FEATURE: The Positively Real Adventures of the True Crime Drama

Flashback. 1992. A personal POV.

As an independent producer with only the façade of independent means, I closed my first rights deal on material for a true crime movie. A New York agent representing a young Chicago stringer for People had sent me an article that he thought would be a great TV movie. Since TV movies were all I had produced, he thought I could get a network interested in developing a script.

The article was about a recently apprehended bank robber named Jeff Erickson and his alleged accomplice wife, Jill. The couple had robbed a record number of banks (estimated to have been over 50!) in Chicago suburbs over the past four years. He was a 30-year-old former cop who now owned a used bookstore; his wife was described as a "part-time college student." Just your average, clean-cut American couple … except for several violent domestic separations during their eight-year union and a revolving door in and out of marriage counseling.

Between the lines and beneath the surface, I knew this was a psychosexual thrill ride for Mr. and Mrs. Jeff and Jill Ordinary. The article concluded with the fact that that she had given cops and FBI officers a wild, 70-mph chase through suburban streets, only to be trapped in a cul-de-sac. She must have been considered dangerous enough to warrant several volleys of automatic gunfire, but an autopsy had just revealed she, in fact, shot herself.

Great dark saga, I thought. Bank robbery as marriage therapy. Very sexy stuff. Too sexy for a TV movie. Although those TV Movies of the Week were my living, I had begun to see them as overhyped, underbudgeted, juiceless formats for drama. It was the era when each of the three networks was about to air its version of an Amy Fisher true-crime movie. Little Amy and Big Joey were about sex, jealousy and more sex. I had no objection to such a movie, but on network TV, any version would turn out to be a tease.

I wanted my bank robbers' story to be about the psychosexual relationship of a couple on the edge. Why make a true-crime movie if you don't try to understand the criminal mind? Network movies had too many restrictions to portray that relationship candidly. I had begun looking toward the new great creative opportunity of the Sundance type of independent movie.

When I agreed to pay the People writer a medium five figure (out-of-pocket) option for six months, the agent informed me that it might not be enough. His client had made a deal to split all dollars earned 50-50 with … perpetrator Jeff Erickson! I had thought there was a law against a criminal profiting from his own story. In fact, 18 states had such statutes since1983. They were called Son of Sam laws, named for the infamous mass-murder case in New York in which publishers and producers had bid avariciously with the killer for his story.

The agent informed me that those laws had just been declared unconstitutional. Only a few weeks earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled they violated the perpetrator's First Amendment rights. The agent told me: "Join the partnership with the writer and the robber, or we'll easily get another producer to take your place."

I signed. At least he didn't raise the price.

I got a publicist to announce my deal in the trades, stating that I was going to take this out for development as a feature film. In print, I predicted that the true-crime TV movie was beginning to lose its audience. My timing was good; the networks, reacting to the tabloid TV label, had just announced a long freeze on true crime.

In spite of my sense of the future of the medium, during the next few months of '92 and '93, all three Amy Fisher movies aired to very high ratings.

As for my gritty little true-crime feature, stay tuned.

I am no longer a producer, but on the subject of true crime, I had a helluva crystal ball. The days of the TV movie reenactment of the latest headline crime are almost gone, with certain notable exceptions. Feature films have indeed inherited the genre. As I write this, a record number of true-crime movies are debuting in theaters, with the past year's vintage prominently displayed in video stores. Currently playing in many cities: Veronica Guerin (martyred Irish reporter's war on drug dealers), Wonderland (notorious unsolved murders of two decades ago, involving LA drug dealers and porn stars) and Party Monster (decline and fall of the late-'80's drugged-out club scene). In selected theaters you can find Shattered Glass, an independent film expose of a rising Washington journalist who pathologically faked stories. (See review, Page 34.) By year's end, just in time for the holidays, we'll get a look at Monster (as opposed to Party Monster). Like the others, it is a indie feature, this time about roadside prostitute-serial killer Aileen Wournos, starring two popular actresses—Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci. Wournos was the subject of a CBS TV movie a decade ago, before her execution. A new documentary, Aileen: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is also due at year's end. Also in selected theaters around the country is the documentary Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, about a champion skateboarder who murdered a girlfriend.

