‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ fact vs. fiction: What Episode 6 got right

**SPOILERS FOR NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE**

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode six, “Descent,” takes place one year before Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) began the killing spree that ended with the murder of the titular designer on July 15, 1997. There are no murders in this chapter, but plenty of tension and suspense, along with the usual blurring of facts.

Here’s what “Descent” got right—and where series writer Tom Rob Smith and director Gwyneth Horder-Payton took creative liberties.

Norman Blachford

The episode opens in 1996 in La Jolla, California. Cunanan is living in a beautiful seaside condo with his wealthy male friend, Norman Blachford (played by Flashdance star Michael Nouri). Cunanan has designed and decorated the home and is paid with room and board, though we soon learn there is more to the arrangement.

The real Blachford was a San Diego businessman who made a fortune producing insulation for cars. He did support the future killer for nearly a year, beginning in 1995, in his La Jolla home. According to a May 1997 report from the San Diego Reader (after Cunanan became wanted by the FBI for the murders of Jeff Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin and William Reese), Blachford was thought to be in his 60s when he got involved with the 26-year-old Cunanan.

Journalist Maureen Orth, whose 1999 book Vulgar Favors is the basis for the FX show, backs up this account, adding that Blachford afforded Cunanan a $2,000 a month allowance and a 1996 Infiniti I30T—the car we see Criss driving in the opening shot of the episode. Several reports mention that Blachford—and briefly Cunanan—were members of Gamma Mu, then a private fraternity and social club for closeted gay men. The Assassination of Gianni Versace leaves Gamma Mu out of its American Crime Story, perhaps because the fraternity is now openly supportive of its LGBT members.

Whether or not the real Cunanan did design Blachford’s home is unknown. One Gamma Mu member told Orth he assumed “Andrew was hired to be Mr. Blachford’s decorator.”

In the episode, Cunanan leaves Blachford after the older man refuses him lavish gifts, and moves into this own place. In reality, he crashed with a couple he knew, Erik Greenman and Tom Eads, a waiter and restaurant manager in San Diego. It was Eads who told Orth that Cunanan requested a Mercedes 500SL and first-class flights from Blachford. Criss’s Cunanan presents a similar list of demands on the show, with an extra request: to be written into Blachford’s will. There is no evidence of the latter request.

In the episode, Nouri’s Blachford accuses Cunanan of manufacturing their "accidental” meeting. This is based in fact. A 1997 Washington Post profile noted that Cunanan was “a multilingual sophisticate who knew exactly which older men he wanted to meet.” Friends said he would spy on his conquests, gathering intelligence about their interests. Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a columnist for the San Diego Gay and Lesbian Times, said that if an older man was interested in orchids, “Cunanan would go out and buy every book available on orchids and soon he would be talking about the subject as if he had studied it all of his life.”

The birthday party

According to Orth, at Cunanan’s 27th birthday party, hosted at Blachford’s estate, he coerced his friend Jeff Trail (the ex-Navy officer played by Finn Wittrock), into giving him a gift that he had selected; on the show it’s a pair of Ferragamo shoes, though Orth didn’t specify the gift in her 1997 Vanity Fair article.

The real Cunanan also instructed Trail to introduce himself as an instructor at the California Highway Patrol, as a way to impress Blachford. This plays out in the epsiode, with some variation. Cunanan tells Trail to say he’s a Navy officer (this was after Trail had left the Navy) not to impress Blachford, but his new romantic interest, David Madson (murdered in episode four).

Orth does not mention whether or not Madson attended that California birthday party, as happens in the episode. It’s even less likely that Lee Miglin, the real estate tycoon from Chicago and Cunanan’s third victim, showed up, as Mike Farrell does in “Descent.” And though it makes for a very dramatic moment, no picture exists of Cunanan with three of his five victims, as the episode claims.

Cunanan’s friend Lizzy

In the episode, one of the guests at the birthday party is a young woman named Lizzy, who Cunanan calls his “best friend from San Francisco.” The character (played by Masters of Sex’s Annaleigh Ashford), is based on Elizabeth Cotes, who, according to Orth, was Cunanan’s close friend from junior high school. (Viewers may recall meeting her briefly in the first episode; Cunanan brags to her about meeting Versace.)

It’s true that Cunanan was the godfather of Cote’s children. Before he killed himself, a month before his 28th birthday, the real Cote and her children recorded a videotape, pleading with him to end his killing spree. They were prompted to do so by the FBI, but the message never reached Cunanan in time: On July 23, 1997, he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Andrew DeSilva

“Your name is not Andrew DeSilva, it’s Andrew Cunanan,” accuses Nouri’s Blachford, midway through the episode. “Andrew DeSilva” was the pseudonym Cunanan used in the San Diego LGBT scene. According to Orth’s reporting, the stories he told acquaintances using that name bordered on the absurd. Some made their way into American Crime Story.

At one point on the show, Cunanan tries to tell Blachford he has a Ph.D. According to Orth, the real Cunanan told his friends he had gone to Choate, dropped out of Yale and transferred to Bennington. In fact, he quit after one year at the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in history. (Orth reported that Cunanan spent two years at the college, but a 2001 Time article states he quit after freshman year.)

David Madson’s LA visit

While there’s no evidence that the real Madson visited La Jolla, he did let Cunanan pay for him to visit Los Angeles, as we see in “Descent.” Orth reports that on Easter weekend in 1997—a month before the killing began—Cunanan bought two $395 hotel rooms at the Chateau Marmont, one for himself and Madson, and one for Madson’s San Francisco friends Karen Lapinski and Evan Wallit, who were engaged. Lapinski and Wallit are omitted from the episode. Police said that Cunanan told Lapinski he’d pay for her wedding reception. Cunanan did buy Madson a new suit, as we see on the show.

Reportedly, the real Madson and Cunanan fought that weekend, after Madson refused Cunanan’s romantic advances. American Crime Story turns the advances into a proposal. Who knows if that actually happened, but the real Cunanan did once call Madson “the man I want to marry,” according to friends who spoke to Orth.

Family lies

The tales Cunanan spins about his parents are pulled from the testimonies of acquaintances. Perhaps he never told Madson that his father retired a rich stockbroker to run a pineapple plantation in the Philippines, but according to Time, Cunanan did often say he was the son of wealthy Philippine sugar-plantation owner. (In reality, his father fled to the Philippines after he was accused of embezzling, abandoning his family—more on that in episode eight.)

