Tag: tom rob smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“House by the Lake” with Tom Rob Smith and Cody Fern

Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson discuss the fourth episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which focuses on a very personal murder. This week’s featured interviews are episode writer Tom Rob Smith and Australian stage and screen actor Cody Fern who portrays David Madson on the series. | 7 February 2018

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American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson

At this point TV viewers tuning in to Season 2 of American Crime Story will have sensed that something’s up. Promotional materials promised a glitzy, pulpy dive into the high-fashion world of the Versace family and a grisly murder in sunny Miami. But after two episodes with nary a Versace in sight (don’t worry, they’ll be back), audiences must have realized that producer Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith actually had a different—and, in my opinion, better—show in mind. The star of Episode 4 is not any of the A-list names like Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin, and Darren Criss or even one of Ryan Murphy’s regular players like Finn Wittrock. Instead, the breakout here (and, perhaps, of the series) is 30 year-old Australian newcomer Cody Fern playing Andrew Cunanan’s second, most personal, and misunderstood victim: David Madson.

Speaking with Vanity Fair’s podcast Still Watching: Versace, Fern admits that this episode and American Crime Story as a whole represent a bait and switch in order to get audiences to care about Cunanan’s less famous victims and the plight of gay men, more broadly, in the 90s. In this episode specifically, Fern and Smith are determined to redeem Madson who was, for so long, erroneously accused of being Cunanan’s accomplice rather than an innocent casualty.

Last month at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, when asked about the slightly deceptive title The Assassination of Gianni Versace, both Ryan Murphy and Tom Rob Smith were quick to defend it. The People vs. O.J. Simpson, they pointed out, wasn’t a show primarily about O.J. Of course, they’re right. Along with a searing look at racism, sexism, and the rise of reality TV in the 90s, the main takeaway from American Crime Story’s first season was the redemption of maligned prosecutor Marcia Clark.

Madson, of course, is not nearly as well-known as Clark and that, Fern argues, is what makes Season 2 even more extraordinary. “Everyone was ready for this to be a huge, splashy, fashion drama,” Fern tells Still Watching “but [Ryan Murphy] really honors the victims who came before. Four people who aren’t fashion designers but who had a family and were loved and were brought into the sordid world of Andrew Cunanan and went down because of it. [Their] stories are equally as vital as Gianni Versace’s. For Ryan to really focus on those stories is incredibly brave and does great justice to those people.”

Madson’s mysterious role in Cunanan’s murder spree baffled law enforcement for over a year (and beyond). Why would an innocent man go on the run with a killer and stay with him for six days? For a detailed breakdown of the main clues and theories swirling around Madson’s role at the time, you can go here. But for Smith and Fern, Madson’s driving concern in his final days was clear: internalized gay shame. It’s true that American Crime Story had to do a lot more theorizing than usual in this episode—with both Cunanan and Madson dead there is no way to know exactly what happened on their six-day journey. (We do know, however, that Aimee Mann never serenaded them in a Minnesota dive bar.) Smith tells Still Watching: Versace: “There’s a dilemma [with this episode]. You are, ultimately, joining dots rather than dealing with transcribed or videotaped evidence. I tried sticking to the fundamental truth which was that a) Andrew was a liar and was trapping David and b) David was full of love and ambition and wasn’t involved in the killing in any way.”

Fern admits those six days on the run were the most fascinating to him. “What the series deals with is not only how the police bungled the investigation because of homophobia at the time, but also this internalized of gay shame. David is dealing with a shame that’s been following him around his whole life.” As the show depicts, Madson was out to both his immediate family and his Minneapolis friends and co-workers, but what the episode theorizes is that he wasn’t ready to to be out to an entire world of strangers.

Smith calls David the hero of Episode 4 and used his own life experience as a gay man to extrapolate what Madson might have been feeling. He tells Still Watching:

Andrew’s cleverness is that he plays on a very deep-seated fear which we’ve always felt as gay men and women that if somehow you open the door to our private lives, everyone looking in is going to be shocked and appalled and we’ll be disgraced and exiled. Now, suddenly, by killing Jeffrey in that apartment that lingering nightmare becomes true because David knows that if he opens the door to that apartment the world is going to be shocked and appalled. They’ll think he was involved somehow. It’s going to be very hard for David to extricate himself from the trap that Andrew’s sprung around him.

