Do you remember how it felt to like O.J. Simpson?
Not with a caveat, not with a qualifier, not with a we-can-never-really-know-what-happened, if that’s your read on the double-homicide he maintains he did not commit.
But to just, you know, like him. Really like him. To see in him the qualities you wanted for yourself: charisma, strength, charm. Fast and graceful and gracious. Handsome as all get-out.
Maybe you don’t remember because too much has happened since then. O.J.’s name has taken on a second-order significance it can’t shake. Or maybe you don’t remember because, like this reporter, you were still watching Sesame Street when the vast majority of America was riveted by the trial of the century. In either case, ESPN’s phenomenal “30 for 30” documentary O.J.: Made in America, which clocks in at just under eight hours and premieres June 11, is something close to time travel. It begins by bringing viewers back to an O.J. that the enduring decades have obscured.
“If you were like, ‘Who is O.J.? Isn’t he that football player who killed his wife?’, then you don’t get it,” said Ezra Edelman, director of Made in America, by phone. This is at the center of Made in America, the driving force behind the series’ length, its sprawl, its all-encompassing, everything-the-light-touches approach to a story about a man that is really a story about sports that is really a story about race that is really a story about America: The insistence that you get it.
Part One of the series (the 7 hour, 44 minute narrative will air in five parts) is remarkably bloodless, gloveless, free of catchphrases and Bronco chases. After a moment in the present — O.J. is currently incarcerated at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada for armed robbery and kidnapping, among other charges — we bolt back to the past, about 30 years before O.J. went on trial for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. O.J. is all smiles, it seems, all the time. He is married to his high school girlfriend, Marguerite. He is absurdly gifted. He is, as one person puts it, “faster sideways than most people are running forward.”
“The intention was to show O.J. in all his glory, to be seduced by O.J. as an athlete, as a pitchman, as a personality,” Edelman said. “Because as an athlete, it wasn’t just that he was that good; he was so aesthetically beautiful and graceful in a way that, if you’re a sports fan, you are seduced by that. He brought people so much pleasure for so long, and you need to be seduced and emotionally connected with him in that way to understand, first of all, how others were so taken by him, but also how people were so shocked by what happened when they all of a sudden heard he was accused of murder. It flew in the face of the image he presented to the world.”
“Seduction” is a word that pops up early and often in Made in America. A childhood friend of O.J.’s says that the athlete was “seduced by white society,” and a recurring theme in the series is that the allure of white culture and all it had to offer — wealth, celebrity, immunity from violence — had enticed O.J. all his life.
O.J. was a world-record holding track star when he said the now-famous line, “I’m not black, I’m O.J.,” to sociologist and activist Harry Edwards. He was declining to participate in the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which advocated boycotting the 1968 Olympics to protest racial discrimination. (Though the boycott didn’t go through, Tommie Smith and John Carlos protested at the Games by raising their fists in the Black Power salute during their medal ceremony, as the U.S. national anthem played.) O.J. knew his talent was transcendent; he wanted to transcend.
Even after the murders, the theme of O.J. as too enchanting to deny keeps coming back. Journalist Celia Farber, who profiled O.J. for Esquire in 1998, describes in the film the feeling of being so “charmed” by O.J. that you feel “confusion… after being in his presence,” a phenomenon she called “the O.J. effect.”
“Unless you engage with that all over again, you can’t get that by someone intellectually explaining it to you,” Edelman said. “You have to feel it.”
If you walk upstairs in Edelman’s parents’ house today, you will see a photo along the staircase of Edelman’s two older brothers. The picture is from the 1970s, and one of the brothers is wearing an O.J. jersey.
“O.J. was very much a real part of my childhood, both as a football player and as a pitch man,” Edelman said. “This guy, literally and subliminally, was in my conscious my entire life. When I was a kid, whenever I was in an airport, I was dodging people in the airport,” pretending to be Simpson in the iconic Hertz commercials.
Edelman has directed two “30 for 30” films — Requiem for the Big East and The Opposition — and produced and directed a hat trick of films for HBO, including the Peabody Award-winning Magic and Bird: A Courtship of Rivals. Edelman says that ESPN approached him with the idea “to do a project that’s more ambitious than all the stuff we’ve done,” something that would keep in the tradition of the critically-acclaimed “30 for 30” series but on a bigger, broader scale. Initially, the pitch from ESPN was a five-hour film. Edelman was interested, until he found out that the subject matter would be O.J. Simpson.
“I have plenty of confidence in my skills as a filmmaker and a storyteller,” he said. “But when someone says, ‘Here is the most picked over topic of our time,’ culturally, what am I going to add to it?”
Still, Edelman was “intrigued” by the amount of time ESPN was willing to give him. “I knew that I didn’t have to go straight to the place that everyone has gone to when they think about this story, which is the murders and the trial. This gives me an outlet to go backwards and to really discuss the history and the context, and parsing O.J.’s racial identity versus what was happening in Los Angeles during the ’60s, literally right beside him when he was at USC. There were juxtapositions that I already understood existed that I wanted to explore.”
