There are more than a few moments of history where the events are vividly scorched into people’s memories. Over the past 50 or so years of American history, society has experienced more than a few of those moments, whether it be the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, or the fall of the World Trade Center towers, and the resulting shared experience creates ripples in popular culture. As I mentioned in the review of Netflix’s Making a Murderer, the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and the saga of O.J. Simpson’s arrest and trial for those murders, was a media spectacle that exploited a double homicide for entertainment and ratings. Many people remember where they were when a white Ford Bronco was chased by the Los Angeles Police Department down the 405 freeway, and a trial that seemed to go on forever had dramatic moments where trying on a pair of gloves led to infamous phrases like “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
However, even with Dancing Itos, the reaction and fascination with the case touched on bigger issues of modern society which had an impact on ideas of what justice means. For some, the murders were a prime example of a sexist society which didn’t take domestic violence seriously, either culturally or legislatively, and let men get away with a slap on the wrist for beating their wives and girlfriends until the worst happens (e.g., the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law by President Clinton only three months after the murders). Others viewed the entire episode as an incident which proved celebrity and money could put a finger on the scale and make the difference between prison for a defendant who could afford a “dream team” or had cameras documenting the ins and outs of the proceedings. And it was also one of the first cases where notoriety became a building block to being a media personality and reality TV, with a certain family parlaying their fame from this and a sex tape to success.
By far the biggest societal aspect of the entire mess was the racial divide in the way Americans viewed the case and the concept of fairness within the American legal system. FX’s new anthology series American Crime Story, developed by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski from Jeffrey Toobin's book The Run of His Life, and produced by Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson, Ryan Murphy, and Brad Simpson, begins its retelling of the story by starting not with the murders, but the Rodney King beating and how both it and the 1992 Los Angeles riots served as a context for the trial, as well as how this might connect and comment on current 21st century American attitudes about race and justice.
There were many, many miscarriages of justice perpetrated because of race before the O.J. Simpson case, and there’s been more than a fair share of occurrences since as well. But it’s interesting to note the reactions. When O.J. was acquitted, there were all sorts of judicial “reform” proposals discussed and floated in the wake of the public outrage by white Americans that a killer was walking free, with some of them calling for an extensive overhaul of the jury system and even others wanting to remove the requirement for a unanimous guilty verdict in most criminal cases. And yet, just looking at some of the events in the here and now, we’ve experienced countless cases where innocent black people have been harangued, attacked and killed, largely with no responsibility or accountability for their deaths. And the reaction from many of the same white Americans who were outraged by what happened in the Simpson case is to shrug with a “well, that’s the way it is” attitude, while wondering why black people are so angry and resentful about watching killers walk free.
I remember watching the Bronco chase live on television with my mother, who made this entire case her own personal, daily soap opera during 1994 and 1995. Every day I would leave for school with CNN’s coverage of the trial playing in the background, and when I would get home Roger Cossack and Greta Van Susteren would be providing legal commentary on the day’s events. In many ways, it was the first modern (unscripted) reality TV show.
What made the Bronco chase or even the eventual verdict —which I remember being broadcast on the monitors in my school and brought everything to a halt that day— so compelling was that it involved so many dramatic touches one might see in a soapy legal drama like How to Get Away With Murder while also being a situation where no one had any idea what was gonna happen next.
The People v. O.J. Simpson focuses on three different prongs of an interconnected story, and uses added detail to iconic moments to keep the audience interested.
The investigation of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by the L.A.P.D. serves as the starting point, with the views, behavior and history of the department and its officers eventually becoming the most contentious facet of the trial. District Attorney Gil Garcetti (Bruce Greenwood) chooses Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) to shepherd the case. While Clark is depicted as confident and sure of her abilities, the situation quickly spirals into something way beyond anyone’s ability to control, and the eventual stresses of being under a microscope in a case that becomes more about hair styles and demeanor than DNA tests take their toll on someone who’s desperately trying to attain a guilty verdict. Her second chair, Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown), becomes a man without a country, as his place within his own community and the establishment grows more and more complicated as opinions divide over Simpson.
While that is happening, the audience also watches the public persona of O.J. Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) be deconstructed and fall apart as the evidence builds. Gooding looks and sounds nothing like Simpson, but he does get across the nature of someone who can at one moment be gregarious and the nicest person one will ever meet, and then in the next be screaming and despondent to the point of a breakdown. Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer) remains a loyal friend to O.J. and his family, while at the same time Kardashian’s unease with the entire mess grows as the legal situation becomes more dire.
And finally, the internal politics of O.J.’s defense team is a major focus. Johnnie Cochran (Courtney B. Vance) views the case through the lenses of someone who has spent a considerable amount of his career observing police brutality. Robert Shapiro (John Travolta) comes across as more of a preening socialite than an attorney, who is more interested in his reputation than his client’s well-being. Travolta’s take on Shapiro is one of the aspects of the series which feels very off note, since the makeup makes Travolta’s appearance as Shapiro rather disturbing and a really bad performance at times drifts into parody/camp territory. The disagreements and contentious relationship between Cochran and Shapiro is joined by F. Lee Bailey (Nathan Lane) for a battle over egos and strategies.
