Tag: maureen orth

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Maureen Orth: Versace’s killer might have found other outlets today

Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, is now the backdrop of FX’s nine-part series, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”. But while the TV show may shine the spotlight on Versace, Orth’s book dug deeper into the complex mind of Cunanan – why he killed, how he hid in plain sight and why he targeted Versace.

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Why ‘Versace’ Profiles Cunanan Victims David Madson and Jeffrey Trail

Andrew Cunanan began his killing spree in early 1997, when he murdered his friends David Madson and Jeffrey Trail. The two men take center stage in the fourth and fifth episodes of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which detail Trail and Madson’s slayings, deaths that happened months before Cunanan gunned down fashion designer Gianni Versace on the front steps of his Miami mansion.

Screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who penned every episode of the FX anthology’s second season, said he structured the season to juxtapose the similarities and differences between Cunanan (Darren Criss) and Versace (Edgar Ramirez), and how both men dealt with societal homophobia in extremely different ways. One thrived as a fashion designer, the other turned into a conartist/serial killer.

“If you look at the crimes themselves, they express various facets of homophobia. They’re very different,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter. “You have the murder of Jeff, which is clearly about someone who should have had this brilliant military career. He was the perfect soldier, utterly dedicated, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was just such a travesty. You have people who went to give their lives for their country and to say to them, ‘We don’t want your life.’ Or, ‘Your life is meaningless to us.’ It seems to me irrational and cruel, and it destroys people. [Next week’s DADT episode] is about how he was killed in a way before he was killed. In this sense that the real killer of Jeff was that policy.”

He continued, “And then you have a very different facet of homophobia with the second victim, David. You had this brilliant young man caught up in a murder, and so ashamed of who he is that he just can’t say to Andrew, ‘I need to go to the police now.’ Why doesn’t he break from that guy much sooner? It’s because he just knows, ‘If I go to the police, they won’t believe me.’ That’s heartbreaking.”

Cody Fern, who plays Madson, said his character struggled with an internalized shame that prevented him from standing his ground against Cunanan.

“David is dealing with the shame of what he’s been carrying around, having hidden, and ultimately feeling like maybe he’s complicit in Jeff’s death,” Fern told THR. “Is that something to do with that thing that’s inside of him that society finds ugly, particularly at that time?”

In next week’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” episode, Trail’s backstory is told through the lens of his military service, and juxtaposed with Versace’s public coming out. Finn Wittrock, who plays the Navy veteran, said the fact that his character was a dedicated soldier trying to serve his country makes his story even more heartbreaking.

“He was a young man trying to make some kind of change, but he also just wanted to do his best,” he said. “He really believed in being in the service. He believed in being in the Navy and he actually believed that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was hurting America.”

The way Trail is portrayed in the series is absolutely true, according to Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which Smith based his ACS season. The reason Trail left the Navy in real life, however, is different than what the series purports.

“He was a really straight arrow, great guy, and he came from a lovely family, and that’s all very, very true — his background and how much he loved the military,” she said. “But by the time he left the Navy I think he was done with it.”

Although Orth said Cunanan thought Madson was the love of his life, Madson didn’t reciprocate those feelings. And both Madson and Trail were worried about Cunanan’s behavior before their deaths.

“Both Jeff and David began feeling very uneasy, and Andrew was spiraling down into drugs and S&M pornography,” she said. “People didn’t want to be around him, and they were rejecting him. And after he had lavished so much material things on both of them and they never said no, for the most part. He felt very used, I guess.”

Trail was the first person Cunanan killed, and Wittrock told THR he thinks it was a turning point for him.

“I think in some sad way, he was sort of the beginning of the end. I think Andrew had a bit of a fascination with him that wasn’t quite reciprocated from Jeff’s point of view,” the actor said. “This is, of course, me speculating on his character, but then it begins the downward spiral of his psychosis and his mania.”

Why ‘Versace’ Profiles Cunanan Victims David Madson and Jeffrey Trail

Oxygen’s ‘Killing Versace’ Documentary Special Is The Perfect Companion Piece To ‘American Crime Story’

Fans of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace have dived headfirst into the tragedy of the famed fashion designer’s murder at the hands of Andrew Cunanan, and now they have an opportunity to look at the case through a new and different lens. On Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. ET, Oxygen will debut Killing Versace: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, which is likely to be a must-see for anyone intrigued by the case. The hour-long special will not only focus on Versace’s murder, but also track the path that lead Cunanan to his doorstep that fateful day and the manhunt that ensued after Versace’s death. The documentary will use real footage from the scene of the Versace murder, and will be hosted by NBC News Senior National Correspondent Kate Snow. Additionally, experts on the 1997 case will weigh in and explore both new and known information about the infamous murder.

It’s the perfect companion special for those who may have been tuning into The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, except this one uses real footage and experts and information to tell the true story. As you can see in the exclusive trailer for the Oxygen special below, it’s just as compelling a story unedited and raw as it is dramatized for ACS.

