Mark Geragos · Piers Morgan · Joe Berlinger
Plus: True-crime podcast stats that might leave you dispirited
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Mark Geragos just bought three prominent SoCal magazines. The celebrity defense attorney (Chris Brown, Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, many others) has recently made headlines for trying (and failing) to block California’s pandemic restrictions around in-person dining (he owns a “new age comfort food” spot in L.A. called Engine Company No. 28) and for a fraud investigation from the state bar association.
But he who owns the presses makes the news, I guess, and his Engine Vision Media just scooped up Los Angeles magazine, Pasadena magazine and Orange Coast magazine, three glossies of varying quality.
Per the Hollywood Reporter, the media acquisition move is part of his business’s “trend of expanding their business endeavors well beyond the law.” Another example: an additional company Geragos founded, called Geragos Global, owns Scott’s Family Resort, which to a Midwest-to-West Coaster like me looks like Dirty Dancing, basically.
It’s always interesting to me when people buy media companies with the assumption that they’ll make — not lose — money on the deal; as we head into an economic downturn, it’s likely that media will be one of the industries hardest hit. Now, he could just be looking for a nice writeoff, I suppose, but some of the media manipulation efforts we’ve seen from Geragos contemporary Alan Dershowitz, it’s hard not to wonder if there’s another strategy afoot. — EB
I can’t lie, I find Joe Berlinger endlessly amusing. Yes, he’s a true-crime icon who has been extremely dismissive of the genre — while, per his tweet from today that you see above, also being extremely defensive about its merits! And every time I read an interview with him, he says a number of things that are just so strange. So strange! For example, here’s a conversation with Berlinger that ran in THR earlier this month, out of which I have plucked some of his oddest remarks. I will restrict myself to six!
“I interviewed New York cabbies about the craziest things to happen in their cabs. It became a festival darling because it was humorous.” Yes, Data, humans enjoy humor.
“By the early 1990s, documentary had become a spoonful of castor oil: good for you but not tasty going down.” Just looking at 1990, here are some documentaries released in the time period Berlinger just dissed: Paris Is Burning, Berkeley in the Sixties, Echoes From a Somber Empire, Resident Alien, Listen Up: The Lives of Quincy Jones, and Made in Milan. If that’s what castor oil tastes like, I’ll have some every day.
“I went off to direct one of the biggest disasters of cinema history: the sequel to The Blair Witch Project. I thought my career was over.” Aw, Joe! Can’t fault you there.
“Even as an unreliable narrator, Bundy provided a deep window into the serial killer psyche. I pitched the idea to Netflix — we were years from the current serial killer craze — and I couldn’t imagine it’d become the platform’s No. 1 unscripted series in 2019.” Yes, no one cared about serial killers at all in the years before 2018!
“Any time I’ve taken on a serial killer-themed project, I ask myself, ‘What’s the social justice lens?’ … With Bundy, it was when I asked my college-aged daughters, ‘Have you heard of him?’ and neither had.” Not clear on how a Gen Z unawareness of a killer equals social justice!?!
Democracy is “a system based on people with different points of view coming together and agreeing on what’s best for the collective good. And we can’t do that if we see the other side as literal enemies. Unless we learn to see each other as three-dimensional human beings again, we will see democracy die in this country.” Berlinger isn’t the first person to say this, not by a longshot. But given that this is a guy who has spent a career looking actual evil in the eye, this feels like a platitude that’s beneath him. Do we really need to come together with white supremacists, or rapists, or bigots, or people who want anyone who isn’t a straight white mail to be locked up/dead? I hope Berlinger doesn’t feel this way, I really don’t. — EB
The Atlantic just published an interview with Michael Peterson. According to David A. Graham, he wanted to ask the media-shy Staircase subject about “his views on the true-crime boom and what it’s like for so many people you’ve never met to have such powerful feelings about you,” but Graham stayed away from any questions about the case that brought Peterson such notoriety. That’s because, Graham said, “I did not imagine that a short interview would be a place to adjudicate his guilt or innocence, though I have my own suspicions.”
Of course, the response to such an assertion might be that lack of length shouldn’t stand in the way of good journalism or necessitate only softballs, but that’s what we end up with. It is still an intriguing read! Here’s Peterson on the dramatic adaptation of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s docuseries:
Oh Christ, that thing was so awful. It’s just utter bullshit. Jean sold our story, my story, without my knowledge or any understanding of this to HBO. I saw that trailer; that’s all I could take. That trailer of us fighting—everybody’s screaming at one another, which never, ever happened. That just became entertainment. That’s taking sex, money, and murder to the tenth degree. What they did was to take our life, real people—I don’t care about me, but my children—and build stories about them; they’re fighting one another. It’s just totally unconscionable, and unethical—taking real people and distorting their lives. Jean didn’t do that in the documentary. Here we are, you can see. But then you get actors: Patrick Schwarzenegger playing my son, Todd; Juliette Binoche playing my daughter Sophie. It should never—I mean, First Amendment—but to take my children and distort their lives for millions to see. They haven’t watched. They couldn’t watch that. Why would they watch that?
I watched Spencer, about Diana. Utter bullshit, again, but it was sympathetic to Diana, played in a nice way, to appeal to people, because Diana was an appealing character, but to take ourselves and my children, who are not public figures, and now they are. I’m Colin Firth in people's eyes. My children are the actors and actresses. And that’s just wrong. It’s just totally wrong.
The entire piece is a pretty quick item, but it’s hard not to feel frustrated at its superficiality and at how little is actually discussed. — EB
Finally, a couple news items that I think are basically gross, but that we should probably be aware of. I’m going to call this “Presented Sans Comment,” but that doesn’t mean YOU shouldn’t comment on them!
‘Crime Junkie’ Is Apple Podcast’s Most Popular Show of the Year [THR]
”Apple looked at user listenership and engagement between November 1, 2021, through Oct. 31, 2022. Crime Junkie, the flagship show of Flowers’ Audiochuck company, also took the top spots in the top followed and top shared categories, while Audiochuck was honored as the top free channel on Apple Podcasts for the year.”Piers Morgan To Interview Convicted Killers For Fox Nation True-Crime Series [Deadline]
Morgan “will host the provisionally titled Piers Morgan’s Killers, in which he will go behind prison walls to interview some of America’s most notorious criminals. The six-part series will stream on Fox Nation … ‘He’ll go inside various prisons in the US, sit face-to-face with these killers and get to the truth of their crimes using the interviewing style he has become known for,’ a source said.”‘Whitewashing’ Fears as SFPD Reality TV Show Producer Made Films for the CIA [SF Standard]
SF “Supervisor Dorsey said Topspin Content first approached him about creating a series with SFPD when he worked as the department’s spokesperson, and that he sees it as an opportunity for transparency into the city police, ‘warts and all … It would be something close to censorship if we were to say no or withdraw our support.” (Fine, I added the boldface, that’s not a comment though, right?) —
Wednesday on Best Evidence: Back to the 1970s.
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