People V. OJ Ep 5

Holy shit, I totally remember this! 

I've been wondering about this Hodgman character and waiting to see if the show would address his sudden absence from the trial, because it's one of the incidents I remember quite well. 

Turns out, yep--they did! But in a totally melodramatic it-didn't-really-happen-that-way fashion. 

In the show, they had John Hodgman (Marcia Clark's litigating partner) suffer a heart attack and dramatically keel over right there in court after getting all pissed off at the defense (specifically, Johnny Cochran). Watching that scene, I actually shouted "Bullshit!" at the TV, because I didn't remember it going down like that. Turns out, I was right.  

From Vanity Fair: 

According to Toobin, it was during a closed-door meeting among Clark, Hodgman, and D.A. Gil Garcetti, after the opening statements, in which the discovery failures were revealed and where Hodgman started to feel chest pains. Paramedics were called and he was treated for a temporary stress condition, which did result in his stepping down from the case.

From a writer's perspective, I can see why they took some license with that, even if it was a bit over the top.

Here's what I remember...

The first week of the OJ trial, I was sitting in class talking with my friend Heidi and some other people from school,* and someone mentioned that one of the prosecuting attorneys in the Simpson case had been rushed to the hospital with chest pains the day before. That's when my classmate Cindy said disdainfully, "Yeah, he's having chest pains because he's lying! He knows he's lying!"

It's worth pointing out here that Cindy--a "good ole girl" from Texas--had an African American fiance and two bi-racial children. Cindy was cool; extremely blunt, very funny, and a blast to hang out with (she was part of a group of us who would sometimes high-tail it over to the nearby Chi-Chi's for nachos and margaritas at lunchtime), although she was obviously one of those "OJ is innocent!" people, a stance that I think had something to do with the fact that she was a white woman living in the black community.

The racial tension surrounding the OJ case is something that is definitely not exaggerated for the sake of the show, as it was a very real and very unfortunate aspect of the whole thing. It couldn't be avoided, especially in LA circa 1994-95, when the LA riots following the Rodney King verdict had happened just a few years prior. It's easy to see why the defense team played the race card like they did. Were they dirty opportunistic shyster assholes for doing so? Oh hell yeah. But still, it was pretty much a no-brainer. Of course they'd make it all about race, especially when Mark Fuhrman made it so damn easy. That's why I totally believe the scene where Christopher Darden tells Cochran he hopes they can be respectful to one another in the press, and Cochran goes, "Brother, I ain't trying to be respectful. I'm trying to win." It's another moment comes off a bit melodramatic, but--even if it didn't happen--it totally seems like it would have.

    Oh, just kiss him already.

On another note, I think Robert Morse is perfect as Dominick Dunne. I always get so excited when actors from Mad Men pop up on TV shows and movies.  

Burt Cooper!!!

The dialogue in the judge's chambers where Ito says something like, "I know you have a special interest in this case because of your daughter's murder" was a bit ham-fisted but I guess it was necessary because at this point most people probably wouldn't know or remember that his daughter, actress Dominique Dunne (she played Dana, the older sister in Poltergeist) was strangled by her ex-boyfriend in 1982. Trivia: her murderer, a chef named John Sweeney, really did get off with a ridiculously light sentence (6 1/2 years, and he served only 3 1/2) and soon after his release got a job as head chef at a fancy restaurant in Santa Monica. Upon learning of this, Dunne and his family decided to serve up some Goldman-style realness, standing outside the restaurant handing out flyers that read "The food you will eat tonight was cooked by the hands that killed Dominique Dunne." Soon after that, Sweeney quit his job and left town.

Dominique Dunne in Poltergeist

In yet another strange Hollywood murder coincidence, Marcia Clark was the attorney who prosecuted Robert Bardo, the crazy stalker famous for killing actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989. At least in that one, Clark was able to send the scumbag down the river (he got life without parole). I've read a lot about that case, and it's super creepy. One of the things that surprised me was how young Robert Bardo was--only 19 years old--when he killed Schaeffer. You wouldn't think that to look at him, because dude looks at least 35 in photos from the trial, but I guess all that crazy can age a person. By the way, I'm too superstitious to post a photo of Bardo's creepy mug on my blog. Google him if you're curious, but be sure to wear garlic around your neck and sprinkle salt around yourself for protection (I'm only half-kidding) because ewwwwwww. As another blogger wrote, you can almost hear the demon wings flapping inside his head.  