The TV and basic-cable networks, have, as I predicted, cut far back on the genre, although in October USA Network presented Sniper, the re-enactment of last year's terrifying attacks in the Washington, D.C. area. Most recently, CBS opened its November sweeps with a family-authorized "docudrama" about kidnap victim/survivor Elizabeth Smart. Video/DVD releases of both telefilms can be expected next year.

For die-hard true-crime buffs who may have missed some of last year's output, there are Dahmer and AutoFocus (Paul Schrader's biopic of sex-addicted '60s TV star Bob Crane, whose murder is still unsolved). They are prominently on display among Blockbuster's and Hollywood's new release manifest. Up on those shelves, too, is last year's major big-budget breakthrough from, of all people, Steven Spielberg with the atypical tale of a misunderstood youth/master thief, Catch Me If You Can. (True crime lite?)

Quite an inventory, but just as I finished this compilation, a quick stop at my local home-entertainment emporium revealed three more 2003 new releases—all direct-to-video, low-budget efforts about true-crime superstars: Gacy (child murder John Wayne Gacy); Speck (serial murderer Richard Speck); and The Night Stalker (LA's infamous home-invading, mystically motivated murderer Richard Ramirez).

I can't wait to see the boxed holiday set.

One look at that list and you might conclude that this genre is flourishing. But the makers of most of these movies could not possibly be looking for major commercial success. For the most part, they appear to be cheaply made exercises in exploitation for fast payoffs. The few decent movies in the bunch—AutoFocus, Shattered Glass, Gator—are small, psychological case studies made as independent films for art-house audiences. Looking back on the true-crime genre's many faces on big and small screens really puts this current crop in perspective.

Real crimes and criminals seem to have been fascinating subjects forever. Long before there were movies, the illustrated penny press depicted the exploits of ruthless, daring lawbreakers, from Jesse James to Jack the Ripper. The movies just gave them a bigger audience. Nearly every factual law-and-order saga, from the banditry of the Old West to the latest ripped-from-the-headlines tale, became commercial movie fare. Early Hollywood loosely fictionalized real crimes and villains, but pictures like Scarface, Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties—even the socially conscious I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang—were graphic, if incomplete, depictions of actual people and events. Later, the trend became real names, incidents, places: Dillinger, Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, the Brinks holdup … even if the facts took second place to the drama. For years, Production Code censorship, community standards limiting screen violence and sexuality, plus emphasis on entertainment over sociology, diminished the "true" component in true crime drama.

And then came Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

In 1965, the high-profile Southern novelist revolutionized crime reporting when he read a wire-service account of the cold-blooded killing of an entire Midwestern family. His eventual book on the case depicted the parallel agonies of the surviving family and townfolk and the execution of the doomed killers.

Two years later, writer/director Richard Brooks made an Oscar-nominated movie of Capote's book (starring Robert Blake!). Suddenly, the definition and content of a new literary and film genre was created.

But even with the success of the feature film of In Cold Blood, Hollywood in the '60s and '70s never could figure out how to make such graphic, downbeat material commercial. A big studio film about the notorious Boston Strangler, from a best-selling book, with star (and Las Vegan) Tony Curtis in the title role, was an expensive flop.

Movies, it appeared, were better served by stylish, fact-based crime sagas that allowed for "artistic liberties," in the mode of Bonnie and Clyde.

At the end of the '60s, the most heinous of true crimes had struck in the back yard of the movie industry itself. No studio or filmmaker could even conceive of any motion picture about the Manson Family.

