found a solid link. It was always very hazy for the rest of us. We could never say, ‘Yes, they met, yes they knew each other.’ She did. We could never contradict, and other newspapers couldn’t either.”How the shooting happened
“We never knew what Versace said,” Yanez says about the designer’s final word. (The episode suggests that Versace had turned and faced Cunanan, but the autopsy results clearly state he was shot from behind in the back of the head.) “Supposedly he was ambushed. So that’s artistic license, to have him say, ‘No.’ The assumption at the time was Versace didn’t know what hit him.”Who witnessed the murder
“[The episode] shows that there’s nobody around and Cunanan walks right up to him,” Yanez says. “I think, in reality, there were some people around and they did notice a guy in a red cap, but didn’t pay much attention to him. People who heard the shot and turned and then saw what happened afterward, not the actual shooting.”The AIDS rumors
“That was a big rumor with Versace and Cunanan,” Yanez says. “And ultimately, Cunanan did not have AIDS. [Whether Versace had AIDS] is one of those questions we could never get a solid answer to. The specter of AIDS did play a role for both of them.” In regards to the episode depicting Versace taking prescription medication and Donatella referencing her brother being sick, Yanez notes, “It’s one of the many questions to this. They are hinting there was something wrong with him.” She adds that AIDS “was an angle we all pursued,” even if ultimately inconclusive.The Polaroid photo of Versace’s body
“There was never a picture or anything like that,” Yanez says of Versace being placed on a gurney by the paramedics. As a result, she’s skeptical that a man snapped a Polaroid shot of the designer in his last moments alive. “The most famous picture is when the lead detective, Paul Scrimshaw, arrives and you see him near the puddle of blood. Back then, you know, not everyone had a cellphone.”The magazine ad dipped in Versace’s blood
Newsweek did report that a fan “ripped Versace ads from a glossy magazine and daubed them in the designer’s blood,” but it’s doubtful the display occurred as depicted in “The Man Who Would Be Vogue.” “That area was sealed off for days,” Yanez says. “I remember hearing vaguely of [the fan], seeing it in a local newspaper. That might have been lore or something that happened late at night, but that house was sealed off immediately. They couldn’t get to those steps if they wanted to.”Gianni Versace’s final outfit
“At the time, we didn’t say, ‘Oh, he was wearing his own design,’” Yanez says about the image of Versace on the operating table, his black T-shirt — emblazoned with his line’s signature Medusa logo — being cut up the middle. (Actor Édgar Ramírez is also outfitted in white shorts for the scene.) Versace, however, is documented as having worn a white tee and black shorts that morning. Adds Yanez, “I don’t think he was wearing his brand.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Fact-checking the Season Premiere
American Crime Story’s Season Opener Beautifully Mines the Tension of Knowing What’s Coming
Rating: 8.9
A man in flowing pajamas ambles through an obscenely opulent villa, murmuring thanks to the silent servant waiting to hand him his orange juice. Nearby, on the beach, another man restlessly unpacks and repacks a backpack containing a biography and a gun.
The first man has breakfast on a patio inlaid with a faux-ancient mosaic of Medusa’s head. The other man vomits in a public restroom whose cubicle wall is etched with a crude drawing of two penises and an exclamation about “faggots.” In a few minutes, fashion designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) will be shot twice in the head on the steps of his mansion and Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) will be giggling hysterically in the driver’s seat of a parked truck.
Miami Beach, July 1997.
It’s a weird kind of tension, when a director spools out minute after minute of lead-up to something we already know will happen because we remember that it happened. (In case we didn’t remember it, it’s the title of the show.) The pre-credit sequence of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is wall-to-wall opulence, in its color saturation, its swelling music, its luxuriant pacing. The tension of knowing what’s coming is sometimes even worse than the tension of not being sure.
Once Versace is shot, the show starts going forward, into the investigation, but more significantly, backward, taking us to a 1990 episode in which Cunanan meets Versace in a gay nightclub and manages to score an invitation to the San Francisco Opera, where Versace is pulling a costume design stint. It’s immediately clear that Cunanan is a DSM-worthy example of a sociopath; even his handful of friends seem to get that he’s a pathological liar. Cunanan meets Versace after the performance, they drink Champagne, and Versace possibly ensures his own future demise by assuring Cunanan he will almost certainly “be important one day.”
Meanwhile, in 1997, the police show up and question Versace’s partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin). They seem very hung up on the fact that “other men” were invited home with the couple. It’s confusing, this “gay lifestyle” thing, apparently even in Miami Beach three years from the turn of the millennium. Were they all his “partner”? No? What’s the difference?
“Fifteen years,” Antonio says incredulously, still wearing blood-stained tennis whites, “I lived with Gianni 15 years. That’s the difference.”
