American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
No series this year has a closer relationship between its form and its function than The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the second volume of Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology drama, American Crime Story. Written entirely by Tom Rob Smith, the nine-episode season tracks the murders of the world-famous designer and four other victims by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), a gay man who envied Versace’s lifestyle but lacked any of the positive qualities that earned it. Assassination disarms the audience by starting where many assumed it would end, with Cunanan shooting Versace on the steps of his South Beach mansion. Smith then moves backward in time and broader in focus than the celebrity who serves as its Trojan horse, giving the three other gay men who died at Cunanan’s hands their own extended eulogies. Assassination is one of the more damning portrayals of cultural and internalized homophobia ever dramatized; by withholding an origin story for Andrew until the very end, the show throws the spotlight not just on his victims, but on the society that created him. No wonder it didn’t become a smash hit. — Herman
Tag: the ringer
Should Phil Collins Be Celebrated or Vilified?
One of the most memorable scenes from The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, FX’s brilliant and underwatched 2018 miniseries, concerns Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) and a wealthy older man who thinks he has hired Cunanan to have sex with him in his Miami hotel room. What the man doesn’t know is that Cunanan is a fugitive serial killer who will soon murder the world’s most famous fashion designer. Cunanan has decided to torture his would-be john with some duct tape, a pair of scissors, and “Easy Lover,” 1984’s hit duet that Collins performed and cowrote with Philip Bailey.
The appearance of “Easy Lover” in The Assassination of Gianni Versace reveals new layers to Cunanan as well as the song. Setting aside the obvious logistical problems — why would Cunanan pack Bailey’s Chinese Wall CD for his cross-country crime spree, on the off chance that he would want to play it during an assault? — the song perfectly spotlights how the killer’s delusional megalomania fed his increasingly homicidal behavior. Criss’s ecstatic arm-waving to this frothy pop tune, moving in time with Collins’s titanic drum beat, while his prey slowly suffocates, is both chilling and darkly comic. The walls are closing in on Cunanan, but he will not be deterred from relishing his mayhem in the meantime.
As for “Easy Lover,” The Assassination of Gianni Versace teases out the song’s dark subtext, and then completely reinvents it. At the scene’s climax, Cunanan straddles his would-be customer, raising the scissors above his head. As he plunges the blade into the duct tape covering the man’s mouth, finally allowing him to breathe, Collins’s screaming vocal lifts on the soundtrack: “You’ll be down on your knees!” Whoa. Was that in “Easy Lover” from the beginning?
Seven Nation Corny: A Check-in on Prestige TV’s Questionable Music Choices
[…] In between vintage charm and current favorites you have the ’80s period pieces. The second season of Netflix’s Stranger Things at least broadened its Ready Player One–style fetishism to encompass Kenny Rogers and Metallica, while FX’s The Americans has been around long enough to develop an intimate and rewarding relationship with Peter Gabriel. If it’s classic ’90s jams you seek, the Billions hive will gladly tell you that the Showtime high-finance drama used Counting Crows’ “Round Here” to spectacular effect as the bookend to a recent third-season episode, further elucidating “the crumbling difference between wrong and right.” And FX’s grim The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story planted its feet in both decades earlier this year, depicting a string of lurid mid-’90s murders and including an American Psycho–style scene of the killer nearly duct-taping a potential victim to death while dancing to the 1984 Philip Bailey–Phil Collins classic “Easy Lover.” Maybe keep that, too.
Seven Nation Corny: A Check-in on Prestige TV’s Questionable Music Choices
Why Didn’t ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Catch On?
American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson was an impossible act to follow. The Emmy-winning event series found a singular subject in the O.J. Simpson trial, in many ways the flash point of modern celebrity. The series also ran in the run-up to the 2016 election, when age-old American rifts from cultural misogyny to media sensationalism were once again under a harsh national spotlight. But like many of Ryan Murphy’s critically acclaimed shows, American Crime Story was announced as an anthology series—and with the successful first season of an anthology comes a promise the more traditional miniseries never has to make good on: a worthy follow-up.
After the planned second season—on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath—hit some production snags, a very different story kicked off in January. American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace had all the makings of a semi-sequel that would fit comfortably within the mood of O.J. (At the very least, the Italian fashion designer’s shocking death seemed to fit much more comfortably in Murphy’s wheelhouse than storm-stricken New Orleans.) Like O.J., Assassination focused on a high-profile case from the ’90s, recent enough to survive in the collective consciousness but long enough ago for a fictionalized account to add a new perspective. Like O.J., Assassination delved into the experience of an identity group marginalized by the American mainstream. And like O.J., Assassination saw Murphy hand over writing and the majority of directing duties to collaborators, allowing him to concentrate on his primary talents of casting and big-picture curating.
