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Bowling For Columbine is 20 years old. Does it hold up? Julia Sirmons looks back at Michael Moore’s “part investigation and part angry screed” for CrookedMarquee.com, and seems to think that it does — that, despite some “simplistic and perhaps offensively cheesy” segments, Moore plays fair with his interviewees. The piece is a bit awkwardly written at times, which can undercut it somewhat, as in the following snip (which Nichols does she mean?):
One of the most chilling interludes is Moore’s conversation with James Nichols, the brother of Terry Nichols, the domestic terrorist convicted of participating in the Oklahoma City bombing. Nichols is a man with a terrifying persecution complex, easily flat-footed by Moore’s challenging questions but incapable of shifting his beliefs.
But that last sentence is a chilling interlude of its own, given how aptly it might describe many on the American fascist right. And Sirmons leads with what I think is a key question when it comes to Moore’s work: “Can such a deadly serious subject only be represented in a sober, unobtrusive, verité style? Or is a more provocative voice of righteous anger needed to upset our growing complacency?” Sirmons is speaking specifically to what “would make a ‘good’ documentary about America’s gun culture” here, but the questions Moore raises more generally about “objectivity” in documentary film; about whether that’s necessary, or whether “objectivity” is only raised as a requirement by subjects of Moore’s (see: Heston, Charlton) who would like to neutralize Moore’s coverage by making his process the problem — that’s Moore’s true value, IMO, not his filmmaking/info-gathering style per se but what that style forces us to confront about genre “packaging.” — SDB
I’d love the chance to ask if a Devil In The White City adaptation holds up, but friends, that shit is just never happening: what felt like minutes after the casting was announced, Keanu Reeves stepped out of the Hulu project, and was followed out the door by proposed director/exec producer Todd Field. Perhaps someone better at reading between the insider-leak lines than I can guess at what went sour this time. Meantime, I’ll pull-quote a helpful timeline of Devil’s production non-history from Joe Otterson’s report on Keanu’s departure from last week:
This is the latest chapter in the long development history of the book. [Still executive producer on this iteration Leonardo] DiCaprio acquired the rights in 2010 with plans to adapt it as a film in which he would star as Holmes. [Martin, ditto] Scorsese came onboard to direct in 2015 with Billy Ray set to write the script. It was first put in development in Hollywood by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner through their Cruise/Wagner banner via the shingle’s deal with Paramount, but the option lapsed in 2004. Paramount reacquired the film rights in 2007 and set it up with producers Michael Shamberg and [Stacey, thritto] Sher.
We’ve had periodic items on the project for about as long as we’ve had a newsletter, and I’ve written about TV and film for long enough to know that sometimes this shit just happens, but I must say I don’t get it with Devil. Covid is part of it, during the Hulu chapter of the story, but this is seriously almost 20 years of ball-dropping — and I don’t think budget is a talking point with names this big involved. Scheduling is what customarily gets blamed, but if big stars and respected helmers really want a thing to get made, it will get made. What do we think the (non-)deal is here?
For the record, I don’t have a theory. The only explanation I can come up with — and I doubt this is in play because narrative creators have historically had zero problem taffy-pulling 40 real minutes of content into a six-part series — is that, at the end of the day, the source material is more interested in, and better on, the World’s Fair part of the timeline than the H.H. Holmes part. Holmes was a sadistic creep with a Donald Trump approach to outside contractors, but that’s not “plot,” really, is it. But a lurid enough Wikipedia entry is more than enough for a lot of true-crime creatives, so, like I said, my only theory is actually not what I think is going on.
But speaking of plot, here’s a twist in this write-up’s: I did go to Holmes’s/Herman Webster Mudgett’s Wikipedia, just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten some investigatory/police-chase-y aspect of his biography after the crimes. It’s worth a read if you’ve forgotten what became of him, which I had — Philly Pinkertons tracked him to Boston; he was hanged at Moyamensing Prison, and that proceeded in cruel and unusual fashion; a scientist had him exhumed in 2017 to put to rest tinfoil-hatting about Holmes having escaped prosecution — and if you think there’s some debate as to whether we can class him with other serial killers, and my eye almost bounced off the craziest information therein, to wit:
Upon his execution, Holmes's body was interred in an unmarked grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery in the Philadelphia Western suburb of Yeadon, Pennsylvania.
