Tag: tom rob smith

American Crime Story: What We Know About Gianni Versace’s Mysterious Illness

*Spoilers: Scene descriptions for episode 2 below

In the second episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the fashion designer is shown in a Miami hospital in 1994, trying to hide his identity as he watches two sick men lie in bed next to each other in a room. He then speaks with a doctor, which is partially overlaid on a shot of blood being drawn, who tells Gianni that the drug therapies are complex and difficult. The show never comes right out and says what illness Gianni has been diagnosed with, and this is a major point of contention between the show’s version of events and what the Versace family claims is true.

The show seems to be implying that Versace was HIV positive, established by the shot of the two very gaunt men in their side-by-side hospital beds. But the family has always denied that was the case. Their explanation for Versace’s illness and recovery is always that he had cancer. In a 2006 interview with New York Magazine, younger sister Donatella said that Versace’s reclusiveness in the mid-1990s was because of ear cancer.

“He was sick with cancer in his ear before he was murdered. The last two years of his life, Gianni was hiding — hiding up in his apartment in Via Gesù — because his ear was so big,” said Donatella. “It was impossible to do a surgery because of the position, because to do a surgery, part of his face was supposed to drop… . But then it was declared cured six months before he was murdered. We celebrated; we drink Champagne and everything. Six months later, he was killed.”

However, in Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, on which the FX series is based, the author maintains that she was told on the record by a Miami Beach detective that Versace was HIV positive.

“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 told The Hollywood Reporter. “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].”

But the Versace family said in a statement that Orth’s book is “a sensational story” full of “contradictions” and “hearsay.”

“In making her lurid claims, [Orth] 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,” the statement reads.

Either way, Tom Rob Smith, who wrote the scripts for The Assassination of Gianni Versace, says that the point isn’t what illness befell Versace; it’s that he recovered and was living life to the fullest when he was senselessly murdered.

“What I found most amazing about it is this is a guy that came so close to death and still clung on,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter. “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 [Cunanan] didn’t have it.”

American Crime Story: What We Know About Gianni Versace’s Mysterious Illness

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Writer On Why Equality Means More Complicated Gay Villains

If the first time you ever heard the name “Versace” was in “Showgirls,” know that you might have missed a key layer of meaning behind the joke.

In the 1995 Paul Verhoeven film, young stripper Nomi (Elizabeth Berkeley) finds herself with some extra cash, so she buys a tight short dress from a Versace shop on the Las Vegas strip. You might think that the point of the bit is that Nomi reveals her trashy roots when she pronounces the name of the brand as “Ver-sase,” as opposed to its proper pronunciation of “Ver-sa-che.”

But according to showrunner Tom Rob Smith, it goes far deeper than that. “It’s not that someone classy doesn’t know it’s ‘Ver-sa-che,‘” he told IndieWire. “Because that person wouldn’t be wearing Versace.”

Instead, the point is that an unclassy person not only doesn’t know how to say “Versace,” but would actively chose to buy a dress from his label. “And that’s the unfairness of it, because actually, I mean, his outfits were extraordinary,” Smith said. “He was adding sex, that’s true. But he was so skillful. I think it’s the misogyny, actually, about it, that, you know, if you add sex to a woman’s dress, that makes it not classy. I don’t know quite where that logic comes from.”

It speaks to just one of the underreported elements of Gianni Versace’s life that fascinates in this new installment of “American Crime Story.” As guided by Smith — a UK native who came to the attention of “ACS” producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson after his critically acclaimed 2015 miniseries “London Spy” — the show digs into two lives: Versace (Edgar Ramirez), the designer behind some of the most daring fashion of the 1990s, and Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the man who killed him.

The show’s split focus means that there are a lot of competing elements in the first season, but one ongoing theme is the idea that the public perception of who Versace was has little relationship with the truth.

“His rise was very neat and tidy,” Smith said. “He started in Calabria, he went to Milan, and conquered the world from there. And it was just a series of steps… Just the most tenacious, driven, brilliant, out of the box thinking. Combining fabrics that have never been combined before. Combining materials that have never been combined before. Fearless of making a mistake. He would career off in one direction and then pull back another, and you fall in love with him.”

