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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘American Crime Story’ Nets Big Viewership in Italy Despite Versace Criticisms

Although the Versace family has slammed American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the public feud has appeared to only have helped ratings in the designer’s homeland. The new show from Ryan Murphy tells the story of the murder of the fashion icon and stars Edgar Ramirez, Ricky Martin, Darren Criss and Penelope Cruz.

In Italy, the series aired on FoxCrime, giving the network its best show debut in four years. More than 700,000 viewers tuned into the premiere of Versace, with 1.3 million unique viewers watching the show in total during its first week on air. By comparison, the seventh season premiere of Game of Thrones in Italy netted only 572,000 spectators.

FoxCrime ran a huge promotional effort in the country, with a digital PR strategy focusing on memories of the Italian designer from the celebrities who knew him.

The fashion house, including Versace Group vp Donatella Versace, has been outspoken in its disdain for the new show, which was widely reported in both American and Italian press.

“The Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about the death of Mr. Gianni Versace,” the fashion company said in a statement in early January. “Since Versace did not authorize the book on which it is partly based nor has it taken part in the writing of the screenplay, this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.”

Versace network FX responded to the accusation by stating that the series was based off of Maureen Orth’s book on the murder, Vulgar Favors. “We stand by the meticulous reporting of Ms. Orth,” FX said in a statement.

Versace also decried Orth’s book when it came out, disputing, among other things, the claim that Gianni Versace was H.I.V. positive when he died.

Italian media has since speculated that the fashion house may also be less than thrilled that equal weight is given in the new series to the stories of Gianni Versace and his killer Andrew Cunanan, which they see as suggesting that the two men may be two sides of the same coin.

‘American Crime Story’ Nets Big Viewership in Italy Despite Versace Criticisms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Closer Look at Two Key Relationships That Influence FX’s ‘Versace’

Wednesday’s second episode of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, “Manhunt,” tells the story of the hunt for Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). But it also shines a light on the loving relationship between the fashion designer (Edgar Ramirez) and his sister, Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz), the one between Versace and his partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) and the final friendship Cunanan formed before Versace’s murder, with an HIV-positive Miami junkie named Ronnie (Max Greenfield of New Girl fame).

While many of the people Cunanan was close with in the final months of his life wound up victims of his killing spree, Ronnie had a different relationship with the serial killer.

“Andrew is a friend to him — or at least he really wants him to be,” Greenfield tells The Hollywood Reporter of his character. “It starts to dawn on him that something is off, and he really doesn’t want to believe it because he values the friendship more than what he feels like this might end up being.”

Although the Versace family has continued to deny that Versace was diagnosed with HIV before his death, the Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology (and Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, on which it is based) posits that he was — and contrasts Versace’s illness with Ronnie’s positive status. Greenfield said that meeting Ronnie, who had also recovered from his sickest days, helps bring context to the new lease on life many HIV-positive people faced at the time.

“Two years before, they had just come up with the medication that treated HIV, and you had these people who had accepted their own fate and had all of a sudden been given this new lease on life,” Greenfield said. “I’m sure a lot of them were lost, and had lost so many people, and didn’t understand why they, all of a sudden, were spared.”

The series jumps back and forth in time to depict Versace in the throes of his alleged illness, which caused him to lean heavily on his sister and on D’Amico. Ramirez told THR that though he and Cruz are Latinx and the Versaces are Italian, their cultures have two very important factors in common: their deep Catholic roots, and the fact that they’re comfortable with expressing emotion.

“That was something that was key to Gianni’s relationships in general, especially within his family, and that’s something that, based on all the accounts that I had access to — people who were close to him would tell me — he was very respectful; he was a generous guy; but passionate, and in touch with his emotions. So was Donatella, and so was the relationship. Penelope and I, we connected to that. We understood that well. Gianni used to say that the beautiful thing about working with family is that you would fight in the morning and then you would have dinner at night as if nothing had happened.”

