From: Jasper
Date: 7/20/01
Time: 11:49:35 AM
I thought I was all done with both Smoking Guns. Then I made the mistake of stumbling across a 1980 movie by William Blatty (the author of the Exorcist) called The Ninth Configuration with Stacy Keach and Scott Wilson. Looks like I'm going to have to add a chapter to The Smoking Gun…Movie Guide.
I hadn't seen The Ninth Configuration since the last time I rented it from the video store in 1985. It was such a terrific movie that I watched it twice in a row and rented it once a week for about two months. I bought The Ninth Configuration from Amazon about two years ago with no thought that it might contain anything relevant to Fuhrman and the Bundy murders. I think that I may have hidden it from myself partly to keep from "contaminating" my methodology for finding Fuhrman links to the movies. If I had gone first to the movies that were adapted from Joseph Wambaugh novels I would have had nothing to worry about.
Blatty, like Wambaugh is a celebrity writer whose novels have been made into screenplays. Wambaugh is the guy that Fuhrman said he patterned himself after.
Stacy Keach and Scott Wilson both starred in movies adapted from Wambaugh novels. The fact that they are both in a movie adopted from a Blatty novel should have told me something. The fact that it was about marines in an experimental psychiatric hospital should have told me more. But the fact that nine years passed until anything happened in the real world to put it in a context other than "a terrific movie," has a lot to do with why I didn't see the connections (there are a BUNCH of them). But after viewing it last night, I saw why so many elements of he Bundy murders and Mark Fuhrman's involvement in them seemed so familiar. They are in The Ninth Configuration.
If you get a chance, watch it. Warning: Don't judge it until you've seen it all, at least once with your brain fully engaged. --Jasper