The Best Evidence True-Crime Résumé Percentage
It's pronounced "Bet-Crap." Obviously. Also, "Bad Blood," Bundy, and Bill Kurtis.
the true crime that's worth your time
Author of Bad Blood John Carreyrou is doing a Reddit Talk Thursday August 26 at 3 PM ET. That’s also the day Carreyrou’s new podcast Bad Blood: The Final Chapter drops, so you can listen in the morning and ask him a question about it — or the book — in the afternoon. Thanks to our Reddit tipster Kresley for the heads-up!
Haven’t read the book? It’s a corker, and it’s on sale at Exhibit B. Books this week, along with a whole raft of older inventory. Enter code EXBACK at checkout, and if it’s not tagged “new ’n’ notable,” it’s 15% off! — SDB
Another podcast to check out: the episode of Slate’s The Waves featuring host Cheyna Roth and guest Rebecca Lavoie of Crime Writers On…, “Can We Love True Crime When We’re the Victims?” The Waves focuses each week on a news story “a pair of writers and guests” can’t stop thinking about, “and what gender has to do with it”; last week’s is on true crime, the gendering of its marketing, and Bundy fatigue.
I love that my esteemed colleague Lavoie chose GH’s Monica Quartermaine as her pop-culture “gateway” to feminism, but here’s a more on-topic snip from the episode transcript where she talks about the pluses of the true-crime “boom”:
I think if it were not for Serial and all of the media that spun off from it, including my own show, do you think that a regular person in your local grocery store would have any sense of like what a Brady violation is or any of this sort of wrongful conviction stuff or false confession stuff? There has been so much good work done by stories like Serial in changing the conversation. True crime used to be just Dateline. A bad guy did a thing. He tried to cover it up. Here’s how he was caught. Now, it is an entirely different kind of story and a much more important story.
From there, they get into how Roth grappled with talking about victims in her own 2020 book, Cold Cases (and if you’ve read that one, I’d love to hear what you thought!)
as well as Fatal Vision, Amanda Knox, and the sexism at the heart of criticism of the entire genre. Oh, and what Nancy Drew and Veronica Mars have in common. Fun listen or read; check it out. — SDB
Last week, our esteemed commenter Thalia noted that Karl Malden starred in a TV movie about the Chowchilla bus kidnapping, and I wondered in passing if I should survey/quantify Malden’s true-crime career. Before I started, though, I had to figure out how to survey/quantify any true-crime career, because this is a process I’d like to apply to the résumés of other actors, as well as directors and/or reporters — what criteria should I use; what weights should I assign, say, narration of a true-crime property versus appearing in front of the camera; do I give extra points for a property that’s a true-crime “classic,” or for the actor playing a titular serial killer, versus a skeptical detective who’s in three scenes.
I also had to come up with a name for the damn thing.
Well, here’s what I’ve come up with, and I reserve the right to tweak the BETCRP (Best Evidence True-Crime Résumé Percentage, or, as I already can’t stop calling it, “the ol’ Bet-Crap”) as I go along, but the arithmetic works like this:
1 point for each true-crime property, regardless of size/nature of role
2 points for playing a “name figure” in case
1 point if the role received awards attention (i.e., Emmy, Globes, or Oscar nods)
1 point if the property is considered a hall-of-famer
all points divided by number of IMDb credits —> the Bet-Crap
If we return to February of 2020 and my more anecdotal analysis of Peter Sarsgaard’s t.c. career, it’s already out of date thanks to Dopesick, and Shattered Glass is kind of a neighborhood play, plus which Boys Don’t Cry got a ton of awards attention…but not for him, and its hall-of-fame case is borderline, BUT but it’s arguably a major case and he plays the killer…alllll this by way of saying that Sarsgaard came out at 14 points, divided by 68 credits, which makes his Bet-Crap 20.5. Seems high, or higher than you’d expect, but you could subtract The Investigation and Shattered Glass on technicalities (or put An Education back in for the same reason) and it more or less evens out.
So how does it work with Karl Malden? (With whom I share a birthday. No points for that, though.) To the IMDb!
The Great Impostor, 1 pt
Birdman of Alcatraz, 2 pts (is this a true-crime classic? probably not, but it is 95% of what the average person thinks she knows about Robert Stroud)
Fatal Vision, 5 pts (Malden won an Emmy as Freddy Kassab)
My Father, My Son, 1 pt (I hesitate to include war crimes here, but this is based on a true story)
The Hijacking of the Achille-Lauro, 2 pts (torn on that second point, because this case isn’t as “name” as it used to be, but Malden plays the most recognizable victim, Leon Klinghoffer)
Absolute Strangers, 1…pt? It’s a true story about a legal battle over a pregnancy termination? …You can see how points tabulation may vary from user to user with the BETCRP, but I kind of feel like it all comes out at more or less the same place. Moving on!