As for Versace’s relationship with D’Amico, “they were very much in love … and we really wanted to pay tribute to what we think was a beautiful love story,” Ramirez said. “They were very close and they were real partners, not only in love but also in business and in creativity and in the enjoyment of life, and that was very important to them.”

But the relationship between Donatella and D’Amico was not nearly as close — their battle for Versace’s estate played out in newspapers and courts in the years following the designer’s death, and plays out on screen in Wednesday’s episode.

“You have to think of Gianni as an emperor, like the sun of a universe that would swirl an orbit around him,” he said. “So, of course when he was gone in such a horrible way and drastic way, no one was prepared for that and that whole universe collapsed. Without the sun, everyone spun out of control.”

A Closer Look at Two Key Relationships That Influence FX’s ‘Versace’

How ‘American Crime Story’ Re-created Versace’s Death — on the Designer’s Own Front Steps

[This story contains spoilers from the premiere of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.]

From the start, the producers behind FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story wanted the series to be different than other true-crime shows.

“The series opens with the murder of Versace, and we made that decision for a couple reasons. One is that it’s the one fact that everybody knows about this case — that Gianni Versace, if you know something, you know that he was murdered outside his mansion. We felt like, instead of waiting eight episodes to get to that, let’s go right toward that, which then led to this backwards storytelling. We’re telling this season backwards,” executive producer Brad Simpson tells The Hollywood Reporter.

That’s why Wednesday’s premiere opened with a lush, nearly eight-minute sequence detailing the final morning of the slain fashion designer’s life, culminating in the moment when 27-year-old serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) shot Versace (Edgar Ramirez) on the steps of the designer’s Miami Beach mansion — which the production re-created on the actual steps of the building.

“Everyone was very moved because we didn’t make the steps, we shot on those steps,” Ramirez tells THR. “He laid on those steps, and Antonio [D’Amico, his partner] might have picked him up in the way Ricky [Martin, who plays D’Amico] did with me. And there’s something very moving and interesting and disturbing to me because Gianni was shot around 8:30 or so that morning … so he was alive. I was playing somebody who’s dying, I wasn’t playing dead.”

Says Martin, “It was very dark. It was very heavy and dark days because it was back to back, the actual finding of the corpse and then the investigation where the FBI just drills him, merciless. But I loved it because the mission was important in a sense — I’m telling this story because people need to know this story.”

Season two of the FX anthology from exec producer Ryan Murphy was a big departure from the franchise’s O.J. Simpson-focused first season, when the Emmy-winning limited series re-created most of its major locations on soundstages.

“What’s important about filming at the mansion is that it reflected how Versace lived his life,” Simpson says. “Versace’s mansion is in South Beach, right on a public beach. You open the door, and the entire world is out there. That’s how he wanted to live — not just authentically, but openly. He loved stepping outside and being among all the different characters in South Beach — the multiple ethnicities, people who were open with their sexuality — it was part of what inspired him. That walk that he did every morning, the walk that we begin with to get the newspaper, was something he hadn’t been able to do for several years because he had been sick, and now he was better. It meant so much to him. The tragedy that this thing that he loved, the openness with which he could live, is how he was able to be murdered, was incredibly important to represent.”

But being in the actual house, which Versace created himself, was invaluable to the show’s creative team.

“When we were in there with our craftsmen and our writers and everything, you felt that vibe coming through, and it felt important to shoot it there,” Simpson says. “At the same time, it’s incredibly chilling. The day that we re-created it, we created it as it happened. Everyone was very somber. People were crying because you could feel the energy of what we were re-creating right there in the moment.”

For Criss, the most striking part of filming that scene in the actual location was the fact that he gained the access to Versace’s life that Cunanan desperately craved.

“I so freely walked in. Me, Darren, just walking right through the gates and into a nice air-conditioned room on a really hot summer’s day,” Criss tells THR. “Andrew never made it inside, which has a more symbolic meaning — he literally and figuratively never got to go inside. There I was, dressed in the same clothes that he was in, re-enacting the scene that would forever define him in opposition of the Versaces, and there I am, walking in their house.”