But Smith wasn’t in love with Versace before he started working on the series. “I don’t think I had a clear perception of him. I think, in a weird way, the perception was of the cliches,” he said. “Of his clothes and the stereotypes around his clothes, which are unfair and which have overwhelmed his name in a way that is sad. I don’t know quite whether he’s been understood. I think there’s a really interesting case to do a reconsideration of his life and his work.”

It’s a dark-hued tale due to Cunanan’s murder spree, in an era when so many stories featuring gay characters end up featuring a lot of death. But that’s something that Smith felt wasn’t just essential to “Versace” as a narrative, but also the general progression of gay-themed narratives.

“I write thrillers. And in thrillers, someone’s always in jeopardy and in danger. And I think, this is an interesting story because Cunanan was this complicated liar, this murderer, and this destroyer, and he was gay,” he said.

Mortality, too, is an inescapable factor given the period setting. “The ’80s are a big part of the story. And people lost a lot of their friends in the ’80s and ’90s in the most horrific circumstances,” Smith said. “If you were making a story set now, to deal with AIDS or not is entirely up the writer, but it’s hard to see how it’s not part of that world in the ’80s and ’90s. It was overwhelming communities.”

Added Smith, “If you want quality, the quality means that some of your stories are going to be disturbing and jagged and not all just upbeat and positive representations of people. The next step in the evolution of equality is, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I want to see a gay ‘Revenant.’ You know, straight men didn’t come out of that feeling, ‘Wow, we got a really bad rap in that movie.’ But they do! They’re the worst people ever! They’re like murderers. They’re terrible! But straight white men are so secure in their identity, the thought didn’t even flicker through their minds.”

Ultimately, Smith is interested in telling character stories that don’t idealize gay lives, but celebrate their complications. “The icon is that [Versace] achieved these great things. But everyone is messy, and I love people’s mess. I love the complications of people.”

Versace’s complications are as much a part of the “American Crime Story” narrative as his successes, especially his health struggles and battles with sister Donatella Versace (played by Penelope Cruz). “The icon thing is interesting, but it doesn’t, to me, rule out that real complexity and sometimes darkness, too,” Smith said.

“No actors want to play just sort of nice people. It’s not interesting. Where do they exist? I don’t know, in the world. So I’m like, I don’t want that. Everyone I know is really complicated. I want the complicated people.”

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Writer On Why Equality Means More Complicated Gay Villains

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

American Crime Story Season 2 Writer Talks Versace

American Crime Story returns tonight. Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, which captivated audiences with The People Vs. O.J. Simpson, now tackles The Assassination of Gianni Versace. This murder is a little different than Simpson’s, though. Andrew Cunanan murdered Versace at the end of a spree totaling five murders. The series is about the crimes, not the trial.

Executive producer and writer Tom Rob Smith spoke with /Film after a Television Critics Association panel for the second season. Based on Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, The Assassination of Gianni Versace begins with the killing and moves backwards. Smith explained some of the details we’ll see in the show’s opening scenes and later episodes.

If The People Vs. O.J. Simpsons was a circus, like the trial was, what is the tone of The Assassination of Gianni Versace?

Of course, the media circus didn’t happen until Versace was killed. Part of that is one of the stories, which is when you go back with these murders, you’re de-escalating the scale of the police investigation. In Miami, it was the biggest failed manhunt of all time, but the murders in Minneapolis got almost no press coverage. They got a tiny bit in the Minneapolis local paper. No national coverage and the police investigation was as small as you could imagine. So you’re watching the evolution of a cultural phenomenon rather than going straight into the cultural phenomenon.

So we’ve seen the very last scene of the story right up top?

No, we will jump at the end and show how he was caught. Episode nine jumps forward.

But Versace remains a main character even though it opens with his death?

He’s a presence all the way through, yeah. We’re taking his story backwards and Cunanan’s story backwards.

With Edgar Ramirez and Penelope Cruz, did you try looks that maybe were too much and scaled it back?

They have a real sense of “what is the sense of this person?” It’s almost like they embody a sensibility rather than a series of physical characteristics. They both have this extraordinary kind of empathy for the character, this person would say this but not this, this person would sit like this. The detail is really precise and thorough. There’s a real love actually. When we’re looking at these characters, one of the tragedies is all of this love, family love, relationship love, love for the work was destroyed. That’s the real loss so we’re trying to really get into that.