Movies made explicitly for television in the '60s and early '70s were mostly 90-minute pilots for ambitious TV series, produced by big studios like Universal and Warners anxious to cash in on new markets. Columbo started in 1971 as a one-shot movie of the week that became a franchise. The Marcus-Nelson Murders, based on the real-life Wylie-Hoffert murders, became Kojak in 1973. A few other early TV movies proved to be successful dramas on their own—My Sweet Charlie, the birth of the multipart miniseries with Rich Man, Poor Man.

But in 1975, when Lorimer Productions and CBS announced they were going to make a two-part miniseries of the best-seller Helter Skelter, about the Manson Family massacre, there were moralistic outcries that network TV had succumbed to sensationalism.

In spite of initial sponsor hesitancy, Helter Skelter, adapted from the book by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, with a cast of unknown actors, became the most successful single program of its time. Critical acclaim, hailing its "intelligent restraint in treating violence and sensationalism" and "well-acted, suspenseful entertainment," was unanimous. TV's limitations prohibited showing the graphic violence, yet the miniseries scared its audience out of their seats. New actor Steve Railsback's authentic portrayal of Manson's ferocity was mesmerizing.

In fact, Helter Skelter didn't have a single violent scene. The three-year capture, trial and conviction of The Family were covered from the point of view of Bugliosi's court case. This meant the lurid crimes happened off-screen. There were a few brief flashbacks that showed the killings in long shots, where the sound of gunfire was eliminated from the track (an effectively scary device). Yet the horrible details of the murders were dramatized in the dialogue of all the testimony, or in a few cases in scenes out of the court. Unforgettable was an eerie retelling by 21-year-old killer Susan Atkins, arrested for a lesser crime, about how she murdered the pregnant Sharon Tate, to a jailhouse lesbian she had just bedded. It was utterly without remorse, and the terrified inmate immediately called LAPD. The scene made the audience witnesses, too. Television had never invaded our consciousness like that before.

Helter Skelter—which CBS has just announced it will remake for next season—was a TV landmark. The thoughtful, informative and, above all, nongratuitous production proved that the sponsor-driven networks could succeed in dramatizing even the most graphic true-crime material for mass audiences. TV had succeeded where feature films had failed.

If there were questions about sustaining Helter Skelter's standards of excellence, they would diminish further with almost every successive true-crime miniseries or movie of the week. For the next decade and a half, network TV would produce a dramatic hall of fame: The Guyana Tragedy, Murder in Texas, Dummy, The Executioner's Song, Family of Spies, to name a few. The challenge in telling them under nonviolent constraints was met by some of the most intelligent writing and directing in the history of the medium. Qualitatively, these films rivaled features, and they attracted mature, discriminate viewers who wouldn't be caught dead at the multiplex in line for the new John Hughes Brat Pack epic. The so-called "idiot box" has rarely been more distinctive, especially in handling subject matter as controversial as murder and mayhem.

Most of those terrific TV movies were based on a new genre of nonfiction books. By the early '80s, there was a feeding frenzy among agents and publishers for material to fill those new "True Crime" shelves in the big bookstore chains. Many of these volumes found their way to the network development lists.

Demand for material kept growing, and a lot of money was thrown around for rights to all these stories. Retelling a true-crime saga usually meant authors and screenwriters needed rights to some participant's point of view, many of whom started signing with lawyers and agents for the best deals. Cops, prosecutors, victims, even—especially—the criminals themselves started lining up for paydays.

In 1983, respected journalist Joe McGinness published a true-crime book titled Fatal Vision, about a Green Beret and Vietnam War hero convicted of murdering his family. Even before the actual publication, Fatal Vision was sold to NBC for immediate development as a miniseries. As predicted, it became an instant best seller, and production of the film closely coincided with the book's rising popularity.

At that same time, however, the entire true-crime genre was coming under scrutiny. McGinness, it was revealed, had made a financial arrangement with the story's antagonist, Col. Jeffrey MacDonald, who had been convicted of the unspeakable murders of his wife and children. MacDonald, always proclaiming his innocence, apparently felt that an investigative nonfiction book by a major author would at least gain him another trial. McGinness welcomed the opportunity for such an "inside" look at this character, but held the right to form his own opinion of innocence or guilt—resoundingly declaring MacDonald "guilty" at the conclusion. Nevertheless, he paid MacDonald, as contracted.