Yet the interpretation writer Tom Rob Smith delivered represents a stark departure from the bedrock principles of Murphy’s blockbuster appeal. Versace is straight-faced where Murphy’s house style is smirking, sorrowful where his oeuvre leans dramedic. Watching one disturbed individual’s vanity, entitlement, and megalomania claim life after life makes for an excruciating marathon of violence and pain, rarely leavened by the campy humor that runs throughout Murphy’s other work. For those who tuned in expecting even a typical Murphy production, not another career peak, Versace’s tone required a learning curve too steep for many to climb.
Predictably, the numbers have borne out the disparity between O.J.’s addictive spiral — and Glee’s ironic sniping, and American Horror Story’s diva-centric gore — and Versace’s mournful dirge. Versace debuted to 5.5 million viewers, fewer than half of O.J.’s extraordinary 12 million. That drop-off is partly explained by the more obscure nature of Versace’s subject; most casual onlookers, like Smith himself before he began his research, are probably unaware that Versace’s death was the culmination of a string of killings, not an isolated event. (And compared with O.J. Simpson, what isn’t obscure?) But Versace’s viewership has continued to trend downward as the season goes on, with the live audience sometimes dipping under 1 million. American Crime Story’s second installment has also lagged behind in the more nebulous, though still palpable, arena of cultural relevance. Initial critical reception was admiring, though not rapturous; in the following weeks, the conversation around the show has remained within the confines of fact-checking recaps.
Heading into the final stretch of both Versace and Murphy’s decade-plus residency at FX, it’s time to explicitly acknowledge the subtext of Versace’s relatively muted response. The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not the new The People v. O.J. Simpson; given its challenging form, lesser-known inspiration, and the sky-high expectations set by its predecessor, it’s unlikely it was ever going to be. Besides, Versace’s popular shortcomings are inextricable from its creative risks. By crafting a true-crime story to evade many of the genre’s ethical pitfalls, Murphy and Smith have delivered a season of television that stands apart from the recent wave of ripped-from-the-headlines adaptations—and largely unable to capitalize on it.
The first and most significant roadblock for viewers excited to learn more about The Assassination of Gianni Versace was that the season’s title turned out to be something of a misnomer. Assassination is as much about the other four victims of 27-year-old spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) as it is about Versace (Edgar Ramirez), whose shooting on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion occurs in Assassination’s first scene. The plot then winds, reverse-chronologically, through the violent unraveling of Cunanan’s life, with Versace sparingly deployed as contrast rather than subject. But Cunanan isn’t truly Assassination’s subject, either: a triptych of midseason chapters—“A Random Killing,” “House by the Lake,” and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—functioned more like stand-alone biopics of Cunanan’s less famous casualties than part of a larger narrative about the murderer himself.
Under Versace’s dreamlike, counterintuitive logic, the more screen time a character gets, the less the audience is allowed into their inner lives. In fewer than 50 minutes, Judith Light is able to shape grieving widow Marilyn Miglin into a self-made woman as vulnerable as she is ferocious; Smith’s script for her spotlight episode, Versace’s third, paints a complete portrait of Marilyn’s complicated, loving partnership with her closeted husband, Lee (Mike Farrell). The same holds for Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), whose contradictory identities—to the United States military, if not Jeff himself—as a soldier and a gay man are negotiated and renegotiated within a single hour. David Madson (Cody Fern) gets a spotlight that visibly works to ensure he’s not just remembered, but remembered as more than a footnote to Cunanan’s story, or even Versace’s. Each victim is quickly and convincingly developed into a complete person with hang-ups to work through and attributes to mourn.
Versace himself, meanwhile, is idealized to the point of abstraction. One of the first images Versace presents of its namesake is his corpse sprawled, Pietà -like, across the lap of his longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico. The religious parallels hardly stop there. Versace died, Smith posits, for the sins of a homophobic culture that was unable to fully accept an openly gay creative genius. The designer is a martyr, but martyrdom can be antithetical to full humanity.
No one on Versace comes across as more of an enigma, however, than the titular assassin. Such are the hazards of depicting a pathological liar, given to acts of fabulism so extreme they almost dare Cunanan’s audience to call his bluff. And dubious though it would have been, Cunanan never lived to tell his side of the story; eight days after Versace’s murder, the fugitive killed himself on a Miami houseboat, leaving his precise motivations and rationale a mystery.
Smith adds to these inherent challenges by intentionally obscuring Cunanan’s background—and along with it, any temptation to excuse Cunanan’s behavior or dilute his responsibility. A common criticism of true crime is how vulnerable its storytellers are to the seductive intrigue of the criminal. Villains are almost always more interesting than heroes, a truism that becomes fraught when the characters inhabiting those roles are based on actual people. Serial’s Sarah Koenig and The Jinx’s Andrew Jarecki both had an obvious and uncomfortable rapport with their subjects; I, Tonya all but erased the woman whose assault the movie supposedly litigated. The Assassination of Gianni Versace takes no such risk. Andrew, not Jeff Trail, is relegated to the margins. Andrew, not David Madson, is kept at arm’s length. Cunanan is no anti-hero; he’s borderline inhuman.