In that same scene, Cunanan tells Madson his parents gave him the master bedroom growing up. This is reportedly true. Cunanan’s sister Elena said as much to journalist Diane Sawyer in an a 1997 interview on ABC. “He got everything that he needed,” she said. “My dad gave him a sports car. He had the master bedroom. He had his own bath and everything.” (American Crime Story delves deeper into Cunanan’s childhood in future episodes.)

Cunanan also tells Madson he’s in the movie business, another favorite of his lies. Madson’s friend Lapinski reportedly told the F.B.I. that Cunanan once said he was making movie sets with a friend named Duke Miglin (the name of Lee Miglin’s son). The real history of Cunanan’s relationship with Miglin is unknown; the Miglin family continues to insist that there was no prior relationship before Lee was murdered, but American Crime Story implies it began before the episode’s birthday party.

Using and dealing

The episode’s titular moment is Cunanan’s descent into drug use after Madson refuses his proposal. The real Cunanan was a drug user and dealer. According to a 1997 Washington Post profile, he became addicted to Vicodin while selling prescription drugs to his friends. And testimonies from San Diego bartenders who spoke to Orth say that by April 1997—the month he murdered Trail—Cunanan was drinking Merlot "like there was no tomorrow.”

Orth also reported that Cunanan wanted Trail to help him with a cocaine deal, which Trail wanted nothing to do with. She even cited it as the reason Trail left San Diego and moved to Minneapolis. But there is no mention of that in the episode; rather, Trail says he’s leaving because he’s unhappy.

At the height of his drug spiral on the show, Cunanan begs Blachford to let him back into his home, after they have broken up. Blachford says no and calls the police. There is no evidence of that this occurred.

The Versace fitting

The scene where Versace takes Cunanan’s measurements is a drugged-out hallucination (obviously). It’s also actor Édgar Ramírez’s only screentime in this episode.

The idea that Cunanan was jealous of Versace’s glamorous life as a gay man, as Criss’s short speech in the scene suggests, was a popular theory among journalists after the murder. But as a 1997 Post article revealed, investigators never nailed down a precise motivation.

Cunanan’s mother

In the final minutes of "Descent,” Cunanan returns to his childhood home, where we meet his mother, MayAnn Schillaci-Cunanan (played by Joanna Adler). The show presents a woman who is clearly unstable—she sniffs her son while bathing him, declaring he smells wrong, and begins scrubbing him vigorously.

Not much is known about the real women, other than her name and that she was Italian-American. Orth described her as “a devout Catholic, a bright but emotionally fragile woman.” Several online obituaries list her death as April 15, 2012. Time reported that she legally separated from Cunanan’s father, Modesto, after he fled to the Philippines and then lived on welfare and food stamps.

There’s no evidence that Cunanan visited his mother before he took off for Minneapolis, and American Crime Story undoubtedly took liberties with her personality. Drama demands creative license.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap, Episode 5

I have to be honest and note that I felt this episode was a little bit of a structural mess — with the caveat that it’s still remarkably well-acted, and “a little bit of a structural mess” for this program is the equivalent of giving a kid on the honor roll a B+. It’s still something to be proud of, but that kid might be a little irritated that you didn’t just hand over the A-. Yet again, I think the problem in part stems from something we’ve talked about at length — namely, that this show is about Andrew Cunanan, and not Gianni Versace, but the title means there’s a narrative requirement to check in on Versace every now and then, even when it feels a little ham-handed. This week, there is a parallel drawn between Versace coming out to The Advocate, and Andrew’s victim Jeff (who is so well portrayed by Finn Wittrock) speaking to 48 Hours about the question of gays in the military, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. While the scenes between Versace and Donatella are very well-acted (if weirdly blocked; half the time, Gianni walks into a room, sits at a table, does nothing, then gets up and walks to another table, and I honestly think it’s to show off the sets), they felt like unnecessary, if interesting, bookends to the REAL story in this episode, which is how Andrew knew Jeff Trail and David Madson, and why he eventually killed Jeff. You could have cut both Versace scenes out of this episode without it impacting the narrative thrust of the story, and to me the parallels felt a little clonky, even though I found them independently compelling.

I also highly recommend Vulture’s fact-checking of each episode, especially for episodes like this one, where I often wondered how much was fact and how much was supposition. It seems that everyone in real life is still in the dark about why Andrew hated Jeff Trail as much as he did, or what happened between them — because everyone who knew the answer died, I suppose. And the scenes that are supposed to elucidate this do seem a little flabby. Jeff and Andrew’s confrontations felt like they were written without The Powers That Be having actually made a creative decision about why Jeff is really so mad at Andrew in the first place, and why Andrew actually chose to kill him. Last week, I assumed Andrew killed Jeff because he knew Jeff and David were hooking up and he was jealous, but that doesn’t seem to be the case; this episode sort of implies that he just kills him because they have a big fight and Jeff hates him for vague reasons. I mean: Andrew is hate-able and also tried to “accidentally” out him, and is also a creepy person who wears other people’s dress whites; there are MANY legitimate reasons for Jeff to hate him. But the actual scene of their confrontation felt like strangely unspecific to me. Certainly, Jeff is miserable not being in the military anymore but his blaming Andrew for that seemed like a narrative stretch for that character, who comes across as a hugely kind, decent, and conflicted person. I think that’s the main stumbling block of this show — there is so much we don’t, and can’t know, that the story-telling by nature turns a little vague.

Alson: This was the episode were I really realized that they actually are telling the story backward and it felt a little confusing; my theory is that, in retrospect, this will prove to be the one episode where that conceit is a little bumpy (it worked well in previous episodes, I thought). It was hard for me, on occasion, to hold in my head where, exactly, we were in time and how much we were jumping around; there are flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, and it was somewhat dizzying.

Other thoughts, before we look at some visuals: Finn Wittrock, as I mentioned, was amazingly good in this episode, and Jeff Trail’s story broke my heart. I found the scenes of his suicide attempt, and his attempt to remove his own tattoo, as painful to watch as anything I’ve seen on TV in a long time; he is heartrending in this. Cody Fern, who plays David, is also excellent in this episode (although last week was more of an acting tour de force for him, naturally). And Darren Criss is just great. He is so chilling in that scene wherein he’s going through Jeff’s stuff and puts on his dress whites; it says something that it’s just terrifying to watch him put on a hat and watch a video tape. I don’t know that this show is getting as much buzz as The People Vs. OJ Simpson — what has? — but I hope the acting is recognized, because it’s really superb.

These scenes with Gianni, Antonio, and Donatella are VERY compelling to me, although at this point in the series, they also kind of feel as if they’ve been ported in from a show that’s more about Versace’s life. I obviously wanted to include this so you can see Versace’s amazing wall of books.