This trend of compensating convicted criminals for their stories created a moral outrage when agents, lawyers, and producers were suddenly lining up for the rights from New York's convicted Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz.

A producer of the time described it as "one big ambulance chase. Except everybody was looking to sign the driver instead of the poor schmuck he ran over."

The State of New York suddenly took action as the legislature passed a bill forbidding living convicted criminals or their relatives from profiting from their crimes by selling their stories to the media. Within the year—1983—16 other states passed similar "Son of Sam" legislation.

Meanwhile, Fatal Vision remained on the bestseller list. McGinness' credibility may have slipped a bit, but the excellent NBC miniseries aired in 1984 to great reviews and ratings.

The whole affair spurred the networks to re-evaluate their standards for true-crime movies. Their apologists coined a new term to describe the rigid fact checks such films would have to face to make it to the air. That term, "docudrama," with its definitions of what can and cannot be depicted in a "true anything" film, is still the standard for such movies.

However, with the new laws against paying the perps, network brass re-emphasized that a "true story" could be taken from any number of points of view. That opened the door for more than one film to be made about a particular crime, depending on the credibility and point of view of the principal paid source. A crime could be portrayed through the eyes of a victim, or an investigator like a news reporter, or a law-enforcer. Usually, these sources were harnessed and combined by authors who wrote books, which the producers and networks would buy. But by the mid-'80s, demand for true-crime docudramas was so great, the book, or even article, was often skipped. Producers would negotiate with sources themselves. Occasionally, this would lead to two networks racing to portray the same criminal story from two separate legitimate sources. In the early 1990s, ABC and NBC aired separate movies about the schoolteacher/convicted murderess Carolyn Warmus, who killed her lover's wife. These movies took three years to make, since Warmus' trials were long and complicated. The networks, from their separate paid sources—the victim's husband/Warmus' lover, and the arresting officer—began developing their scripts during the first trial, before the accused was convicted. This actually caused the trial to end with a hung jury, when it was revealed that one of her accusers had signed to give his version of the case to a TV producer. Not exactly an ethical interpretation of "innocent until proven guilty."

Into the '90s, record numbers of true-crime films were made for TV, but ratings and quality continued to slip. Then, in 1992, almost out of nowhere, the Supreme Court put an end to the Son of Sam laws as a violation of the First Amendment rights that even criminals possess. Now it would be possible for TV to make three variations on child femme fatale Amy Fisher's sleazy story: one from catch-all public records sources; another from the paid "inside story" of wounded victim, Mrs. Joey Buttafuoco (who had publicly forgiven her husband and taken him back to share the network loot); and the paid-for confessions of little Amy herself. Though all three got decent ratings, Amy Fisher: Her Own Story had the highest.

Ratings notwithstanding, the golden age of true-crime drama on TV was over. One network, NBC, decided that it could cover a vast array of such stories without negotiating for any rights. The network created a special franchise of direct-from-the-headlines reenactments of commercially appealing crimes, under the banner "In the Line of Duty." These would be written as law-enforcement procedurals, with the criminal characters written strictly from published and media accounts in the public record. TV movies treated us to reenactments of disastrous events like the first—1994—World Trade Center bombing and the Waco Texas shootout, each as "An NBC In the Line of Duty Movie."

Although all networks, including NBC, make few TV movies of any kind any more, this franchise remains on their books.

The networks more recently have embraced an even cheaper alternative to docudrama movies: reality shows on every kind of crime. And there is enough depiction of every variation on real criminal behavior on a season of Law and Order or C.S.I. to equal all the TV movies and features combined.

