Ever wonder why so many crime dramas and murder mysteries are made up of variations on so few themes? When you come right down to it, there aren't that many possibilities. Any screenplay in which the action revolves around a crime or a series of crimes, we either know who did it or we don't. Either the authorities are pursuing the right people or the wrong ones. That means the accused can be a bad guy who left behind incriminating clues to his identity by chance, a coincidental victim of circumstances or the target of a frame-up.

For variety you can change the setting, the characters and the props so that a 13^th century sword-welding Norman knight in one screenplay is a modern, gun-toting Puerto Rican drug lord in another. Men can be transformed into women, adults into children, magicians into scientists, American Blackfoot warriors into African Zulu warriors, etc. The Magnificent Seven was a cowboy version of The Seven Samurai. MacBeth has been told at least twice as a gangster story. In short, a few basic story elements can be used with minor changes to create an infinite variety of stage plays, screenplays and teleplays. But when you see more of the same elements from one script in another script than you can account for by chance you know that the person who wrote the later script borrowed at least some of his ideas from the earlier one.

From time to time someone will commit a crime that can be traced to a movie. The MO for a rash of airline extortion threats in the '60s came from a 1966 Rod Serling teleplay called Doomsday Flight. The rape of a young girl by a gang of older girls came from a 1974 television movie called Born Innocent. Some details of the killing spree at Columbine High School in Colorado came from  the black comedy Heathers. John Hinkley’s attempt to impress Jodi Foster by assassinating President Reagan was inspired by her role and Robert DeNiro’s in Taxi Driver.

Hollywood has also been know to borrow from the news, as was the case with the Norman Bates character in Psycho and the insurance adjuster and the woman he killed for in Double Indemnity. Gone With the Wind and Ben Hur were novels before they were movies. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a retelling of the Greek Myth Pyrimos and Thisbe. Wait Until Dark and The Bad Seed were stage plays that underwent little change in their transition to the big screen.

TV introduces a new way of telling the same stories with its own assets and limitations. You can tell a story in blocks of time ranging from a half hour to one-hour increments or more in a day or on successive days. You use the same charters or the same themes to do a series or a mini-series based on history, recent events in the news, winning personalities, award-winning books, stage plays or screenplays. You can even show the same movies—minus some rectangular viewing space trimmed to a relatively square screen. Even some of the commercials have seeped into our collective vocabulary of thought with clever catch phrases and celebrity spokesmen for everything ranging from soft drinks to rent-a-cars.

Since the mid ’80s VCR’s have added two new dimensions to television. They have allowed us to see the televised programs we want to see when we want to see them without commercial interruption. And they have made a wide assortment of movies available to us on TV that we might not have seen in months or years if at all.

What do these story-telling media have in common—apart from telling the same stories in different ways? A lot of things, obviously. But the two thing we want to focus on in this book are the sources of story telling and the power of the people who can sell things on the strength of their endorsements. In the ’80s and early ’90s few men enjoyed more success in that department than Michael Jordan and a couple of other sports figures who wore the number 32, Magic Johnson and O.J. Simpson.

Again and again in the network of television references to Mark Fuhrman and the Bundy murders, you will see allusions to Fuhrman’s top three list of athletes, George Foreman, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. The first Smoking Gun deals with the movie connections to those celebrities in detail. Here, you may want to think more about what you have seen of them on TV sandwiched between the shows that gave the Bundy murder scene and the investigation of O.J. Simpson their special characteristics. With the lone exception of a 1992 broadcast of Brotherhood of the Bell, I don’t have the commercials that came with the shows. But the sheer number of ads done by O.J., Magic, Bird, Forman and Jordan guarantees their appearance in some of them.