“That felt very strange to me,” he continues. “It was surreal, but it made it very real, for sure. Being in that house was almost like being in a church because Versace was so present in that house. I found myself saying a silent prayer to Gianni and asking his forgiveness, not on behalf of Andrew, but I guess of hoping that he would be trusting of us telling this story and that we would try and create something with light that had so much darkness.”

How ‘American Crime Story’ Re-created Versace’s Death — on the Designer’s Own Front Steps

How FX’s ‘Versace’ Tackles Homophobia and the Family’s Main Point of Contention

The Versace family has now issued two statements denouncing FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. But the producers and stars all maintain that the second season of FX’s Emmy-winning anthology is a respectful portrayal of the famed fashion designer, who was gunned down by wanted killer Andrew Cunanan on the steps of his Miami mansion in the summer of 1997.

“The primary thing is that we are celebrating Versace,” writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We are exploring why he was a genius, why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered — both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.”

The family’s main point of contention seems to be the portrayal of Gianni Versace as HIV-positive, which reporter Maureen Orth contended in her book Vulgar Favors. (The season is based on Orth’s book and reporting.) Orth, who covered the hunt for Cunanan for Vanity Fair at the time, was told on the record by a Miami Beach detective that blood tests done after Versace’s death confirmed his HIV-positive status. Orth, for her part, told THR that more than a decade later, she stands by her reporting.

“I was told on the record by the lead detective on Miami Beach that he had heard from the medical examiner who did the blood work that he was [HIV-positive],” Orth said. “And it also goes along with other people who told me that he was very weak at one time and he needed [partner] Antonio to help him walk, and they came over to his house when he was having breakfast and he had 27 bottles of pills in front of him. Now, does that mean they’re for HIV? But the blood thing from on record from the Miami Beach, that’s pretty [solid].”

The Versace family has blasted the FX drama as a “work of fiction” and Orth’s book, saying that the FX series relies on a book they say is “full of gossip and speculation.”

“Orth never received any information from the Versace family and she has no basis to make claims about the intimate personal life of Gianni Versace or other family members. Instead, in her effort to create a sensational story, she presents second-hand hearsay that is full of contradictions,” the family said in a statement. “Orth makes assertions about Gianni Versace’s medical condition based on a person who claims he reviewed a postmortem test result, but she admits it would have been illegal for the person to have reviewed the report in the first place (if it existed at all). In making her lurid claims, she ignores contrary information provided by members of Mr. Versace’s family, who…were in the best position to know the facts of his life…. Of all the possible portrayals of his life and legacy, it is sad and reprehensible that the producers have chosen to present the distorted and bogus version created by Maureen Orth.”

Showrunner Ryan Murphy responded to the family’s criticism, telling THR that Donatella Versace’s actions seemed to indicate she wasn’t entirely displeased with the series. “Donatella Versace sent Penelope Cruz [who portrays her in Versace] a very large arrangement of flowers when she was representing the show at the Golden Globes,” he said. “I don’t know if she is going to watch the show, but if she did, I think she would see that we treat her and her family with respect and kindness, and she really is sort of a feminist role model in my book because she had to step into an impossible situation, which she did with grace and understanding.”

But regardless of Versace’s status, the fact that he overcame a serious illness and was excited about his life provides a sharp contrast to the desperation of Cunanan’s outlook.

“To me if you look at just the facts of his illness, he did get very sick at that time, and he did recover at the time of the new [HIV/AIDS] drug therapy. So it does seem to fit that,” Smith said. “But even all that aside, what I found most amazing about it is this is a guy that came so close to death, and still clung on. He really fought for life. Life was very important to him. Contrast it with someone who gave up, and someone who was beaten by circumstance. And what’s interesting in some of the reactions was, ‘Oh, he’s the killer. He must have AIDS.’ Actually, Andrew didn’t have it.”

