Fun
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It was never really a police chase.
The white Bronco rambling down the Los Angeles freeway on June 17, 1994, was more like the idea of a police chase — a dress rehearsal for an action movie, a dry run at half speed. The SUV lumbered through its scenes, first west below Compton, then north past LAX and UCLA, and eventually nuzzling into the hilly enclave of Brentwood. Normally gridlocked, the highway was cleared by troopers, giving cameras clean line-of-sight all the way. At 35 mph, the scene was like a slow-mo sports reel — one of those documentaries from NFL Films with baritone narration to dramatize each first down, play by play. Fans gathered on overpasses, cheering for the local Heisman winner, like bleachers atop an asphalt gridiron.
With O.J. Simpson in the backseat, and his longtime friend and teammate Al Cowlings at the helm, the 1993 white Ford Bronco moseyed down the highway as seven news choppers congregated overhead, beaming images up to satellites that beamed them back down to 95 million people — a larger audience than that year’s Super Bowl.
A bloody coda seemed inevitable. On live television, Robert Kardashian read O.J.’s apparent suicide note, strangely evoking Courtney Love performing the same ritual just two months prior, after Kurt Cobain’s death. But this self-destructive peregrination was still a work in progress. A deranged celebrity was waving a .357 Magnum after eluding arrest for double murder. As Howard Cosell used to say, “The Juice is loose” — with a big gun, $8,700 in cash, a passport, a fake goatee and a mustache. More than 20 troopers escorted the Bronco, while a SWAT team of over two dozen waited at their destination. The cameras were careful about closeups, as a gory splatter on live television seemed a foregone conclusion.
As the sun dipped into the Pacific, the Bronco wobbled to a stop in O.J.’s shadowy driveway. Slow and tense, the scene desaturated into a familiar coastal dread, reminiscent of the city’s greatest artistic invention: film noir. But instead of cinematic hard-boiled voiceovers — the dead man in Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. or the omniscient narrator of Kubrick’s The Killing — the cast of a dozen broadcasters whispered from the darkness of every network or cable channel that could catch the signal.
The chase embodied so many cinematic styles: action movie, sports documentary, live news, film noir, and cinema verite. But the hybrid was unlike any of those. In real time, Hollywood was again creating a new kind of cinema, which would eventually engulf the world.
Welcome to the birth of reality television.
The second episode of The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story does one thing remarkably well: It swerves between the frenzy inside the Bronco and the media spectacle on the outside.
Inside was mayhem. From a car phone, Cowlings was screaming at a 911 dispatcher, “It’s A.C. You know who I am, goddammit!” while Simpson swallowed a muzzle. Eventually, LAPD Detective Tom Lange would get on the phone to subdue “Juice” (that’s what the detective called Simpson, over and over), who sounded like a man scratching at death’s door: “I’ve already said goodbye to my kids” he confessed to Lange. (Not played at the criminal trial, the audio of the conversion was later heard in O.J.’s civil case.) Simpson desperately tried to call friends and acquaintances, including Bob Costas, who was at Madison Square Garden watching Spike Lee bellow at zebras in the Knicks/Rockets NBA Finals game. Costas later recounted missing O.J.’s call:
Outside the Bronco was also mayhem. Especially in the sky.
The renowned helicopter pilot Bob Tur was the first to locate Simpson and televise the slow-speed chase. (A fascinating and controversial figure, Tur designed and built the first modern live news choppers. In 2007, he also became the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement, as told in a long Esquire profile. A few years ago, “Chopper Bob” announced she had become Zoey Tur, but was deemed an imperfect spokesperson by much of the transgender community.)
Birds seldom fly solo, so one chopper quickly became a flock. They flew so close to each other that one station’s feed would cross bands with another, creating a channel-surfing effect for confused viewers. CNN’s disorienting live coverage, which flipped between station feeds and commentators, is of course archived on YouTube:
Because every station was airing the Bronco chase, NBC famously had to go split-screen for the NBA playoff game. It was prime time in America, so the whole country settled in and ordered pizza. (Domino’s would later extol June 17 as its highest single-day revenue in history. In the The People v. O.J. Simpson, this is dramatized as a pizza parlor running out of cheese, which is a pretty clever metaphor.)