Of the four other murders, were some more well known, if not as well known as Versace?

Some were really well known like the Versaces. Lee Miglin in Chicago was well known in the city but not well known nationally. And in Minneapolis, those murders are not known at all, so it’s really interesting to give everyone that equality, to say everyone’s story is worth exploring.

Is the series compassionate towards Andrew Cunanan?

I think what Darren was trying to say is if you go back far enough, you find a human and not a monster. I mean, he becomes someone who is terrifying, someone who is very disturbed, someone who caused a huge amount of misery. So there are parts when this man is despicable. In some ways that was one of the reasons why we decided to tell it backwards because then you’re taking him and saying he is secondary, less than the victims and their life because they’re the heart of these episodes. The killer becomes pushed back, almost this force that drives a destructive force through them, but they were the center. Then when you go back before the murders, you can say this person is a human then. You’re looking at what went wrong.

There’s a lesion on his leg in the pre-title scene. Did he have AIDS himself?

He didn’t have HIV/AIDS. That was known. One of the early things was they were like, “Oh, he must’ve had HIV/AIDS because he’s this killer.” That’s just not true. It was one of the stigmas of HIV/AIDS. The autopsy said he didn’t have it.

So is it a misdirect?

No, it’s one of those clues about story. He had this horrific abscess on his leg. It’s from drug use. It’s trying to signal physical decay. You’re looking at this man who was once beautiful, coveted and wanted, and his disintegration physically.

It made me nostalgic seeing Cunanan swig a Jolt cola. Are there other signs of the ‘90s you include?

There were all kinds of things. You have to get into the way the police work, the way in which cell phones were used to track things, all these details that are really important period details that aren’t just random. They’re part of the story.

Does Jolt cola still exist or did they have to dress that up?

I don’t know. I actually scripted it as an energy drink. The props department are amazing. The thing about that is where it’s important, like in the book it will tell you, and you can Google it and find pictures. The gun is the exact same gun, all that kind of stuff. Then I just said energy drink and they found that. I can ask the props department. All I put in the script was he’s drinking an energy drink and I guess Red Bull must’ve been later or something.

I tried Jolt once and I couldn’t finish a can. It was awful.

That I will have to hand onto them. I’ll tell the props department you were impressed with that. I’ll ask them, I’m interested. Jolt Cola. It’s funny because I was looking at it, like, “What is that can?” I didn’t know it.

Did you give the entire layout of the Versace estate in the opening sequence?

That’s pretty much it. It’s that courtyard and then he knocked down the hotel that was next to it and built a pool. So it’s those two rectangles. He worked on those. So yeah, we got a really good sense, flowing through all the corridors. My favorite part of it is the Spanish villa courtyard with the planetarium on the top. That’s beautiful. It has a real magic about it. Everyone loves the pool. It was the most expensive pool of all time when they built it. Whatever was shipped in from Italy.

What might viewers learn about the fashion business in this series?

I think it’s less a story about the particulars of the fashion business, more about what it is to go from someone who has nothing to someone who builds a really successful business and the key points in that journey. Hard work, love, an amazing team. Then you’re contrasting that with someone who was of a similar position, who has actually many of the privileges, he was sent to a great school, and what goes wrong. You’re kind of building out these two stories like that. The fashion industry, we’re interested in it because it has lots of interesting elements, details, period details, but you’re kind of digging deeper and saying this is a story about someone who achieved so much. He’s a Steve Jobs-like figure.

American Crime Story Season 2 Writer Talks Versace

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

Andrew Cunanan’s Minnesota victims aren’t forgotten in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

LOS ANGELES – “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” references one of the most notorious murders of the past 25 years, but even crime buffs may be thrown by the miniseries’ twist.

It’s not really about Versace.

The focus is squarely on the famed designer’s killer, Andrew Cunanan. Which means executive producer Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith spend more time on the jealous rages that led to the deaths of Minnesotans Jeffrey Trail and David Madson than they do on the fifth and final target of Cunanan’s 1997 killing spree.

