Donatella Finally Shines in the Latest Episode of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Given that Gianni Versace has ended up as a supporting character in the series named after him, it’s perhaps inevitable that Donatella Versace has felt like a guest star at best. But Penelope Cruz finally gets her spotlight moment in tonight’s episode, as Gianni persuades Donatella to model a daring new Versace dress she co-designed. Later, Donatella is forced to take over the company as her brother’s health declines.

Meanwhile, we see more from Andrew Cunanan’s origin story, starting with Cunanan working as a humble drugstore clerk but dreaming of a more glamorous life—one he successfully cons his way into by the end of the episode.

Here are five talking points from Episode 7 of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, “Ascent.”

1) Donatella really did wear that iconic dress in 1993.

Donatella has a vision of “a dress as a weapon”—making literal the idea that women wield fashion in order to get what they want—and she and Gianni create a stunning dress that incorporates steel and harness motifs to reflect this idea. The siblings working together has an extra layer of poignancy, because at this stage, Gianni is very sick, and believes that this dress may be the last one he ever makes.

Determined to push Donatella to grow into more than an assistant role, Gianni insists that she should be the one to debut it at the gala. “This is perfect for Naomi,” she exclaims, referring to supermodel Naomi Campbell. But Gianni insists Donatella wear it, and even though she’s convinced she’ll look absurd, she absolutely kills it at the event. The dramatic moment of her posing in the dress with Gianni generates a huge amount of buzz for the brand and draws attention away from Gianni’s declining health. And even though there’s some snarky coverage, Donatella is thrilled.

2) Versace’s HIV status is once again addressed without being fully addressed.

As was the case in Episode 2, this episode walks a very fine line in its dialogue about Versace’s health. Maureen Orth claims in her book, Vulgar Favors, that Versace was HIV positive, but the Versace family has always vigorously denied that. Here, Gianni is in a foul mood, flying into fits of rage at the drop of a hat, and it soon transpires that he believes he’s dying—and he’s understandably furious. Though his disease is never named, it’s clear it’s something without an easy cure; after he’s been especially vicious to Donatella, Antonio tells him, “You don’t have time to be cruel.” Later in the episode, Gianni struggles to hear anything during a sales meeting. He ends up taking a leave of absence from the company because he’s become so sick, and Donatella explains to her concerned employees that Gianni has developed a rare form of ear cancer (which was also referred to in Episode 2).

3) Long before he’d had a taste of the high life, Andrew Cunanan was obsessed with getting the best of everything.

Andrew is still living at home at this point, and his poor, unstable mother makes the mistake of buying store-brand vanilla ice cream instead of the Häagen-Dazs he likes. This prompts a full-blown tantrum, and a lengthy explanation of why that Danish-sounding name was made up by the company’s American founders. Clearly, Andrew’s already taking mental notes on how easy it is to win through branding and subterfuge.

There is some love in this mother-son dynamic; she clearly adores him, and he’s affectionate to her too, promising that he will take her with him when he ascends to greatness. But when he actually claims to have hit the big time, and makes plans to leave home to travel the world with Gianni Versace, he tells her she can’t come with him. She won’t let it drop—it seems like Andrew got some of his relentless pushiness from her—and in the end, he pushes her against a wall and injures her in a horrifying scene.

In other news, when Mrs. Cunanan asks Andrew whether he’s drunk, he responds: “Drunk on dreams,” which is a great response that I will certainly be using myself in the future.

4) Andrew’s greatest fear is being rejected.

“For me, being told ‘no’ is like being told I don’t exist,” Andrew reveals to Jeff Trail—who’s still his good friend at this point in time—in a self-reflective moment. Ironically, we then see him summarily rejected by an escort agency. The no-nonsense owner unceremoniously asks Andrew for his attributes, his measurements, and his ethnicity—and balks when he gives the honest answer that he is Filipino-American. “This is about being what people want,” she says flatly. “I can’t sell a clever Filipino, even one with a big dick.” Stung but undeterred, Andrew tells her he’ll sell himself in that case—and does so pretty successfully.

5) Andrew meets both the love of his life—and the sugar daddy of his life—in this episode.

There’s a lot happening here. Andrew gets dressed up in a tux and goes to the theater by himself, where he successfully draws the attention of Norman Blachford, the sugar daddy whose relationship with Andrew we saw souring in last week’s episode. But at this early stage, it’s actually Norman’s friend Lincoln Aston whom Andrew ends up in a “relationship" with. In exchange for effectively being a 24/7 callboy who will hook Norman up with the San Diego gay social scene, Andrew demands a weekly allowance and an expense account.