“Suburb” is somewhat misleading; it’s functionally Philadelphia. I know this because I’ve visited Holy Cross more than once, in order to put to rest some genealogical tinfoil-hatting in my own family — many of whom are also interred there. Here’s a hawk who buzzed my head during a visit in 2018, almost hitting me in the face with a rodent it was carrying.
I’ve done research at a number of smallish cemeteries over the years and the Holy Cross staff was by far the most conscientious about checking my bona fides; once I proved ancestry, I got what I needed no problem (and as it turns out, there’s paid-for space in the plot still; AMA, heh), which, great, don’t just tell anyone any old thing, but it was striking. As I prepared to click through on FindAGrave.com to see if anyone else of note is buried at Holy Cross, I thought, “Well, I guess Holmes’s ‘permanent residence’ explains that.”
It kind of doesn’t, because guess what, Holy Cross is crime-y as hell. Half the Scarfo crew is at Holy Cross, plus some congressmen and some old-time baseball players (and impressionist/comedian Guy Marks)…and of course, The Orange-Ice King Of Sea Isle City himself, my great-great-grandfather, who may not have come to the States legally but was otherwise not crime-y as far as I can tell.
This entry took a turn! Anyone else here with forebears buried near big-time crooks, you know what to do. — SDB
It’s unsurprising, albeit rather nauseating, that I got a PR email asking if I’d like to interview a “top” astrologer about the most common zodiac signs of serial killers. Eve and I snarked back and forth about it via email, and then I clicked idly on a link to a background article, datelined last year, and fairly quickly became annoyed. “Isn’t ascribing any meaning, predictive or otherwise, to astrological ‘analysis’ annoying?” Well, kind of, but my issue is that, besides the fact that correlation is not causation and tying sun signs to lethal psychopathy is meaningless, the actual conclusions are also meaningless statistically.
I’m not the mathiest person on earth, God knows, but…well, look for yourself:
Key findings:
Four signs — Cancer, Pisces, Sagittarius, and Scorpio — account for almost 40 percent of serial killers. Gemini and Taurus combined account for only 11 percent.
Killers born in the sign of Capricorn accounted for more victims total and on average than those in any other sign. Combined, they killed more than 800 people, or 19 on average; the lowest average was for Virgo killers, with seven victims each.
The water signs (Cancer, Pisces, and Scorpio) accounted for the highest number of killers and victims in our analysis — 28 percent of killers and 27 percent of victims.
Four signs out of twelve is one third, so: 33 percent. “Almost 40 percent” is probably 38-9 percent. Let’s call it 39, but 6 percentage points, when we’re not told whether those four signs “account for” 33 percent of the population, is not exactly a holy-shit stat. The Gemini/Taurus stat is slightly more significant, I guess, but anecdotally, I happen to know like three times as many Arieses as I do Gemini and Taurus combined, which means…fuck-all, right? Like, it’s a stat, but it doesn’t really measure anything.
The third stat in the series, same ish. Three out of twelve is a quarter — 25 percent. Three and two percentage points’ difference, again without the context of gen-pop distribution? What’s the margin for error here?
This is the kind of “aggregated facts /= A Story” sound-bite garbagio that always ended up in the Yahoo! carousel instead of stories my colleagues and I had spent three days reporting out — and to be clear, I don’t judge consumers who either use horoscopes as a guideline for friends’ and colleagues’ behavior OR download information on serial killers as a way of managing their anxiety about an out-of-control world, but this isn’t even “information,” quite. It’s a bunch of data with no context, “curated” to capitalize on the clickiness of Dahmeriana right now (“DAHMER” was the first, and only capitalized, word in the email’s subject line).