Unfortunately, breaking the link between main character and protagonist creates as many problems as it solves. Conceptually subversive as they might be, when consumed in real time, Versace’s structural choices make for a confounding and even alienating viewing experience with a vacuum at its center. There’s a reason so many shows give in to the temptation of valorizing their monsters: It’s hard to get an audience on board with spending hours on hours, week after week with a person who has no redeeming qualities, however fascinating their pathology or sympathetic their supporting cast.
Coming from a franchise, and a creator, that promises all the sex and violence of tabloid fare sans network censors, Versace is almost shockingly cerebral. The themes are heady and high-minded—the damage wrought by homophobia on and within the gay men community; how the closet can manifest as ignorance as well as oppression—with a meditative rollout to match. In the binge-watching era, such a protracted, patient rollout can prove fatal; I’m not sure I myself would have stuck with Versace long enough to reap its rewards if FX hadn’t made the majority of the season available to critics in advance.
Many true-crime stories start with a well-known event and purport to uncover some new angle. Versace is working with events much of its demographic isn’t aware happened in the first place, assuming the mantle of educating as well as storytelling. In bringing the Cunanan victims into focus at Cunanan’s own expense, Smith and Murphy have made a trade-off between moral clarity and entertainment value. I’ve found their gamble has paid off, even if the swap isn’t one every viewer has been willing to make. Taking on a sociopath’s point of view may put a series in a compromised position as an adaptation of true events. It may also be essential for a show to succeed as entertainment.
In ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace,’ the Camera Stays on the Victims
When Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) and David Madson (Cody Fern) return to the latter’s sleek, minimalist apartment, something is immediately amiss. David’s dog is tied to a coffee table, and their mutual friend Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) is waiting unseen across the hallway. That’s when it happens: Andrew snaps. He bludgeons Jeff with a hammer, blood spraying everywhere. David (and his poor dog) can only look on in horror from the other side of the room; as most of this unfolds, the camera remains affixed to David’s terrified expression. Blood occasionally splashes on his face.
Gruesome scenes like this one at the start of “House by the Lake,” the fourth episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, are a familiar sight for a medium that’s been historically obsessed with killers. But each portrayal is different, and how a TV series depicts a murder tells you a lot about its intentions. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal turned many of its deaths into baroque pieces of bloody art, relishing in the creative ways victims could be disposed (death by electric eel is definitely … different). On the opposite side of the spectrum was Dexter, whose eponymous serial killer would do just about the same thing every time — a calculated routine devised over decades that carried out like an everyday chore. As for Versace, Cunanan’s murder of Jeff Trail is the beginning of a violent, agenda-driven killing spree.
Because Versace plays out almost entirely in reverse chronology — beginning in the premiere with the fashion mogul’s death at the hands of Cunanan before the opening title comes into view — the audience knows we’re seeing is Cunanan’s first murder, despite it being the final one presented onscreen. The show continuously folds into itself, in the process delving into Cunanan, studying how and when the seeds were planted before they blossomed into this narcissistic, entitled, and dangerous personality.
However, what makes Versace a unique presence in an ever-crowded television landscape has less to do with its Nolanesque chronology or its insidious killer than it does how much attention the show dedicates to the people who were killed, the lives that were affected by these murders, and how a society plagued with systemic homophobia enabled Cunanan to claim five total victims — culminating in the death of Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramírez) on the steps of his opulent mansion. By devoting screentime to Versace and Cunanan’s lesser-known victims — with the exception of William Reese, whose death was the result of a man being in the wrong place at the wrong time — the show empathizes with the discrimination each faced as a gay man in ’90s America and the institutions that failed them. In Versace, there’s more than one killer.
The fifth episode of the season, which aired Wednesday night, flashes back to Trail’s first meeting with Cunanan, in addition to his time as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The title of the episode, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” is self-evident, and Trail suffers from the Clintonian policy. When one gay soldier offers to out other gay military members who frequent a well-known hookup spot as part of a deal to avoid dishonorable discharge, Trail uses a knife to remove his biggest identifier, a tattoo on his leg. The closest Trail gets to coming out is agreeing to be interviewed by a news program for a “don’t ask, don’t tell” package. Trail’s experience in the episode is juxtaposed with that of Versace’s coming out in a magazine interview with The Advocate. As Versace is invited to a glitzy hotel suite to sit down for a cover story alongside his partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), Trail meets his interviewer in an unbecoming motel room, his face is shrouded in darkness to avoid identification. It’s less of a coming out than an affirmation that he needs to stay in the closet — or leave the Navy entirely.