If American Crime Story has problems, it’s in moments with some really awkward and bad dialogue, with the writers sometimes underlining things that don’t need to be underlined, and getting a little too cute with in-jokes about Kardashian sisters. I don’t need a scene of Johnnie Cochran telling me Shapiro is thinking about himself after watching the previous scene where Shapiro performs actions and says things where he’s obviously thinking about his own interests. I get it.
But where the series excels is in reconnecting to the visceral feelings from the events, expounding on them by putting the audience in the meetings and conference rooms where matters were discussed, and inside the white Ford Bronco as O.J. held a gun to his head. Moreover, by connecting the Simpson trial to the Rodney King beating and the ‘92 riots, which occurred just over two years before the beginning of the Simpson trial, the series implies the differences in racial views of the case were an outflow from differing perspectives and treatment by authorities which came back to bite the prosecution. Those divisions and inequalities made the defense’s accusations, whether true or pulled out of their ass, of police incompetence and corruption believable enough to a jury drawn from people in a community that still remembered the Daryl Gates led L.A.P.D., and effectively negated the science of O.J.’s blood and DNA being at the crime scene and other incriminating places.
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Current attitudes about Simpson’s guilt: Polling conducted last year by the Washington Post and ABC News found that majorities of both white and blacks now believe O.J. was responsible for the murders. This might be due to Simpson currently being in a Nevada prison on a 2008 armed robbery conviction. However, while majorities of both demos believe Simpson is guilty, the number of whites who believe it is still significantly higher.
The Washington Post's astute polling team points out that part of the change might well be driven by technical changes. The specific wording of the question about Simpson's guilt changed just slightly over the course of the 21 years that The Post-ABC poll has queried Americans on this issue. Also, in 1997, a civil jury found Simpson liable for the deaths of Brown Simpson and Goldman. (Notice those 1997 uptick in the trend lines up above. That a civil court found Simpson responsible and that his punishment involved a court-ordered multimillion-dollar payout might have shaped public perception at the time.) Of course it's also true that, over the next decade, white America's confidence in Simpson's criminal culpability declined while black America's grew.
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June 17, 1994: For those that either don’t remember or weren’t around for it, the day which eventually culminated in the Bronco chase was in some ways even crazier than it was depicted in American Crime Story. The entire situation just kept escalating throughout the day from the moment it was first announced Simpson was a fugitive and had eluded arrest, and by the time the Bronco pulled into Brentwood it was unclear whether or not most of the country was about to watch a person commit suicide live on national television. The “June 17, 1994” episode of ESPN’s documentary series 30 for 30, which was directed by Brett Morgan, juxtaposed the other sports events which occurred that day —Arnold Palmer playing his final round at the U.S. Open, the opening of the 1994 FIFA World Cup games which were being hosted by the United States, the New York Rangers celebrating their Stanley Cup victory with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, Ken Griffey, Jr. tying Babe Ruth's record for the most home runs (30) before July, and Game 5 of the 1994 NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks— to find commonality and contrast.
Sports becomes a great window into our own psyche. They're a metaphor for life, and when you have this many emotions wrapped into one day, as we do on June 17, 1994, it's the ultimate metaphor. From the triumph of the New York Rangers' ticker tape parade, to the lowest of lows with O.J. Simpson, to the cycle of life represented by Arnold Palmer playing his final round in a U.S. Open, it's an opportunity to tell the story of this one day, and in doing so, to look at the soul of America.
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The tale of Leonard Deadwyler: The second episode of the series has Johnnie Cochran referencing the killing of Leonard Deadwyler in 1966. Similar to the circumstances surrounding a number of recent incidents, Deadwyler was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital, with his daughter in the backseat of the car. The L.A.P.D. pulled Deadwyler over and during the traffic stop shot and killed him for making a “sudden move,” with descriptions of the scene having Deadwyler’s dead body slumping over his wife, while their child watched it all happen from the back of the car. The District Attorney of Los Angeles County refused to file charges against the officer who killed Deadwyler, and Deadwyler’s family hired Cochran to sue the city. During a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, Cochran mentions being a city attorney and seeing a number of cases of African-Americans beaten by officers who would then charge suspects under California penal code 148, which is so nebulous it covers almost anything as resisting arrest and has been used to protect police against abuse accusations.
The mute moment that would change his life came in May of 1966, when an unarmed black man named Leonard Deadwyler was fatally shot by Los Angeles police during a traffic stop … At the televised coroner's inquest, the cameras soon locked in on the 28-year-old Cochran. Under archaic rules in effect back then, a defense attorney was forbidden to pose questions directly to the court, forcing Cochran to whisper into the ear of the deputy district attorney. Over and over again in this bizarre game of legal telephone, the DA's man would repeat and all the city would hear: "Mr. Cochran wants to know ..."
By the time it was all over, Johnnie Cochran, without uttering a single audible word, was famous.
The working plan, according to Murphy, is to follow a group of six to eight people in an attempt to examine all sides of the tragedy, from the Superdome to the hospital to those who were put on buses and dropped off with babies who were forced to wear trash bags for multiple days.
"I want this show to be a socially conscious, socially aware examination of different types of crime around the world," he said. "And in my opinion, Katrina was a f—ing crime — a crime against a lot of people who didn’t have a strong voice and we’re going to treat it as a crime. That’s what this show is all about."