No, the irony of my bitching about this when I just spent several grafs banging on about a random coincidence of posthumous geography is not lost on me, but cornily gratuitous editorial like this only contributes to the impression that the target demo for true crime — namely, ladies — is fundamentally unserious and flaky. — SDB
I promise not to go down a wiki-hole on this item, a look back at Charles Van Doren’s New Yorker piece, “All The Answers.” Van Doren, of course, was at the center of the 21 quiz-show scandal as seen in Quiz Show and, per The New Yorker’s newsletter from yesterday, ended up “exposed as part of an imbroglio that included congressional hearings, a second-degree perjury plea, and termination from an on-camera job at the ‘Today’ show.” A snip from Van Doren’s 2008 remembrance:
When I went before the grand jury, I wasn’t sure what I would say. When I looked at the jurors’ faces, I saw that the foreman was a senior professor at Columbia, a man I knew by sight. And I panicked, thinking that if I told him the truth I would in effect be telling everyone at the university. So I lied. This was, of course, folly, since I had to tell the story anyway—to everyone, not just to him.
An excellent, evocative read and a nice break from all the Dahmer heds cluttering up our brainwaves of late. — SDB
Our esteemed colleague Skye Pillsbury has a deep dive into “Gimlet’s Slow Demise” on The Squeeze today. This is more of a meta-meta story; I’ve noted it because Gimlet and Parcast, both acquired by Spotify in 2019 and both subject to pod cancellations and layoffs last week, have or have had large footprints in the audio true-crime space. But I’ve also noted it because Pillsbury’s oral history of Gimlet’s devolution will sound awfully familiar to anyone who’s had a creative-content enterprise acquired by marketers.
We were told that Spotify loved what we were doing; nothing would change. We would have more resources at our disposal to tell the stories we were already telling. Management kept saying that this was going to be amazing for everyone.
Yep, been there — and, you know, overlords gonna overlord, but I still don’t understand the “let’s acquire this successful brand, then change it so it’s not the brand we acquired anymore, thereby wasting our money and setting up a lightning rod for negative PR” playbook, and it’s the only one the acquisition partners ever use. Like, maybe let the people who built the thing you want keep doing what they do, if only because it’s cheaper net?
I’ve also noted it because I always got the impression re: Parcast that the founders’ goal was scale-to-sale — not that the network wasn’t interested in the stories its podcasts told, but that those stories seemed carefully and consciously positioned as close to the center of the SEO fairway as possible. The resulting product IME is competent and eminently searchable but, especially in the far more crowded 2022 pod landscape, too unremarkable to bother reviewing.
I interviewed Parcast co-founder Max Cutler way back in 2016 when their first true-crime pod blew up; I could have sworn that interview made its way over here, but I can’t find it. Here’s an excerpt:
Sarah D. Bunting: True crime is pretty hot right now, finally. When I started The Blotter, it was still kind of considered this, like, trashy thing that no one would admit that they consumed, but I was still into it. Was this a genre that you'd been thinking about working in for a long time, or did the recent successes of stuff like Serial and Making A Murderer feel like a road was being paved for you to really get into this genre?
Max Cutler: Yeah, I think there's kind of two points to that question, actually. I've always loved true crime, and I would love to get into true crime, so that's why Unsolved Murders: True Crime Stories started, but it also was dictated by the fact that true crime did get hot, and we thought that if we were able to do a true-crime show that was different than already existed, we might be able to kind of cut through all the other shows and become very popular. That's kind of what we did. So, for me, I'm extremely happy that true crime was at a point where we thought it could be a viable business for us and be a great podcast, but also, it's been my passion for a long time.