Cunanan (played by Glee alum Darren Criss) shot Versace as he returned from his morning walk to the newsstand, something the designer did regularly when he was staying in Florida — even when he was sick.

“Gianni did the walk to the magazine store in Miami often. Once he did it when he was so sick he could barely make it that couple of blocks. He was carrying the magazines back, and he couldn’t even hold them. That morning [of his death] when he walks, he’s so alive again. It’s really powerful to think that he must’ve been like, ‘This life is great,’ and he can do that walk and carry the magazines. And then Andrew comes up,” Smith said. “It’s really terrible when you look at those two. I thought that was a really powerful part of his story, so that was why we did it.”

Edgar Ramirez, who plays the late designer, did not contact the Versace family for both legal and personal reasons when he was preparing to take on the part in theMurphy-produced drama.

“What this family went through was a horrible tragedy, and I would understand [not wanting to discuss it], had it been my case to be contacted to talk about something that caused so much pain and also was infused with so much misrepresentation, prejudice, and so much stigma and confusion,” Ramirez told THR. “I was lucky enough to have people who were very very close to Gianni to talk to me and to open to me. They were the ones that were very generous to me.”

Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico, did speak to the man he portrays, and said he now counts the designer among his friends. But before they spoke, he simply wanted to get a small amount of justice for Versace’s murder, a crime he says shouldn’t have even happened in the first place.

“There’s so much injustice,” he told THR. “Why did we allow it to happen when this killer was on a killing spree for weeks, killing gay men? He was on the list of the FBI’s most wanted. He was not hiding. Why did it happen? Just the fact that we are still dealing with this level of ignorance frustrates me.”

As a gay man, he wanted to bring the story not only of the homophobia that contributed to Versace’s death, but the struggle he faced in his life.

“The fact that someone as successful and as powerful as Gianni Versace was struggling to come out of the closet, it was like, give me a break,” Martin said. “That was in 1997, but I know now in 2018, there are men and women that are still struggling with this kind of fear, of their career going to collapse if they come out. Everybody’s going to hate them at home if they come out. It is sad. But it was important for me to be vocal about how unjust life is for some of us. I’m so lucky, but it’s not right. Something needs to be done.”

How FX’s ‘Versace’ Tackles Homophobia and the Family’s Main Point of Contention

Visiting Versace’s Miami, Where the Memories Haven’t Faded

Tony Magaldi corrects the record about one Gianni Versace anecdote that has persisted all these years: The designer did not eat breakfast at News Café the morning of his death on July 15, 1997. “His routine was to visit our newsstand in the morning and buy out-of-town papers; once in a while he had coffee with us,” explains Magaldi, managing partner of the iconic 24-hour café on Miami’s South Beach. “But he rarely ate here; he had his own chef at home.”

News Café will be one of the locations seen when American Crime Story:The Assassination of Gianni Versace premieres Jan. 17 on FX, but the script doesn’t put the designer there on that fateful day. “I thought they might re-enact when he came in that last day, but it was another scene,” says Magaldi, who recalls standing on the café’s front steps on that July 1997 morning. “I remember how hot it was – July in Miami, you know? He came in, bought his papers and left. Not long after, a cop came by on his bicycle and asked if Versace had been here, and I said yeah, I had just seen him. And then he sped off. It’s one of those days you don’t forget.”

Memories of Gianni Versace have not faded in South Beach over the two decades since Andrew Cunanan shot and killed the designer, who was just 50 years old, on the steps of Casa Casuarina. Versace had purchased the South Beach mansion for $2.95 million in 1992 and lovingly converted it into not only his personal residence but also one of the world’s most celebrated examples of Italian Baroque splendor (it’s now a luxury hotel). Versace’s big-picture vision in this endeavor shouldn’t be underestimated: In 1992 South Beach still felt undeniably dingy and largely underdeveloped, dotted with faded Art Deco buildings occupied by senior citizens, many of whom spent their mornings (before the sun rose to sizzling temperatures) in lawn chairs on the porches of these forgotten hotels; locals had dubbed it “God’s waiting room.” But with News Café as a buzzy spot at Eighth Street and Ocean Drive, Casa Casuarina situated between 11th and 12th streets, and now-legendary hotels like the Clevelander, the Carlyle (used as a location for 1996’s The Birdcage and now a condo building) and the Tides (where portions of 1999’s Random Hearts were filmed) nearby, not to mention considerable help from the fashion and modeling industries, the oceanfront avenue evolved within less than a decade into one of the world’s most glamorous vacation spots.

