Ezra Edelman, 2016
#15, 2016 Skandies; AMPAS Best Documentary
This is not what I expected! I had heard that in 2016 there had been an acclaimed TV show dramatizing the O.J. Simpson case, and then here’s the 2016 Skandies list, and checking in at #15 is a five-episode TV series about O.J. Simpson. So a question mark appeared above my head when the first episode began, “The following documentary contains mature subject matter.” Documentary? Hadn’t I heard something about Cuba Gooding Jr. playing the guy? How do you call that a documentary? Anyway, it turns out that there were actually two giant O.J. Simpson projects released within a few weeks of each other, and it was this 467-minute documentary, not the 499-minute drama, that the Skandie voters had plumped for. I wound up watching both.
I started with the documentary. I’ve watched a handful of other documentaries in plowing through Skandies lists over the years, and they’ve been about the sorts of stories that don’t dominate the headlines day after day. A man who teaches computer programming to preteen boys at his home in the 1980s is accused of molesting his students. A wildlife activist who believes he can befriend wild bears is eaten by one. A preschool girl is credited with paintings that sell for huge sums, but her father is suspected to be the actual artist. But the O.J. trial… by some metrics, this was the biggest story of my lifetime. The news that a one-time football star was suspected of murdering his wife—and a waiter who’d had the bad luck to stop by to drop off a pair of forgotten sunglasses, catching the fatal stabbing in progress—might have been a big story on its own, but after Simpson made a break for it and wound up getting chased around the Southern California freeway system as he held a gun to his head, it was saturation coverage from that point on. Watch the coverage of the infamous Ford Bronco chase and you might see my car! It was 1994, June 17, I had just graduated from college, and I’d been at my mother’s apartment in Signal Hill with my brothers, watching Game 5 of the NBA finals between the Houston Rockets and the New York Knicks, when the game was pre-empted to show the chase. I decided to drive back to my father’s house in Anaheim, and as I headed east on the 91, I found that many cars had pulled over to the left shoulder so that the occupants could get out and watch O.J. go by headed westbound with a dozen cop cars behind him. I pulled into the empty right lane and made it home a lot quicker than I usually would!
What followed was my gap year between college and grad school. This was my first year as an SAT tutor, and as I drove around the East Bay from appointment to appointment, the news radio stations didn’t play any news—it was gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial. The same was true on TV. Month after month went by, and this was the only story. The war in the Balkans, the Republican takeover of Congress for the first time in forty years… it all receded into the background, and we heard a lot more about the likes of Kato Kaelin, Rosa Lopez, and Dennis Fung than we did about Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Slobodan Milosevic. (One exception: the Oklahoma City bombing in April did knock O.J. into second place for a week or so.) By 1995, October 3, my gap year was over, I was at grad school in Illinois, and I watched the verdict come down on my dorm room TV. The reception was absolutely terrible and it only got one channel, but that was okay, because the trial was on every channel. Not even the 9/11 attacks got this depth of coverage for so long! Yes, it was all 9/11 all the time for weeks and weeks, and the aftermath of the attacks dominated the news of the decade that followed, but by 2002, attention had shifted to the scandals that were taking down huge companies such as Enron and Worldcom. But O.J. ate up the American media for sixteen months. The upshot of all this is that, in terms of actual events, O.J.: Made in America didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know—someone too young to remember the trial (which includes, uh, pretty much everybody I ever talk to nowadays) might boggle at all the crazy twists and turns of the case, but for me it was just like being back in my apartment at 1835 Delaware Street watching the news. I used to set my VCR a lot back then, when I had a tutoring appointment during a show I wanted to watch—I probably still have VHS tapes in my storage space with some of these recordings, with news bumpers during the commercials urging the viewer to tune in at eleven for the latest O.J. developments.