Smith’s efforts to redeem Madson entirely in the span of an hour may have resulted in a bit of white-washing of this particular character. The real Madson was a bit older than Fern (and a good deal older than the baby-faced Fern looks here). According to Maureen Orth’s well-researched book Vulgar Favors, Madson was a beloved but forcefully charismatic person who dated a good deal and was hardly the Midwestern babe in the woods this series would sometimes have him be.

Neither Fern nor anyone in the cast reached out to the surviving family members of Cunanan’s victims while filming the series—though Ricky Martin, at least, has since been in contact with Versace’s life partner Antonio D’Amico. It was conscious choice they made as a group out of sensitivity to such a great loss. However, the Madson family, specifically, was at the forefront of Fern and Smith’s minds as they constructed this episode. “There was a cloud of suspicion over David,” Smith explains. “The police declared him to be the killer at first and the parents really struggled to clear his name. Such a gross injustice.” Episode 4 of American Crime Story rescues Madson not only from ignominy, but from anonymity as well. Anyone watching this episode and Fern’s irresistibly vulnerable performance won’t soon forget Andrew Cunanan’s second victim—even if he didn’t have a name you’d find on a fashion label.

And as Fern points out, the reverse chronology of American Crime Story acts as another kind of redemption for David Madson. It’s no spoiler to say that Fern as Madson will return for a few more episodes as the season spools back in time and we learn how he and Cunanan first met and fell in love. “There was something nice about leaving this man, David Madson, with a moment of beauty rather than a moment of terror,” Fern explains to Still Watching. “The way we remember David in the series is not the way we see him in Episode 4.” Smith notes that by the end of this hour of television “there’s a sense of David being an inspirational figure rather than someone who people have forgotten.”

To find out more about the true story of David Madson and Andrew Cunanan, you can listen to the full interview with Smith and Fern as well as past guests Maureen Orth, Ricky Martin, Max Greenfield, and Judith Light by subscribing to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes air every Wednesday night.

American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson

Versace: The Mysterious Murder of Lee Miglin

Two months before Andrew Cunanan killed Gianni Versace, another murder was already making national headlines—the savage killing of Lee Miglin, a self-made real-estate tycoon. Authorities did not immediately link Cunanan to the killing—his third murder in a spree that spanned from Minneapolis to Miami. Even so, the real-estate developer’s affluence, his position as a philanthropic society fixture alongside his Home Shopping Network empress wife, Marilyn Miglin, and mysterious circumstances made the killing the focus of intense media interest.

On May 4, in the toniest neighborhood of Chicago, Miglin was murdered at the property he shared with his wife while she was out of town on business. The Chicago Tribune reported that Miglin’s body “was discovered in a detached garage, tucked under a car and obscured by a trash can. Miglin’s feet were bound together and his face was carefully wrapped in masking tape, except for a hole for his nose, sources said. The masking tape was soaked in blood, as were Miglin’s shoulders and chest, sources said.”

“The murder was brutal and had grisly, ritualistic overtones: Miglin’s hands and feet were bound, and his body was partially wrapped in plastic, brown paper, and tape,” wrote Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth.“His ribs had been broken, and he had been tortured with four stabs in the chest, probably with garden shears. His throat had been cut open with a garden bow saw. According to friends, however, the autopsy revealed no sexual molestation.”

When Miglin’s 96-year-old mother, Anna, heard these details, she told press that her son had “died a worse death than Christ.”

Perhaps even more mysterious than the murder scene, however, was the condition of the Miglins’ home when Marilyn returned to it. According to Orth, the murderer had slept in Miglin’s bed, eaten a ham sandwich in the library, shaved in the bathroom, and bathed in the bathtub. The killer, it appeared, had been in no hurry to leave the duplex—and when he did, he is said to have helped himself to as much as $10,000 in cash and several of his victim’s suits. These details, along with the facts that Miglin did not have defensive wounds and there were no signs of forced entry in the home, suggested that Miglin might have known his killer, or immediately acquiesced to a threatening intruder.

In her book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, Orth included more details about the crime scene: that a tube of hydrocortisone cream was found under Miglin’s body; he was wearing Calvin Klein bikini underwear, jeans (with an open zipper), and just one Ferragamo black suede shoe. His ankles were bound by an orange extension cord, his chest was weighed down by two bags of cement, and “the wrapping of Miglin’s face resembled the latex masks Andrew seemed so intrigued with from watching S&M pornography.”

Once police found Cunanan’s stolen Jeep parked around the corner from the Miglins’ home—linking Cunanan to the crime—they discovered several other clues inside: a copy of Out magazine and a tourist pamphlet.