Edelman “knew that part of the power of the story was living through the events, living with O.J. the character, to get the full power of what happened to him, versus futzing around with time,” so he stuck to a pretty straightforward chronology. “In my mind, the story starts in 1965.”
In 1965, O.J. is still at junior college in Northern California. He won’t arrive at the University of Southern California for two more years. But it is the year in which “the world really knows how talented he is for the first time,” Edelman said. “So it’s this sense of: Here’s this guy who, in the fall of ’65, is playing football and becoming famous for his talents, and that’s what he has to be. And at the same time, you have a group of people in Watts who are frustrated by the situation, who lash out to be heard in a way that he just has to run a football to be heard.”
Made in America takes viewers to L.A. where, as one person puts it, racism “is as stark as in Jim Crow South.” Part One burns with the fires of the Watts Riots; Part Two gets into the cases of Eula May Love, a black woman fatally shot in her front yard by two white LAPD officers, and 39th and Dalton, an LAPD drug raid on two apartment buildings in southwest Los Angeles in which officers ravaged homes and arrested dozens of residents. Many of those residents were beaten and none were charged with a crime; the officers only found under six ounces of marijuana and less than an ounce of cocaine. And all of that comes before Rodney King; the tape of his beating by the LAPD in March 1991 makes repeat appearances in Made in America.
Before he began researching for the film, “I did not know about Eula Love,” Edelman said. “I did not know about 39th and Dalton… But what I found was, when you start talking to people who have lived through this history, there was this series of events that kept coming up as these defining moments in this trajectory between the LAPD and the black community.”
Once Edelman was fluent in “these tentpole moments,” he said, “You realize: This is pretty significant. I wasn’t prying these things out of people. They were talking about how galvanizing these specific events were. And that provided me with a timeline.”
Not that reality always fit neatly into a narrative arc: Love’s death came 14 years after the Watts riots. But “that juxtaposition to me” between O.J.’s rise and racial turmoil in L.A. “was the breaking off point of the story… Those were the two tracks I was on from the get-go.” That “became the framework,” said Edelman, and the film’s double-helix construction unfolded from there.
The film “need[s] to show, emotionally, what a community of people endured in L.A. for you to understand why they were so invested in [the O.J.] trial, why they reacted the way they reacted when the verdict was read.”
Edelman interviewed 72 people, from O.J.’s oldest friends to his former teammates. He spoke with members of the Goldman and Brown families, ex-police officers, jurors from the murder trial. Some are almost outrageously candid: O.J.’s former agent, Mike Gilbert, reveals that he told O.J. not to take his arthritis medication for two weeks before trying on The Glove in court to ensure that it wouldn’t fit. Also present are big names from the O.J. trial, including Mark Fuhrman, who famously got caught lying about his use of racial epithets and was accused of planting evidence against O.J., head prosecutor Marcia Clark, and defense attorney Carl Douglas, who is a particularly entertaining presence with a flair for the quotable, if hyperbolic, line; at one point, he casually says that if the jury had been predominately Latino, his team would’ve put O.J. “in a sombrero.”
The sheer wrangling involved in getting people to participate, Edelman said, was “the most exhausting part of the process… because no one really wanted to revisit this. People had either lived through this or put it away and buried it.” The trial players in particular, he said, “are both so defensive and rightfully skeptical of the ‘media,’ so when you’re calling them up, you’re trying to scale this wall that has been built to keep people like me out.” A lot of that groundwork, Edelman said, entails “convinc[ing] people that you’re not the media, you’re not out to do something sensationalist, you’re not out to explore whether Marcia Clark and Chris Darden had a relationship.”
Getting Gil Garcetti, L.A. district attorney at the time of the O.J. trial, took two in-person meetings and “three times of him telling me, ‘I’m absolutely not doing an interview, I haven’t done one in 15 years, I don’t trust anyone in the media.’” The clincher? His son, Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles, talked him into it. And once Garcetti said yes, Bill Hodgman, the third prosecutor, stopped ignoring Edelman’s requests. Hodgman ultimately provided the police crime scene photos that have rarely been seen by the public.
O.J. did not return Edelman’s request for an interview, and none of his family members are interviewed, either. But the no that disappointed Edelman the most was Darden, “the one [member] of the prosecution I wanted more than the rest,” Edelman said. Darden’s “is the story I was telling: A story about race in America, above all else. Here is a guy who was an African American attorney in Los Angeles, who grew up in Richmond, California, idolizing the Black Panthers, who tried to prosecute cops.”
Darden also prosecuted the 39th and Dalton case, “so in some ways, he was on the right side of this discussion,” Edelman said. “So as a black attorney to be thrust into this role… and in turn be called an Uncle Tom, when the guy he’s trying to prosecute becomes this symbol of black America, when how [O.J.] lived his life is just the opposite, those are the ironies I was interested in discussing.” But Darden “is a big part of the film whether he’s in it or not.” (Though Edelman said he has “zero issue and completely understand[s] anyone” not wanting to be in the film, “I feel that, if [Darden] had given me a fair trial, he might have felt differently.”)