And this was a nifty shot – and that’s a glam jacket on Donatella, who is arguing against Gianni’s coming out publicly because she thinks it might hurt the business; 1993 was a very different time.

I did have to kind of laugh in this scene; Gianni is explaining to Donatella why the Advocate interview is important to him, and all Edgar Ramirez does is walk to various work stations, briefly stand next to them, and then walk to the next one. It seems like…an unrealistic look at his atelier. That being said, I actually thought this scene was really interesting and illuminating. I didn’t know, for example, that Perry Ellis had died of AIDS, and nearly collapsed on his own runway, which is incredibly sad. I’m currently reading Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries – which are dishy and great, and you’d like them, I think; a lot of the Amazon reviews are like, “there’s so much name-dropping!” but when you’re EiC of Vanity Fair, you have a lot of names to drop – and much of it is about the AIDS crisis in New York in the early 90s, and it’s so sad and poignant. There is also a whole bit here where Gianni is talking about how he should have died, but it’s a miracle that he didn’t, and again the show is kind of vague about whatever medical issue he’s talking about: IS he talking about AIDS? (I also wonder how much of this vagueness is due to the show’s unwillingness to get sued by the Versace family.

This is a very naive question, but what do we think Andrew is injecting into his toe? He seems too peppy for it to be heroin? I am assuming it’s speed, but this is not my area of expertise.

It made me laugh in the Vulture piece where they noted, essentially, “we do not know if Andrew had a creepy stalker wall of anyone in San Diego.” (He did NOT have a creepy stalker wall of Versace in Miami.) Nevertheless: there’s no better way in TV to explain that you’re dealing w. a real crackpot. FWIW, this vaguely reminds me of my own shrine to Ralph Fiennes when I was in college.

I’d like to commend the costumer for absolutely nailing Man Denim of the Early 90s.

Darren Criss is SO GOOD at being…very alarming even when he’s ostensibly being nice.

This actress, Sophie von Haselberg, is Bette Midler’s daughter, which I figured out because I thought, “WOW, she looks like Bette Midler.”

I thought the Jeff Trail storyline tracing his time in the military – he’s terrified that people will find out he is gay – was really, really moving. I also think this INSANE COMIC the Navy gave to officers to explain Don’t Ask Don’t Tell seems BONKERS. Can you imagine being the artist who had to make this thing?

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap, Episode 5

Big Dreams Are Deadly in American Crime Story Season 2

Andrew Cunanan, who shot and killed Gianni Versace on the front steps of the designer’s palatial estate on the morning of July 15, 1997, was good at bragging. In the second episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, a new FX miniseries about the crime and the years that led up to it, Cunanan (Darren Criss) lands in Miami’s South Beach. It is the last stop on a three-month killing spree, in which he has already murdered four men in three different states. Boasting energetically to a new friend, he claims he was once engaged to Versace (he wasn’t), who took him to dinner at the fabled San Francisco restaurant Stars (he didn’t). He launches into a reverie on Versace’s gift for design, and when his friend replies with, “Sounds real nice,” Cunanan is not pleased. “I don’t see something nice. I see the man behind it. A great creator. The man I could have been.”

Cunanan’s curdled sense of self-importance runs through the next seven episodes of the series, which travel backward from Cunanan’s crime spree to his troubled childhood. His parents, a depressive Italian-American mother and a Filipino immigrant father, poured all their hopes into young Andrew. He slept in the cavernous master bedroom by himself and attended a swanky private school in La Jolla, California, even though his parents could barely afford the tuition. He wore a red leather jumpsuit to school on occasion and was voted “Most Likely to Be Remembered” in his senior yearbook, but his own page gave almost no information about him. Instead, he inserted just one quote, attributed to the French King Louis XV: “Après moi, le déluge.” After me, the flood.

Cunanan’s first victims were Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern), two young gay men he met through the San Diego and San Francisco nightlife scenes when he was in his twenties. Trail, a former naval officer, befriended him when his ship was docked in the San Diego harbor. Madson, a promising young architect from Minnesota, and Cunanan had met in San Francisco in 1995, when Cunanan spotted him at a restaurant bar and sent a cocktail over. That night, according to writer Maureen Orth’s account (the FX show is partially based on Vulgar Favors, her 1999 best-seller about Cunanan’s crimes), the pair had a “nonsexual sleepover” inside the Mandarin Oriental hotel, where Andrew was staying thanks to an allowance he collected from a wealthy, older La Jolla businessman named Norman Blachford.

Blachford, whose partner of 26 years had just died when he met Cunanan, allowed him to move in to his mansion and decorate it, giving him credit cards, a $33,000 Infiniti, and a $2,500 living allowance. Cunanan was apparently ashamed of being a “kept” man but also flaunted his nouveau riches, spending lavishly on friends and acquaintances. When he met Madson, Cunanan felt a genuine emotional connection and obsessed over the architect romantically for the next two years. By the time Trail took a blue-collar job in Minneapolis, where Madson also lived, Blachford had dropped Cunanan, who was now alone. Cunanan flew to Minnesota, killed Trail with a claw hammer inside Madson’s airy loft, and then shot and killed Madson four days later on the banks of East Rush Lake, an hour outside town—perhaps out of jealousy or despair.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace sticks with Cunanan throughout his spree. Versace (Edgar Ramírez) and his longtime partner, Antonio (Ricky Martin), only appear intermittently, like pops from a flashbulb rather than fully developed characters. This feels purposeful: Cunanan was preoccupied with fame, perhaps to the point of psychopathy, and he put celebrity on a pedestal. He saw himself as destined for greatness, and it is this tragic misconception of himself that makes his story so very American. Versace was an openly gay immigrant, succeeding at the highest levels of American business. This must have enraged Cunanan, the openly gay son of an immigrant, who saw in Versace the anointed prince that he longed to be.

Shortly before the first episode aired, members of the Versace family distanced themselves from the new show, which they thought “should only be considered as a work of fiction.” In Vulgar Favors, Orth asserts that Cunanan had met Versace in San Francisco around 1990, when the designer created the costumes for a San Francisco Opera production of Capriccio. Although it’s not clear whether the two met only in passing or were much better acquainted, we see this encounter in a scene in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. If they had dated, as Cunanan often boasted to friends, Cunanan’s violent act may have been personal: Some reporters at the time speculated—with a homophobic slant—that Cunanan may have been an “HIV killer,” out to get revenge on former boyfriends. (A medical examiner later testified that he was not in fact HIV positive.) Versace’s family holds that he never met Cunanan, that the designer was a victim of his own fame and of one man’s twisted rampage against a sparkling culture that rejected him.