Versace makes his decision to come out in spite of his sister, Donatella (Penélope Cruz), who pleads with him to reconsider for the sake of the financial future of their business. The show paints this less as a success of the individual than an indictment on just how large you have to be to avoid public discrimination — coming out might be OK, so long as you’re a multimillion-dollar fashion designer. How the gay men of Versace react to societal homophobia affects them in wildly contrasting ways — Versace sits atop a fashion empire, while Cunanan, fixated and jealous of the designer’s rarified experience, becomes a con man and, eventually, a spree-killer targeting other gay men. Then there’s someone like Trail, suffocating from the effects of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” “I can’t help feeling that by talking to you it’s the end of my career,” he tells his motel room interviewer. “But maybe my career actually died a long time ago.”
Cunanan leverages this rampant homophobia against both Trail and Madson. He sends Trail’s family a letter addressed to him that heavily implies their son is gay while he’s still closeted, trying to force his hand. And after killing Trail in Madson’s apartment in “House by the Lake,” Cunanan convinces Madson that calling the cops is the worst possible idea — he’s a gay man with a dead body in his apartment, who are they going to believe? — and that they need to run off together. Cunanan preys upon these men’s insecurities, using society’s homophobia as a trap, while also seemingly lashing out because of it.
Trail, Madson, the Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) from Versace’s third episode — these are tragic figures, undone by shame brought upon by outdated norms. Seeing them broken down in reverse chronology, knowing they’ll fall victim to Cunanan, makes it all the more heartbreaking. That Versace devotes the time necessary to show how these characters were victims — specifically to a rage-filled spree killer and more broadly to a repressive society — speaks to what the series cares about. Versace could luxuriate in the violent, sociopathic tendencies of Cunanan, or, as more befitting of creator Ryan Murphy, envelope itself in Versace’s elegant, campy world of fashion, but it doesn’t. At times Versace might be more interesting to think about than to watch unfold onscreen, but the series’ intentions — much like its time-bending narrative — are a particularly unique sight on television, and especially among crime shows.
In ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace,’ the Camera Stays on the Victims
How ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Looks Beyond Its Subject
The titular event of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story happens within the first 10 minutes of the nine-hour show. It’s a beautiful day in South Beach, i.e., a normal day in South Beach, and the legendary designer is on his way home to the man he loves. He’s returned from his daily outing to fetch some magazines, unlocking the gates to a mansion that’s unabashedly ostentatious, just like him. Then there are two gunshots, and in between, Versace’s final word: “No.”
And so Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series dispatches with the version of the story many critics and viewers anticipated: a celebration of a proudly over-the-top titan of fashion, brought to you by a proudly over-the-top titan of TV. That was the expectation set by an Entertainment Weekly cover showcasing Edgar Ramírez as Versace, Penélope Cruz as his sister Donatella, and Ricky Martin as his longtime partner Antonio D’Amico; long before that, it was the reputation afforded by Murphy’s decade-plus of vamping, shark jumping, and general sensibility offending. From the mind that conceived of Nip/Tuck, a retro-ish Florida crime romp even felt like a return to the very form that gave Murphy his start in prestige TV.
Instead, it turns out, Assasination is less about Versace than the five-murder spree that concluded in his gruesome death in July 1997 at the hands of a disturbed young gay man named Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). This season of American Crime Story begins with the splashiest, most tabloid-friendly part of its narrative and pulls the audience backward into a deeper, sadder story, the majority of whose casualties are much less famous than Versace but no less deserving of our grief and admiration.
“All I knew — as, I think, will be true for most of the audience — was that Versace was shot in Miami on the steps of his house, and I knew the houseboat siege [where Cunanan died by suicide after an eight-day manhunt]. And that was it,” recalls screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who wrote all nine chapters of Assassination. Then producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson approached him about adapting the Versace story for the second season of the nascent American Crime Story, which had yet to achieve blockbuster success with its first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson. The more Smith researched the Cunanan story, the more he found lying beyond its infamous climax: “I was really taken aback at how [the Versace murder] was really just the tip of this iceberglike structure that went down into this road movie across America, the American Dream, ambition, [and] homophobia.”
Such a broad focus doesn’t mean that Assassination has been warmly received by the Versace family itself, which has greeted the series with the same condemnation it extended to Vulgar Favors, the 1999 book about the Cunanan killings by Vanity Fair contributing writer Maureen Orth. “As we have said, the Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about the death of Mr. Gianni Versace, which should only be considered as a work of fiction,” read a statement issued last week. “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.”
Long before the family denounced the series, however, Smith had to figure out how to replicate his own experience of being drawn into the Cunanan saga for a larger audience, presumably as ignorant of the lead-up to the Versace killing as he was. So he decided to leverage that ignorance to his advantage, using Versace’s murder as an entry point into a larger story rather than an end in itself. “You start with the thing that everyone knows, and then you guide them backward through the bits that they don’t know,” Smith explains. His approach to the script “became about how we understand the case, myself included, which was that we didn’t understand it.”