Growing up, I loved mysteries and I loved true crime. Started off with mysteries. I really loved Sherlock Holmes. I was fascinated by that. I was always fascinated, and relished great detective mystery shows, I guess you could say. Then, as I got older, I started to become more of a true-crime fan ... I've always had an inherent issue when people commit a crime and it's not solved. I think that justice should be served. Unsolved Murders is a little bit more of an entertaining podcast in the true-crime genre, but it's still the essence of who did the case, and trying to solve it. I think it's very interesting. Our listeners have really enjoyed it. It's been really just a humbling experience, so far, for us.
What was the chicken and what was the egg -- did you decide, "We're going to do a podcast, and we're going to start a network that features storytelling" first, and then you sort of latched onto this flagship topic or genre --
Yes.
Or did you have the topic first?
Definitely, the first step was, I had been passionate about audio my whole entire life. My dad, who's also a partner with me on this, was in radio growing up. I grew up just listening to radio, loving radio, and I always wanted to have it be my life, somehow. I wasn't sure how to make it happen, and then, podcasting, over the last couple of years, really grew. It's growing every day, it's an amazing industry to be in right now, I think. I knew I wanted to get into podcasting, I knew I wanted to build a network, and I thought, when I listened to other podcasts out there, the storytelling elements was really lacking from a lot of podcasts. I would say eighty to ninety percent of podcasts are two hosts talking about something they're really passionate about, or great storyteller talking about whatever the story is they're saying, but there wasn't many highly-produced and great storytelling pod, great podcasts out there. That was the first step.
Then, the second step, for me, was trying to see what kind of genres there were holes in, and match it with my passions. Like you mentioned earlier, Serial was a huge step for true crime, and it really paved the way. Now you have probably thousands of mimicking-Serial shows, but I thought there was something different in the true-crime genre, still, that people wanted, and I think that True Crime Stories really is filling that void, currently, and hopefully we can keep it up.
Now it's come to the point we just want to get better with every episode. Yeah.
I don’t know if Cutler is still on board over there or what their deal package was, and I could very well have it wrong as far as the network trying to position itself from the jump as a deal target. And Eve and I may find these inside-media stories more interesting than y’all — but they matter for y’all, because as informed students of the genre, you want responsibly reported, innovatively structured storytelling. You don’t want the big players acquiring shows and networks that do those things, then telling those creators that there’s no money in/for the things that make their narratives worthwhile, and instead they should focus on garbage-time bonuses and poorly conceived (ugh) “collabs.”
Not that you should, like, go picket Spotify HQ. The point is that worthwhile true-crime podcasts and reporting cost money and take time, and not every corporate adoptive parent is going to invest in either thing once everyone’s signed the paperwork.
Another point: if you find “bespoke” true-crime coverage that’s worth everyone’s time and you want to signal-boost it, tell us! Contact info is below. — SDB
Another day, another “approaching email word limit” warning from Substack. So that The Vow Part 2 review will have to wait until Monday (don’t have a paid sub yet? grab one now and spend the meantime in the archives!), but here’s four interesting stories to hold you. — SDB
A Warhol “fair-use” case may change how courts look at art and artists [Hyperallergic] // That Samuel Alito is anywhere near Mr. Warhola grosses me out.
“An afternoon with Robbi Jane Lew, the woman at the center of the poker cheating scandal” [L.A. Times] // I keep reading that hed as “RABBI Jane Lew,” but the article is still compelling without a top note of sectarian misrule.
“The Bodies in the Cave” [New Yorker] // Rachel Monroe on who “owns” ancient anthro/archeo finds on private land, and a solid overview of the legal issues at work under the Antiquities Act and other statutes (“The law proved relatively toothless; there were only ten convictions under it in the following sixty years”).
“The Killing of Dom and Bruno” [WaPo] // I’m apparently really into rainforest-based crimes, vanishings, and expeditions gone arrogantly wrong; I can never not engage with them, especially the Roosevelt story. Terrence McCoy waded, figuratively, into the Amazon to find out what happened to his friend Dom; the prose makes you feel the unease, in the best way.
Coming up on Best Evidence: More Raniere, crime surges according to FOX, and more.
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