Al Pacino and Helen Mirren are starring in a made-for-HBO movie being directed by David Mamet. The movie is about Phil Spector and the murder of Lana Clarkson, pictured above.Pacino plays Spector. Mirren plays one of Spector's elderly friends.
It's rather disgusting. Spector was convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson. Spector liked carrying a gun. It was proven in court that he had a long history of getting drunk, waving his gun around. He liked threatening women with them. He brought Clarkson to his house. She was shot. The gun was in his hand and he immediately confessed to shooting her.
But David Mamet is convinced that Spector is innocent, or he pretends that he's convinced.
Spector's defense was that Clarkson met Spector for the first time, went with him to his house, and suddenly decided to commit suicide with Spector's gun. This was disproven in court. Other women testified that he had put a guns to their heads and threatened to murder them. That was his thing, apparently.
Spector claimed that he couldn't get a fair trial because he was an "outsider" in the music industry.
There's no credible reason for Mamet to believe in Spector's innocence. If there is, he hasn't said what it is. I can guess the real reason, and I'd probably be right, but it'd still be a guess.
And what is wrong with the "feminist" Helen Mirren? She plays one of Spector's friends. Why is she in a movie with a misogynist director defending a woman's murder? Would Mirren have shot herself if her career hadn't gone as well as it had, as Mamet claims Lana Clarkson did? Does she intend to kill herself when her career goes into decline, as it inevitably will if she lives long enough?
The movie is being protested by a group called Friends of Lana Clarkson which I hope will have some effect. They already got Bette Midler to back out of it. She had been set to play Mirren's role.
There was the case recently of several people, convicted as teenagers of committing a horrible murder, being released from prison because they were falsely convicted. In that case, an HBO documentary exposed the utter lack of evidence and the biases of the prosecutors and the community against the impoverished teenagers whom they imagined were "Satanists".
In Spector's case, he's clearly guilty. He had the best defense money can buy, and Mamet has nothing to offer.
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