Such thinking gave rise to Assassination’s highly unorthodox structure: a reverse-chronological account of Cunanan’s unraveling and its consequences, with every episode moving further back in time from the eponymous event. Along the way, most of Cunanan’s victims get their own spotlight installments, making Assassination almost an anthology within an anthology: A Chicago real estate titan’s dedicated wife throws herself into preserving his legacy. A promising Minneapolis architect comes to terms with his father, who loves his son even as he struggles to understand him. A gay ex-soldier wrestles with the dual identities that the Clinton-era military has ruled to be mutually exclusive.
The result is the only Murphy-associated production that could conceivably be described as “slow,” methodically pausing and pulling apart the action to make space for people whose names have largely been lost to history, except as a footnote to Versace’s sensational death. Though Cunanan is the thread that unites these men and undoubtedly Assassination’s central figure, it isn’t quite accurate to say the show is a character study, at least until its final stretch of episodes, because the viewer watches his monstrous actions without any background information that can excuse or even explain them. “We wanted to say that the victims are the heroes of those episodes. They are the central characters,” Smith says. “Cunanan, in a weird way, is this kind of vortex, a dark abyss. Once he starts killing people, he crosses a line, and he isn’t really human in a way that we understand.” Cunanan’s inscrutability can make Assassination an excruciating watch, but the show consistently foregrounds the killed over their killer.
Versace remains in the picture via flashback throughout the season, albeit mostly as a foil to Cunanan, a habitual liar who uses his looks and extravagant inventions to place himself in proximity to wealth and power. “To me, the shape of the story was always how these two people grow up to be so different,” Smith observes. “They struggle with many of the same issues: homophobia, ambition, being the outsider. One conquers all these problems and becomes this great creator and great celebrator of life. One is beaten and ends up ripping down other people’s success.” Assassination’s view of Versace is almost beatific, holding up the designer as a paragon of vivacity, commitment, and creative genius. Cunanan is a parasite — in the words of one astute observer, “too lazy to work, too proud to be kept.” Versace, on the other hand, is both generative and generous.
Assassination’s flattering presentation of Versace represents an expansion of his presence in Orth’s report, which Smith was tasked with fictionalizing into compelling dramatic television while also doing justice to his real subjects. “It weighs very heavily on you,” Smith says of his first experience writing true crime. (Smith has written four crime novels, including Child 44, and a BBC miniseries, London Spy.) “It’s a great responsibility. These are such amazing people, and I always felt a great sense of privilege to get to know them a little.” Still, there were passages when Smith was obligated to make use of creative license, like the multiday stretch from David Madson’s abduction to his eventual murder. In those cases, Smith says, he did his best to extrapolate from the known facts “in support of those larger truths.” We may not know exactly what Madson and Cunanan said to each other, but we know where each man was coming from, and where they ended up. On Cunanan’s end, “There was some sense that he was in some upside-down, sick way trying to extend the relationship that had long since ended”; on Madson’s, “that was a mix of both fear for your life, but also a sense of, If you go to the police, will they believe you?” From that dynamic, Smith draws almost the entirety of Assassination’s horrific, elegiac fourth episode.
Then there was the biography of Versace himself. One of the Versace family’s principal objections to Vulgar Favors is its assertion that Gianni was HIV-positive, a claim that Orth says is backed up by accounts from the Miami police and is written into the show as canon. “It’s interesting; the book was written in a certain period of time, when things were considered shameful which are now not,” Smith reflects. “I thought we were really trying to undermine [the stigma], and break away all those assumptions. … That was the reason we decided to put that in, as opposed to being salacious or engaging in gossip. Versace was this great breaker-down of convention. He was one of the first out gay celebrities, and he was living with his partner for 15 years. It’s something we celebrate. He represented love in a way that Andrew didn’t.”
Assassination’s handling of HIV is just one dimension of how the show sets out to tell a specifically gay story, looking back on the repression of the ’90s from the more progressive, though by no means perfect, climate of 2018. At the time, Cunanan’s and Versace’s sexuality gave the murder’s media coverage a condescending, almost sadistic edge. In his review of Vulgar Favors for The New York Times, Frank Bruni accused Orth of titillation, though Smith puts it more diplomatically: “At some point, [the book] reads very much like an outsider commenting on a world of which they’re not part, and sometimes that can make you seem quite removed from it. … It’s not contesting some of the descriptions of what’s going on; it’s just saying that some of the words lacked a sense of what the wider picture might have been, emotionally, behind some of these scenarios.”
Conversely, Assassination is not an outsider’s perspective on what it means to be gay in a culture openly hostile to your identity; with the benefit of Smith and Murphy’s insights, the show depicts both a broader culture of homophobia and the tools that helped Versace weather the storm of coming out (namely, his wealth and public acclaim). “The options were, either you’re as successful as Versace … [or] you have to be in the closet,” Smith says. “There were so few options and ways of exploring in this world. I think fundamentally, if you boil it down, it’s a survival show: What decisions do you make to survive in society?” Many people didn’t, and with empathy and hindsight, Assassination aims to explore why.
