Tag: john landgraf

Why Viewers Aren’t Ready to Make “Versace” a Cultural Phenomenon Like “O.J.”

When American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson debuted on FX in February 2016, it was the most-watched premiere of an original scripted series in the cable channel’s 22-year history. And no wonder: Like the steadfast hits of the Eighties and Nineties that TV execs are now joyfully rebooting, FX’s subject was the inescapable pop-culture phenomenon of the “trial of the century,” which has held Americans tight in its grip in the 20-plus years since the conspicuous case collided with a burgeoning 24-hour news cycle.

It’s hardly a surprise that the ratings for the second installment in the Ryan Murphy true-crime anthology series, subtitled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, have so far been much lower: While the O.J. premiere drew a rare-these-days 8.3 million total viewers — that number rose to 12 million after accounting for FX’s “encore” airings — Versace’s first episode, which aired two weeks ago, pulled in a still-impressive 3.6 million viewers live, and 5.5 million factoring in repeat broadcasts. (For context, Game of Thrones may regularly attract a per-episode audience of 8 to 10 million viewers , but even critical darlings like Big Little Lies don’t necessarily bring in those numbers; none of the HBO miniseries’ seven episodes drew even 2 million live viewers.)

If you were old enough to remember the O.J. trial blaring out of countless TV screens and newspaper headlines for a solid year, The People v. O.J. Simpson was not just great TV but a chance to relive that indelible moment through a fresh lens, like a revival of a beloved sitcom. Versace’s smaller audience is somewhat inevitable, and it reflects a central revelation of the series: that law enforcement only began to seriously pursue a string of murders of gay men at the hands of a cagey 27-year-old named Andrew Cunanan when he killed a fifth gay man who happened to be famous.

The crime described in the show’s subtitle occurs within the first few minutes of the premiere, when Cunanan (Darren Criss) guns down Versace (Edgar Ramírez) in front of his Miami Beach mansion. The subsequent episodes move backward, tracking Cunanan’s killing spree from Minneapolis to Chicago to rural New Jersey. (The show is based on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History.) Along the way, we meet his victims: Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern), both friends and former lovers of Cunanan; Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), a Chicago real estate developer who’d hired Cunanan as an escort; and William Reese (Gregg Lawrence), a caretaker at a cemetery who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As I wrote in my review, Versace is a bit of a bait and switch: It’s not really about the famous Italian designer and his soon-to-be-famous sister Donatella (Penélope Cruz). The Versace family merely frames the story of Cunanan, an accomplished bullshit artist who worked at a local pharmacy while living with his mother in San Diego — before he got a taste of the high life when he landed a gig as a live-in escort for a wealthy, elderly gay man. The more we learn about Cunanan’s past, the more the show — aided by a compelling, three-dimensional performance from Criss — emphasizes the man’s internalized shame. (For more on the show’s interrogation of this suppressed self-loathing, read Matt Brennan’s review at Paste.) Along the way, we also learn about his victims; the fourth and fifth episodes, which delve into David Madson’s and Jeff Trail’s backstories, are particularly affecting, and the fact that the show devotes so much run time to tell their stories is a refreshingly uncynical approach in an age of arrant celebrity worship.

In the two decades that have passed between Versace’s murder and this series, mainstream culture has reached the point where the most heavily promoted series in a major cable channel’s current lineup tells the kind of story that would’ve been labeled “niche” just a few years ago, simply because of its lack of a straight, male perspective. “One of the things that excites me about this era of television is that you can come at it from any character’s point of view, or any showrunner or creator’s point of view,” FX CEO John Landgraf told me over the phone. “You don’t have to make reference to the majoritarian point of view, whether that’s male or white or heterosexual.”

(Landgraf has been vocal about the need for TV executives to reform their hiring practices. In 2015, Maureen Ryan wrote a Variety article lambasting networks for hiring so few women and people of color to direct their shows, and FX in particular had a bad track record: Just 12 percent of its series in the 2014–15 season were directed by people who were not white men. In the wake of that study, Landgraf vowed his network would work to close that gap, and at the 2016 TCA Press Tour, he announced that 51 percent of the directors booked at that time were women or people of color.)