But Lincoln tires of this arrangement pretty fast and cuts Andrew off—and shortly afterwards, Lincoln is murdered by a drifter he picks up in a gay bar. While Lincoln’s murder and the alleged circumstances are all true to life, Andrew witnessing the murder and allowing the killer to escape are clearly a fictionalization. But if you’re looking at this incredibly grisly scene in which Lincoln is beaten to death with an obelisk and thinking “hmm, this seems familiar,” some people did draw a comparison between the manner of Lincoln’s murder and that of Jeff Trail’s in real life. But Andrew was never a suspect in Lincoln’s murder, and the killer later confessed.

This is also the episode in which we finally see Andrew’s first meeting with David Madson, which was described in Episode 4. Andrew and his high-society friends are dining at a very ritzy San Diego bar, where David is drinking alone until Andrew invites him to join them. From there, the attraction seems instant, and David is just as bowled over by Andrew’s suite at the Mandarin Oriental—and the free slippers—as he said he was in that Episode 4 diner scene. This show really is unique in a number of ways, especially since it’s rare to watch a meet-cute where you’ve already seen the romance end in grisly murder.

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace || Episode 06 – Recap Rewind

In 1996, Cunanan lives in La Jolla, California with middle-aged businessman Norman Blachford, who handles his finances as part of their arranged relationship. During his 26th birthday party, Cunanan tries to impress David Madson by fabricating details about his life and claiming everyone loves him. JLAG and NBEA review, react and recap this episode and discuss. Check it out! | 7 March 2018

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

Why Didn’t ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Catch On?

American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson was an impossible act to follow. The Emmy-winning event series found a singular subject in the O.J. Simpson trial, in many ways the flash point of modern celebrity. The series also ran in the run-up to the 2016 election, when age-old American rifts from cultural misogyny to media sensationalism were once again under a harsh national spotlight. But like many of Ryan Murphy’s critically acclaimed shows, American Crime Story was announced as an anthology series—and with the successful first season of an anthology comes a promise the more traditional miniseries never has to make good on: a worthy follow-up.

After the planned second season—on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath—hit some production snags, a very different story kicked off in January. American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace had all the makings of a semi-sequel that would fit comfortably within the mood of O.J. (At the very least, the Italian fashion designer’s shocking death seemed to fit much more comfortably in Murphy’s wheelhouse than storm-stricken New Orleans.) Like O.J., Assassination focused on a high-profile case from the ’90s, recent enough to survive in the collective consciousness but long enough ago for a fictionalized account to add a new perspective. Like O.J., Assassination delved into the experience of an identity group marginalized by the American mainstream. And like O.J., Assassination saw Murphy hand over writing and the majority of directing duties to collaborators, allowing him to concentrate on his primary talents of casting and big-picture curating.

Yet the interpretation writer Tom Rob Smith delivered represents a stark departure from the bedrock principles of Murphy’s blockbuster appeal. Versace is straight-faced where Murphy’s house style is smirking, sorrowful where his oeuvre leans dramedic. Watching one disturbed individual’s vanity, entitlement, and megalomania claim life after life makes for an excruciating marathon of violence and pain, rarely leavened by the campy humor that runs throughout Murphy’s other work. For those who tuned in expecting even a typical Murphy production, not another career peak, Versace’s tone required a learning curve too steep for many to climb.

Predictably, the numbers have borne out the disparity between O.J.’s addictive spiral — and Glee’s ironic sniping, and American Horror Story’s diva-centric gore — and Versace’s mournful dirge. Versace debuted to 5.5 million viewers, fewer than half of O.J.’s extraordinary 12 million. That drop-off is partly explained by the more obscure nature of Versace’s subject; most casual onlookers, like Smith himself before he began his research, are probably unaware that Versace’s death was the culmination of a string of killings, not an isolated event. (And compared with O.J. Simpson, what isn’t obscure?) But Versace’s viewership has continued to trend downward as the season goes on, with the live audience sometimes dipping under 1 million. American Crime Story’s second installment has also lagged behind in the more nebulous, though still palpable, arena of cultural relevance. Initial critical reception was admiring, though not rapturous; in the following weeks, the conversation around the show has remained within the confines of fact-checking recaps.

Heading into the final stretch of both Versace and Murphy’s decade-plus residency at FX, it’s time to explicitly acknowledge the subtext of Versace’s relatively muted response. The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not the new The People v. O.J. Simpson; given its challenging form, lesser-known inspiration, and the sky-high expectations set by its predecessor, it’s unlikely it was ever going to be. Besides, Versace’s popular shortcomings are inextricable from its creative risks. By crafting a true-crime story to evade many of the genre’s ethical pitfalls, Murphy and Smith have delivered a season of television that stands apart from the recent wave of ripped-from-the-headlines adaptations—and largely unable to capitalize on it.