With two gay men serving as writer and executive producer, Assassination stands out even in TV’s rapidly diversifying landscape for the specificity of its story and the nuance of its psychological observations, however cut-and-dry Cunanan’s grandiose pathology. The season makes for a fascinating follow-up to Feud: Bette and Joan, another potentially high-camp Murphy production that surprised many with its grounded approach. Assassination is also an intriguing prelude to Pose, the ’80s-set New York drama that will break the record for the most trans actors in series regular roles on a single show and presents an opportunity to extend this more somber trend into a new phase of Murphy’s career. Whatever one thinks of Murphy’s infamously maximalist style, the mega-showrunner (Assassination is his second major launch of the month) has played an undeniable role in pluralizing the faces and voices on our televisions.
“I think Ryan is big on telling stories that aren’t told, that have been ignored by people,” Smith says early in our conversation. “This is certainly one of them.” In this sense, Assassination is the opposite of its predecessor. Nearly two years ago, The People v. O.J. took the most over-covered case in the world and confronted the audience with what it had still managed to miss. The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows us what’s allowed to fester when we condemn an entire segment of the population to the dark — and in the process, makes a forceful argument for bringing both bad and good into the light. “Andrew didn’t kill [these people] randomly,” Smith notes. “He was very much motivated by jealousy, and the good that they represented. When you’re telling the story, you feel like you’re celebrating their lives.”
How ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Looks Beyond Its Subject
Give Judith Light an Emmy for Her Guest Spot on ‘American Crime Story’
“They killed my husband for a car.”
That is what Home Shopping Network star Marilyn Miglin, played by Judith Light, tells her viewing audience at the end of the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. It’s what the rest of the world was told as well: Her husband, Chicago real estate magnate Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), was the unfortunate victim of a random act of violence. Tragic, but most important, random.
The real story behind Miglin’s murder is much more complicated and multifaceted—there’s compelling evidence that Miglin knew his murderer, spree killer Andrew Cunanan (as portrayed in Versace by a terrifying Darren Criss). Not only that, Miglin was quite likely a client of Cunanan, who was a high-end escort for gay men. Following her husband’s murder, the most important thing to Marilyn is perception, and the lengths necessary to preserve a certain outward facade that’s falling apart.
As a dramatized account of Cunanan’s killing spree, Versace has the liberty to put the implied pieces together as follows. Miglin’s corpse was gruesomely left for show, spread out alongside gay porn magazines; Cunanan put women’s underwear on Miglin postmortem. The Miglins were a powerful couple well connected with the cops, and therefore, Marilyn is able to keep the details of her husband’s death—and the heavy implication that he was a closeted gay man—private.
The weight of this juxtaposition that the Versace viewer is privy to—public versus private—and the excruciating burden of keeping those two things separate, falls almost entirely on Judith Light’s performance. Her face is how Versace communicates its central theme, the way a systemic, internalized homophobia and suppression of truth allowed a killer like Cunanan to break free, and the devastating way that affected the lives of people such as Marilyn. It’s not every day that a show gives a guest actor this level of responsibility, but Versace does, and Light is up to the task. “A Random Killing” aired on the last day of January; we’re barely into the second month of 2018. But with her portrayal of Marilyn Miglin, Judith Light has already wrapped up the Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.
Since this episode, like most of the Versace season, is chronologically all over the place, we see Marilyn at different points, before and after the death of her husband. Even while Lee is alive, Marilyn’s expression is consistently poignant. The Miglins have built a successful life, but there’s a distance between them, an unspoken secret; something that feels like it’s been festering for decades.
Versace implies—again, because it can—that Marilyn probably knew, at the very least, that her husband was gay; it also implies that Miglin knew that she knew. Perhaps the most telling moment in the episode comes as the Miglins prepare for bed. Lee places his hand directly over his wife’s, somewhat platonically, and Marilyn then locks their fingers together—a more intimate embrace.
Light nails her character’s physical tics, which present Marilyn as a mess of contradictions—she seems less concerned that her husband was keeping secrets from her than with keeping the public facade of their marriage intact. When she finds out that her husband is dead—after arriving home and finding the house in a somewhat suspicious state—she whispers to herself, “I knew it.” She’s disconcertingly calm around the cops, until she breaks into tears, her makeup smearing in the process—doubling as some unsubtle but effective subtext. “How dare they say our marriage was a sham?” she chides, as Light cathartically falls apart, releasing some of her character’s suppressed emotions. “Lee and I shared our whole lives. We shared all kinds of adventures. We rode in hot air balloons. When I was lost in the desert, he rescued me. How many couples can say they have that kind of romance? I loved him. I loved him very much.”
The episode closes with Marilyn addressing Lee’s death on air. “When I first started selling my perfume on television,” she says, “my friend Dorsey Connors, who hosted her own television show, gave me a piece of advice. And she said, ‘Just think of the little red light as the man you love.’” Light’s face staring at the camera is the final image we see before the credits, unspooling the same wounded emotions she shared with the cops in private, now public.
