A new mugshot- the first released in three years – shows an older, heavier and grayer O.J. Simpson.
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In 2002, seven years after O.J. was acquitted for double murder, HBO broadcast a truly awful documentary called “O.J”.
Then, when the verdict was announced on October 3, 1995, “I was hoping that this person, who I held in certain regard, was not capable of doing those things”. “I was concerned that after the show engaged people in that way there might not be room for ours”, he says, claiming he hasn’t watched.
Made In America pulls back enough to encompass all of that.
O.J. Simpson’s infamous booking photo from June 1994..
Despite the extensive research that went into the project, Edelman said ultimately no one but Simpson could truly know what might have spurred the former football star to behave as he did.
Here are five of the most shocking revelations in the first two installment of Made in America, and how they deepen our understanding the contradictory narrative of his life. Simply as a documentary about law enforcement, the film is both painstaking and enraging.
With renewed interest in the O.J. Simpson trial after the success of the FX Series The People vs OJ and the upcoming documentary on ESPN, people are no longer questioning the events in the historic rise and tragic fall of his life, they want to know how and why it happened.
CP: Theoretically it could draw more attention to your film.
Shipp also says that he is dismayed that Jason Simpson is being accused of the murders in the Sheen documentary, and says this is the time for Simpson to show some character, and tell the world that his son didn’t do it, that Jason Simpson is innocent.
But the final entry also offers one of the most baffling epilogues in recent memory, chronicling Simpson’s later years in Miami, surrounding himself with yes-men and fame junkies.
As a film about race in America, Made in America is razor-sharp and remarkably nuanced. It’s a journalistic marvel, assembling fact after fact and observation after observation into a portrait far more complex overall than it appears at any given moment.
In the two decades since Simpson was acquitted by a majority-black jury, the racial gap has narrowed significantly.
Edelman: Yes, I’m on the one hand very much ready to be done with this.
It took about 30 minutes before I was completely reeled into the film. One of the more fascinating aspects of Simpson’s post-football celebrity is how bizarrely amorphous it was.
We see clips of Simpson’s awesome USC runs, of Bob Hope fawning over him and Howard Cosell praising his “impeccable character”.
ESPN will debut a five-part documentary, O.J. “Nada. If ever there was not only a colorless but soulless man, it was him”. It would be inaccurate to say that one walks away from O.J. feeling that its subject was misunderstood or got a bad rap, but Edelman recontextualizes his life so that we see it as a tragedy of his own making. Over the course of O.J.’s almost eight hours, the film’s talking-heads-and-archival-footage structure can feel repetitive and overly polished.
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Simpson became the first African-American spokesman to appear in advertising campaigns for mass audiences, which until then had featured nearly exclusively white actors.