These days you will find plenty of onlookers at the gates of Casa Casuarina; the numbers have not diminished after all these years. “We have literally thousands of people taking photos in front of the house each week — it’s actually the third most-photographed home in the U.S., after Graceland and the White House,” maintains Chauncey Copeland, general manager of the property, now the Villa Casa Casuarina, a boutique hotel, restaurant and event space owned by Victor Hotels Management since 2013.

American Crime Story execs contacted both Magaldi and Victor Hotels Management early in 2017 when they were getting set to film this latest installment of the Ryan Murphy-produced anthology. A miniseries highlighting the devastation and after-effects of Hurricane Katrina had been planned, but as the 20th anniversary of Versace’s murder approached, this story — broken into 10 episodes and based on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History — was pushed to the front of the line. The News Café scene was filmed in just one day in May 2017. “They needed a couple of days prior to that, because just the month before we actually had closed down the newsstand; everyone is always on their phones these days, so we didn’t really need it anymore,” Magaldi says. “But they did a great job bringing everything back to what it looked like at that time.”

The production took over Casa Casuarina, meanwhile, for the entire month, Copeland says. “At one point I know they were going back and forth about how they could re-create things as best they could on a Hollywood lot,” he notes. “But then they realized how little we had changed the environments, and they got very excited about filming on site. They didn’t have to do very much to it: They switched out some courtyard furniture for something more of that era, added some vintage chaise lounges by the pool, repainted the gate the color Versace originally had it, and removed some exit signs that are required because we’re a hotel. That’s really it.”

Indeed, it would have been costly to reproduce Versace’s vision on a soundstage. After he purchased the property, the designer reportedly spent $33 million on restoring and enhancing the original 1930 building, which had been conceptualized by Alden Freeman, an architect and heir to the Standard Oil fortune. Casa Casuarina, which takes its name from the species of tree Freeman regretfully razed while constructing his home, had changed hands and fallen into disrepair over the years; it was a dilapidated apartment building with 24 units when Versace discovered it during a South Beach vacation (among the elements that charmed him was a 1928 statue known as Kneeling Aphrodite, installed long ago by Freeman and currently positioned at the front entrance). Versace combined the building’s 24 units into an Italianate villa with 10 bedroom suites; after purchasing and tearing down the property next door, he added both a new wing and a garden with a 54-foot, mosaic-lined pool.

Those 10 bedroom suites remain largely unchanged, Copeland says. Donatella Versace removed furniture, artwork and other personal items, putting most of it on the auction block at Sotheby’s in 2001 after selling Casa Casuarina in 2000 to telecom millionaire Peter Loftin, who tried to make a go of the property as a private club. The current owners painstakingly examined books and old magazine layouts in an effort to reproduce Gianni Versace’s original interiors. “We combed through old photos and available film stock and also spoke with people who had worked with him on the design,” Copeland says. “There were several pieces we had to re-create, but we wanted to be faithful to his original vision.”(It should be noted that Donatella Versace has disavowed the miniseries; on Monday the Italian label released a statement affirming that no one connected with Versace authorized Orth’s book or the resulting screenplay, and that the miniseries should be considered “a work of fiction.”)