I apologize to all other actresses set to make splashy guest appearances on television in the coming months. The Emmy belongs to Judith Light.
Give Judith Light an Emmy for Her Guest Spot on ‘American Crime Story’
How ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Looks Beyond Its Subject
The titular event of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story happens within the first 10 minutes of the nine-hour show. It’s a beautiful day in South Beach, i.e., a normal day in South Beach, and the legendary designer is on his way home to the man he loves. He’s returned from his daily outing to fetch some magazines, unlocking the gates to a mansion that’s unabashedly ostentatious, just like him. Then there are two gunshots, and in between, Versace’s final word: “No.”
And so Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series dispatches with the version of the story many critics and viewers anticipated: a celebration of a proudly over-the-top titan of fashion, brought to you by a proudly over-the-top titan of TV. That was the expectation set by an Entertainment Weekly cover showcasing Edgar Ramírez as Versace, Penélope Cruz as his sister Donatella, and Ricky Martin as his longtime partner Antonio D’Amico; long before that, it was the reputation afforded by Murphy’s decade-plus of vamping, shark jumping, and general sensibility offending. From the mind that conceived of Nip/Tuck, a retro-ish Florida crime romp even felt like a return to the very form that gave Murphy his start in prestige TV.
Instead, it turns out, Assasination is less about Versace than the five-murder spree that concluded in his gruesome death in July 1997 at the hands of a disturbed young gay man named Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). This season of American Crime Story begins with the splashiest, most tabloid-friendly part of its narrative and pulls the audience backward into a deeper, sadder story, the majority of whose casualties are much less famous than Versace but no less deserving of our grief and admiration.
“All I knew — as, I think, will be true for most of the audience — was that Versace was shot in Miami on the steps of his house, and I knew the houseboat siege [where Cunanan died by suicide after an eight-day manhunt]. And that was it,” recalls screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who wrote all nine chapters of Assassination. Then producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson approached him about adapting the Versace story for the second season of the nascent American Crime Story, which had yet to achieve blockbuster success with its first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson. The more Smith researched the Cunanan story, the more he found lying beyond its infamous climax: “I was really taken aback at how [the Versace murder] was really just the tip of this iceberglike structure that went down into this road movie across America, the American Dream, ambition, [and] homophobia.”
Such a broad focus doesn’t mean that Assassination has been warmly received by the Versace family itself, which has greeted the series with the same condemnation it extended to Vulgar Favors, the 1999 book about the Cunanan killings by Vanity Fair contributing writer Maureen Orth. “As we have said, the Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about the death of Mr. Gianni Versace, which should only be considered as a work of fiction,” read a statement issued last week. “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.”
Long before the family denounced the series, however, Smith had to figure out how to replicate his own experience of being drawn into the Cunanan saga for a larger audience, presumably as ignorant of the lead-up to the Versace killing as he was. So he decided to leverage that ignorance to his advantage, using Versace’s murder as an entry point into a larger story rather than an end in itself. “You start with the thing that everyone knows, and then you guide them backward through the bits that they don’t know,” Smith explains. His approach to the script “became about how we understand the case, myself included, which was that we didn’t understand it.”
Such thinking gave rise to Assassination’s highly unorthodox structure: a reverse-chronological account of Cunanan’s unraveling and its consequences, with every episode moving further back in time from the eponymous event. Along the way, most of Cunanan’s victims get their own spotlight installments, making Assassination almost an anthology within an anthology: A Chicago real estate titan’s dedicated wife throws herself into preserving his legacy. A promising Minneapolis architect comes to terms with his father, who loves his son even as he struggles to understand him. A gay ex-soldier wrestles with the dual identities that the Clinton-era military has ruled to be mutually exclusive.
The result is the only Murphy-associated production that could conceivably be described as “slow,” methodically pausing and pulling apart the action to make space for people whose names have largely been lost to history, except as a footnote to Versace’s sensational death. Though Cunanan is the thread that unites these men and undoubtedly Assassination’s central figure, it isn’t quite accurate to say the show is a character study, at least until its final stretch of episodes, because the viewer watches his monstrous actions without any background information that can excuse or even explain them. “We wanted to say that the victims are the heroes of those episodes. They are the central characters,” Smith says. “Cunanan, in a weird way, is this kind of vortex, a dark abyss. Once he starts killing people, he crosses a line, and he isn’t really human in a way that we understand.” Cunanan’s inscrutability can make Assassination an excruciating watch, but the show consistently foregrounds the killed over their killer.