The first and most significant roadblock for viewers excited to learn more about The Assassination of Gianni Versace was that the season’s title turned out to be something of a misnomer. Assassination is as much about the other four victims of 27-year-old spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) as it is about Versace (Edgar Ramirez), whose shooting on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion occurs in Assassination’s first scene. The plot then winds, reverse-chronologically, through the violent unraveling of Cunanan’s life, with Versace sparingly deployed as contrast rather than subject. But Cunanan isn’t truly Assassination’s subject, either: a triptych of midseason chapters—“A Random Killing,” “House by the Lake,” and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—functioned more like stand-alone biopics of Cunanan’s less famous casualties than part of a larger narrative about the murderer himself.

Under Versace’s dreamlike, counterintuitive logic, the more screen time a character gets, the less the audience is allowed into their inner lives. In fewer than 50 minutes, Judith Light is able to shape grieving widow Marilyn Miglin into a self-made woman as vulnerable as she is ferocious; Smith’s script for her spotlight episode, Versace’s third, paints a complete portrait of Marilyn’s complicated, loving partnership with her closeted husband, Lee (Mike Farrell). The same holds for Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), whose contradictory identities—to the United States military, if not Jeff himself—as a soldier and a gay man are negotiated and renegotiated within a single hour. David Madson (Cody Fern) gets a spotlight that visibly works to ensure he’s not just remembered, but remembered as more than a footnote to Cunanan’s story, or even Versace’s. Each victim is quickly and convincingly developed into a complete person with hang-ups to work through and attributes to mourn.

Versace himself, meanwhile, is idealized to the point of abstraction. One of the first images Versace presents of its namesake is his corpse sprawled, Pietà -like, across the lap of his longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico. The religious parallels hardly stop there. Versace died, Smith posits, for the sins of a homophobic culture that was unable to fully accept an openly gay creative genius. The designer is a martyr, but martyrdom can be antithetical to full humanity.

No one on Versace comes across as more of an enigma, however, than the titular assassin. Such are the hazards of depicting a pathological liar, given to acts of fabulism so extreme they almost dare Cunanan’s audience to call his bluff. And dubious though it would have been, Cunanan never lived to tell his side of the story; eight days after Versace’s murder, the fugitive killed himself on a Miami houseboat, leaving his precise motivations and rationale a mystery.

Smith adds to these inherent challenges by intentionally obscuring Cunanan’s background—and along with it, any temptation to excuse Cunanan’s behavior or dilute his responsibility. A common criticism of true crime is how vulnerable its storytellers are to the seductive intrigue of the criminal. Villains are almost always more interesting than heroes, a truism that becomes fraught when the characters inhabiting those roles are based on actual people. Serial’s Sarah Koenig and The Jinx’s Andrew Jarecki both had an obvious and uncomfortable rapport with their subjects; I, Tonya all but erased the woman whose assault the movie supposedly litigated. The Assassination of Gianni Versace takes no such risk. Andrew, not Jeff Trail, is relegated to the margins. Andrew, not David Madson, is kept at arm’s length. Cunanan is no anti-hero; he’s borderline inhuman.

Unfortunately, breaking the link between main character and protagonist creates as many problems as it solves. Conceptually subversive as they might be, when consumed in real time, Versace’s structural choices make for a confounding and even alienating viewing experience with a vacuum at its center. There’s a reason so many shows give in to the temptation of valorizing their monsters: It’s hard to get an audience on board with spending hours on hours, week after week with a person who has no redeeming qualities, however fascinating their pathology or sympathetic their supporting cast.

Coming from a franchise, and a creator, that promises all the sex and violence of tabloid fare sans network censors, Versace is almost shockingly cerebral. The themes are heady and high-minded—the damage wrought by homophobia on and within the gay men community; how the closet can manifest as ignorance as well as oppression—with a meditative rollout to match. In the binge-watching era, such a protracted, patient rollout can prove fatal; I’m not sure I myself would have stuck with Versace long enough to reap its rewards if FX hadn’t made the majority of the season available to critics in advance.

Many true-crime stories start with a well-known event and purport to uncover some new angle. Versace is working with events much of its demographic isn’t aware happened in the first place, assuming the mantle of educating as well as storytelling. In bringing the Cunanan victims into focus at Cunanan’s own expense, Smith and Murphy have made a trade-off between moral clarity and entertainment value. I’ve found their gamble has paid off, even if the swap isn’t one every viewer has been willing to make. Taking on a sociopath’s point of view may put a series in a compromised position as an adaptation of true events. It may also be essential for a show to succeed as entertainment.