During high season — October through April — booking one of the suites can be tough, especially if you want to stay in the connected two-bedroom Villa and Empire suites; Versace slept in the former, which is adjacent to the latter via a lavish vestibule. The decor is as opulent as you might expect, with details ranging from frescoes to double-king beds that stretch 12 feet across. Rates for any of the 10 suites range from $899 to $1,599 per night during the slower summer months on up to $1,399 to $2,999 during high-occupancy periods. Hotel guests also are able to swim in the ultra-glamorous pool, but only until 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. “That’s when we start to set up the restaurant, with tables on the pool deck,” Copeland explains. “On Monday, when the restaurant is closed, you can swim all day.”

Rechristened Gianni’s in 2016, the restaurant features a menu that showcases Mediterranean seafood and is helmed by executive chef Thomas Stewart, who cooked dinner for the James Beard Foundation at Casa Casuarina soon after taking over the kitchen. In addition to the dining room, tables spill over onto a raised terrace and the aforementioned pool deck (during high season, tables also are positioned in the galleries leading to various dining areas). And regardless of season, don’t expect to walk in without a reservation; the privacy of the property remains strictly guarded. “Anyone with a reservation is of course welcome to enter,” Copeland says. “We’re very protective of the space, but that’s also for the enjoyment of our guests.”

Ultimately, with the premiere of the miniseries a week away, has Casa Casuarina been feeling any effects from, say, the release of various trailers, which make it clear that Versace’s beloved South Beach residence was used to its full advantage? “We’ve been on a steady rise in interest the past few years, so it’s really hard to say,” Copeland says. “A lot of people, however, still don’t know that they can stay here and eat here; I have no doubt that interest will increase within the next few months.”

Twenty years later, Magaldi is happy that News Café patrons still seek out the site because of its connection to the most famous neighbor he’ll ever know — not because it’s good for business, though that idea is undeniable, but very simply because he genuinely liked Gianni Versace. “He was very gentle, quiet, unassuming,” Magaldi says. “Everything I saw about the [miniseries] production was that they were trying to be respectful to his memory. That was important to anyone who was here when it happened. That made me feel good about doing it.”

Copeland agrees. “If they bring to film what we saw them doing, I think it’s going to be a very high-quality production,” he says. “From our point of view, what Gianni Versace brought to South Beach was nothing less than heroic. He established himself right here in the middle of things when it was still very edgy and unknown. What happened was a tragedy. But we’ll always feel it’s important to celebrate the man.”

Visiting Versace’s Miami, Where the Memories Haven’t Faded

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’: TV Review

The bottom line: Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez take a backseat to Darren Criss in a juicy if uneven saga.

The scope of the “trial of the century” — its racial and economic implications and the fact that it featured one of the country’s most famous people and played out on national television — made the O.J. Simpson saga a logical choice as the backdrop for Ryan Murphy’s first American Crime Storyseason.

The anthology’s second installment, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, has to work a little harder to make what is certainly a portrait of the bedsore-ridden underbelly of the American Dream feel like a match. Adapted from Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors by London Spy creator Tom Rob Smith, The Assassination of Gianni Versace juggles three storylines and an innovative crimes-in-reverse structure in a way that yields a disturbing character study and an assortment of strong performances. Still, through eight of the nine episodes, it isn’t quite as convincing or thematically unified as The People v. O. J. Simpson.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins in Miami in July 1997 with a contrast. Italian fashion icon Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) lives in a beachfront villa oozing opulence from its palatial bathrooms to its gaping closets to the man-servants practically lining the hallways and the poolside terraces. Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) reads books about this world, but in reality he’s falling apart physically and mentally. Before the Murphy-directed premiere is 10 minutes old, he has sought both symbolic rebirth in the ocean and notoriety by approaching Versace at his front gate and shooting him dead.

In the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, the pilot follows Cunanan as he flees the authorities, Versace’s longtime partner Antonio (Ricky Martin) as he grieves and Versace’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz) as she arrives and tries to hold the empire together. Subsequent episodes work backward, somewhat Memento-style, following Cunanan back through each step of his multi-state killing spree, sometimes paralleling his journey with key steps in Gianni’s career and the building of his own brand and his own outsider identity.