Versace remains in the picture via flashback throughout the season, albeit mostly as a foil to Cunanan, a habitual liar who uses his looks and extravagant inventions to place himself in proximity to wealth and power. “To me, the shape of the story was always how these two people grow up to be so different,” Smith observes. “They struggle with many of the same issues: homophobia, ambition, being the outsider. One conquers all these problems and becomes this great creator and great celebrator of life. One is beaten and ends up ripping down other people’s success.” Assassination’s view of Versace is almost beatific, holding up the designer as a paragon of vivacity, commitment, and creative genius. Cunanan is a parasite — in the words of one astute observer, “too lazy to work, too proud to be kept.” Versace, on the other hand, is both generative and generous.
Assassination’s flattering presentation of Versace represents an expansion of his presence in Orth’s report, which Smith was tasked with fictionalizing into compelling dramatic television while also doing justice to his real subjects. “It weighs very heavily on you,” Smith says of his first experience writing true crime. (Smith has written four crime novels, including Child 44, and a BBC miniseries, London Spy.) “It’s a great responsibility. These are such amazing people, and I always felt a great sense of privilege to get to know them a little.” Still, there were passages when Smith was obligated to make use of creative license, like the multiday stretch from David Madson’s abduction to his eventual murder. In those cases, Smith says, he did his best to extrapolate from the known facts “in support of those larger truths.” We may not know exactly what Madson and Cunanan said to each other, but we know where each man was coming from, and where they ended up. On Cunanan’s end, “There was some sense that he was in some upside-down, sick way trying to extend the relationship that had long since ended”; on Madson’s, “that was a mix of both fear for your life, but also a sense of, If you go to the police, will they believe you?” From that dynamic, Smith draws almost the entirety of Assassination’s horrific, elegiac fourth episode.
Then there was the biography of Versace himself. One of the Versace family’s principal objections to Vulgar Favors is its assertion that Gianni was HIV-positive, a claim that Orth says is backed up by accounts from the Miami police and is written into the show as canon. “It’s interesting; the book was written in a certain period of time, when things were considered shameful which are now not,” Smith reflects. “I thought we were really trying to undermine [the stigma], and break away all those assumptions. … That was the reason we decided to put that in, as opposed to being salacious or engaging in gossip. Versace was this great breaker-down of convention. He was one of the first out gay celebrities, and he was living with his partner for 15 years. It’s something we celebrate. He represented love in a way that Andrew didn’t.”
Assassination’s handling of HIV is just one dimension of how the show sets out to tell a specifically gay story, looking back on the repression of the ’90s from the more progressive, though by no means perfect, climate of 2018. At the time, Cunanan’s and Versace’s sexuality gave the murder’s media coverage a condescending, almost sadistic edge. In his review of Vulgar Favors for The New York Times, Frank Bruni accused Orth of titillation, though Smith puts it more diplomatically: “At some point, [the book] reads very much like an outsider commenting on a world of which they’re not part, and sometimes that can make you seem quite removed from it. … It’s not contesting some of the descriptions of what’s going on; it’s just saying that some of the words lacked a sense of what the wider picture might have been, emotionally, behind some of these scenarios.”
Conversely, Assassination is not an outsider’s perspective on what it means to be gay in a culture openly hostile to your identity; with the benefit of Smith and Murphy’s insights, the show depicts both a broader culture of homophobia and the tools that helped Versace weather the storm of coming out (namely, his wealth and public acclaim). “The options were, either you’re as successful as Versace … [or] you have to be in the closet,” Smith says. “There were so few options and ways of exploring in this world. I think fundamentally, if you boil it down, it’s a survival show: What decisions do you make to survive in society?” Many people didn’t, and with empathy and hindsight, Assassination aims to explore why.
With two gay men serving as writer and executive producer, Assassination stands out even in TV’s rapidly diversifying landscape for the specificity of its story and the nuance of its psychological observations, however cut-and-dry Cunanan’s grandiose pathology. The season makes for a fascinating follow-up to Feud: Bette and Joan, another potentially high-camp Murphy production that surprised many with its grounded approach. Assassination is also an intriguing prelude to Pose, the ’80s-set New York drama that will break the record for the most trans actors in series regular roles on a single show and presents an opportunity to extend this more somber trend into a new phase of Murphy’s career. Whatever one thinks of Murphy’s infamously maximalist style, the mega-showrunner (Assassination is his second major launch of the month) has played an undeniable role in pluralizing the faces and voices on our televisions.
“I think Ryan is big on telling stories that aren’t told, that have been ignored by people,” Smith says early in our conversation. “This is certainly one of them.” In this sense, Assassination is the opposite of its predecessor. Nearly two years ago, The People v. O.J. took the most over-covered case in the world and confronted the audience with what it had still managed to miss. The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows us what’s allowed to fester when we condemn an entire segment of the population to the dark — and in the process, makes a forceful argument for bringing both bad and good into the light. “Andrew didn’t kill [these people] randomly,” Smith notes. “He was very much motivated by jealousy, and the good that they represented. When you’re telling the story, you feel like you’re celebrating their lives.”
How ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Looks Beyond Its Subject
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