They’ve Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping, 1 pt (I never heard of it before Thalia mentioned it, so if he plays the bus driver, he gets no points for that this time)
That’s 13 points for Malden, divided by his 71 IMDb credits, which puts us at a Bet-Crap score of 18.3 percent. Here again, you could shave a point here or add one back in there — some of these spaghetti/baguette-y Westerns from the middle of the last century could be based on true outlaws; I didn’t get all that granular — but this score looks about right to me. Higher than 22-25%, you’d expect one of the t.c. projects to make the lede in his obit, but of course it didn’t; the Brando pictures did. Fatal Vision would have come a line or two later.
I’ve got half a dozen subjects lined up for the BETCRP treatment now that there is a BETCRP — Melanie Lynskey; Christian Slater — but I welcome your suggestions, whether it’s topics or point values! — SDB
“Hey, I can’t get to that Sarsgaard piece you linked above.” It’s probably paywalled — but with an affordable and handy Best Evidence subscription, you can read that and every other subscribers-only piece back there. It’s just $5/month, or $55 for a whole year of us bringing the true crime worth your time to your attention (and warning you away from the useless shite).
That piece also contains a dropkick of Errol Morris’s MacDonald-case book that I feel is worth a fiver by itself; see what you think. — SDB
Are the Cold Case Files and American Justice reboots worth your time? Glad you asked! I watched the pilot of each for Primetimer.com, expecting them to transport me back to fond memories of hungover Sundays gone by, but not much more. And…you know, “you can play a game on your phone and not miss much” isn’t the highest praise I could have bestowed, but when you think about everything they could have done wrong here, A&E stuck the landing really well IMO. Here’s a snip of my review:
There's something to be said for a documentary-justice series knowing what it's good at, and doing those things, particularly in a reboot-heavy landscape that's seeing a lot of revivals trying to "fix" elements of the original that weren't necessarily broken. Cold Case Files and American Justice could re-center their storytelling away from cops and officers of the court a little more, I suppose, and I hope going forward that both shows choose cases that aren't quite as white as the ones they opened with; it's not like there aren't any adjustments that would make these old standbys more relevant.
But at the same time, that old-standby status is probably their chief selling point.
Bill Kurtis is a genre treasure, Dennis Haysbert was born to do this…it’s just solid-B true-crime fare. If you’re in a waiting room where it’s on, you’re all set. — SDB
Sorry to end on a down note today, but Eyal Press’s “Dying Behind Bars” in the August 23 New Yorker is a maddening must-read. The piece talks about law prof Andrea Armstrong’s creation of a database to track “granular data” on “how many deaths were taking place in specific detention facilities” — specifically in Louisiana, which “boasts” “the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country,” as well as “the highest in-custody mortality rate.” Press notes that liberal/abolition advocates focus on reducing the number of prisoners in custody, versus improving (mostly horrid) conditions that do exist, then irises in from there to mishandling of the COVID crisis, which included officials lying to inspectors about observing CDC protocols, and poor responsiveness to sick-call requests.
After a couple of upsetting anecdotes about in-custody suicides in a parish jail, the article digs in on how there’s even less data about local jails than there is on state or federal prisons — but we do know that “nearly half of Louisiana’s prison population is held in these jails,” and from there, the parallels to Kalief Browder’s death are legion.
Armstrong is also working on a project “that will soon go online: a collection of narrative accounts describing the lives of men and women who have died in confinement.” Armstrong believes that such a project highlights people behind bars as just that, people, and that doing so is vital to reform, particularly of jail and prison living conditions. And that has parallels to projects like the Times doing biographies of all the people known to have died on September 11, and the AIDS quilt — that those who were taken will not also be lost. One of Press’s interviewees uses that word about detainees with few narrative details except for paperwork surrounding their arrests and deaths…“lost.”
“Dying Behind Bars” ends with a quote from former Chief Justice Warren Burger about the fates of the incarcerated belonging to all of us. The article’s really something, crisp and infuriating at once. Give it a look. — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: Jewel thieves, casting news, Scott Peterson’s defense team under fire, and much more.
What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Twitter and Instagram. You can also call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME.