Harvey Weinstein · Martin Scorsese · McMillion$
Plus: "Surviving R Kelly" Season 2 hits Netflix
the true crime that's worth your time
The Good Fight kicked off its fourth season last Thursday. I didn’t get to it until this past weekend, and it was a weird one, in which the protagonist awakes in a world in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and the Me Too movement never took place. The show has always been fairly ripped from the headlines, but typically there’s a bit of a veil: Google and Facebook’s issues are played out as problems stumbled upon by a fictional tech company called ChumHum, for example.
But in this episode, Harvey Weinstein is lampooned by name, as in this alternate reality, he remains free. The episode dropped on CBS All Access (a streaming platform which my husband characterizes as having only “commercials for joke shows from 30 Rock” — when he saw that there was a show called God Friended Me he laughed so hard that he began to weep) a day before officials in LA announced that Weinstein would face a new charge. The alleged 2010 sexual assault took place, CNN reports, in a Beverly Hills hotel. The process of extraditing Weinstein from New York to California is ongoing, the New York Times reports, which suggests that he’s recovered from his case of COVID-19. — EB
Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Killers Of The Flower Moon is in jeopardy. We talked about this movie back in August: based on David Grann’s book of the same name, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro will star in the adaptation of the conspiracy to kill scores of Osage Indians between 1921 and 1925, reportedly motivated by the oil found on native land.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the movie’s budget has skyrocketed to $200 million, an uptick that prompted Paramount Pictures, which had been set to produce the film, to tell Scorsese that he could shop the project elsewhere. The Journal proposes Apple or Netflix as possible homes for the movie, writing that “traditional studios have been increasingly shying away from expensive adult dramas, as in recent years the box office has been dominated by family-friendly titles, superhero movies and sequels.” I guess it “worked” for The Irishman? — EB
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McMillion$ co-director Brian Lazarte says what we saw of FBI agent Doug Mathews is true to life. In an interview with Clevescene, Lazarte says that “How he is on the show is exactly how he is in real life, every hour of the day. There’s never really a dull moment, but he talks about a thousand miles a minute. The only problem with him is keeping up, if, for example, he might skim over an important talking point.”
Mathews was the filmmakers’ favorite interview subject, Lazarte says, and he and his FBI colleagues were “really excited to talk about [the McDonald’s case] because there are so few things that they do that they can actually talk about.” You can read the full interview with Lazarte here. — EB
Surviving R. Kelly Part II: The Reckoning landed on Netflix Monday. The second season of the series, as with the first, started its life cycle on Lifetime, and appeared on the streaming platform on April 13. (Sarah talked about The Reckoning with Mark Blankenship in Episode 127 of The Blotter Presents.) This season strives to “examine further evidence against the famed pop star with new women coming forward to share their stories.” Also added to Netflix is The Impact, a companion documentary about the documentary hosted by Soledad O’Brien., You can find the series here, and the doc here. — EB
The Daily Beast’s Alaina Demopoulos has a great story about how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting makers of true-crime content. I do not recommend this item lightly: all day long as a food/news writer, all I do is cover how an industry has been disrupted by both the virus and the measures taken to slow its spread. But this is legitimately engrossing, as it includes a race against a work-from-home order at 48 Hours, Peter Thomas love (can’t get enough), and why true crime feels so good to us right now. This, for example, from 48 Hours executive producer Judy Tygard:
If you take the wide shot about what true crime stories are, there’s this epic battle between good and evil. Right now, we’re facing this big monster out there that nobody can see, we don’t know when it’s going to strike, it’s just out there lurking. So true crime, I think, eases that anxiety. Our monsters have faces, they have names.
It’s a long piece that looks at the issue from a number of angles, and I enjoyed every word. You can read it here. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: It’s The Blotter Presents Episode 139, with guest Jeb Lund. Sarah and Jeb take a look at A Thread Of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy and American Animals. Get a jump with the show notes:
A Thread Of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy on Amazon
The Broken Harts podcast
My Blotter Brief on same, and Eve's write-up
Bello Collective's Nafari Vanaski on the difficulties more broadly of reporting this particular story
American Animals on HBOGo
VF's “Transy Book Heist” piece from 2007
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