Landgraf acknowledged that Versace so far hadn’t been as “widely accepted” as O.J.“It’s pretty dark material,” he said. He suspects the cooler response has more to do with the lingering perception that stories told from the perspectives of gay people are still coded as “alternative.”

For the record, I really like The Assassination of Gianni Versace; yes, it’s a lot darker than The People v. O.J. Simpson, and its narrative structure — on top of the fact that it tells a less-familiar story — demands more from the viewer. Still, I suspect the fact that its early ratings are such a comedown from the previous installment, and that it hasn’t been welcomed into the new TV season with quite as much fanfare, says less about the show than it does about us.

“My gut feeling is that it’s still hard to put that point of view out there,” Landgraf told me. “I think there’s a process, a pathway, from rejection and bigotry to a willingness to be in somebody’s skin, and a willingness to consider their skin as valid as your skin. And I think that for a hetero-dominant culture, we’re not there yet with gay people.”

Still, Versace is a big step toward that brave new world. And while viewers in the States may not be quite as rapt with this story as they were with O.J., in Italy, the show has earned record ratings, with 700,000 tuning in to watch the premiere — compared to 572,000 who watched the seventh-season premiere of Game of Thrones. Who’s gonna tell them this is a show about the constraints of gay identity in 1990s America?

Why Viewers Aren’t Ready to Make “Versace” a Cultural Phenomenon Like “O.J.”

There’s Not That Much Fashion in FX’s Big Versace Drama

LOS ANGELES — Has fashion’s big moment on television finally arrived with the docudrama “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” the long-awaited installment of “American Crime Story” that begins airing on Wednesday on FX?

Not exactly.

This show centers not on Mr. Versace, the storied Italian designer fatally shot on his doorstep in Miami at age 50 on July 15, 1997, but on his killer, Andrew Cunanan, whose three-month murder spree culminated in his suicide at 27 a week later, leaving any motive a mystery. Mr. Versace doesn’t even appear in some episodes. Much of the season is told backward, beginning with the murder, and then working through Mr. Cunanan’s origin story, going back to his childhood.

It’s grittier and bloodier than its predecessor, “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” which skipped the two gruesome murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and focused instead on the madcap trial that followed, setting ratings records for FX and winning Emmys and Golden Globes aplenty.

“We knew we didn’t want to do ‘O.J.’-lite,” said Brad Simpson, an executive producer of the series. “We didn’t want to have the exact same tone or vibe because we felt like that’s something we couldn’t match. This is much more about crime.”

“‘O.J.’ was very frenetic,” said Ryan Murphy, another executive producer. “‘Versace’ is lot slower and grander in its compositions. That’s one of the turn-ons of the show for me. Every season, we’re going to take on a crime, we’re going to look at broader social issues, and every season will have a different tone.”

This one is two-toned. There is the color of Mr. Versace (Edgar Ramirez), whose over-the-top sensibility brought celebrities to the front row, and who helped nurture his younger sister, Donatella (Penélope Cruz), into a star in her own right. In the series, life is getting better for Mr. Versace before his death: His fashion house is about to go public; he is out and proud, rare for high-profile gay men at the time; and though he is H.I.V. positive, new medication is making him stronger.

Then there is the darkness of Mr. Cunanan (Darren Criss), who had a taste for the high life but appears to have made few earnest efforts to get there. The series focuses on his hideous unraveling from social climber to killer. In all, he murdered five people, including two friends, and at least three, and possibly four, gay men.

Much of the series is based on “Vulgar Favors,” Maureen Orth’s 1999 book about Mr. Cunanan, from which the Versace family has distanced itself. “The Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about Mr. Gianni Versace,” the fashion label said in a statement last week. “Since Versace did not authorize the book on which it is partly based nor has it taken part in the writing of the screenplay, this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.”

Regardless of its genre, ratings estimates indicate that roughly half the audience that tuned into “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” will not return for this season, said John Landgraf, the chief executive of FX, and he’s just fine with that.

“We’ve made a show that by definition that a gay man that’s lived through this experience is going to have a richer, deeper connection to this material than a straight guy who lived through that period of time,” Mr. Landgraf said. “That’s probably not the most commercial choice you could make in America, but the way you get to great television is to ask people to go into experiences that are compelling but that are challenging.”

