Candy · Heidi · Gacy
Plus: the Peabodys and the Mets
the true crime that's worth your time
I did watch part of yesterday’s Mets broadcast — but not the part where former Met first baseman and Seinfeld guest star Keith Hernandez admitted he’d almost gotten phished. This is perhaps not of huge interest if you don’t follow baseball/haven’t lived in the NYC area most of your life, but Keith is a local and MLB institution; what’s more, while he’s at times a figure of fun (and God knows his boothmate, Gary Cohen, is having great fun at Keith’s expense in this clip…as usual), Keith has historically had a reputation as a clever guy who did the crossword in pen and gave good quote. If you’ve had trouble convincing older relatives that these scams get more audacious and persuasive all the time, Keith’s near miss might do the trick.
This isn’t Keith’s first time at the intersection of crime and sport, either. — SDB
A book about “the Dexter killer” is getting a film adaptation. The story is a Möbius of meta referents — a book about a movie director who committed a murder “inspired by” a TV show will now become a movie — so I’ll let Deadline help me explain:
Face/Off and Hacksaw Ridge producer David Permut has acquired Steve Lillbuen’s true crime book The Devil’s Cinema about Canadian filmmaker Mark Twitchell who was convicted of first degree murder in 2011.
Twitchell is serving a life sentence for the murder of John Brian Altinger, whom he lured into a “kill room” set up in his garage-turned-film-studio. Twitchell bludgeoned and stabbed Altinger, before cutting him apart and then dumping his remains in garbage bags. His arrest and trial attracted substantial media attention since his crimes were inspired by TV series Dexter and lead character Dexter Morgan, prompting some outlets to refer to Twitchell as the “Dexter Killer”.
An upcoming episode of 48 Hours will surface the case, which I must confess I only vaguely remember; Sam Hobkinson, whose genre credits include Kleptocrats and Fear City, is set to direct. The latter credit makes me think the adaptation will have something to say besides “shit’s crazy, no?”, which, shit’s definitely crazy, but true crime has enough projects that don’t amount to much more than a filmed recitation of a case’s Wikipedia entry. We’ll see what it turns into and whether I’m right (my money’s on a four-part Hulu docudrama that drops in 2024 and is juuuust a little too long). — SDB
A new trailer for Candy dropped yesterday. I hate to say it about the version of the Candy Montgomery/Betty Gore story that features our queen Melanie Lynskey, but I took a look at the updated cast list for the HBOMax version, Love and Death, and…that one just looks better. Plus, based on the teaser above, Candy is awfully pleased with its own production design, and may think that condescending to the macramé owls and food-coloring-forward “cuisine” of turn-of-the-eighties Texas is the same thing as insight.
But I think I had similar concerns about The Act, that it would be too busy feeling superior to its central characters’ dowdiness to find the heart of the thing, and it proved me wrong. Candy also has the advantage of coming out well ahead of Love and Death, which only finished principal shooting a week ago and, depending on how well Candy sticks the landing, could feel extraneous by the time it drops later this year…or your girl could just be looking for reasons to skip stuff given the absolute tidal wave of content facing her in the next month. Welcome to the post-vax boomlet, I guess? — SDB
The Peabody Awards announced the 2022 slate of nominees yesterday, and you’ll see a lot of familiar titles in the group. Works we’ve talked about around here include Attica, Philly DA, Dopesick, Only Murders In The Building, Blindspot: Tulsa Burning, and Lynching Postcards: “Token of a Great Day.” Peabody “season” snuck up on me; I got tipped that the noms were out by one of the jurors, Nicholas Quah, who writes the 1.5x Speed pod-review newsletter for Vulture, and that in turn reminded me that a podcast I’d been waiting for, Heidi World, dropped this week. The 10-episode pod on “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss, per Elle,
traces Fleiss’s rise to infamy: growing up the daughter of a progressive pediatrician-to-the-stars in crunchy Los Feliz, making a name for herself on the party-girl circuit, and, finally, becoming a powerful madam with a stable of hundreds of high-class escorts and an A-list black book (reportedly actually a red Gucci planner) of Hollywood’s rich and powerful—before it all came crashing down.
Pod creator Molly Lambert talked to Elle about the series at the link above, which is a solid read; Quah said of Heidi World that
The execution has been a little rough in practice so far — Lambert’s narration could be tighter, the script could be neater — but her treatment of Fleiss’ story is intriguing. It fits neatly into the blended vibes of the nineties revival and a reconsideration of women from the era that we seem to be bouncing around in these days.
I don’t know if I’ll make time for all 10, but I do remember Fleiss’s stint in Celebrity Rehab, a show I still feel ashamed of “encouraging” back in the day. I remember rooting for her:
Her willingness to present as completely broken and unsightly -- or her apathy as to whether she does -- ties in to what I'm liking about Fleiss. She just puts it out there: "I sit around my house in the middle of nowhere, I do my drugs, I talk to my birds, and I don't have anything or anyone and I can't do it anymore." Most of the addicts try to tell Dr. Drew that it's fiiiiine, they're maintaining, everything's cool, and then he has that genuinely horrified reaction to the abuse they relate from their pasts, and only at that "wow, that must have sucked for you" face do they finally come out of denial to start forgiving themselves. Fleiss skipped all that and went straight to "my life sucks, you gotta help me." She feels like hot buttered shit, but she comes to group; she's not messing around.
Are you guys planning to listen to this one? — SDB
The crime
John Wayne Gacy assaulted and killed nearly three dozen boys and young men prior to the 1978 disappearance of Robert Piest, which is what finally brought him down.
The story
Between November 1979 and April 1980, Gacy was interviewed by a member of his defense attorney’s staff, and those tapes form the foundation of Conversations With A Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, the second in the Conversations “franchise” from Joe Berlinger dropping next Wednesday April 20 on Netflix.
The first iteration took on Ted Bundy, because of…course it did, and I could have sworn I reviewed that one either here or for Primetimer, but all I could find was an early-2020 overview of the veritable legion of Bundy projects, prompted by the docuseries Ted Bundy: Falling For A Killer. I do remember respecting Conversations/Bundy; here’s what I said about it in 2020: “Berlinger…took two runs at Bundy in the last couple of years. This is the non-fiction take, and the better one — exhaustive, expertly assembled, and chilling.”
I feel similarly about Conversations/Gacy — it has excellent access; it’s put together skillfully, tiresome stock footage of old tape players aside; it finds a way to center Gacy’s victims more than you might expect from the title and the central materials — but the problem I have with recommending it is that we already have a property that did what Conversations does. Yes, it’s twice as long, and yes, it’s on a streamer not as many people may have access to, but last year’s John Wayne Gacy: Devil In Disguise already exists, and has already done the work of 1) serving as an explainer on a case that has gotten boiled down over the decades to “clown+crawlspace” and 2) providing cultural context for how a Gacy could continue and flourish. Here’s a snip of what I wrote in my review:
Devil In Disguise is skilled at pointing out the many opportunities law enforcement had in the '60s and '70s to neutralize Gacy permanently — and the ways in which societal attitudes towards sexuality allowed him to continue his murderous activities with impunity. The series is a good overview of the activities themselves, but where it really shines is in reviewing how Gacy's underground chamber of horrors was discovered, then using that to underline the fact that it didn't have to happen that way. Maybe Gacy could have been stopped if prison officials were immune to his industrious breed of, as one interviewee describes it, "hail-fellow-well-met" networking. (This is the disguise the title refers to — not the clown make-up, but the turning of a harmlessly jolly face to the world.)
Maybe Gacy could have been stopped if attitudes towards crime, and specifically sexual assault, within the LGBTQ+ community at the time weren't consistently blown off by police as not worth investigating.
It’s not that Conversations doesn’t do this; it’s not that this isn’t worth doing again. I’ve only seen the first episode so far, but there’s a stunning, wrenching sequence in the middle in which Steve Nemmers — who was menaced by Gacy during Gacy’s time in Iowa, but survived the encounter — relates a literal case study in a sexual predator’s means and methods of control, from pretending he’s “testing” a victim to emotional extortion.
It’s ugly, and almost as hard to take in as it is for Nemmers to talk about over half a century later, but the testimony of victims is important not just to acknowledge but to learn from by shining a light on antisocial manipulations like Gacy’s. That first episode has other notable moments, too, like Gacy rationalizing his clinical assessment of his own sexual orientation in a way that distances him from his lethal shame, or his criminal attorney, Sam Amirante, still nauseated four and a half decades later, describing how he “aged many many years” the night Gacy unburdened himself to Amirante (after which Gacy…fell asleep). Conversations has compelling information, and it isn’t dull. But it got to the topic second, and it’s a bit more traditional in its story-framing.
So…I don’t not recommend it? If you’ve only got three hours to give to the case, Conversations will get the job done. But I recommend Devil over Conversations. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: The adaptation barrage continues!
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