With the benefit of hindsight, Orth’s book, and additional research, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story writer Tom Rob Smith views Miglin’s murder as being uniquely reflective of Cunanan’s personality.

“The murder of Lee Miglin is full of Andrew’s monstrous thoughts about how he’s furious with the world and how he’s attacking both the reputation and the successes of Lee Miglin,” Smith told Vanity Fair. “And that again is spoken to by the women’s clothing, the pornography left around the body of Lee Miglin. In the same way that terrorists try to talk to the world, Andrew’s trying to talk to the world through these monstrous acts.”

“Lee Miglin really was an extraordinary embodiment of the American dream,” added Smith. The future mogul sold pancake batter out of the trunk of his car before finding real estate.“I found it very inspirational reading about his journey from being the seventh child of a coal miner who was worth nothing, earning his way into the heights of Chicago society through tenacity and brilliance and the amount he gave back.”

Speaking about the extremely violent nature of the murder, Smith reasoned, “If you can’t communicate to the world through creation, you communicate it through destruction. And that’s how a very clever, genuinely clever young man who had never hurt anyone ended up doing this horrific, horrific thing. The process seems much closer to radicalization and terrorism than it is to the pathology of a serial killer.”

In the aftermath of the murder, reporters and authorities tried to find a link between Miglin, who appeared to have been happily married for nearly 40 years, and Cunanan. Cunanan had a history of being “kept” by wealthy older boyfriends, and was rumored to have worked as an escort. Was Miglin one of the men Cunanan rendez-vous-ed with during his days on the “sugar daddy” circuit?

Authorities also questioned Miglin’s surviving son, Duke, a handsome actor at the time. According to Orth, Cunanan had casually name-dropped Duke—and an unnamed “rich family in Chicago”—on several occasions in his lie-filled conversations with family and friends. There were suggestions that Cunanan could have known Miglin: one of Miglins’ neighbors told Orth that she saw Miglin during the weekend of his murder “with a young man with dark features wearing a baseball hat.” A sex worker also told Orth about being hired twice by a man named “Lee”—whom the worker believed to be Miglin.

Investigators suspected a relationship between killer and victim as well.

“Why would Cunanan go to Chicago, find Miglin, and torture him without some motive?” investigator Todd Rivard of the Chicago County Sheriff’s Department asked Orth, testing the logic of the killing being random. Gregg McCrary, senior consultant of the Threat Assessment Group and former supervisory special agent of the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, added, “I’d say it’s highly probable that [Cunanan] knew Miglin. Would this guy let some stranger in off the street? The answer is no. Either [Cunanan] knew of the guy or knew his son. The idea that he just picked him up off the street and stalked him and tortured him and then killed him is bizarre—not the most likely scenario.”

As recently as last year, however, Duke Miglin maintained that there was no connection between his father and Cunanan before the murder.

“There was no relationship whatsoever,” Duke Miglin told ABC, adding that any reports to the contrary were “very hurtful, very painful, for me personally … there were attacks on me as well that I really didn’t appreciate. And I still don’t.”

Even reporters at the time were left stymied, like John Carpenter, the lead reporter on the story at the Chicago Sun-Times. “To me, what everybody always felt was that it was clearly somebody who knew that Marilyn Miglin was away for the weekend,” Carpenter told the Chicago Sun-Times this week. (Miglin’s family has maintained that the killer could have known Marilyn was out of town by listened to a voicemail she left for her husband, alerting him of what time she would return to Chicago on Sunday.)

Though the family maintains that the murder was random, the creators of American Crime Story clearly believed differently—as evidenced by Wednesday’s episode, which suggests Cunanan and Miglin had a romantic relationship.

American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson said this week that the episode “dramatize[s] what we believe happened that weekend starting from the established facts of the crime scene. Based on the evidence, we believe that Lee and Andrew did know each other, and [that] Andrew’s attack, as with all his victims except for William Reese, was targeted and specific. We used Maureen Orth’s book and consultancy, as well as the FBI records and the statements from witnesses inside the records for research and background.”

When asked whether she felt any conflict over the series depicting Lee Miglin as gay—in direct contradiction to the message the Miglin family has stuck with since his death—actress Judith Light who portrayed Marylin in the episode told Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast: “I don’t contradict it. That’s not my business. That’s for other people to talk about and to discuss…I would never, ever add anything to a dynamic of people who are suffering through a tragedy.”

Actor Mike Farrell, who plays Miglin, said that “a further manifestation of the horror of” the murder is “a kind of inability or unwillingness to accept what I think is a very real and very natural part of this man’s life.”