The detective concedes that 15 years is a significant amount of time. Somehow they’re not running a particularly effective investigation, though. The FBI shows up, saying they suspect Cunanan. A pawn shop operator (Cathy Moriarty) calls the police to say she’d turned in paperwork days ago from a transaction with Cunanan, and gives them an address.
Versace’s sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz), shows up, cancels the company’s public offering on the New York Stock Exchange and says they have to keep things in the family because strangers will “judge the killer, but they will also judge the victim.” She rakes poor Antonio over the coals a few times for good measure.
Police storm the address they’ve gotten from the pawn shop, but the man in the seedy hotel room isn’t Cunanan. They’ve lost him.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace is, in its opening episode, richly detailed and quite subtle. I don’t love Cruz as Donatella Versace—was Lady Gaga busy?—but then again, the real Donatella creeps me out, too. Criss, Ramirez and Martin are remarkably good, though. The episode brims with strange tensions, between wealth and non-wealth, status and non-status, and between straight and gay cultures. The 1990 scenes are tinted by the AIDS crisis in a way that feels very authentic and not at all ham-fisted. The spooling out of backstory is occasionally imperfect (usually in expository monologues, not generally in real-time scenes). The 1997 scenes have a real-feeling paparazzi-prurience, evoking our often morbid obsession with celebrity and our often subverted fear of Other-ness. (In one horrible moment, a chubby tourist breaches the police line to soak a Versace magazine ad in the blood still pooled on the steps of the villa.) The time-hopping will, I expect, continue, showing us visions of how both men, killer and killed, became who they were.
We appear to be setting up for a beautifully filmed, opulently styled investigation of self-acceptance, self-loathing, rage and unfulfilled desire. When I Googled Gianni Versace to make sure I had his death date correct, this quote floated up at me: “I am not interested in the past, except as a road to the future.”
I think it’s safe to say we’re going to be on a season-long road to the future.
American Crime Story’s Season Opener Beautifully Mines the Tension of Knowing What’s Coming
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 1 review: a gossipy, killer slice of docudrama
★★★★☆
An aura of decadent fabulousness lingers over The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. The tragic fashion designer is introduced gliding about in a blinding pink dressing gown in his Versailles-like Miami palace – a riot of stucco and sunshine over which director and show-runner Ryan Murphy overlays sonorous opera.
As if inspired by one of Versace’s swirling creations, Murphy wastes no time ratcheting up the overkill to a clanging crescendo in FX’s true crime follow up to 2016’s The People Vs. OJ Simpson.
Gunned down on his doorstep by the psychotic fabulist Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), Gianni Versace bleeds to death alongside a bloodied dove similarly, if inexplicably, pierced by a bullet.
Storming on three quarters of the way in as Donatella Versace – Gianni’s beloved sister and heir – Penélope Cruz adds to the excess with a performance as filthily ridiculous as her dirty blonde wig. The most delicious aspect of the series, however, is its element of surprise.
Versace (Édgar Ramírez – whose performance is, weirdly, the most sober here) was a global fashion figure when cut down in July 1997 yet the details of his killing are not widely known.
That’s in contrast to the OJ Simpson case, so embedded in our memories that watching Murphy recreate the events two years ago felt like participating in a game of true crime bingo. The Ford Bronco chase, the misogynistic humbling of Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran’s “if glove don’t fit” speech – all were dutifully trotted out, each beat as predictable as the chorus in a Justin Bieber song.
Season two, by contrast, packs a gilded punch. The first episode bounces between the slaying of Versace to his first encounter, in a San Fransisco gay club, with Cunanan. The future killer is a Walter Mitty-like social climber whose life is wallpapered with so many habitual lies it’s unclear whether even he knows truth from fiction. Preppy of manner and soulless of gaze, he gives Murphy something the Simpson case lacked – an unambiguous villain scary even when he isn’t shooting dead international fashion designers.
As Donatella, Cruz meanwhile cuts a furious swathe. She trowels on the accent and affectations quite gleefully: a little thrill is sure to run through you every time she flutters her reptilian eye-lids or pronounces “company” as “kuuumpany” (perhaps unsurprisingly the Versace family have dismissed the series as fantasy).
Even more impressive is pop star Ricky Martin as Gianni’s devastated romantic partner Antonio D’Amico. It’s 1997 in Miami but gay rights are still an evolving concept as made clear when Detective Scrimshaw (Will Chase) casually asks the grieving D’Amico whether, after 15 years together, Versace was paying his lover for services rendered in the bedroom.
Amid the towering chintz and power-house performances, there’s a slight clumsiness to the interweaving of the murder hunt with wrangling over the future of the Versace empire (Donatella wants to delay plans to float the “kuuumpany” on the stock exchange). But the bare facts of the case are so intriguing, the evocation of Nineties Miami so searing, as to paper over the structural clunkiness.
With American Crime Story season two, Murphy has served up another killer slice of documudrama – a lush, gossipy tour de force that dazzles and tantalises in equal measure.
ACS news 