The cause of Versace’s untimely death is well-known, especially by those who are fashion enthusiasts or who lived during the time in which it took place. Versace fell victim to Cunanan, who shot the fashion mogul just outside his famed Miami Beach home, before heading on the run, according to the FBI account of the events. According to Time magazine, 27-year-old Cunanan was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive list at the time of Versace’s murder, and was suspected in the murders of people in Minnesota, Illinois, and New Jersey. Eight days after he shot Versace, Cunanan was found dead by suicide, according to the FBI.

Not much is known about Versace’s relationship with Cunanan prior to the murder, and that’s one thing that continues to be speculated upon. Maureen Orth, who wrote the book upon which this season of American Crime Story is based, told Vanity Fair that there was “no doubt in my mind that [Cunanan and Versace] met.” Versace’s family, though, has long maintained that he never met Cunanan prior to the murder, according to Vanity Fair.

The Oxygen special will be a new journey for anyone who has already tuned into another exploration of Versace’s murder. American Crime Story’s interpretation is now in full swing this season, with stars Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez portraying Cunanan and Versace, respectively. That show, produced by American Horror Story’s Ryan Murphy, is based upon true events, but, per Deadline, Murphy has been very clear that there are certain creative licenses that are taken when dramatizing a show of this nature.

“When you’re doing a show like this you’re not doing a documentary, you’re doing a docu-drama. There are certain things you take liberty with,” Murphy said at a panel, according to Deadline. ACS also features a message in each of its episodes, reading, “This series is inspired by true events and investigative reports. Some events are combined or imagined for dramatic and interpretive purposes. Dialogue is imagined to be consistent with these events.” This is true with many shows based on true events — no matter how much respect is paid to the real-life happenings, it’s still a dramatized production, and details are often smoothed out or tweaked in order to help attain a showrunner’s vision.

Oxygen’s Killing Versace is different, though. It will be an entirely new venture even for fans of ACS, because it relies on real, authentic footage and interviews with experts, conducted by a professional and well-respected journalist. There’s no movie magic or invented details, so fans can rest easy that the information they’re seeing and hearing is accurate. When Killing Versace airs on Sunday, viewers will get an even more nuanced and informative account of the mystery surrounding the icon’s tragic end.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Why ‘Versace’ Shifted Its Narrative Away From the Fashion Designer

[This story contains spoilers from the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.]

American Crime Story creator Ryan Murphy has said that while the first season of his FX anthology series, The People v. O.J. Simpson, was a courtroom drama, he conceived the second, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, as a thriller.

While the first two episodes of the season focused on the fashion designer’s slaying and the hunt for his killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the third installment focused on the murder of Chicago real estate titan Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) — and didn’t actually include Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) or his sister, Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz) at all.

“Thrillers to me are about a sense of unease,” explained London Spy creator Tom Rob Smith, who wrote all nine episodes of the season. In The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which is told in reverse chronological order, the audience knows that Cunanan has left a trail of bodies across the United States — but each subsequent episode focuses on those people the FBI Most Wanted serial killer leaves in his wake.

“We have these amazing people, not just Versace but Lee Miglin, [first two victims] David Madson, Jeffrey Trail, [carjacking victim] William Reese, these figures that you fall in love with and that you are fearful for because Andrew is in their world and you know that Andrew is dangerous and destructive. There’s that permanent sense of tension that I think makes it a thriller. You’re unsettled. You want people to live when you know that they’re not going to live, and I think that’s the unsettling nature of our thriller,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter.

While Versace might be the namesake of the show, the fact that he is not included in the third episode at all was in the interest of honoring Cunanan’s other victims rather than a slight to the designer.

“We did not want to just focus on the most famous victim,” executive producer Nina Jacobson told THR. “The more we researched the more you really felt the enormous sense of loss about the lives of these other people and the intimacy of these murders of the people he knew so well, and what they meant to him. We got so caught up in those characters. We wanted to tell their stories as well, and Tom just rendered them so completely. And the actors got under their skin so that once you got to know them, you wanted to have that time with them, and you wanted to feel that they got the same kind of attention and respect, as characters, even though they were not the names that people remembered.”

“A Random Killing” focused on Cunanan’s third and fourth victims, Lee Miglin and William Reese. While Reese was killed when Cunanan needed a new escape vehicle, the episode makes the case that Miglin not only knew Cunanan, but that they’d also been intimate. The family has consistently denied that Miglin was gay, but journalist and Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which the season is based, said her sources told her otherwise.

“His family always maintained very, very strongly that he was not [gay]. I did talk to a number of people, one of whom was a young male prostitute who said that he had had an assignation with both of them — I don’t know if his identity was 100 percent, but that’s who he thought he was,” Orth told THR. “A lot of people I talked to said they thought that Andrew was the guy they met in the airport when the Miglins were going to go with their son on a vacation, but it was not 100 percent. But the idea that the way he was killed would be evaluated by authorities as a crime of passion, or a crime of total hatred — you don’t usually kill that viciously when you don’t know the victim, according to what the police told me.”