Why Didn’t ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Catch On?

What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?

The new series telling the story of the fashion designer’s murder is on 9pm, Wednesday 7th March, BBC2.

What can we expect from the first episode?

There are moments of deep, dangerous darkness in Tom Rob Smith’s brilliant screenplay for this very adult, hugely accomplished drama as we step into two worlds that will soon collide.

Fashion designer Gianni Versace is at the height of his career, while Andrew Cunanan, the man who is plotting his murder, has already killed four men when he arrives in Miami. He’s an unstable, terrifying presence, a fantasist who can’t stop telling stories and is unpredictable and obsessive.

There are echoes of Tom Rob Smith’s London Spy as Cunanan follows Versace (Darren Criss and Edgar Ramirez, both terrific) into Miami’s edgy gay underworld. But Versace returns to his opulent beachfront home, while Cunanan holes up in a rancid, cheap hotel.

What time is American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on TV?

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Pick of the Week: The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story

If you thought The People v OJ Simpson was a one-off hit, prepare to be stylishly corrected. Ryan Murphy (king of anthologising such shows as American Horror Story) has done it again with this new true crime drama, which tells the events of The Assassination of Gianni Versace. We’re slickly sashayed back to 1997, when the pink dressing gown-wearing fashion designer was gunned down in Miami. It was a murder that happened at the height of gaudy fame and sunbathed glitz, and Murphy’s series gorgeously wallows in the vibrance of it all, filling the frame with vivid colours, delicious costumes and super-slick camera moves. There’s no mystery, of course, as to who the assassin was: that’s Andrew Cunanan, played by Glee’s Darren Criss with a magnetic presence – almost as if he’s staking claim to the screen before Penelope Cruz can walk on set and try to steal it as Versace’s sister, Donatella. Between the two, Edgar Ramirez is almost understated as Gianni, as we fly back to see the first meeting between him and his eventual killer in a nightclub. It’s an electrifying encounter, one made more so by Criss’ compelling portrayal of a man who can’t seem to stop lying, almost as if he’s read The Talented Mr. Ripley one too many times (or just pretended to). This is flashy crime drama at its most soap operatic, and when it’s this well done, it’s hard not to get sucked into its whirlwind of fame, greed, jealousy and Ricky Martin. Welcome back, American Crime Story. This is killer telly.

Available until: 30th March 2018 (Episode 1)

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In ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’, Ryan Murphy proves—again!—he can never get race right

Andrew Cunanan was half-white, half-Filipino—and so is actor Darren Criss, who plays the ‘90s serial killer in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. That’s the extent of the conversation about race in the current FX series produced by Ryan Murphy, who is also the creative brains behind television hits like Nip/Tuck, Glee, Scream Queens, Feud, and American Horror Story. On July 1, Murphy will join his fellow showrunner Shonda Rhimes at Netflix. The 5-year contract is believed to be the most expensive in television history, putting up to $300 million in Murphy’s pocket.

“His unfaltering dedication to excellence and to giv[ing] voice to the underrepresented, to showcase a unique perspective or just to shock the hell out of us, permeates his genre-shattering work,” Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, told Deadline of the deal, adding that Murphy’s stories are “broad and diverse.”

Perhaps. But Murphy’s on-screen history suggests he gives the most depth and complexity to stories of rich, white people. The first season of Feud, for instance, is about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford; the second season will be about Buckingham Palace. Scream Queens was a horror series about a mostly-white sorority in a southern American university. He directed the film adaption of Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts, which is about a wealthy white woman who travels the world to discover herself (and have good sex).

But Murphy has a glaring blind spot when it comes to telling the stories of people of color. Just look at his biggest television hit, Glee, which was where Criss landed his first primetime role: yes, there is an Asian American girl, an Asian American boy, a disabled boy, a black girl, a Latina girl who came out as bi, one white cheerleader who came out as bi, one white gay boy, one gay boy who passed as white (Criss), and many, many more white straight characters.

“It’s still about whiteness at the center and people of color as accessories who have a little bit of a story line, but are seen as sort of decorative accents,” Ronak K. Kapadia, PhD, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explained. “He has this sort of shallow understanding of a kind of racial justice project in relation to TV work.”

This season’s American Crime Story, featuring half-Filipino American Cunanan, is a continuation of Murphy’s lack of nuance when he attempts to focus on minority-focused narratives. As noted by Slate’s Inkoo Kang, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is preoccupied with examining ’90s homophobia particularly in rich, white communities—it is not so preoccupied with anti-Asian racism or Cunanan’s potential self-hatred of being Asian.