As for Fuhrman, Edelman described him as the “most challenging” interview of all. “I came there with the understanding in my mind that the way he was framed in that period of time was extreme, to say the least. And I don’t know what truly exists in his mind, if he has basic views that would run counter to mine, or if he is a guy who had a hard upbringing and had certain experiences and as he’s gotten older, he’s changed. The guy I met, frankly, felt very shaken to me. He knew why he was there and he didn’t want to be there, and I respect that. He also felt that he needed to say his piece. This guy was chastened and smart, very smart.”
During the interview, “[I’m] sitting across from a guy and the tension and the weirdness is so apparent, because what are you talking about? You’re talking about the way a guy’s life and reputation have been dragged through the mud, [and] whether that was deserved or not. For me, I’m not there to judge who he is, I’m there to have him reflect on his experiences during this time. So that just made it tricky for me.”
“What did you think of him?” Edelman asked me.
I brought up the way Fuhrman reacts to the Rodney King beating, which occurred not too long after the LAPD banned the use of the chokehold as a means of controlling suspects. Fuhrman expresses no horror, no disgust, no sorrow. Instead, he says, “This is why we need the chokehold.” If that were me, I told Edelman, I would not agree to be in this film. Fuhrman seemed so un-self-aware. Even if that’s what’s in your mind, after Rodney King, if you are Mark Fuhrman and you know what America thinks of you, why would you ever say that out loud?
“You’re not wrong in that,” Edelman said. “I share that sentiment.”
The crime scene photos are like something out of a horror movie.
The average human body contains about 1.5 gallons of blood. Have you ever spilled a gallon of milk? Imagine spilling three. Imagine it red, and imagine it everywhere.
Ron Shipp is former friend of O.J.’s who went on to be a police officer. In the film, Shipp describes how he felt seeing those photos for the first time. In his years on the LAPD, Shipp had seen his share of violent crime. He was not new to homicide.
“I looked at those pictures,” Shipp says in the film. “It changed me.”
Once Edelman heard Shipp say that, “I understood, matter of factly, that’s where you’re going to see, for the first time, the crime scene photos. I want them to be purposefully conveyed through the eyes of someone who is talking about them.” The images will likely scan as brand new to the average viewer; though they are a matter of public record at the D.A.’s office, they are rarely shown in a non-redacted form. To grasp “why that person who was O.J.’s friend and was a cop could have been convinced to testify, you needed to understand that motivation, by seeing that and seeing her.”
More crime scene photos appear later in the series, when the deputy district attorney “sort of very coldly and chillingly describes his theory of that night, as far as what happened in the murders, and the clinical way that he described that, to me, that was the right time to show those photos — especially because he was talking specifically about just what happened to the victims, in a way that justified, to me, having you see those.”
Seeing the photos forces the audience “to understand what this was about, more than all the crap that it ended up being about.”
“The greater purpose to me of the photos is, you need to understand the brutality of that night,” Edelman said. “No matter how you saw O.J. before this film and what you thought of the question of his innocence or guilt, you could think, ‘Maybe he did it or knew about it; maybe he was there but someone else did it.’ Whatever it is, you are forced to deal with the brutality of those crimes in a way that, in my mind, changes the way you look at O.J. after that.”
I asked Edelman if working on this documentary changed the way he thought about how we treat athletes in our culture, about the kind of amnesty they get. Why is athletic prowess so powerful to us as an audience?
“I suffer from this,” Edelman started. “I’m a huge sports fan. The amount of pleasure I get watching Steph Curry play basketball is astounding… He does things that haven’t been seen before, and with a smile on his face, and he’s such a nice guy. He brings me pleasure. He makes me feel good. So there’s something about that dynamic that is very important to understand when it comes to how celebrities get built up and how a sense of entitlement gets cemented and how we treat our heroes.”
“Because we are all complicit in this, and that’s part of this story,” he said. “We built O.J. into who he was… We all want to be around greatness. We want to be around people that bring us pleasure.”
“I think that’s an important thing to convey, and that was something I already understood. It’s not a great commentary on our culture.”
Nor is it great to see, Edelman thinks, that the structures that enable abuse — abuse of power by the police, abuse of women by their spouses — have been so slow to change for the better that it often seems like they aren’t changing at all.
“We have a very selective memory, and we have a selective amnesia, which are the same thing,” Edelman said. “The point of the movie is, nothing ever changes or has. These things flare up and people pay attention, and we all go back to our lives, and this shit keeps happening. I don’t need to, at all, reference what’s happening today for you to understand that it’s about what’s happening today as much as it’s about what happened in 1965.”
Out Of Her Justice League: ‘People v. O.J. Simpson’ Writer On Marcia Clark, Sexism, And The HaircutBefore the scene even begins, “Kiss From a Rose” starts playing. Softly. Just that intro with Seal singing syllables…thinkprogress.orgPart 1 of O.J.: Made In America premieres at 9 p.m. on Saturday, June 11 on ABC. Parts 2 through 5 air on ESPN at 9 p.m. on June 14, 15, 17, and 18.