In the aftermath of the murder, Miglin’s wife, Marilyn, worked through her grief by throwing herself back into work—appearing on the Home Shopping Network just three weeks after the funeral.

“I just agonized over it, but I was determined to not let adversity affect my life, so I got on that plane feeling more alone than I ever felt in my entire life… I decided that I would hide in front of the camera,” Marilyn told press in 1998, explaining why she returned to work so quickly.

A former model and dancer who built a $50 million cosmetics empire and earned the nickname “the Queen of Makeovers,” Marilyn was firm in her refusal to believe the rumors about Lee, saying, “We don’t even think about it. We know who we are and what we stand for.”

Speaking about her unwillingness to let her husband’s murder destroy her, she told the paper, “I will not let one evil force run my life … I won’t acquiesce to that.” As for the fact that—like Donatella Versace in the aftermath of her brother’s murder—she did not show the world she was mourning, Marilyn said, “Weeping publicly wouldn’t have been good for me or my family … someone had to take charge.”

Versace: The Mysterious Murder of Lee Miglin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Writer Tom Rob Smith on ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Tom Rob Smith seems like a nice enough guy, but many of his works are about grisly murders. His newest project is ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace,’ FX’s second entry in its American Crime Story anthology. The series examines the murder of the fashion icon, and looks at the lives of the other men who died at the hand of killer Andrew Cunanan. Smith tells us why writing about murder is a useful way of exploring a society.

AMERICAN CRIME STORY: Writer Tom Rob Smith on THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE – Exclusive Interview

FX’s Wednesday-night second installment of the anthology drama series, THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE, deals not only with the well-known event of the title, but of the murder spree that led up to it. Andrew Cunanan, played in the miniseries by Darren Criss, killed at least four other men – Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin and William Reese – before attacking Versace, who is portrayed by Edgar Ramirez. Based in part on Maureen Orth’s nonfiction book VULGAR FAVORS, argues that law enforcement was slow to track Cunanan due to the homophobia of the times.

AMERICAN CRIME STORY comes from executive producers Ryan Murphy (who also directed a number of episodes), Brad Falchuk, Alexis Martin Woodall, Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson. Rather than have a writers’ room for THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE, the executive producers opted to have a single writer for all ten episodes, Tom Rob Smith.

Smith, an Englishman who is also an executive producer on this season of AMERICAN CRIME STORY, created and wrote LONDON SPY and CHILD 44. He talks about his research for the project, and what struck him most in what he found.

ASSIGNMENT X: When the producers came to you, did they say, “We’d like you to write all ten episodes?”

TOM ROB SMITH: No. It just evolved from the fact that we were in a room, and it was Brad, Ryan, Nina and myself, and the book just needed a very particular approach. It wasn’t that we sat down and said we were going to tell the story backwards [as the series does, to an extent]. We didn’t have that concept. It was, we were trying to figure out how to do it organically. The thing with a [writers’] room is, if you have a big room, you have to make those decisions and then send everyone off to write their episodes. And we would move forward a fragment, and then decide to change direction. You’re much more nimble if you’re on your own. I think it just happened like that.

AX: How was it decided that this season of AMERICAN CRIME STORY would be ten episodes, as opposed to twelve or eight or whatever?

SMITH: That was again all decided by the story. We look at them and think, “What is the right number?” They’re like books in a weird way. You’re like, “What are the parts that we have?” No one says, “We want ten episodes,” or “We want twelve episodes.” They say, “What is your story?” And you look at it, and think, “This is how much we have. These are the great episodes.” The quality control on this is so high, they would never stretch it to fill a quota. It was always about, each episode has to feel really satisfying in its own right, almost like a story in its own right. So that’s where it comes from.

AX: How aware were you of the murders at the time they occurred in 1997?

SMITH: I was very aware of the Miami murder, but I knew nothing about the build-up. And I think that’s one of the things, that we take that thing that everyone knows, which is the perception of Miami, and we’re unpacking it, so we’re literally pulling those pieces apart. And that to me was a discovery, too. I went on a journey in a sense that viewers kind of go on, which is, I knew the thing on Miami, and now let’s see what was behind it all.

AX: Cunanan’s murder spree stretched across the U.S. What kind of research did you do in the different cities and states?