To Murphy’s credit, he doesn’t exactly whitewash Cunanan. Criss is half-Filipino. You see cursory acknowledgments that Cunanan is Asian and how that plays out in the conservative San Diego community where he lived. It’s an incestuous community—one which Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth describes as “Omaha by the bay” in her book, Vulgar Favors, on which the show is based.

When he auditions to be an escort, for instance, Cunanan is told that no one wants a smart Asian—he is not a desired archetype by the rich, white men he wants to attract. Broadway performer Jon Jon Briones, who is Filipino-born, steals the show towards the end of the series as Cunanan’s father, Modesto. We see that Cunanan’s delusions of grandeur, propensity for taking shortcuts, and obsession with materialistic wealth and status stems from Modesto, who in the show (and in real life) fled back to the Philippines in 1988 to evade embezzlement charges. Sometimes, Orth reported, the real-life Cunanan would pretend to be Jewish.

But when Cunanan—real and fictional versions—did acknowledge his Asian background, it was a lie constructed through a fabulist’s filter: his father owned pineapple plantations back in the Philippines, he would say, or his father was the personal pilot of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines who was known for her extravagance and marriage to a dictator.

“This is not just a story about how much alternative sexuality or sex panic there was in the 1990s,” Kapadia said. “It’s also the story about a multi-racial mixed-race person from California in the very moment in which California’s becoming a majority minority state and there were all of the kinds of questions around the new face of America into the new millennium.”

But Murphy doesn’t touch these complex racial points—about how Cunanan may have struggled with his racial identity, about, even briefly, what it was like to be a mixed-race kid going to the exclusive mostly-white private school he attended. Race is not given the complexity of storytelling it deserves—the complexity Murphy so readily gives sexuality.

We will never know Cunanan’s exact relationship to his racial identity, just as we will never know his exact motives for killing. Those explanations died with his suicide on July 23, 1997. But we do know Murphy’s interpretation of Cunanan—and unfortunately, Murphy doesn’t seem to think that race matters at all.

In ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’, Ryan Murphy proves—again!—he can never get race right

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘Descent’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com

Versace…! Head is officially starting to hurt trying to keep this timeline straight.

Versace is back from its week hiatus, the new episode of American Crime Story: Versace goes back even FURTHER in the timeline of Andrew Cunanan. Granted, not all the way back to his first interactions with Versace, but a year before he started his killing spree.

In 1996, Andrew is doing alright for himself, as he’s living the glamorous life. That is, he’s crashing at a mansion with a luxurious swimming pool (in which Andrew swims in naked during the opening scene), which is technically owned by an older man named Norman (Michael Nouri).

Andrew and Norman aren’t dating, per-say, despite having had sexual relations in the past. Rather, and this is where the tale turns sad, Norman pities Andrew. He sees that he’s become accustomed to his lifestyle, and doesn’t want to throw him out on the street.

But all good things must come to an end. This relationship does end up crashing and burning eventually, shortly after Andrew’s birthday party.

Most noticeably amongst the guest that Andrew invites is David, whom he killed two episodes ago, and Jeffrey, who met his fate in the previous episode.

Andrew loves David (lol some things never change). Like, head-over-heels in love, despite the fact that David clearly doesn’t feel the same way. Jeffrey, at this point, is no more than just a close friend to Andrew— a close friend that he plans to use to get closer to David.

After trying forcing Jeffrey to put on his old navy uniform for a conversation starter (clearly Andrew was manipulating people long before he started killing them), David arrives and is almost immediately impressed.

Impressed with Jeffrey, that is. The two hit it off right away, leaving Andrew running to the bathroom to do lines of coke and wonder what’s happening and where he went wrong.

The party doesn’t improve when he’s interrupted by Lee, the guy who Andrew killed THREE episodes ago (are you starting to see where the headache comes from?). Andrew, evidently, is embarrassed of Lee and doesn’t want David knowing about his relationship with him.

After gathering together everyone who he eventually ends up killing for a group photo, Andrew has his confrontation with Norman. Norman catches Andrew in a web of lies and then gives him a pretty solid ultimatum: either tell the truth or get out.

Andrew being Andrew choses to leave. The problem is he really doesn’t have anywhere to go — his apartment is literally falling apart.

That’s not going to stop him, though. Oh no. As we heard referenced in previous episodes, Andrew then saids the letter to Jeffrey’s dad — hoping to out him as gay before he’s ready and sabotage the relationship between Jeffrey and David.