The main value that O.J.: Made in America adds is context. Explanations of why the O.J. Simpson case dominated the news for well over a year often start with the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a drunk driver who had led police on a high-speed chase on both the freeway and residential streets. Members of the Los Angeles Police Department finally did apprehend him, and beat him to a pulp in the process; a bystander with a camcorder captured the beating on video and sent the tape to KTLA. The images of a gang of officers viciously clubbing an unarmed African-American man shocked members of the public who had never seen such a thing on TV before, and thrust the issue of police brutality into the limelight. A year later, those officers were acquitted of assault by a jury only one member of which had any African ancestry; the trial had been moved from Los Angeles to the affluent suburb of Simi Valley, known as the heart of “Reagan Country” and a popular bedroom community for police. The subsequent outrage led to many days of rioting in Los Angeles. In the aftermath of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal by a heavily African-American jury, many speculated that the result had little to do with the evidence presented and was instead payback for Rodney King; one juror in this documentary cheerfully agrees that, for “oh, probably ninety percent” of the jurors, it absolutely was. But O.J.: Made in America goes well past 1991 in laying the groundwork, starting with the Second Great Migration of African-Americans out of the rural south as the country mobilized for World War II. It probably should have started with the First Great Migration a generation earlier. In that exodus, African-Americans relocated from the rural south to cities in the north, but not the west. Boosters of Los Angeles, the tenth-most populous urban area in the U.S. in 1920 and fifth-most populous in 1930, advertised their city as the nation’s remaining “white spot”, attracting people from east of the Rockies for whom that message resonated. So when, in the 1940s, with the U.S. at war with a Pacific empire, Los Angeles did attract African-Americans looking for work in the factories and shipyards there, they found themselves among a more racist population than they might have had they arrived a couple of generations earlier. In 1950, William Parker was named the chief of police of Los Angeles, and set to cleaning up the notoriously corrupt LAPD. Out went the officers who had become cops in order to take bribes; in came the true believers in law and order. The problem was, that “order” was a racial hierarchy with whites at the top; Parker was reputed to recruit officers from Ku Klux Klan rallies. The result was an endless string of incidents of police brutality directed at African-Americans—the vast majority of which we never heard about, but to run through even the tiny fraction that made the news could make this article arbitrarily long. Some mentioned in the documentary: the violent apprehension of Marquette Frye, another drunk driver, that touched off the 1965 Watts riots; the fatal shooting of Leonard Deadwyler, who had run some red lights while speeding his pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth; the case of Eula Love, shot dead by the LAPD for waving a knife at utility workers who had come to collect on her gas bill. Flashpoints like these would ignite plenty of anger on their own, but making things worse was the impunity with which the justice system allowed police to commit these crimes. And not just police: thirteen days after the Rodney King beating, grocer Soon Ja Du shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the back of the head, was caught on tape doing so, received a conviction for voluntary manslaughter, and was sentenced to… five years of probation. Against this backdrop, the O.J. Simpson prosecutors needed the LAPD to look absolutely impeccable for a jury in downtown Los Angeles, familiar with this litany, to accept any evidence linked to the police. Instead they got sloppy forensics work—blood brought from a lab to a crime scene, dirty blankets used to cover (and contaminate) a victim’s body, officers taking evidence home with them, etc.—and they got Mark Fuhrman, caught on tape tossing around racial slurs and crowing about falsifying reports and framing non-white suspects. (He’s now a regular on Fox News. You can’t say the network doesn’t know its audience!)
The other half of the context the documentary provides is about O.J. Simpson himself. This actually wasn’t all old news to me. It always did seem strange to me that so much attention would be given to this guy—this wasn’t the trial of Michael Jordan, after all. To me, Simpson was barely a celebrity: a Heisman winner from way back when who’d been exposed as overrated in the pros (he played a grand total of one playoff game in his career, and lost it), then had become a pitchman and D-list actor. I didn’t even know him from his commercials—the O.J.-related commercial that played incessantly when I was watching TV actually featured his mother:
What O.J.: Made in America explains is that what made O.J. Simpson an important figure in American culture was not that he won the Heisman, but that he won it in 1968. The college football season followed on the heels of the Summer Olympics, at which Tommie Smith and John Carlos had given “Black Power” salutes at the medal ceremony for the 200-meter dash. UCLA basketball superstar Lew Alcindor, who had converted to Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (though he wouldn’t reveal this until 1971), boycotted those Olympics, citing “the futility of winning the gold medal for this country and then coming back to live under oppression”. A year earlier, heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali had been stripped of his titles for refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Sports had long been one of the few windows through which African-American achievement had been visible to the wider public, but now conservatives were beginning to grumble that so many top athletes were turning out to be militants. But then you had Alcindor’s football counterpart: O.J. Simpson. Though no child of privilege, having grown up in the projects of Potrero Hill in San Francisco, Simpson’s extraordinary athletic gifts had won him a scholarship to play at UCLA’s cross-town rival USC, a.k.a. the University of Spoiled Children, with its country club demographics. For his onfield heroics, O.J. Simpson found himself hailed as a hero by a rich, almost entirely white student body and alumni base, and he liked it. And all he had to do to remain beloved by USC fandom, and by those with the same basic specs as USC fandom, was to continue to play the comforting role of the country’s least militant black superstar athlete. Bob Hope would show up and marvel at how at USC “you haven’t had a riot, a demonstration, or even a sit-in—are you sure this is a college?”, collect a few laughs from the Young Republicans, call O.J. up on stage to feed Bob a few canned straight lines, and send everyone home feeling that, hey, these crazy radicals are all wrong to say that this country has issues with race. We can’t have any problems with race if we all love O.J., right? Some of our best friends are black! For his part, O.J. Simpson—very understandably—chafed at being defined by his race. “I’m not black—I’m O.J.!” And the fact that so many agreed, saw him as a category unto himself, allowed him to break barriers.
This, then, is the thesis the documentary puts forth. O.J. Simpson was able to put himself forward as, in the words of one of the talking heads, “the counter-revolutionary athlete”, making himself much more acceptable to America’s USC demographic than other African-American sports stars. He spun this into a career beyond sports, becoming the first African-American celebrity endorser for any number of companies, and even establishing himself as the face of Hertz, the rental car agency. This turned out to be crucial for his net worth, as in the 1970s top athletes signed contracts for six figures rather than the nine figures that are common today. He therefore had the money to hire a top legal team after the murder. Just as importantly—O.J. Simpson lived in Brentwood, a Los Angeles neighborhood that was listed in the 1990 census as 86% white, 1% black. Unsurprisingly, he was the first member with African ancestry at any number of country clubs, where he hobnobbed with his best friends, such as network executive Don Ohlmeyer and business tycoon Robert Kardashian. That is to say, he not only had the money to hire a top legal team, but connections who knew whom to call. But then, when that legal team decided on a race-based strategy, he was able to pivot and position himself as the vehicle through which African-Americans could avenge the injustices that had been heaped upon them over the years. And because the recalcitrant LAPD had failed to root out racism to such an extent that it couldn’t send three detectives to a crime scene without one of them turning out to be an overt white supremacist, the overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence of Simpson’s guilt was effectively poisoned, and the defense’s outlandish, preposterous conspiracy theories came to look plausible. And thus, payback for Rodney King and other outrages came not via effective reform of law enforcement but through letting a country club multi-millionaire get away with murdering his wife. And a waiter who had stopped by to drop off some sunglasses.
As with the Kurt Cobain documentary, another bit of value that O.J.: Made in America adds to the newscasts is some behind-the-scenes video. Instead of watching a helicopter shot of O.J. Simpson’s house on TV in 1995 and wondering, “What’s going on in that house?”, now you can just see what was going on in that house. I think probably the biggest gap filled in for me was what happened in between the civil trial (at which Simpson was found responsible for the murder of the waiter, Ron Goldman, and ordered to pay the Goldman family $33 million, which he never did) and Simpson’s trial for armed robbery in 2008. I had gathered that Simpson was more or less a pariah, believed innocent in the sorts of neighborhoods he’d tried to escape from, but universally considered a despicable monster in the circles in which he actually wanted to transact. I had envisioned him either sitting in his big house watching TV and eating hamburgers or else shuffling around a golf course with a couple of yes men. You know, like Trump. Instead, video clips from the documentary reveal, he spent a decade partying down in Miami. Cocaine and threesomes every night. He wasn’t a pariah in South Beach: in clip after clip, he’s surrounded by blonde party girls and tattooed dudebros, flocking around him like he’s the latest reality TV sensation. And these clips aren’t from 2022—that is, these weren’t Zoomers too young to know who he was. They were early Millennials. Maybe they’d been in middle school when the trial was on every channel every day, but they’d have known that he was a multiple murderer. They just didn’t care. If anything, it just gave him more cred with them.