SMITH: The Minneapolis murders, we got all the police files. One of the big gaps was that, [author Orth] must have read the police files, but obviously, you’re getting her fragments. It’s always interesting to get your own, and the Minneapolis police files, they released them without any problem. I think they were like four hundred pages. I think we got a thousand pages on the FBI, I think we had four hundred from the Chicago [police]. So you have these volumes of information. We’ve got a great researcher on the project. We got all of that. In San Diego, these weren’t released by the San Diego police force, we had to the court records. So we got everything that was possible to get. Minneapolis is where the murders start, and they’re a key part of our story. When we say AMERICAN CRIME STORY, this is an American crime story in a geographic sense. We have L.A., we have San Francisco, we have San Diego, we have Minneapolis, we have Chicago, we have New York, we have New Jersey – all of these towns were part of this enormous story.

AX: How is it for you setting a story in the U.S.? You’re British and your other projects have been set in England and Europe. Was there anything you sort of had to absorb about Americans?

SMITH: I don’t know. I just think, we were telling an American crime story for sure, but I think one of the reasons [the first season of AMERICAN CRIME STORY, THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON] was so successful is, it spoke to everyone around the world. You go for those universal truths. I do think, pushing all of the universal truths to the side, the minutiae is very important, like going to San Diego and going to Andrew Cunanan’s house, seeing where he grew up. Sometimes those things can be overstated, because they didn’t give you an episode, for example. You don’t get an episode from it. But Andrew Cunanan was very sensitive to class and status. And I was like, well, I get that as an idea. And I went to his house, which was in La Bonita, and it’s a nice house. His parents did well to pull him up out of relative poverty in National City. But even on the street he’s on, which has a slight incline, he was on the bottom of that street, and it went on to kind of a wasteland. And as the houses went up the hill, they got steadily more expensive. And I was like, “Even in this one street, there’s this microcosm of the haves and the have-nots.” He went to La Bonita High briefly, and I went there, and it’s a regular high school, and then he was sent to Bishop’s in La Jolla, and I was like, “This is a world apart.” You turn up and it’s this beautiful courtyard with these whitewashed walls. He was taken from this household that was modest, and given everything. And just when you go into the detail and you see it for real, those things really start to speak to you about the character.

AX: Obviously, there’s a lot of visual oomph in Gianni Versace’s world. Was it easier or harder for you to write with knowing that, “Okay, people are going to be taking in the surroundings,” so you need to give them a moment to look at that before you start the drama?

SMITH: Oh, no. I see it all as one. I see the locations and the clothes, all that detail is storytelling. That opening is the contrasting of these two worlds, this world that someone had created that was down to the ashtray, down to the silk robe, down to the slippers. [Versace] built all of that. He built his own homeware, and so that sense of, look at what he’s created, [and then at Cunanan, who is] someone who was literally down to nothing on a beach, who had this terrible abscess on his leg, he had physically broken apart, and who was in shorts he’d probably been wearing for weeks and weeks, and was in this sweaty t-shirt, and this sense of, look at the contrast between these two men. So I always saw the visuals as being a real storytelling engine and not some kind of secondary thing.

The Versace home is – it’s weird going there, because now it’s a hotel, and I felt this energy of, he’s missing from this space. You really feel it. You feel like, this isn’t just a nice house, this was his. This needs him on some level. I could really feel an absence.

AX: What is it like writing someone like Versace who, in a sense, creates his own world?

SMITH: What I found so inspirational about him, and one of the things was, he’d turn up to Milan, this guy from the south of Italy who was looked down on by the [design establishment], and now he’s such a grand figure that we forget that he was this person who was told “no” by everyone. And even different fabrics – he would refuse to accept “no,” he would say, “I’m going to [use] this fabric.” And I found that refusal to accept the constraints and confines that were presented to him very inspirational. That was a key part. I found that he inspired me as I wrote, if that makes sense. I was like, “This man is amazing.”

AX: Do you have any other projects we should know about?

SMITH: I’m doing a show for BBC2, MOTHER, FATHER, SON.

AX: And what would you most like people to know about THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY?

SMITH: I’m fascinated by crime stories, because I think they’re about society. I feel like they soak up something about society, tell a bigger story. And this really does. It tells a story about America at that time and about identities, aspirations, it’s emotional. But I also think this was the largest failed FBI manhunt of all time in Miami. This has enormous scale. And how this kid in La Bonita ends up causing the pandemonium to tip over Miami to me is a very interesting story to tell.

This interview was conducted during FX’s portion of the Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour.

AMERICAN CRIME STORY: Writer Tom Rob Smith on THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE – Exclusive Interview