I was glad to see that the show included the infamous "redecorating" of OJ's mansion, where the defense went in and cleared out photos of OJ posing with (white) Playboy models, golfing buddies and girlfriends, replacing them with African art and photos of black family members...supposedly some of the photos they planted there were of random black people OJ didn't even know. And I love that Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage" played over that scene, because how appropriate is that? 

What's the deal with all those rappers wearing button-down flannel shirts at the beach? 

Didn't they get hot?

It also reminded me that Coolio actually did do a song that I liked back in the day, because I hated his one other hit, "Gangster's Paradise," which was so annoying and inescapable that year. (For the record Weird Al's take on it is sooooo much better.) 

*I attended school to be a court reporter from 1993 - 1995. It came to a sudden end when the school folded and declared bankruptcy. (The bright side? I got my student loans forgiven!) I was about 6 months from graduating. Needless to say, I ended up going in another direction job-wise, one of many "Plan B's" I took during my twenties, which was really a decade full of "Plan B's".

If it doesn't fit, you can suck my---well, you know.

Tonight, I plan to do something that I may well hate myself for in the morning. Yes, I'm going to watch the first installment of the new miniseries The People Vs. OJ Simpson.

I would say I'm watching it just for camp value, but that's not strictly true. I'd say it's partly for the camp value and hopefully some unintentional hilarity, but I would also add a dash of morbid curiosity and a heaping helping of nostalgia. I don't look fondly upon the OJ Simpson trial--I mean, who does?--but it kinda was one of those giant cultural events that anyone who lived through the 1990's remembers vividly and has very definite opinions about. It was probably like the Watergate of our generation, only even more ridiculous. 

The casting looks pretty spot on. I normally can't stand to see any reminder of that Kardashian family dung heap, but even I have to admit that David Schwimmer playing Robert Kardashian is an event not to be missed, especially since there's (apparently) a scene leading up to the infamous Bronco chase where OJ grabs a gun and locks himself in a bedroom at Kardashian's house, prompting Ross from Friends to shriek, "No OJ! That's where Kimmy sleeps!" 

Oh, the humanity!

Speaking of the Bronco chase, I have my own memories of that evening. My boyfriend and I were having "date night" and it was happening on an actual Friday, something I'd lobbied hard for, since Rick worked at a restaurant as a waiter and bartender and him getting a weekend night off was a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. It seems kind of funny then that the restaurant we chose for date night was the Provincial Kitchen--his place of employment--but Rick was well-loved there and we were good friends with all of the waitstaff, plus the watering hole downstairs was "our bar" (Johnny Whitaker's Broad Ripple Tavern--or "the BRT" as we regulars called it), so I guess it was just a natural choice at the time. 

Anyway, there we were enjoying our dinner at the Kitchen when this guy Mark--one of Rick's waiter friends--came running up from the bar downstairs to exclaim "You guys! OJ Simpson just took off in a white Mercedes down the LA freeway with a bunch of cops chasing him!" (Yeah, I know it was a white Bronco and not a white Mercedes, but that's what Mark said.) Rick and I were like, "Oh my God, no way!" and we grabbed our drinks and ran downstairs to watch the action unfold on the bar's big-screen TV, followed by about a dozen other patrons in the restaurant who had overheard Mark's announcement and wanted to see for themselves.

Of course, that was just the beginning of the hot mess express that turned into "the trial of the century"--five words that I would get extremely sick of hearing over the next year. 

Still, there was no avoiding it. Even today, I'm surprised at how much I remember. There was the Bronco chase with OJ and his buddy Al "You know who I am goddammit!" Cowlings at the wheel, then there were all the gory details of the murders of Ron-and-Nicole (it was always Ron-and-Nicole, not Nicole-and-Ron), along with the revelation that OJ Simpson--who I only knew as "Nordberg" from the Naked Gun movies--was a scary-ass wife beater. I even remember that dorky TV movie they rushed to make about OJ and his rage-y, abusive marriage to Nicole, a film directed by "Alan Smithee" (haaaaaa) featuring a then-unknown Terrence Howard. 