I guess if I had to name a weakness in this documentary, it would be this: yes, even a running time of 467 minutes means you’re going to have to leave something out, but it still struck me as a notable oversight to spend a huge amount of time on race, and a fair amount of time on wealth and celebrity, and then spend almost no time on sex. Yes, this case laid bare the ways that Americans’ experience with and attitude toward the police differ wildly depending on whether they have non-European ancestry or not. It raised questions about the extent to which “justice” in America is a function of one’s ability to pay for a favorable outcome. But it also exposed how deeply misogynistic American society is, even granting that most of the rest of the world is even worse. We see tiny hints here and there: a protester holding a sign declaring that the acquittal signaled “open season on women”, for instance. Dig beneath the crust of race and wealth and fame and relations between the police and the community, and at its core, you find that this is the case of a man who beat his wife for years and then killed her. He felt entitled to own her and fell into a rage at the slightest hint that she was more than just his property. But it seems like the only people involved with this project who see the case that way are the prosecutors. So much context about O.J. Simpson’s place in American culture, so much context about the LAPD—where’s the context about the history of domestic violence in this country, about domestic abuse law? We hear so much about slavery in history classes, but in the nineteenth century, abolitionism was never the leading social movement in the U.S.—temperance was, and that in turn was an outgrowth of the recognition that half the population lived in fear of being savagely beaten by their drunken husbands. Why is this generally turned into a footnote at best? Why were there no consequences on the many occasions that the police were called out to Brentwood to find Nicole Brown Simpson covered in cuts and bruises, or boot marks on her face, or other injuries sufficient to require hospitalization? Why do we put the onus upon battered women to press charges, as if it weren’t in the general interest to remove violent men from society? Why, when O.J. Simpson’s domestic abuse record did come to light in the years before the murder, was he not treated as persona non grata? I would suggest that it had something to do with far too many men fearing the personal consequences of such a societal shift, but one of the other lessons of the O.J. Simpson trial is that it is not just men who are misogynistic. Consider prosecutor Marcia Clark. Yes, we can talk about the way that the media turned her into a figure of fun, incessantly critiquing her hair and her outfits—while somehow no one ever critiqued Robert Shapiro’s hair or F. Lee Bailey’s outfits. But setting that aside—let’s talk about the miscalculations she cites in this documentary. Both she and the defense took the line that demography was destiny when it came to jury selection. The defense wanted to maximize the number of jurors with African ancestry; the prosecution wanted to minimize it. When the district attorney, with an eye on optics after Rodney King, decided to hold the trial in downtown Los Angeles rather than Santa Monica, it seemed to play into the defense’s hands. But Clark wasn’t concerned: as long as she could maximize the number of women on the jury, she theorized, then race be damned, she could win. In fact, she cynically thought, having a jury two-thirds of which consisted of African-American women might be an advantage, as she suspected that many of them would be angry that a successful black man had ditched his black wife to marry a blonde white woman. And they were angry, focus groups revealed. They were angry at Nicole. They called her a gold digger. O.J. Simpson they continued to find handsome and charming. And then, to return to the automatic disrespect accorded to Marcia Clark—when she was presented to the focus groups, she couldn’t get a sentence out of her mouth before the immediate response came back: “Bitch!” But it wasn’t the men in the groups who dismissed her thusly—it was the women. This was a trial that demonstrated the polarization of the public along the lines of race. In poll after poll, when 80% of African-Americans felt one way, 80% of those classed as “non-Hispanic white” felt the opposite way. Marcia Clark bet that the intraracial solidarity and interracial disparity she saw would also hold true for sex. It did not. Men demonstrated contempt for women, and women demonstrated contempt for women. I don’t know whether that is more depressing or infuriating. In any case, it strikes me as worth digging into—how did we get here? how do we get out?—but this documentary, which goes to some length to unpack other issues, elects to let these moments pass without further comment.
Jeffrey Toobin, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, and Ryan Murphy, 2016
And now I will spend about ten percent as many words on the drama, even though I enjoyed it more. In theory, I’m dubious about the main thrust of the series, which is to build fairly conventional story arcs on each side of the case: infighting and jockeying for dominance on the defense’s “Dream Team”, and a potential romance between Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden of the prosecution. But whatever—it is still trippy to take an extensive set of very well known scenes and events, stay impressively faithful to all of them, and make it all work as a gonzo legal drama. And the casting! While O.J. Simpson dominated the headlines, Pulp Fiction hit the theaters, and 1970s icon John Travolta rejoined the ranks of movie superstars; meanwhile, NBC premiered a series called Friends, which became a smash hit, with David Schwimmer as one of its breakout performers. Well, here they both are, playing Bob Shapiro and Robert Kardashian! Meanwhile, Courtney Vance, whom I know from The Last Supper, a movie that premiered (all together now) during the O.J. Simpson trial, makes for a very convincing Johnnie Cochran—no surprise that he won one of the show’s many Emmys. Beyond the performances, the show is just well made in general. Direction was strong. The era-appropriate music cues were on point, as the kids say, or used to say: “Sabotage” was a hilariously perfect choice for the beginning of the Bronco chase, and other selections made me more than a little nostalgic. This show is set back when I was watching a lot of MTV, 120 Minutes in particular, and while these were never among my favorites, I had to give a thumbs-up to the Cardigans and Folk Implosion songs that popped up. I also appreciated the attention to detail: a prescription bottle meant to draw no attention has a 1997 expiration date on it; I spotted a blurry Thomas Bros. guide, long gone today but ubiquitous in California in the mid-’90s (I had three for different areas); license plates have era-appropriate sequences, and I only spotted one PCI. So, not a classic, but better than any of the 2016 Skandies films so far!
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