For those who lived through the trial of the century and are still grappling with its ramifications 30 years on, OJ Simpson’s death from prostate cancer last April was a marked anticlimax – one last deception from the ultimate fake out artist, maybe. Given his grave prognosis, the hope was that he would be moved to reflect on his past mistakes, or that he would be overcome with the kind of long-festering feelings of guilt that might culminate in a shock death bed confession.
Instead, the Juice remained defiant to the end, convinced he would beat the cancer wrap too, and carried on tweeting about sports and politics until time ran out on him at age 76. “If you remember he said he was fine,” recalls director Floyd Russ. “So I always joke that he lied to us until the day he died, basically.”
Russ’s latest project – American Manhunt: OJ Simpson, a four-part Netflix docuseries on the disgraced American football hero – attempts to unpick Simpson’s ultimate legacy: the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Essentially, Russ is resubmitting the case, a national obsession that mushroomed into a worldwide phenomenon because of Simpson’s sports and Hollywood celebrity, for gen Z’s consideration.
A native Angeleno who spent his formative years living in Germany, Russ had just moved back to the Los Angeles area with his family as the OJ trial was winding down. He remembers struggling to relearn English and make high school friends as the trial aired everywhere in the background. “I didn’t understand what was happening initially – but then my parents divorced, and I wound up moving with my mom to an apartment complex in Brentwood,” he recalls, nodding at the affluent suburb that Simpson made infamous. “She ended up going to church at Brentwood Presbyterian, which is on Bundy Drive – two blocks from where Nicole and Ron were murdered.”
Clearly, it was only a matter of time before Russ directed a series attempting to make sense of that overheated period in his life. But he didn’t go into it oblivious to the steep competition. Not only have there been scores of films about Simpson over the decades, but Ezra Edelman already won an Oscar for directing a near eight-hour ESPN 30 for 30 series called OJ: Made in America, the definitive view on the matter. “For any film-maker, having to follow a masterpiece like that is daunting,” says Russ.
But that epic is nearly a decade old now. Russ can remember asking a 20-year-old about Simpson and the person replying, somewhat Jim Downey-like: “Isn’t he an actor?” It was a helpful reminder of the scores who missed out on experiencing the thrill of the Bronco chase and the bloody glove fitting in the moment.
Rather than make Simpson the protagonist of a heroic fall that amplifies his indelible impacts on football, culture and media at the turn of the century, Russ keeps a tight focus on the double murder and the live TV courtroom drama that ensued. Manhunt, which Russ wrestled down to about five hours altogether, relitigates every aspect of the case, tracking back to evidence that wasn’t collected (there was so much) and witnesses who weren’t called to testify; not least the LAX bystander who alleges to have seen Simpson discard “something long that was maybe wrapped in a cloth” in a curbside trashcan before hopping a flight to Chicago – the murder weapon, perhaps. (Police never recovered one.)
Most of Manhunt’s interview screen time is devoted to players in the main cast: Kim Goldman, Ron’s eternally bereaved kid sister; Chris Darden, the deputy DA whose office was outfoxed by Simpson’s legal dream team; Yolanda Crawford, one of the 12 LA county jurors who delivered a not-guilty verdict for Simpson. But no one gets grilled quite as thoroughly as Mark Fuhrman, the outwardly clean-cut LAPD detective whose documented history of using racist language tainted the prosecution’s argument from the off. Deliciously, Carl Douglas, the right hand to the lead Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, likened Furhman to a roach in a perfect platter of spaghetti – an analogy Russ went the extra mile to reconstruct along with circumstantial scenes from the night murder.
Altogether, the interview with Fuhrman, the only person convicted of a crime in the Simpson case (for perjury), lasted eight hours. Crucially, Russ asks Fuhrman if he planted evidence to stitch up Simpson for the murders, a question he famously ducked on the witness stand while invoking his fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Fuhrman issues a firm “no”, but the answer is too little too late.
Russ remembers Fuhrman, an ex-Marine who would go on to serve as Manhunt’s false protagonist, equating the interview process to “being waterboarded”. Never mind the breaks and snacks and the long lunch that he enjoyed during the shoot. “But that’s the thing: It’s tricky to get anyone to come out and talk,” Russ says. “OJ, in a sense, is like a curse.”
Three families would be left most destroyed in the end: the Browns, the Goldmans and the Simpsons. And OJ would make his death even more final by not donating his brain to science (despite expressing some fear that he might have CTE) and fortifying his estate against any attempts by Goldmans and Browns to collect the damages owed from a $33.5m judgment that found Simpson civilly liable for the 1994 murders. (Russ spoke with Simpson before he died about appearing in Manhunt, but those talks broke off when Simpson “wanted to control who else was going to be in the documentary”, the director says.)
The actual lawyers who tried the case were wilted by their spotlight overexposure too, a plight further underscored by the armchair legal eagles on the TV periphery who bypassed them on the rise to fame. Darden and lead prosecutor Marsha Clark watched their career ambitions in government disintegrate. All the while the Dream team lost its luster in the aftermath of breakup and victory, a victory that would not have been possible without them turning a case of overwhelming blood evidence into a referendum on race relations and police conduct – a faustian bargain, maybe. Cochran and Simpson confidante Robert Kardashian, of those Kardashians, died young. Robert Shapiro, the celebrity fixer who launched the team, was never taken as seriously again. F Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz, once venerated as titans of criminal law, have been disgraced by their own scandals.
Only Barry Scheck, the sharp-eyed DNA expert for the defense, seems to have found redemption since starting the Innocence Project, a legal non-profit that aims to exonerate wrongfully convicted. In Manhunt, Douglas, who continued Cochran’s civil rights work, remains as convinced as ever of Simpson’s innocence despite a history of violence that continued after 1994 and resulted in a 33-year prison sentence for kidnapping and armed robbery in 2008. (Simpson was released after serving nine years.) The murderer, Douglas argues, would “have to be a sociopath” – at which point you can imagine millions of Netflix viewers screaming, uhh yeah we’ve only been saying that since 1994! “It’s like he’s back in the trial,” Russ says. “He’s still OJ’s defender. It’s amazing to see the case and the persona of OJ still live on through everybody.”
Still, Russ doesn’t expect that his film will have zillenials turning the case into a Menendez-level reparative justice cause. “That’s not what this film is about,” he says. “It’s about what happened during the trial, the investigation, the chase, the trial – all of the complicated layers that led to OJ being acquitted of murder. If you’re still debating whether he’s guilty or not, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the control of a narrative and how to manipulate bias. The 20- and 25-year-olds who are more idealistic than me can hopefully do more with the information than we did. The story belongs to them now.”
American Manhunt: OJ Simpson is now available on Netflix