There was the cast of characters.... 

Kato "Wouldn't you be happy to see me?" Kaelin:  

"Hey OJ, pull my finger!"

Faye "wanna see my tits?" Resnick:

Thanks but no thanks, hon. 

The "Dream Team":

Ugh. You can just smell the giant cloud of Drakkar Noir wafting up from that crew.

This horseshit:

Fuck off Billy Bird, whoever you are.

And then there's this, which--okay--this made me laugh: 

Sure, I'm laughing about the key players involved in a terribly gruesome murder trial, but still, there's something kind of naive and almost (well, not quite) innocent about that point in time. It was pre-9/11, pre-Dubya, pre-all the awfulness that happened over the last two decades. There were no smartphones, no Facebook, none of the other obvious things that make the 1990's so glaringly different from the world of today. 

I guess it's just...I don't know...we were just all so young back then, weren't we?  

Rescued From Obscurity: A Rod Stewart Double Shot

How YOU doin'?

While Rod Stewart definitely isn't obscure--I think by now even his detractors would agree that he's reached "legend" status--the following two songs could definitely be categorized as such. And since I was going to post both videos on here anyway, I figured I might as well use the RFO tag, even though it's just the tracks themselves that are relatively unknown and not the artist.

I get a lot of flak for being a Rod Stewart fan. One reason is because, well, he's Rod Stewart. At best he's seen by non-fans as sort of a campy old relic from the seventies. At worst he's viewed as a musical whore who sold his soul several times over, first by abandoning his "respectable" rock roots and embracing pop in the mid-seventies ("Tonight's the Night"), then from pop to disco in the late seventies ("Do Ya Think I'm Sexy") then synthesizer-infused pop rock in the eighties, ("Young Turks," "Passion") and then from about 1990 on sliding steadily down the adult contemporary slope and straight into old fogey/Vegas territory with his Great American Songbook series. 

It makes me wish that some of Rod's "deep cuts" were in the public consciousness. "In a Broken Dream" is just one of many breathtakingly awesome songs that are pretty much known only to Rod's hardcore fans, and that's a shame. If "In a Broken Dream" had the fame it deserved, I don't see how anyone aware of its existence could sneer at anything else Rod recorded, no matter how cheesey. The song is truly sublime: it manages to be sad and angry and darkly funny all at the same time. It could be argued that while "In a Broken Dream" is great song on its own, the lyrics and music comprise only about 20% of its awesomeness. The remaining 80% is all ROD. It's in his voice and his delivery, and it makes my knees go weak.           

While it's hard to imagine "In A Broken Dream" being a commercial success in any decade, I feel like "Leave Virginia Alone" could have been a hit had it existed five years earlier. As luck would have it, Rod Stewart's seventeenth studio album A Spanner in the Works was launched into the world in May 1995, smack in the middle of a musical period where watered-down grunge and Top 40-approved gangsta rap ruled, leaving no room for anything that fell outside those two dismal categories. No surprise then that "Leave Virginia Alone" barely got any love at all, peaking at #52 in the US charts. It shouldn't have been that way, dammit, because it's an amazing song. It was written by Tom Petty, who (to my knowledge) never recorded it himself. I like Tom Petty, but there's no way his voice could do justice to the song's whimsical, melancholy lyrics. No one does whimsy or melancholy like Rod Stewart--see "Maggie May," "You Wear It Well," "Some Guys Have All the Luck," and pretty much every hit he's ever had. The video is beautifully shot, too (by director Zack Snyder, who I guess is a big deal these days) and it fits the track perfectly. I love the vintage shabby chic New Orleans-y feel of this clip, particularly the giant papier mache heads that look like something out of a Mardi Gras parade (and the throwaway shot of that one head breaking into dance at the 3:29 mark is fabulous). 



And because I'm such a fan of Rod the God, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention his new album--his first one of original material in several years--just dropped last month . I got my copy the day it was released, and it's fantastic. I'm so glad that Rod is back in the game and that he has (for now) gotten away from the old standard covers he kept cranking out over the last decade. I mean, I loved hearing his voice on songs like "My Funny Valentine" and "That's All," but seriously, it was time for him to move on from all that.

It was "time" for him to move on....get it?