From: Jasper
Date: 04 Aug 2008
Time: 02:47:01 PM
Bob – Good question. I don’t have the answer. Maybe there are many answers. One of them could be that nobody has come up with a screenplay that CAN be produced. ................. In the first place, who is going to put up the bucks it would take to make a major motion picture without some assurance of a reasonable return on the investment? That means the screenplay has to fit the popular conceptions of how and why O.J. Simpson committed the murders. ................ The second big problem is the casting. The actor who plays O.J. has to be roughly O.J.’s height, build and color to be totally convincing in the role. This is not a part where it is enough for a great actor to capture the essence of the character. The O.J. on screen has to look like O.J. looked in 1994. He has sound like him and he can never for a moment be confused with the actor playing his part. ................ These are not insurmountable problems for a determined producer. However, the screenplay could present insurmountable problems. ................ In Oliver Stone’s JFK, which was based on Jim Garrison’s book, there was plenty of room to act out plausible scenarios and inject strategic doses of fiction. Garrison played the part of Chief Justice Warren, thus lending a considerable amount of credibility to the accuracy of the entire production based on his investigation. You can’t get anything like that from books written by Faye Resnick, Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, Dan Petrocelli or Mark Fuhrman. If Pavelic’s book ever comes out, you won’t be able to get what you deed for a screenplay from that book, either. In Petrocelli’s words, “The devil is in the details.” .............. Every scenario in which O.J. murders Nicole and Ron in a jealous rage is cluttered with details that don’t follow a rational sequence as well as essential sub-components that are physically impossible. As long as you stick to verbal descriptions in place of physical actions in finite time and space and you omit details that violate the laws of physics you can tell a convincing story of O.J.-the-killer. But when you set the players in motion, with props and costumes on a Bundy and Rockingham set you inevitably run into can be resolved only by taking obvious liberties with the facts. –Jasper