The second installment in Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story anthology series, the show doesn’t aim to establish which version is true so much as to expose the rot at the center of American culture—horrors that could only happen here. (Last season followed the trial of O.J. Simpson, dissecting the racial and gendered complexities of the case.) What we do know, from Orth’s book and from several other reports following the murders, was that Cunanan’s life was one of deception and delusion, of falsehoods and fibs and chicanery. He wanted to travel in the highest echelons of society, clinking glasses with socialites and captains of industry and cavorting on yachts. He didn’t like to work but loved to party, a less talented Mr. Ripley.

Cunanan wanted to travel in the highest echelons of society, clinking glasses with socialites and cavorting on yachts.

Throughout, Cunanan has to confront the mismatch between his aspirations and reality. From an early age, he bluffs about his background, telling classmates he is the son of wealthy aesthetes, that his father, Modesto (Jon Jon Briones), once served as Imelda Marcos’s personal pilot and that his mother has filled his lunch box with lobster tails. In the penultimate episode, we learn that Modesto has had to flee the country after embezzling fortunes from his clients. When Cunanan, now in his teens, goes to Manila to find him, Modesto is living in squalid conditions. Criss and Briones stare at each other for long minutes in this scene, filmed inside a tiny tropical shack. Cunanan realizes his father’s success was a lie, and that all of the confidence and self-regard he has absorbed from his bellowing belief must also be fraudulent.

Many people would experience this sort of trauma—the explosion of the family unit, the disgrace of a parent—and cave inward. Cunanan does the opposite. When he returns from Manila, his lies only get bigger. He claims that his father owns a pineapple plantation, that as son and heir, he is set to inherit millions. He tells friends that he has family in New York, Paris, and Rome, and that Signore Versace has asked him to travel around the world with him designing costumes. Even before the period when a quick Google search could swiftly puncture outrageous claims, all this bragging raises suspicion. In a conversation Madson imagines shortly before he is killed, he asks Cunanan to tell him one true thing about his life. It doesn’t happen. Cunanan was like a Gatsby so enchanted with the green light that he would kill for it, a man so bedeviled by the American dream that he became a walking nightmare.

Because the show tells Cunanan’s story backward, we often see his victims die before we get to spend time with them. We see Cunanan in the days leading up to the murder of Versace, then we see him bludgeon Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), a prominent Chicago real estate developer, in Miglin’s garage. We see him shoot a cemetery caretaker in Pennsylvania just so that he can steal his red pickup truck. When these victims appear again on-screen, beaming and unaware of their bloody future, it can feel like agony. They die in front of you all over again, and you are mourning them even while they are simply talking and moving.

The best episode of the series is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which follows Jeff Trail through the trauma of being gay in the military. In one scene, he tries to hang himself in uniform; in another gruesome moment, he takes a box cutter and begins to slice a tattoo from his calf, after hearing that officials can identify homosexuals by their body markings. The anguish and shame that Trail feels is devastating, especially as we know what fate lies ahead. He is forced to leave the Navy, but as he leaves, he gives an interview to a news program about the struggles of being gay and wanting to serve your country. The fact that this act of bravery—and its promise of a new, more open life—so closely precedes his death haunts the episode.

No one is safe in Cunanan’s world, but then, perhaps, it was never safe to be gay in 1990s America, even for gold-plated celebrities like Versace. The media of the time blamed the victim for his own murder as much as it blamed Cunanan. While Cunanan was “a killer on the loose,” Edward J. Ingebretsen has written in At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture, Versace was seen as “a different threat entirely, that of a profligate and well-traveled member of the upper class, whose mobility, like the killer’s, is also the stuff of myth.” The media wrapped Versace’s and Cunanan’s stories together, frequently drawing parallels between the two: both gay, fashion-obsessed men, enchanted by wealth. Yet they couldn’t have been more different—one of them created, while the other destroyed.

In the end, The Assassination of Gianni Versace belongs to Cunanan, because it is a singular story: the story of a boy who wanted everything in the world but never figured out how to get it. This is an American crime story, in that we see in the rearview how the consumerist ’90s could warp those who treated celebrity like a religion, how some were even willing to commit vile acts for a taste of rarefied air. Very little is, at its core, more American than that.

Big Dreams Are Deadly in American Crime Story Season 2

Uncovering The Spoilers Buried In The Music Of American Crime Story: Versace

Showrunner Ryan Murphy decided to start The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story with the titular designer’s death. For the first eight minutes of the show, there is minimal talking. We hear only the greetings as Versace (Edgar Ramírez) encounters various characters at the start of his day and the screams of Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), who was in the midst of a killing spree targeting gay men. What overwhelms our senses are the sounds of “Adagio in G Minor,” a haunting piece of baroque, Italian composition that we’ve all heard on screen many times, from Flashdance to Casanova to Manchester by the Sea. Though effective, it is not a particularly original choice. But, another layer is added to the story ACS: Versace is telling us if you explore the murky history of this piece of music.

“There were a couple of others we were trying, all in the same classical, Italian landscape,” the show’s music supervisor, Amanda Krieg Thomas, told Refinery29 on a recent phone call. Murphy, who directed the first episode, chose to set the sequence to a single piece of music and had the show’s composer, Mac Quayle, record a new version of this song to picture, so the arrangement matches up perfectly with the action.

There is a duality to watching a man who will lie, steal, and kill to serve his own ends execute another man in a moment scored by someone who perpetrated the most significant scam in classical music history. A musicologist named Remo Giazotto claims to have discovered the adagio, circa 1949. Giazotto was writing a book on the 18th-century Venetian master Tomaso Albinoni and said he had found this fragment of music in his archives, consisting of six bars of a melody. Giazotto took the liberty of finishing the composition, and the “Adagio in G Minor” was born. Except that Giazotto’s story wasn’t true. There is no proof to support that Albinoni wrote that fragment of music. Giazotto retracted his story later in life and took sole credit for the piece.

When it comes to pop music, of which the show has an abundance, powerhouse female vocalists from the late ‘80s and early ’90s are the stars in ACS: Versace. “It’s different from The People Versus O.J. Simpson in every way, but that show was a snapshot of the period, and that’s what we did for it musically as well. This season, the vision from Murphy was more focused on Cunanan and the type of music he would have grown up with; songs that would have been around him and in the places he went to that he’d be listening to,” Krieg Thomas says. The universe of ACS: Versace is aurally made up of women: club and radio jams by Lisa Stansfield, La Bouche, Indeep, Soul II Soul, and Jocelyn Enriquez all make appearances. And, of course, Laura Branigan whose cover (with its rewritten English lyrics) of “Gloria” became a hit in 1982. Her take is revived in episode 2, when Cunanan blasts it while he sings along in a stolen truck, taken from a man he killed.