In 1990, Hollywood released two brilliant, unconventional true-crime pictures, both from popular books. Reversal of Fortune was adapted from attorney Alan Dershowitz's published account of his successful retrial defense of convicted wife-killer Klaus von Bulow. Goodfellas was Martin Scorsese's portrayal of deadly, low-level New York mafiosos in the '70s, from Nicholas Pieleggi's best-seller Wiseguys. They were creative, original approaches to true-crime storytelling, with great box-office appeal. Nicholas Kazan punctuated his Oscar-winning script for Reversal with outrageous storytelling devices like having the corpse, Sunny von Bulow, narrate the opening, and emphasizing the dark humor in the story's pairing of a pompous, philandering anti-Semite with a high-strung Jewish lawyer.

With Goodfellas, Scorsese virtually invented a new narrative form, using his protagonist's hyper, often humorous voice over about 75 percent of the film. He also focused entirely on the violence these crooks imposed on each other, while leaving their considerable crimes—including a famous heist at Lufthansa Airlines at New York's Kennedy Airport—entirely offscreen.

The stories these films told might have been done as TV docudramas—in fact a version of the von Bulow case had already been a TV movie. But the small screen couldn't have accommodated the cinematic art in their telling.

During the '90s, it appeared that quality filmmakers were reinventing the true-crime movie, and for a while there were a number of big-budget, star-driven pictures in that genre.

But beware of Hollywood trends. If the golden age of the TV true-crime movie was over, features didn't create much of an alternative. Donnie Brasco was a good mob-infiltration story, very well made and acted, but it never found an audience. The excellent Quiz Show, Robert Redford's tragic take on the '50s TV game-show scandals, fared only a bit better. Scorsese's Casino was a pale imitation of Goodfellas. Not even Jack Nicholson in the title role could put the one-dimensional Hoffa over.

The only bright spots in quality movies in the genre in the past decade or so have been a handful of pay-cable features, like HBO's satirical look at stock scandals in the adaptation of Barbarians at the Gate and its sendup of TV docudramas with the dark, comic The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. The 2000 HBO movie Cheaters, about a high-school teacher who helped his Chicago ghetto students beat a standardized achievement test, was a very special film. But cable's output since has been meager.

Is our fascination with this genre finally waning? There will always be that instant-replay TV market for a few traditional docudramas. Ratings for last spring's FX network movie 44 Minutes (a reenactment of a shootout during a foiled North Hollywood bank robbery in 1999) were among the highest for that cable network. The recent Sniper on USA did well with audiences. And CBS' movie on kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart won the recent network sweeps in its time slot. But these are hardly the complex, provocative subjects the likes of Helter Skelter. Movies that simply reenact crimes, even emphasizing the triumph of law and order, do little to explain the impact of a serious crime on society. TV has a long way to go to live up to the standards it set for the genre.

Meanwhile, another look at that current batch of true-crime movies only confirms that we are at the bottom of the barrel. All but two of them—Veronica Guerin, from the news stories of a public heroine, and Shattered Glass (the one good drama of the lot), from a detailed article in Vanity Fair—are based on rights payments to the criminals themselves, if they are still alive. I knew an author who cut a 50-50 deal a decade ago with Night Stalker Ramirez for a book and movie. The book was eventually published and mercifully disappeared soon after. I can't bring myself to look at that video, but I keep wondering if that's covered by the rights deal. Or, for that matter, if the makers used the old "from public records" excuse/approach, and if cult killer Ramirez is trying to sue their asses …

Now that would be a true-crime movie I might want to see, if they fictionalize it. But my long-time fascination with true crime is over now that I am no longer a producer. I started losing interest quite a while ago, when I got involved in a true-crime picture myself ...

Flashback Continued. 1992-97.

My deal for the rights to develop a feature film about bank robber Jeff Erickson and his late wife was made. I spent the next month carefully observing his trial in Federal District Court in Chicago. My People story source and his profit partner kept me informed every day. She called one day, extremely worried. Erickson had a great lawyer, she told me. Even with his wife's violent death and a ton of evidence concerning her guilt, the lawyer was pushing for a mistrial because the long list of eyewitnesses to the robberies could not ID his client—the robber had worn a series of ridiculous-looking beards and makeup, plus masks.

