August 18, 2023

Peter Berg · Rudy Giuliani · FedEx

What are you watching this weekend?

the true crime that's worth your time

I’m late to Sound of the Police, but plan on rectifying that this weekend. The Hulu documentary (that’s right, we’re one and done!) dropped last Friday; my eye sort of skated over its name when I saw it was under the ABC News Studios umbrella, as I am still holding an Ashley Madison grudge.

But the film has been gaining buzz since then, and I can see why when I look at who’s actually behind it: it’s co-directed by Stanley Nelson, Jr., one of the greatest documentarians working today. (Note to Hulu: put THAT name on the front page, not stupid ABC.) The Attica director might be the most qualified person working today to trace what he describes as “Civil War-era slave patrols, the advent of Jim Crow at the turn of the century, the uprisings against police brutality in the latter half of the 20th century to the many acts of police violence against African Americans that we’ve witnessed in the media in recent time” for a doc on the relationship between Black Americans and police officers.

In an interview with Salon, Nelson, who co-directed the film with Valerie Scoon, notes one of the things that Sarah and I have been talking about more and more — about how popular TV is one of the most pervasive delivery systems of copaganda out there.

Visually it was stunning when you see the cop show intros cut together and you realize that during all our lives, we've seen hundreds of different cop shows, and the cops are good guys and concerned for doing the right thing for citizens. And for so much of the African American community, and other communities in the United States, that's not what the police represent. We tell our kids to avoid the police as much as you possibly can. I tell my son, "No good can come from a police encounter." It was important to show that, and it was also arresting visually.

…and then I reopened the Hulu tab for Sound of the Police and was told that “you may also like” Law & Order, The Rookie, and Blue Bloods. So, yeah.

The other thing I might dip into is A Life Too Short: The Isabella Nardoni Case. It was just released yesterday, and other than reblogs of its press release it hasn’t generated much coverage. Here’s the logline, which is either an AI translation or just plain AI:

In 2008, the Isabella Nardoni case stopped Brazil. The 5-year-old girl was thrown through the window of her father and stepmother's apartment in São Paulo. Between the crime and the conviction there are little known details. While the population, the media and even the authorities demanded a quick and exemplary solution, the forensic team worked to find material that told what happened. How did this happen? What evidence attested to the guilt of the Nardoni couple? What made the police rule out any other hypothesis? Get to know the story, for the first time, through the eyes of Isabella's mother, Ana Carolina Oliveira, and her grandparents, in addition to the divergent versions between defense lawyers, journalists and experts about the crime that moved the country.

Not a blurb that builds confidence in the product, but the Wikipedia entry on the case — with which I was previously unfamiliar — intrigued me enough that I will probably flip this on for at least 20 minutes, after which I’ll either look up from my phone to turn it off or stick around for the whole thing. I shall report back!

Now it’s your turn. What true crime are you into this weekend? Please do share. — EB

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Hearsay

‘Painkiller’ Director Peter Berg on Turning the Opening Legal Disclaimers Into Something Profoundly Emotional [The Hollywood Reporter]
Paid subscribers got to read Sarah’s take on Painkiller Monday, in which she wrote that “it’s extremely watchable, captivating, in spite of director Peter Berg’s inability to resist doing The Most at every moment, which is by turns effective and too much.”

One of the hats on hats she might have been referring to are the legal disclaimers at the top of every episode that are garnished with a — as THR’s Brian Davids puts it — “heartfelt and profoundly emotional story involving the loss of a child to opioid addiction.” Berg’s here to explain what all that’s about and how they did it, including the intel that they found the participants via an open call in L.A. Curious if or how they vetted for accuracy! — EB

Rudy’s RICO Origin Story Is as Fake as His Hair Color [The Daily Beast]
Just in case you thought I was going to send you into the weekend without the sweet sounds of Gerardo1 in your brain, here’s a nice longread that suggests — as many of us are beginning to believe — that Rudy Giuliani was lying about his actions and career long before he aligned himself with former president Donald Trump’s political ambitions.

G. Robert Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who has also taught at Cornell University, drafted the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 on a yellow legal pad. Title IX of the act was RICO.

“Giuliani falsely says he got the idea of using RICO against the mob himself because he read a biography by the head of one of the crime families,” Blakey, 87, told The Daily Beast this week. “That was his story.”

Blakey said that he has not previously challenged Giuliani’s account because what most mattered to him was that RICO had been used with devastating effect against the Mafia.

“Giuliani used it in the commission case,” Blakey said, referring to Giuliani’s prosecution of members of the ruling commission of the five mob families who ran gangland at the time. “If he says he invented it, fine. I don’t care who invented it. If he wants to take credit for it, let him take credit for it.”

It’s hardly the smokiest gun we’ve seen this week (I say as footage of Kenneth Chesebro at the Capitol on Jan. 6 plays on my hotel TV), but for those of us who (at least mentally) enjoy a “well, actually,” this is a fun fact check. — EB

Mississippi judge declares mistrial in shooting attack on Black FedEx driver [Associated Press]
The case seemed fairly clearcut: white men Brandon Case and his father, Gregory Case admit that they shot at and chased Black FedEx driver D’Monterrio Gibson as he made a delivery in Brookhaven, Mississippi. But after a local cop admitted while on the stand that he’d withheld evidence and the judge said he’d improperly testified, the Cases’ defense requested a mistrial, which was granted. As the judge’s docket is reportedly full, a new trial, should it be pursued, won’t take place until next year. — EB

Next week on Best Evidence: Chinese food, Al Pacino, and the Village Voice.

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