“Murphy is such a fan of music, and for many of the moments, he knew what he wanted. ‘Gloria’ was one of those; he’s a big Laura Branigan fan,” Krieg Thomas said, which is probably not something anyone has said in decades. Her assertion bears itself out, though; the show uses another Branigan track, a No. 1 hit that has been all but forgotten in modern times, “You Take My Self Control,” in a future episode. “It works really well on many levels — it’s so incongruous with what just happened, he’s murdered people, he’s driving, and we hear this happy, upbeat song,” Krieg Thomas continued. She noted that the lyrics speak to what is happening: “Gloria, you’re always on the run now / Running after somebody, you gotta get him somehow” and “Gloria, don’t you think you’re fallin’? / If everybody wants you, why isn’t anybody callin’?”

A checking of the boxes (fits the show’s aesthetic, lyrically speaks to the scene) is noticeable at numerous moments in the first two episodes alone. “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” plays when Cunanan meets Versace in a club in San Francisco, letting us know something is afoot. “Be My Lover” plays while Cunanan fruitlessly searches for Versace in a South Beach club in a fit of desperation. It’s a sickening foreshadowing when Phil Collins & Phillip Bailey’s “Easy Lover” plays as Cunanan ties up and dominates a john. Under the Miami Vice aesthetic of this ’80s hit lies a cautionary tale about a lover who will leave and deceive, giving you nothing but regrets. As for talk that it might be an homage to American Psycho, Krieg Thomas said, “although it’s pulled from the same easy listening palette, it wasn’t a reference point.”

In episodes 3, 4, and 5, the soundtrack pivots to speak to us about the other men Cunanan killed: Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock), and David Madson (Cody Fern). With Lee, it’s a resetting of the aesthetic by using songs coded for older gay men; where Doris Day and Astrud Gilberto play on the hi-fi. With Trail and Madson, the work is largely done by the show’s score, which sets a mood of horror to match the change in cinematography to the darker, harsher tones of Minnesota sunlight and Madson’s industrial loft. In episode 4, the foreshadowing is heavy when Madson and Cunanan are in a bar listening to Aimee Mann sing the saddest version imaginable of “Drive,” a morose uber-hit for the Cars in the ’80s. Madson’s tears along with the lyrics, “Who’s gonna pay attention / To your dreams? / Who’s gonna plug their ears / When you scream?” let us know that there was no escape. Not to the outside world where gay men were vilified, and not with Cunanan on a Bonnie and Clyde-esque murder spree.

The show uses music to tell us about Versace, as well. His South Beach soundscape is not so different from Cunanan’s, full of club music and dance hits but with flourishes of Italian classical dropped in to remind us where he comes from. In episode 2, there was a moment where the real Versace spoke. In another theme for this show, that of cover songs, they lifted a track that Versace used in his final fashion show for the scene with Donatella (Penélope Cruz), dropping the Lightning Seeds cover of “You Showed Me” in after their big fight over models and how to build a fashion brand. Reports have the siblings fighting quite a lot at the time, with Donatella trying to find her place in the house of Versace after her brother’s return upon his recovery from an illness. The use of this song in his real life may have simply been reaching for what was in the air at the time — it was the height of Britpop, and in his other shows he had used adjacent tracks like “Wonderwall” by Oasis. Or, it might have been a carefully constructed message to his sister. That we even ask the question, however, is entirely thanks to its presence in the American Crime Story universe.

Uncovering The Spoilers Buried In The Music Of American Crime Story: Versace

How Jeff Trail & David Madson’s Real Relationship Reportedly Stoked Andrew Cunanan’s Paranoia

Spoilers through the episode “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The past two episodes of American Crime Story (executive producer: Nina Jacobson) Season 2 have introduced Darren Criss’s Andrew Cunanan’s first two victims. But given the backwards chronology of the show, some viewers may still be confused about the real life history between the three men. In The Assassination Of Gianni Versace, Jeffrey Trail and David Madson are depicted somewhat ambiguously as having been in a relationship with each other at the time of their deaths. The episode “House By The Lake” seems to imply that jealousy over this relationship is what motivated Cunanan to murder both men. But is this really what happened?

In the opening moments of the Feb. 7 episode, Andrew invites Jeff over to David’s apartment with the intention of murdering him. As David and Jeff are on the way up in the elevator, David nervously tells his friend, “He knows about us.” A few moments later, Jeff is dead. Given that the real Cunanan took his own lifebefore he could be interrogated by police, the world may never know his true motives for allegedly killing his five victims. As such, Versace writer Tom Rob Smith is forced to take some creative liberties to fill in gaps in the heavily researched narrative of Maureen Orth’s 1999 non-fiction book Vulgar Favors, on which the season is based. But the idea of a relationship between David and Jeff might be one of Smith’s biggest inventions, according to other sources.

In an article published four days after Versace’s 1997 murder, The New York Times quoted Trail’s sister Lisa as saying, “Jeff had just started a new relationship.” Lisa alleged her brother was uncomfortable over Cunanan’s impending visit to Minneapolis: “Her brother, she said, feared Mr. Cunanan might insinuate himself in a way that would make trouble for Mr. Trail and his partner,” the article states. Although the piece never names Trail’s partner, it’s clear that it wasn’t Madson, since the article explains that Cunanan had to spend the night at Madson’s apartment because “Mr. Trail had gone out of town with his partner.” Ergo, Trail’s partner and the person Cunanan was staying with couldn’t have been the same person.

Indeed, Orth’s 1997 Vanity Fair article “The Killer’s Trail” — which formed the basis for Vulgar Favors — names Trail’s partner at the time of his death. “Trail had made it clear that he wouldn’t be around much the weekend of Andrew’s visit,” Orth wrote. “His boyfriend, Jon Hackett, a student at the University of Minnesota, was celebrating his 21st birthday, and Trail was taking him out of town Saturday night.” In fact, Orth’s account of the murders implies that Trail and Madson weren’t even that close; she states that the pair had only “casually” befriended one another after meeting in Minneapolis and realizing they both knew Cunanan.

But just because Trail and Madson weren’t dating — or reportedly even particular close — doesn’t mean Cunanan knew that. In fact, Orth claimed in her piece that a large part of the reason for his visit to Minneapolis was his paranoia over their relationship. “Cunanan had told a friend that he was uncomfortable having the two people he cared most about living in the same faraway city without him,” she wrote, getting up to who knows what in his absence.

