‘O.J.: Made in America’: Inside ESPN’s Definitive Simpson Doc
On June 17, 1994, following a televised reading of a supposed suicide note by Kim Kardashian’s dad and a slow-speed car chase up the 405 freeway that interrupted the NBA Finals, O.J. Simpson surrendered to police outside a Brentwood home. He was charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
It was an auspicious — and eerily prescient — start to “The Trial of the Century,” in which Simpson, a former football hero, movie star, TV analyst and pitchman par excellence, was acquitted while the world watched. With cameras rolling in the courtroom and nascent 24-hour news networks more than willing to fill the time between gavel hits, the real-life legal drama spanned nearly 10 months, and an audience of 150 million tuned in to witness the verdict read live on the air. There’s a pretty good chance you were one of them.
There’s an even better chance you know the particulars and the key players, even if you can’t quite recall the roles they played. In the two decades since a jury found Simpson not guilty, every aspect of his trial has been editorialized, hyperbolized or dramatized — just this year, FX aired a 10-episode miniseries about the case — to the point where the entire saga now seems impossibly momentous.
But was it really?
That’s the first question posed to Ezra Edelman, director of ESPN Films’ O.J.: Made in America — the exhaustive and, dare we say, definitive new documentary about Simpson, the trial and everything in between. And his answer will probably surprise you. “My initial response to that question is, ‘God, I hope not,'” he says. “If that’s one of the most impactful events of the past 50 years, that’s kind of sad. That’s not to diminish what happened, but the basis of that question speaks more to the rabid fascination of the thing itself.”
If Edelman sounds like a guy who spent nearly two years interviewing subjects involved with the case, pouring over crime scene photos and parsing court transcripts, that’s because he did. It wasn’t a labor of love, but rather, a matter of necessity; in the hopes of stripping away the sensationalism surrounding the trial for his seven-and-a-half documentary on the Juice (which premieres on ABC on June 11th, then airs on ESPN from June 14th-18th), he had no other choice but to go back to the source material.
“This was a story that we had always considered and thought about, and in the original conversation around ’30 for 30′ we had always talked about: ‘Is there new territory to explore?'” Connor Schell, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer at ESPN Films, says. “What was interesting to us is everything that led up to the case: the people, their experiences, the city, the relationship between the criminal justice system and the black community in L.A. And that’s what we talked to Ezra about — originally, we said the film would be five hours, but he went out and found all these elements of a story that I didn’t even know existed.”
“I had lived through it, and I know how much it’s been picked over since, so I wondered what I could possibly add to the story?” Edelman sighs. “What else could I say? ESPN had said they wanted to do something bigger and ambitious, and that interested me. It seemed like the only way; you need the [large] canvas. I had things I wanted to explore and I had places I wanted to get to, so I just started putting the pieces together.”