A third thread, one insufficiently developed or explored, involves the failure of local, state and federal law enforcement to stop Cunanan, a debacle the series wants to connect to institutional homophobia, with limited success. This is the part of the story that feels most like the process-oriented People v. O.J. Simpson and the part that most viewers probably won’t even notice. The series does well with “What a difference 20 years makes” glimpses at how being gay, and openly gay, impacted the way people lived their lives in 1997. But there’s a leap to how that led to different treatment under the law that I believe completely in theory, but not at all in how it’s executed here. It’s also going to be tough to make audiences invest in procedural storylines led by Will Chase, Dascha Polanco and Jay Ferguson when there are movie stars playing famous people nearby.

Battling and largely overcoming a series of increasingly youthful hairpieces, Ramirez nails Versace’s soft-spoken genius and he has good chemistry with a surprisingly sturdy, emotional Martin. My wariness that Cruz was perhaps overdoing Dontella’s accent and mumble lasted until I watched one YouTube clip and suddenly I was astounded by how well she’s evoking the real woman’s transfixing oddness. The thing to know about these big name characters and performances is that they’re decidedly supporting roles. Multiple episodes include either no Versace or a couple brief flashbacks, but if you’re FX you can’t push The Assassination of Gianni Versace by boasting that Aussie actor Codie Fern, solidly playing Cunanan victim David Madson, has more dialogue than Ramirez or that M*A*S*H veteran Mike Farrell, as Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, is nearly as important as Cruz.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is mostly Andrew Cunanan’s story and that’s unsettling, because the archetype of the duplicitous, code-switching gay killer has long been one of Hollywood’s most negative depictions — and Smith’s reverse chronological structure means that Cunanan is introduced as a murderer before the series gradually backtracks into matters of motivation, and we generally only get to know his victims as humans in the episodes after we saw them become corpses. It’s a challenge of dramatic irony, seeing if you can make viewers find a path to empathizing with a man previously depicted as a remorseless killer or to challenge us to feel grief for dispatched strangers and then tell us why their death was a loss. It mirrors coverage of the story, in which the celebrity casualty at the end of the spree turned Cunan’s other victims, and his own story, into footnotes beneath the Versace headline.

While the Simpson season had the advantage of story with all of the built-in beats of a twisty trial and character details wrought from countless first-hand accounts, Smith has both less plot and fewer resources to work with. The structure is a reasonably effective cover for the linear variety, inserting practical mysteries — How did he meet that person? Where did he get that car? — and turning characters into riddles to be solved. With only an outsider’s perspective on Cunanan, though, the arc he chooses is both plausible and very conventional. Expectations and sense-of-self warped by a disturbing childhood — Jon Jon Briones is dynamite as Cunan’s father in a late episode — Andrew bucks his limited upward mobility through reinvention and through the construction of an American Dream facade until the lies and manipulation become self-deception. Criss plays it to the hilt, leaving constant questions as to how much control Andrew even has, but his whole arc has the feel of familiar fiction and not granular fact. Especially in the middle hours, in which Andrew is still only part-analyzed and the Versace story is an afterthought, it feels like you’re watching a padded adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley and a thin reading of a real person.

Even when the portrait of Andrew isn’t enlightening or you aren’t sure you want this guy justified at all, The Assassination of Gianni Versace offers frequent pleasures. Production designer Judy Becker relishes the gold-leafed opulence of Versace’s world, but she’s just as enamored with the lurid stucco of a Miami flophouse or the cold sterility of a Minneapolis loft. And although Murphy isn’t on quite the same “Everybody’s a star” casting power trip as he was on OJ, he still gets great drop-in work from a career-redefining Farrell, the reliably superb Judith Light and, perhaps best of all, Max Greenfield, almost unrecognizably twitchy and emaciated as the Ratso Rizzo to Cunanan’s Joe Buck in the season’s second episode.