So why does Versace (executive producer: Alexis Martin Woodall) include the line where David worries that Andrew “knows about” him and Jeff? Well, the Feb. 14 episode, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” might clear that up. Despite seeming to imply that they were in a relationship only a week before, the show makes no mention of such a connection between Jeff and David while exploring Trail’s backstory and the events leading up to his murder. In fact, David is shown inviting another man over to his apartment — although no mention of Hackett is made.

There are two possibilities that explain the “he knows” line in retrospect. One is that the scene is Andrew’s imagined version of events of what happened after David went to let Jeff in; he feared that his two closest friends were in a relationship, so that’s what the viewer sees. The other is that David simply wasn’t referring to Andrew knowing about some secret relationship — but rather, that he knew both he and Jeff were planning to cut Andrew out of their lives after that weekend, as is revealed in the opening moments of the Feb. 14 episode. Either way, the line seems designed to instill the same paranoia in the viewer that Andrew was feeling at the time, while clearing up the truth of David and Jeff’s relationship in the following episode.

Ultimately, Smith isn’t writing Versace to serve as a factual tell-all of the people involved in Cunanan’s killing spree, but rather to serve as a parable to highlight how life in the closet damages gay men in various ways. “If you look at the crimes themselves, they express various facets of homophobia,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. He continued:

“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. 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.”

Versace will continue to explore the various ways in which homophobia contributed to the tragic events of this story in the season’s remaining four episodes.

How Jeff Trail & David Madson’s Real Relationship Reportedly Stoked Andrew Cunanan’s Paranoia

The Overdramatic Camerawork in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

There is a lot to love about the second season of American Crime Story. The performances are fantastic. It has a fun, pop soundtrack, which comments on gay culture as Judy Berman writes about for Pitchfork. It has a chilling and tragic true story of a serial killer. All of these aspects that make the show great are overshadowed by the way it is shot. How we see the story has a lot to do with how we interpret it, which could be damning for the show if not handled right.

The show flashes between the aftereffects of the killing of legendary fashion designer Gianni Versace and what came before with his killer Andrew Cunanan. Even though the scenes are dramatized in a fictional way, the underlying story is true. Andrew did kill several men before finally murdering Versace on his doorstep, and he got away with every single one. This true story is why many of us are watching the show, so it is an important element to consider when making it.

However, the style of this show doesn’t reflect the kind of filmmaking we associate with true stories. Far away from a documentary style, the show uses a style that pulls us out of the reality of the story and makes us feel like it is like any other fictional show we watch. This could benefit the entertainment aspect of the show, but when it is done in excess, it makes the show cheap.

This dramatic style of camerawork includes an overload of wide shots, overheads, dolly shots, and lens flares. Many scenes begin in overhead, birdseye views of settings or characters. Even in rather serious scenes like one where Andrew murders someone, the lens flares in the sun, giving beauty to the shot that feels out of place with the tone.

Versace was shot in Gianni’s real Florida mansion, where he was murdered. The home is enormous, and the camerawork constantly reminds you of this, panning out in large rooms or staying wide while actors are talking or giving emotional performances. There’s one way to make use of the space of a location, and then there’s letting it drown out the story.

The constant movement of the camera doesn’t just give the story a fictional feel; it takes away from the remarkable performances by an incredible cast, including Ricky Martin and Penélope Cruz. When so much of a scene is in a wide shot or panning all over the place, it’s hard to focus on the actor. Darren Criss plays Andrew Cunanan so well; it’s hard to imagine he came from a show like Glee. He’s serious, charming, emotional and in an instant, he can switch between the three. He’s a terrifying character and one that is so interesting to the viewer since this show is really about him.

Much of the season so far has been about Andrew and what he did even long before he met Versace. The main question everyone is drawn to is Why did he do this? The best way to try to understand this would be to give us a sense of Andrew’s interior. We need to be close to him, literately close to him with the camera, to appreciate the emotion coming across his face and interpret it ourselves. We hardly get this throughout the show since so much emphasis is put on the settings or ridiculous shots. A good example of the overload of movement by the camera is in the clip below.

In the scene, Andrew is about to trick the motel owner to think he’s from France and get a motel room where he makes plans to murder Versace. The shitty, run down hotel is introduced with a wide, panning shot that makes it look glamorous. The only close and static shots we get are in the brief conversation Andrew has with the owner. Not only does this scene give us a good sense of Andrew’s character, but it also sets up the most important act of the show– the murder of Versace. Instead, the focus is on the camera movement, like so much of the show.

If you think this style is familiar, you’re not mistaken. Cinematographer for the first two episodes Nelson Cragg has worked with the producer of American Crime Story Ryan Murphy one several of his projects before this. Each of Murphy’s other dramas Feud: Bette & Joan and American Horror Story employ much of the same dramatic camerawork by Cragg that is as gaudy as the plotlines. The influence is not entirely on Cragg, since he has experience that is not as overdone as his work with Murphy, including Breaking Bad and Homeland. This style is very much Murphy-esque, but it doesn’t fit with this show like his other dramas that rely heavily on cheap stories. American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson wasn’t popular for the camerawork. It was the writing and performances that won big during awards season.

This show holds the Murphy style when it shouldn’t. It needs a simple and serious tone that reflects the nature of this story. This story is about sexual repression, mental illness, and violent murders at the hands of a deeply troubled man. It’s about the loss of a true legend, by a man he may have befriended. It’s a sad story, full of gruesome violence that’s unsettling. The style of the show shouldn’t glamorize these events by focusing on the material settings and the artificial beauty of the era, but the true pain Andrew Cunanan caused so many families and himself. The show holds true potential for a successful follow-up to the first season if the rest of the season focuses on the story rather than the spectacle of cinematography.

The Overdramatic Camerawork in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

TV Review: Assassination fascination

I love a good assassination. As a teen I came into possession of a coffee-table book that wallowed in the glory of this particular form of butchery. Abe Lincoln, Franz Ferdinand, J.F.K, and Martin Luther King — these greats were all dispatched with well-aimed shots that have rippled through our historical timeline.

It’s impossible, yet kind of fun, to imagine how things would have unfolded if these hits hadn’t been so successful.

No WWI if Franz lived perhaps? Nukes dropped on Vietnam if John F. Kennedy had bent down to tie his shoelace? The end of all life as we know it, or some much better turn of events?

Perhaps we’d now have billions upon billions of superannuation dosh if Muldoon had been liquidated by an assassin?

Of course, the killers are even more fascinating than the killed, perhaps because that was something I could actually aspire to, as being a respected world leader looks like too much hard work.