Such experimentation makes FX an appealing line item on the slate of properties that the Walt Disney Company is looking to buy from 21st Century Fox, in a deal that will depend on regulatory approval. Mr. Murphy, a hitmaker whose contract expires later this year, has said he is not sure if he will stay with Fox after the Disney sale.

He said he was inspired to do the show because he was living in Los Angeles at the time and gay men in all major national metropolises were transfixed by the story, and terrified Mr. Cunanan would be arriving in their city next. But when Mr. Murphy proposed a season about Mr. Cunanan three years ago — well before the Simpson series debuted — it gave his colleagues pause.

Nina Jacobson, a producer of the series, politely nodded along before she went home to Google the killer. “I was pretty much in the dark,” she said. Brad Simpson, another producer, had a dim memory, too, and wondered if there was “enough meat on the bone.”

Compared with the abundance of coverage around the O.J. Simpson case (tons of books, boundless archives of material), the public’s fascination with Mr. Cunanan’s murder spree was faded like a pair of acid-washed jeans.

But the producers saw bigger themes in Ms. Orth’s book. If Mr. Simpson’s trial touched on racism and sexism, the Cunanan tale connected to something else: the shame of the closet, the remarkable difficulty of being openly gay in the 1990s.

“‘American Crime Story’ at its core only works if you’re telling a bigger story about a societal ill,” Mr. Murphy said. “So I thought, ‘Can we do something on homophobia in the ’90s and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies at the time that I think and ruined so many lives?’ And it’s more topical than ever now with this president who is all about discrimination and exclusion.”

Ricky Martin, who plays Mr. Versace’s longtime lover Antonio D’Amico, was himself in the closet in 1997. During multiple time jumps in the series, Antonio is presented as both devoted lover when Mr. Versace was in the closet, and then devoted and even happier lover after he came out.

Mr. Martin said that his performance was informed by two things: just how much better it is to be proudly out now, and the embarrassment that he felt considering how he treated his former partners while he kept his sexuality secret.

“I went back to my life and what my life was in the ’90s: big closet,” he said. “I made my lovers be like Antonio where he was kept in the shadows and kept in the dark back in the ’90s. It took me back to a place, where, see, it was not necessary. I go back to Harvey Milk where he said everyone has to come out and we have to normalize this. So for me, I was playing both roles. I was playing the man coming out and the relief of it, and the lover, the victim.”

It wasn’t hard for Mr. Murphy to secure Mr. Martin’s participation.

“I used to live in Miami when the actual crime happened,” Mr. Martin said. “Although I never met Gianni personally, I was invited to that house many, many times. And for some reason I never went. I had a Giorgio Armani campaign back in the day, so I’m sure that didn’t help!”

Never one to miss a red-carpet opportunity, the house of Armani last week blasted out a news release announcing that it had dressed Mr. Martin, Mr. Criss and Finn Wittrock, the actor who plays one of the Cunanan victims, for the Los Angeles premiere of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”

Ms. Cruz chose a Stella McCartney dress for the premiere. A 2009 Academy Award winner for her performance in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” she called Donatella Versace, with whom she had come into contact “here and there” over the years, after being cast.

“She said to me, ‘If somebody is doing this and play me, I’m happy that it’s you,’” Ms. Cruz said. “We spoke for one hour. It was a very good conversation.” (Ms. Versace did make one request of the producers, which was granted: that neither of her two children be portrayed in the series.)

Ms. Cruz said she watched hundreds of hours of tape of Ms. Versace to master her Italian accent and mannerisms, and that her portrayal was intended to be one of “respect and love.”

And she said that early last week, Ms. Versace sent her flowers and that the two have been texting like middle-schoolers.

As for Mr. Ramirez, he found access to his character through compassion for the intense scrutiny Mr. Versace faced post-mortem. Mr. Versace “was killed twice,” he said. “He was killed physically, and he was killed so to speak morally and socially.”

The show’s main accomplishment, according to Mr. Ramirez? “I think it’s the redemption of Gianni Versace.”

There’s Not That Much Fashion in FX’s Big Versace Drama

dcriss-archive:

Actors Darren Criss, Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin, Cody Fern, executive producers Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, writer Tom Rob Smith and John Landgraf, CEO, FX Network pose at the after party for the premiere of FX’s ‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ at the Hollywood Palladium on January 8, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.