“There’s a distinction between the victims,” Smith said. “When Andrew’s life was falling apart, he murdered his closest friend and lover. Once he crossed that line, he then started to kill to pursue ideas. Versace is the culmination of that.”

Two episodes are set in the Twin Cities — the fourth and fifth of the nine-part drama ­that begins Wednesday — but were filmed in and around Los Angeles.

They include visits to a rural Minnesota dive bar (where singer Aimee Mann tackles an acoustic version of the Cars’ “Drive”) and the late lamented Nye’s Polonaise Room, where friends dragged Cunanan one night. Fans of Nye’s will be disappointed to see the Minneapolis restaurant and bar portrayed as a second-story nightclub with a dance floor the size of an airport hangar.

The decision to explore the mind of a murderer gave the storytellers a chance to make a statement about homophobia in the 1990s. Because Cunanan’s first victims were gay, the show suggests that law enforcement responded initially with a shrug rather than shock until the killer gunned down a big name.

One episode is dedicated to Trail’s decision to leave the Navy after a suicide attempt, spurred by the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gay troops. The Minneapolis Police Department comes across as particularly flat-footed and disinterested in diving deep. The series essentially argues that Versace’s murder outside his Miami Beach mansion could have been averted if investigators had pursued the Cunanan case more aggressively.

“Versace’s death is political,” said producer Nina Jacobson. “It was the neglect, the isolation, the sort of otherness in how the police handled the murder of gay men. This was ultimately a death that didn’t have to happen. Some of our anger informed us.”

The reverse-chronological approach of the series is bound to throw viewers, especially after a nearly wordless, expertly choreographed opening, directed by Murphy, that features Versace’s final moments following a morning stroll to retrieve fashion magazines from a Miami Beach newsstand.

There’s also a red herring in the casting of Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace. Other than showing off a gruff Italian accent, the Oscar winner isn’t given much to do. The production team clearly spent megabucks re-creating Versace’s studios in Italy, but so little time is spent on the lavish set that it’s like stopping at a fancy restaurant for an appetizer.

“The obsession with Gianni Versace and the dance between the creator and the destroyer is the spine, the fabric, of what held this together,” said producer Brad Simpson, who also worked on the previous “Crime” installment, “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” which won the Emmy for best miniseries. “But we felt it was really important along this journey to not only tell this story of Versace and what he meant, but use that to tell the story of David Madson and Jeff Trail and the other victims.”

They considered putting Cunanan’s name in the title of the series, as Maureen Orth did in her book “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History,” the primary source for the screenplay. “We decided that, ultimately, it was elevating him to a place we didn’t want to put him in,” Simpson said.

The emphasis on Cunanan over Versace (played by Edgar Ramírez, best known for portraying a terrorist leader in 2010’s “Carlos”) and his longtime lover Antonio D’Amico (pop star Ricky Martin) puts the pressure on actor Darren Criss, who made his name as a happy-go-lucky teen singer on the 2009-15 Murphy series “Glee.” His Broadway credentials are utilized in “Versace” only when Cunanan dances shirtless while torturing sexual partners during S&M sessions or sings along to “Pump Up the Jam” on the car radio while a deathly nervous Madson sweats in the passenger seat.

Criss didn’t take the role home with him. “I know a lot of people who jump into these things, and it really consumes their whole lives,” he said. “I think what saved me is that Andrew compartmentalized so many things in his life: emotions, people, experiences. He was able to dissociate and, likewise, I was able to dissociate. As an actor, it’s your job to find as many common denominators between you and the person you are playing, however good or bad. The differences are few in number, but high in content. Those differences made it OK for me to step away from it because I was doing things on set so far away from myself at home.”

While this “American Crime Story” decidedly emphasizes the criminal side, Murphy cautions viewers about reading too much into how future franchise installments might play out. The next show in the anthology will look at the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The fourth season will deal with the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“One of the joys for me about this show is that every season will have a different tonality,” Murphy said. “The first season was very much a courtroom potboiler. The second season is a manhunt thriller. The third season really looks at the medical conditions in our country, and global warming, and who decides who gets to live and die. So every season will be different from anything we’ve done before.”

Andrew Cunanan’s Minnesota victims aren’t forgotten in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’