Added Smith, “there is a lot of indication that he … had sex with men. There are escorts on the record, and there are lots of indications that he had met Andrew before, and they had a long-running sexual relationship. And how he constructed his life, which is, ‘To survive in this world you need to get married, you need to build a respectable facade around yourself.’ It boils down to, I guess, ‘How do you survive in this world if this world despises you?’”

The episode featured intimate scenes between Miglin and Cunanan, but also centered on the pain of Miglin’s widow, Marilyn, played by Judith Light. Light told THR that she approached her role sensitively, especially because it will unearth decades-old pain that the Miglin family has faced.

“I know that it could be painful, and I have sorrow for that. I don’t want anybody to ever, ever be hurt,” she said. “I also know that it’s a theatrical event, and I know that people want to know about it, and I hope that they will appreciate it in that light and give great care to the thoughts of the families as well.” But, Light said, she feels confident that everyone involved in Versace took the victims’ families feelings into account and approached the story with care, because “it’s incumbent upon us to do so.”

Why ‘Versace’ Shifted Its Narrative Away From the Fashion Designer

‘Versace’: Why Did the Manhunt for His Killer Last So Long?

[This story contains spoilers from the second episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.]

Andrew Cunanan killed himself a week after he murdered Gianni Versace on the steps of his own home, but the 27-year-old con artist had been on the run for much longer than that — and on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for more than a month before the fashion designer’s death. The second episode of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story took a look at how, exactly, it was possible that a serial killer like Cunanan could have gone so long without getting caught.

According to creator Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith, institutionalized homophobia at the time was partially to blame. Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which the second season is based (and reported on the hunt for Cunanan for Vanity Fair), told The Hollywood Reporter that simple disorganization also played a role.

The second episode of the season, titled “Manhunt,” focused briefly on the various ways law enforcement bungled their hunt for Versace’s (Edgar Ramirez) killer, Cunanan (Darren Criss), despite the fact that he had killed four other people before arriving in Miami and eventually shooting the famed fashion designer on the front steps of his Miami Beach mansion. The disorganization and the disregard for Cunanan’s gay victims compounded the tragedy of Cunanan’s killings.

“There’s an enormous sense of injustice,” executive producer Nina Jacobson told THR. “Had the victims been straight, in all likelihood, he would have been caught much sooner, and Versace would never have died.”

Said Orth, “One of the biggest changes from today to that time is how gays are politically organized, because today they’re far more powerful politically than they were 20 years ago. In Miami beach, for example, they didn’t want to have anything to do with cops at all. This was a place for hedonism and pleasure, and so I think a lot of it had to do with incompetence, and then in some cases they just weren’t comfortable, they didn’t get it.”

Star Criss, who plays the killer, told THR that he thinks Cunanan was able to evade capture for so long because small instances of homophobia — “fear and misunderstanding on an institutional level within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, within local police force,” for example — were able to compound into a much larger issue.

“I think a big point of Maureen’s book was how the fuck did this happen? Even by the time he’d killed four men and was on the lam, before he killed Versace, he should have been caught. He was just living out in the open and a lot of that has to do with, I think, homophobia,” Criss said. “There’s just so much fear and misunderstanding that just let this slip through the cracks.”

While Orth is unfamiliar with FBI protocol in 2017, the author did note that after the failures in the Cunanan case came to light, procedures changed.

“To the FBI’s credit, after this happened and they realized how woefully inadequate their outreach was to the gay community, they did take steps to overcome that,” she said.

“Manhunt” centered on Cunanan’s brief friendship with an HIV-positive junkie named Ronnie, whom Orth said was a very real person — he just didn’t bear any resemblance to New Girl star Max Greenfield who portrayed him on Versace.

“They were in the same hotel,” she said. “They stayed on the same floor together. Ronnie was one of these down-and-out druggie guys and hustlers, and it was interesting because … the real Ronnie had long white hair, platinum white hair, and he’s tall and skinny. He doesn’t look anything like the Max Greenfield character, but he definitely was a real person.”

At the end of the episode, a pawn shop clerk called the FBI to tell them that Cunanan had been to her shop to sell a rare coin and used his real name, and she’d submitted the proper paperwork — they just hadn’t followed up despite the fact that he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

“Whomever was in charge of the paperwork had been called up, I think, to work on the Cunanan chase, and then they didn’t turn in the paperwork because it was a long weekend and the guy had an extra day off, or something,” Orth said. “Now, that has been computerized and changed, but the fact [is] that he gave his real name, and used his real passport. Andrew had a very high IQ and was very smart, and a lot of times I was told by some of these police profilers that these guys, they like to taunt police, they like to show how much smarter they are.”

‘Versace’: Why Did the Manhunt for His Killer Last So Long?