The plan has the exact opposite effect. Jeffrey confronts Andrew, telling him he’s moving to Minneapolis — where David lives.

Panicking, Andrew comes up with another brilliant plan (since he’s so full of those): he’s going to invite him to a fully funded trip to Los Angeles and try to win him back. Sorry, did I say invite? David really didn’t have much say in the matter, as Andrew refused to take no for an answer.

Of course, Andrew doesn’t have the money to pay for any of this, but that’s not really his concern at the moment. He just wants David to see how much he means to him.

And, to his credit, David realizes that feeling pretty quickly. Problem is, it’s not a mutual feeling. He eventually tells Andrew that they can’t be together and he’s not the one. Even when David gives him the slightest chance, Andrew reverts back to his lies and the whole thing falls apart.

A couple of days letter, Andrew is hitting a new low. After stumbling into a bar and making up a lie about his new fiancé to the bartender, he comes across a shady guy sitting in the corner who offers him meth. He takes it and winds up having a trippy dream that involves Versace, love and a measuring tape.

Now, with a new drug addiction to support and an exponentially growing credit-card bill, Andrew is officially out of money.

He returns to Norman’s house, pleading to be let back in, but Norman opts to call the police instead (can you blame him?), He gets bailed out by his mother, who takes him back to her apartment — a housing situation that somehow looks even worse than Andrew’s.

His mother, though, seems to think Andrew is destined to great things. Even when Andrew straight-up tells her that he’s unhappy, his mother won’t let him stay in that frame of mind — he’s a born star.

A born star who ends the episode declaring he’s on his way to Minneapolis. And the rest is history.

There’s only three more episodes of Versace left, what do you think is going to happen next? Check out the new episode on Wednesday nights at FX and read our other Versace recaps by clicking here.

‘American Crime Story: Versace’ recap: ‘Descent’ – TheCelebrityCafe.com

Gianni Versace and The Looming Tower: does truth matter in ‘true-life’ dramas?

“This TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.” That was the view of the Versace family before The Assassination of Gianni Versace aired. The FX series, showing in the UK on BBC2, is one of a recent run of shows to dramatise recent history. It focuses on the designer’s murder, on the steps of his Miami mansion in 1997, taking it as the starting point for a nine-part drama that admits to some storytelling licence. Meanwhile, The Looming Tower, which began on Amazon Prime last week and is based on Lawrence Wright’s book, has reopened controversy about 9/11, and in the US, critics are discussing whether Paramount Network’s drama Waco has too much love for cult leader David Koresh.

So, should we view these shows only as works of fiction? The debate boils down to whether the point of fact-based dramas is to reveal what really happened, or if it is to tell a wider dramatic truth. That’s tricky, because the answer is almost always: both. This means that, callous or unethical as it might seem, it’s sometimes OK for such programmes to ignore complaints about events being reshaped for artistic purposes.

A stark and difficult example was The Secret, ITV’s grim 2016 dramatisation of the murder of Trevor Buchanan and Lesley Howell by their adulterous spouses. The complaints from Lesley Howell’s daughter that her mother had not been portrayed correctly deserved, of course, to be heard – but they didn’t deeply affect the validity of the series. That was all about telling the story of Colin Howell (James Nesbitt), a predatory egotist for whom religion offered justification for pursuing his sexual urges at all costs. Dramatically speaking, it didn’t matter if his victims, who didn’t feature heavily, were not presented with precise accuracy.

In contrast, it did matter that The Curse of Steptoe, a BBC4 biodrama aired in 2008 but then withdrawn from circulation in 2010 after a damning BBC Trust investigation, drew flak from relatives and colleagues of Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell: among their assertions was that the central point about Brambell and Corbett hating each other and subsequently feeling cursed by Steptoe and Son was false.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s showrunner, Ryan Murphy, is acutely aware of the dangers. His series from last year, Feud: Bette and Joan, was a fabulously gossipy take on a bygone Hollywood era, only slightly marred by the fact that one of the supporting characters, Olivia de Havilland, is still alive and is now suing. That’s annoying for Murphy, but for us, Feud’s smart take on the lonely, bitter showbiz world isn’t diminished. Murphy is brilliant at finding the story beneath the story; the moral that renders exact truth irrelevant.

The Versace story is the second series under Murphy’s American Crime Story banner. The dramatic truth of the first, the Emmy-winning The People vs OJ Simpson, was that the Simpson trial illustrates how modern America’s ravenous 24-hour media and ingrained racism interlocked in the 1990s and are still a twin menace today. The Assassination of Gianni Versace doesn’t make as profound a point about society, although a theme develops about how the celebrated designer had a different experience of being gay in the homophobic 20th century US to lonely dropout Andrew Cunanan. It is primarily a chillingly authentic portrait of Cunanan, a fantasist who became a serial killer.