Although I had my doubts when I started, The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows why Murphy and company thought this was a story worth telling in this anthology. The tragic meeting of Gianni Versace, embodiment of the American Dream, and Andrew Cunanan, protean warper of the American Dream, holds up thematically if not always in the telling of the tale.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’: TV Review

‘American Crime Story’ Costume Designer on Creating Versace Wardrobe Without Help From Versace

One of the most hotly anticipated TV projects of the new year, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story comes to FX Jan. 17. Ryan Murphy’s series tells the story of serial killer Andrew Cunanan’s cross-country killing rampage, which culminated in his murder of Italian fashion designer Versace on the steps of his Miami villa on July 15, 1997, and offers a window into the gilded lifestyle brand he created, which at the time of his death counted Princess Diana, Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley as fans.

Costume designer Lou Eyrich (who also worked on Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan) was charged with creating ‘90s-era Miami “heat and sizzle,” as she calls it, including rococo-style Medusa head print shirts and loungewear for Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) and hand-studded leather jackets, skin-tight jodhpur leggings and vibrant silk gowns for sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), who took over the business after his death.

And she had to do it without any help from the actual fashion house of Versace, which is not involved in the project.

Instead, Eyrich and her team bought up hundreds of pieces of vintage Versace from dealers around the world, including The Way We Wore and Catwalk in Los Angeles and C Madeleinesin Miami. “I think we drove the prices up,” she says, adding, “We were on the Internet 12 hours a day.”

“Miami was party city in the ‘90s. It was very bodycon dresses, tank tops, short shorts and heels, hot pastels, and a lot of skin on the boys as well as the girls,” says Eyrich.

What she couldn’t find or afford (the original Versace chainmail gowns, for example, were too expensive), she recreated. “We were cautious to make it look as amazing as it could to honor the house of Versace and Donatella, so we tried to use the best silk, and when we used safety pins as a decorative element, we had them plated in gold,” says Eyrich, explaining that Cruz is friends with Donatella Versace, and has worn many of her designs, so it was very important to her to be respectful.

For a pink silk, curve-hugging evening dress, for example, “we collaborated with Penelope on the design. We wanted her to look uber-sexy, so it’s corseted and skin-baring. We were inspired by a Versace design from 1996, but it’s not an exact replica because we didn’t want to rip them off. First of all, that’s not legal, but also we didn’t want to insult them.”

Gianni’s wardrobe is resplendent with print pajamas and loungewear, which he wore around his mansion, Casa Casuarina, where the crew was able to film. “Ryan said make a pink bathrobe, so we did,” says Eyrich, adding that the director was very specific about how he wanted the designer to walk through the halls of his home, trailing flowing silk behind him.

“Ryan is such a visual person, he wanted to show the opulent world of the Versace estate in opposition to Andrew Cunanan’s upbringing,” explains Eyrich, who describes Cunanan as a gigolo and his style as “West Coast preppy aspiring to look rich.”

There’s even a scene of the designer’s final fashion show in 1997, for which Eyrich painstakingly recreated 17 looks that came down the catwalk. “How he cut for women was just exquisite,” she says, adding that just as they were wrapping production in September, Donatella staged her own supermodel-studded 20^th anniversary tribute to her brother’s style during Milan Fashion Week, paying homage to many of the original design codes of the house, including color, print and yes, chainmail. “We said, ‘Oh my god!’ How perfect.”

‘American Crime Story’ Costume Designer on Creating Versace Wardrobe Without Help From Versace

“I grew up in a home that embraced outdoorsmanship as a form of male bonding, so that type of language and shared space was something that I understood from the time I was a little kid,” Bomer tells The Hollywood Reporter, who called from the set of his directorial debut, an episode in the forthcoming American Crime Story: Versace. (Of the latter, he couldn’t give away any plot details but did praise the cast and crew, calling the experience “an unbelievable honor.”)

Matt Bomer interview for The Hollywood Reporter | 13 October 2017