But I can imagine being an unhinged fame-seeking killer; that’s well within my grasp. If all humanity exists on such a spectrum, how many of us really think we are closer to Gandhi than Lee Harvey Oswald?

That notion is milked with great alacrity in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the follow up to the tremendously executed The People Vs O.J Simpson.

Both shows appear under the banner of American Crime Story, and are the work of Ryan Murphy, a master craftsman of television who also gave us Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story and the ace 2017 bio-soap Feud: Bette and Joan, which dramatised the fractious relationship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. It’s one of last years best shows.

His latest lavish production begins with the shooting of the famous fashion designer Gianni Versace by a troubled young man; an appalling narcissist with just enough humanity to elicit the baseline of pity that a viewer can fashion into something approaching empathy.

Evil monsters exist in lame procedurals but in real life and better shows, we get glimpses of mental illness, shocking histories and all the stuff that adds up to the notion that no one truly chooses to be awful, let alone evil.

It’s a terrific opening episode, and the only one directed by Murphy himself.

It starts with the execution. Something chills as we flee with the killer, we want him to be caught, even as we want him to get away. Edgar Ramirez, who plays Gianni, possesses a remarkable likeness to the dead fashion legend, while former Glee star Darren Criss seems like he was born to play the killer, Andrew Cunanan.

Also impressive are pop star Ricky Martin as Gianni’s partner and Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace.

The latter is a real-life mate of Donatella and only took the part after she got the thumbs up from the living Versace. Other family members and Gianni’s ex were less impressed with the outcome.

TV Review: Assassination fascination

Mainstream LGBTQ Movies Are Failing Because Studios Aren’t Reaching The LGBTQ Community

…

This isn’t just about LGBTQ-specific media being left out of movies representing its own community. Black journalists and critics recently started a discussion about being left out of Black Panther press opportunities, with entertainment journalist Jaleesa Lashay asking Sterling K. Brown about publicists ignoring black reporters when it comes to access to and for black-related TV and film actors and projects.

“Are you aware,“ she asked, "of the disparities between the opportunities given to black journalists in comparison to our white counterparts? And do you think there’s any plan in Hollywood to make sure that the media room starts to reflect the diversity that we’re beginning to see in the industry?”

A similar scenario happened, too, when a Filipina reporter, Yong Chavez, shared with Darren Criss that she wasn’t able to get access to him despite his playing a Filipino character in American Crime Story. In response, Criss emailed his publicist from her phone, requesting they set something up.

Just how "aware” are stars, writers, or directors? Probably not very. Brown’s response to the reporter signaled this.

…

Mainstream LGBTQ Movies Are Failing Because Studios Aren’t Reaching The LGBTQ Community

Turns Out Versace Is Tangential To ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Well, as we suspected last week, this mini-series is really becoming The Andrew Cunanan Story dressed up as a high-fashion murder. And the thing is, that’s okay: As true crime goes, it’s fascinating stuff. Cunanan’s spree is a solved crime that’s also forever an unsolved mystery. We know who did it, but we can only ever grasp at why. There are so many blanks to fill in with reporting and analysis and extrapolation, but in the end, the only way to finish the puzzle is to guess. And while Versace was Cunanan’s flashiest victim, the story didn’t begin or even end there, and American Crime Story is doing an admirable job trying to make sense of the insensible. Here, it outlines all we know and the best anyone can guess about his first and second victims, who were connected and in quick succession.

Sometimes, of course, that means trying to find something sympathetic in the guilty. It’s almost like we can’t possibly believe that anyone is just simply a psychopath, so we reach and dig and scrape for something to latch onto that makes the person relatably human. Maybe in Cunanan’s case, he was. Or maybe he was just insane.

This episode almost toes both lines. I had just read Maureen Orth’s Vanity Fair piece — dated 2008, but it reads like she wrote it much closer to 1997 — about Cunanan’s spree, which draws in particular detail the deaths of Jeffrey Trail and David Madson. It begins with Cunanan’s flashy days in San Diego as a gigolo and a kept man of sorts with a rich sugar daddy, which is where he met Trail and Madson, both ultimately Minneapolis-based. The show does not clarify Cunanan’s relationships with them, but the article does: Trail was a man Cunanan considered a best friend, and Madson was the love of his life, and both of them — Trail first, then Madson — slowly began to see through Cunanan’s lies and eventually stopped even feeling sorry for all the reasons he might’ve been telling them.

The facts, as Pushing Daisies would say, are these: Trail died in Madson’s apartment by Cunanan’s hand, but remained there for days before he was discovered. Eyewitnesses saw Cunanan walking Madson’s dog with him on what would be the day after the murder, before they dropped out of sight and out of touch. A panicked Madson coworker finally convinced the landlord to let her into David’s apartment to check on him, which is how they discovered both the body rolled up in a rug, and energetic blood spatter. Cunanan had created enough confusion that the cops mistakenly believed he was David Madson’s victim; by the time the coroner identified Jeff Trail’s body, Cunanan and Madson were long gone.

History does not seem to connect Trail and Madson romantically, but the show gives them a scene together in an elevator that hints to a crime of passion or at least of betrayal on Cunanan’s part. It’s not disputed that he loved Madson, and the show alleges he proposed, and that Madson had only stayed in Cunanan’s life because he was still in the stage where he thought hurting Andrew was like kicking a puppy. Trail had hardened to Andrew. Given that Cunanan eventually used Trail’s gun to kill Madson, the theory presented here is that he stole Trail’s weapon as a way of luring Trail to Madson’s apartment, so he could kill him in full view of Madson and thus create a situation in which Madson had no choice but to leave with him. A forced happy ending by homicide.

Considering we know the outcome, the show is really adept at replacing “what will happen” with a palpable sense of dread about when and how. For example, the second Trail enters the apartment, Andrew flies at him so fast with a hammer and bashes his brains in so repeatedly and violently that the viewer wants to scramble away almost as fast as poor Madson does. That one is fast; Madson’s march to death is much slower and more agonizing, even though we know where it’s going. No one really knows how Cunanan worked over Madson. The show posits that he expertly manipulated him, first by claiming he simply lost control of himself, then by nursing him through shock gently enough that he had time to plan his next step. Which was, calmly, coolly elucidating all the reasons why not to call the cops, including telling Madson the cops hate gay people and pretending flight was an act of love: “I’ll get 30 years, but you’ll get 10 years. I can’t let you ruin your life,” this Cunanan tells Madson. He also dissuades Madson from calling his father, claiming it would ruin his life as well. Their final joint escape, the show suggests, was prompted by being afraid the landlord would enter and discover the body with Madson still there looking guilty as sin.