My stringer and I both conjured the same image—what if he's declared not guilty?

Near the end of the trial, the writer called me with the news: Jeff Erickson tried to escape as he was led from court by three armed marshals. In the elevator he stole a gun from one and shot them all, killing two. He ran to a ledge on the third floor of the court building, Chicago cops in hot pursuit. He jumped, hitting the sidewalk hard. He looked up once as he struggled to his feet, lifting the pistol as crowds scattered. He screamed—Jillllll! —and ate the gun barrel for the last shot.

I listened to the stringer's excited description, suddenly very nervous that she was celebrating that we finally had a commercial ending. That night I saw a brief news segment about it and later would study the entire uncut local news footage. It didn't occur to me until a full day later that neither he nor his wife had killed anyone during their robbery spree.

His lawyer contacted me shortly after. He was disgusted and downbeat, and he offered me all the details about the robberies and the secret compulsions of a couple whose thrill robberies enhanced their sex lives. He also cut himself in for a piece of my profits.

I believed that moral issues aside, I had the basis for a good, dramatic true-crime picture. Many studio execs agreed, but it was bad timing. A record number of raging Bonnies and Clydes were about to hit theaters with True Confessions, Kalifornia, Natural Born Killers, Love and a 45 …

Sometime later, I gave the story to a talented husband-and-wife writing team known for their comedies. I couldn't afford their script price; they wanted to do it to prove to (other) producers they could, so I gave them the research and agreed to pay expenses and a deferred fee upon production. I renewed the expensive part of the remaining 18 months of the option and hung in.

The script turned out brilliantly, but buyers were smarting over the failure of last year's gun-crazy-couples pics. Almost two years later, a big agency looking to package movies for the Sundance crowd came to me with a director and two young stars. From that, a deal was cut for very little money to make the picture. So little, in fact, that I had defer my fee. But, hey, who wants money with an opportunity at the feature game?

The picture was shot in less time than an average TV movie. Much of the script's sexy tone was underdirected and the action sequences were flat. When it was cut together it played ... sooo slow. The two actors were good, though, and the overrated director had enough spin to get it to Sundance.

There it opened, and in spite of a few encouraging reviews, there it closed. The domestic distributor decided against releasing it, selling it to HBO as a premiere. Since my fee was tied to a theatrical release, I never got paid.

In 1996-97 the movie was shown more than 30 times on HBO and Cinemax, where it gained something of a cult status. The cable company always promoted it well as a love story so strange, it had to be true.

The movie is called Normal Life, and it starred two brave actors who made almost as little as I did—Luke Perry and Ashley Judd.

This is not quite the end of my life in true crime.

In January, 1997, NBC aired a movie under its "In The Line of Duty" franchise. It was called Blaze of Glory: The true story of bank robbers Jeff and Jill Erickson! I couldn't bring myself to watch, but did take satisfaction in the comments of a New York Daily News critic who compared the NBC effort to Normal Life (mistakenly calling mine an HBO film). He was offended by the network movie, which he claimed "… uses the characters' real names, as if that were a license for 'truth' and shamelessly copies the HBO film, except for the crucial 'R'-rated scenes that provide real insight into the criminal minds of such characters …"

The whole experience still weighs heavily on me. The mere fact that I had offered this guy money for his story when he was alive and had not yet killed anyone makes me shudder. Maybe my joyless, uncompensated road to the production was a kind of justice. And then NBC's insult to injury, with its true story of my true story … The name of the criminal, which the writers and I had agreed to change to ensure that he never became Billy the Kid, was the TV movie's last straw.

I left producing over ironies like this, but now, looking back, I think maybe this story of mine qualifies for the true-crime genre. Do I have a buyer?