In that sense, the show is roughly in the same category as The Secret. The Versaces’ complaints also feel akin to those made by the Matthews family about The Moorside, BBC1’s 2017 dramatisation of the fake “disappearance” of Yorkshire nine-year-old Shannon Matthews. Her relatives didn’t want the story to be examined afresh and thought they ought to have been consulted, but for viewers there wasn’t a compelling reason to heed them. Similarly, to the extent that The Assassination of Gianni Versace is even about the Versaces, it’s about analysing their effort to maintain and control their public image. Seeking their approval would undermine that.

In any case, New York Magazine’s online culture site Vulture has been fact-checking each episode, with help from a reporter who covered the Cunanan story at the time. The embellishments and elisions they’ve turned up have been no more than an intelligent viewer would expect from a fact-based drama. The genre creates its own unique suspension of disbelief, where what we see is both real, in the sense of being plausible or instructive, and not, because we know that some of it has been invented.

Amazon/Hulu’s political expose The Looming Tower, starring Jeff Daniels as John O’Neill, the FBI agent who tried to bring down Osama bin Laden before he committed a major atrocity, illustrates the point in a different way. Daniels plays a whisky-downing, ursine veteran who is juggling two mistresses and rubs the stuffed shirts in the CIA up the wrong way. He’s too much of a boilerplate flawed/ambiguous hero, in other words. Even if O’Neill really was like that, it doesn’t feel true. The plotting of Bin Laden and his associates, and the field work by US law enforcers trying to break these terror networks, is also too laden with familiar spy-thriller devices to be convincing. Lots of what we see might well have happened, but since The Looming Tower all has the air of contrived fiction, it doesn’t matter, because we don’t feel as if we’re witnessing reality. That’s a very delicate balance, but it’s the one Ryan Murphy has mastered.

Gianni Versace and The Looming Tower: does truth matter in ‘true-life’ dramas?

Why Was Gianni Versace’s Queerness More Important To Ryan Murphy Than Joan Crawford’s?

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace easily peaked with its fifth episode, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which throws back the curtain on Versace’s controversial decision to come out in an interview with The Advocate. His struggle is brilliantly juxtaposed against the outing of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Jeff Trail, another eventual victim of Andrew Cunanan, which effectively ended his military career. The result, under the direction of Daniel Minahan, is complex, sinister, heartbreaking, and an important historical look back at mid-’90s queer culture.

It’s worth noting that show creator Ryan Murphy didn’t give his last unauthorized biographical star vehicle the same treatment. As Feud wrapped up its first season, dedicated to the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis during the filming of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, queer women caught the punch they’d been bracing themselves for: Crawford’s queerness wasn’t going to be addressed, or explored, or even obliquely referenced in the miniseries, despite its relevance to her toxic relationship with Davis and despite the show aiming itself at “LGBTQ” (ie., cis gay male) audiences. Murphy was perfectly capable of telling a compelling queer narrative when it came to Versace and the other characters in his story, so why didn’t Crawford’s queerness merit the same attention?

In the months leading up to its release, Feud: Bette and Joan was lavished with praise as a triumph of queer representation. Esquire called Crawford and Davis “perhaps the gayest on-set rivalry in Hollywood history” and congratulated Murphy on his “successful packaging of gay content in ways both overt and covert for mainstream audiences.” Bustle unpacked the significance of depicting Victor Buono’s struggle as a closeted gay man in studio-era Hollywood. But there was an opportunity for queer storytelling at the very heart of Feud: Bette and Joan and Ryan Murphy missed it.

Joan Crawford was an OG celesbian. Of course, she wasn’t exclusively attracted to women, and her daughter surmised that she was likely bisexual in a 2010 interview with Joy Behar. She was well-known for having multiple affairs with women nonetheless. In her prime, Crawford was romantically linked to Alice Delamar, Barbara Stanwyck, Martha Raye, Dorothy Arzner, and Claudette Colbert. There’s even a rumored anecdote about how she propositioned Marilyn Monroe for sex at a party, Monroe accepted, and then politely confessed afterwards that she wasn’t that into it after all.

And while mainstream acceptance of queer identity in America during the golden age of filmmaking obviously didn’t exist, it was prevalent enough in Hollywood that the film community was largely supportive of queer talent. As long as they maintained an image of plausible deniability, studios covered for them and Hollywood could be a playground for queer debauchery. In Crawford’s case, MGM reportedly shelled out $100 million to prevent the leak of a lesbian pornographic film she’d made as a teenager. Said costume designer Miles White in the introduction of William J. Mann’s book Behind the Screen: How Gays And Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969, “It was the best and worst of times. On the one hand, [studios] didn’t care and you had extraordinary freedom, but on the other, of course they did, and you weren’t free at all.”