The road trip is all Andrew being completely deluded — cranking “Pump Up The Jam” and eating burritos from the back of Madson’s car — and David looking bummed and scared. Cunanan is shown telling one puffy lie about how they can stop in Chicago and get some money from a business associate, the unknowingly doomed Lee Miglin, and how his business in Mexico will boom and they can live a rich life there together. He goes on and on about how it’s okay if David wants to leave him down there, of course, “and I respect that,” but they wouldn’t have anyone else but each other. “You should really start thinking about your new life. What you want to do with it,” he says. A metastatement about Andrew Cunanan if ever there was one, as this is a man who created tens of new lives for himself, often at the same time.

David is portrayed as being in utter disbelief the entire time, visibly afraid Andrew will kill him despite Andrew’s assurances that he loves him too much to cause him harm. At one point, he rambles about being scared of what the cops will dig up about him, and how it will affect his parents’ lives in his small hometown: “Who’s going to buy anything from my dad’s shop?” he murmurs.

Eventually David appears to realize he can’t win, so he starts challenging Cunanan about his lies — both in Minnesota and in his flashy life in San Diego. “You never worked for anything. It was an act… You loved [Jeff]. It was so obvious. But he figured you out in the end. It took him a few years, but he finally saw the real you, and you killed him for it.” Andrew blinks a few times and the brightly insists they can have that life again in Mexico, but ten times better, thanks to all his fancy business deals. “You can’t do it, can you?” David marvels. “[You can’t] stop.”

And when David finally realizes Andrew planned killing Jeff in front of him all along, he signs his own death warrant. Andrew, the very picture of agony and disillusionment, shoots his former lover in the back as he tries to run for his life.

Is that how it went down? Who knows. They had the bodies, they had the weapons, but they never got to ask the killer any questions. And so he moved on to richer pastures, and bigger murders.

The loft set they made for David Madson’s loft already looks like a place where a serial murderer might be. I can’t recall them addressing why there is plastic sheeting hanging up or whether he had recently moved in, or what.

This shot started with David working, and we saw Cunanan enter and walk toward him. Simple blocking, except that the way Darren Criss holds his body while walking as Cunanan is amazing. He glides, but so precisely, as if he’s a tightly coiled snake.

Finn Wittrock plays Jeff Trail, and gets only one scene and like a minute of face time, max. Of course, that’s partly because in the NEXT minute he will no longer HAVE a face.

Afterward, while David cowers in horror on the couch, Cunanan walks to him while still holding the bloody hammer and puts it on David’s cheek, while acting like he’s sharing in David’s grief. It’s well-constructed manipulation.

As is the whole ensuing bit, where Cunanan takes a shocked David and gently leads him to the shower, and almost tenderly helps him rinse himself clean of the blood spatter. By acting so caring, he got a dazed and confused David to go along with him immediately, which is the beginning of explaining why David never did call the cops.

Another subtle power play: leaving Jeff’s body lying uncovered in the hallway. David would’ve had to flee OVER it, and when they do decide to go walk the dog – Andrew, obviously, does not let David go anywhere alone – they have to cover the body up together, which then makes David more of an accomplice while also continuing to drive home the horror of what happened and keep the vaguest notion that it might be David’s fate no matter how much Andrew placates him.

Seriously, the set designers were either DELIGHTED to have very little to do, or bored out of their skulls.

Andrew leaves a bunch of S&M porn and supplies on David’s bed, as a way of helping create suspicion that this might have been a sex game gone wrong.

And here, we have David’s family’s very sedate living room. My favorite little touch are the greeting cards lined up on the mantel.

We pause for Aimee Mann – traveling through space and time to play as her current self but in 1997 – to show up and perform a plaintive cover of “Drive” by The Cars, pregnant with meaning for Andrew.

The camera is on Criss as Andrew lets the words sink in and starts to cry. It’s open to interpretation what he’s crying about; it could be that he’s coping with the fact that he’s just committed murder, that he’s made a prison for himself, or that he is realizing that this delusion of a life – much less a life with David – is not going to hold. Probably all three. It’s very well done, and also TENSE AS HELL, because during this David is in the bathroom punching out a window and hoping to escape so we keep expecting Andrew to get up and find him in there and kill him. (He doesn’t.)(Yet.)

This diner scene is where the shine starts t come off: Here is the first exposition that clarifies how these two even know each other, and it’s David drawing Andrew into a conversation about the glory days of when they met in San Francisco… before turning sour and hissing that it was all A LIE because Andrew is a big fake faker.

Naturally, this doesn’t end well, although the show posits that Andrew was still trying to play along with his fantasy of a life together in Mexico before David finally snapped and tried to commandeer the car.

David pleads for his life. Then he just gives up and cuts Andrew verbally before turning to run while Andrew is facing the other way. Andrew turns and fires the gun.

There are some flashbacks throughout demonstrating David’s relationship with his father..

… to a point. David came out to him after he had won an award (“good news, bad news”), and his father took a moment to compose his words and then finally said he can’t change what he believes or pretend that he supports that lifestyle, but “I love you more than my own life.” So after Andrew fires the gun, David seems to make it to a nearby trailer… but then he turns and sees his father, pouring soup from a Thermos and offering him some, and poor David sits down and shares an imaginary happy reconciliation with his father…

… as it’s revealed that he did indeed get felled by a bullet and tried to plead silently one more time before Andrew shot him in the face. We end with Andrew curled up next to David’s dead body, head on David’s chest, efore getting up and taking the Jeep straight to Lee and Marilyn Miglin’s personal hell. It’s a really stirringly shot piece.

Turns Out Versace Is Tangential To ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Killer Queen: Andrew Cunanan, My Love Rival

I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing, but Mark Simpson made me.

Write a preface, that is – for the following journalistic essay “Killer Queen” on “gay spree killer” and “Versace assassin” Andrew Cunanan, my erstwhile love rival who once offered to kill me. It was first published in The Stranger July 23, 1997, concurrent with the breaking news of Andrew’s death by self-inflicted gunshot to head upon being cornered by police, a week after shooting Versace to death outside his house in Miami.

The uber-cool Seattle alternative weekly had a red hot global scoop on its cover. The piece was widely picked up and also syndicated in The London Times, the Irish Independent and The Face. This is the first time it has been available online, however. So in a 21^st Century sense, this is the first time it actually exists.

Some 20 years later as I write this, American cable channel FX is airing episode 3 of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. The show is said to be “loosely based” on a book by Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth: Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History.

Full article

Added to supplemental materials

Killer Queen: Andrew Cunanan, My Love Rival