For Crawford, an ex-showgirl whose film career enjoyed a resurgence in the 1940s, coming up during what Mann called a “wartime revival of gay subculture” undoubtedly played a part in her comfort with exploring her own queerness—this, in spite of being depicted as something of a prude on Feud. The arrival of other visible queer actresses at the time, like Marlene Dietrich who hailed from queer-positive post-war Berlin, meant that Crawford was in good company and had plenty of access to queer community when she wanted it.

It could be argued that Crawford’s sexuality didn’t come up in Feud because of the time period on which the story focuses. It’s late in both Crawford and Davis’ careers, and the same-sex flings of Crawford’s youth had passed her by. But Murphy found plenty of ways to reference both actresses’ pasts and Crawford’s sexuality was such a relevant factor in the actual tension between the two, so much of which was otherwise manufactured for publicity. When Crawford “stole” away Davis’ crush and Dangerous co-star Franchot Tone, marrying him herself in 1935, Crawford reportedly quipped, “Franchot isn’t interested in Bette, but I wouldn’t mind giving her a poke if I was in the right mood.”

After that, all of Crawford’s attempts to ingratiate herself with Davis, who courted the critical acclaim for which Crawford was so desperate, were dismissed by Davis as “lesbian overtures.” Crawford was obsessed with maintaining a modest image—likely an after-effect of studio training to stay closeted—which comes across on Feud as prissy uptightness. Meanwhile, Davis gets to play the cool girl, carousing with the crew after long shoot days and having sex with the director. But in truth, it was Crawford who enjoyed more sexual fluidity and Davis who responded with vaguely homophobic disgust.

The other glaring possibility for why this dynamic was excluded from the narrative is Ryan Murphy’s relationship with Bette Davis. The pair were close and had maintained a long penpalship leading up to an hours-long in-person interview a month before her death in 1989. She reminded Murphy of his grandmother, he said, and his admiration for her is obvious in headlines like “’Feud’ Ryan Murphy: How Bette Davis Changed My Career.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Murphy claims he never struggled with staying objective during the making of Feud, saying, “I went into it knowing a lot about Davis and not about Joan Crawford but I left it knowing a lot about both of them and finding them both to be fascinating and sympathetic.” It’s possible that he simply didn’t want to face or disclose his idol’s latent homophobia.

But the real problem here isn’t where Murphy’s loyalties lie or even that we were robbed of a precious opportunity to see female queerness depicted on-screen. (In fact, given Murphy’s track record with delivering nuanced portrayals of queer women, it’s probably for the best that he didn’t try to delve into one of Crawford’s same-sex relationships.) The problem is that, in his execution, he reinforces the same problem he claims he wanted to expose with the making of Feud: the commodification of female conflict for male consumption and male gain.

Feud: Bette and Joan was touted as a victory for queer representation because it affirmed the pinnacle of gay male camp. But exploiting female conflict for the pleasure of gay men at the expense of representing Crawford’s own queerness is hardly a queer victory. And frankly, it’s this kind of disregard for and degradation of women on behalf of cis gay men which alienates them from more intersectional queer rights movements in the first place.

For better or worse, Murphy has dedicated most of his projects to queer visibility through the lens of camp. Even The Assassination of Gianni Versace, serious and dramatic though it may be, delivers moments of camp in its sheer sumptuousness. And that’s not to take away from the success of projects like it or his 2014 HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart, both of which capably depict queer identity in ways that are earnest and affecting. But the least we can do is stop praising Feud: Bette and Joan as some big favor to queer culture. For Crawford’s sake, if nothing else.

Why Was Gianni Versace’s Queerness More Important To Ryan Murphy Than Joan Crawford’s?

What’s on TV tonight

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story
BBC Two, 9pm
Two episodes in for this “true crime” drama about the 1997 shooting of Gianni Versace, and the show is definitely being stolen by Darren Criss’s portrayal of his killer, Andrew Cunanan. As we follow Cunanan round Miami — bizarrely gaffer-taping his face and carrying out disposable-camera reconnaissance on Versace’s mansion — Criss switches seamlessly between self-deluded mania, terrifyingly emotionless psychopathy and moments of gleeful camp abandon. The showrunner Ryan Murphy is successfully treading the line between considered drama and the soapy froth that it could otherwise have been — overhung by only the slightest waft of spuriousness.

What’s on TV tonight