Millions watched and waited. If you were tuned to ABC, you saw Peter Jennings fall for a prank phone call from a Howard Stern acolyte that concluded with a wildly time-specific reference, “And Baba Booey to y’all!” (Try explaining that one to millennials.)
Most people cite The Real World, launched two summers prior, as the founding moment of modern reality television. But its documentary style was only part of the equation. After the Bronco chase, Hollywood seemed to collectively realize what happens when you mix celebrity, steadicams, and a power-hungry ensemble of wannabes — huge audiences congregate. O.J.’s escapade supplied the defining characteristics of the paradigm, making way for such hyperreal spectacles as Survivor, Celebrity Rehab, The Bachelor, and the Housewives franchise. But one specific group helped manifest the surreal genre more than all others: Lawyers.
The duty of an attorney is to create a narrative that sits atop what “really” happened. Like reality show producers, lawyers write scripted adaptations of observed phenomena. Then, they cast themselves in leading roles. O.J. and his “dream team” of lawyers taught Hollywood how to rewrite reality on the fly. As an inspired next step, The People v. O.J. Simpson takes it even further: having actors play lawyers who performed like lawyers who wished they were actors.
In 1994, we couldn’t foresee the fuzzy future that was coming: celebrity sex tapes, affluenza, microfame, subtweeting, autotune, truthiness, the uncanny valley, and whatever semi-reality we have now accepted. During the actual trial, “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” we could not have known what havoc Kimye would wreak, but after 22 years, the TV show version, The People v. O.J. Simpson, is keenly aware of what the future would be. The show tries to not be too coy with its advantage of historical perspective, but when you have the hindsight of the Kardashian clan, how can you resist? When the Kardashian kids cheer in unison while watching their father on television, you almost want to gambol along with them, hands in the air as you glide down the amusement park ride called The Birth Canal of Reality TV.
“Kar-dash-i-an! Kar-dash-i-an! Kar-dash-i-an!”
The repercussions of this case on the future of television were significant. If any event could be said to typify the aftershocks, it might be when the network most dedicated to the trial, Court TV, later transformed into truTV, a reality television network. But more impactfully, countless individuals who are associated with O.J. have gone on to be founding members of the Reality Television Complex. The most spectral of these is Donald Trump.
Lest you suspect I have concocted a wild conspiracy theory about the birth of reality television, I would like to introduce some new testimony to this trial. Your honor, I humbly enter Exhibit A into evidence — a case file charticle of individuals associated with O.J. Simpson who helped trigger the reality television big bang:
When O.J. finally exited the Bronco after the standoff, the police allowed him into his house, where he called his mother. He went to the bathroom and drank a refreshing glass of orange juice. (Really!)
Those strangely prosaic activities were not captured on camera. But then, finally, he was arrested, which was:
MISCELLANEOUS HISTORICAL NOTES:
- During a transition scene, someone speculates whether the police chase is an advertisement for Ford Broncos. It just so happens that sales of Broncos went up by 25 percent the following year.
- The best exchange of this episode occurs while Christopher Darden cooks BBQ in his hometown backyard as the neighborhood watches the Bronco chase. Darden: “Once O.J. made his money, he split and never came back. He became white.” Guy over the fence: “Well, he’s got the cops chasing him. He’s black now!”
- Baba Booey and Donald Trump are both referenced above, but one person brings them together: Howard Stern. A month after the verdict, Stern published his second book, Miss America. Originally titled “Getting Away With Murder,” the first edition had a back cover picture of Stern with O.J. Simpson, taken at Donald Trump’s second wedding in 1993:
- On the night of the Bronco chase, David Hasselhoff had a pay-per-view musical performance in Vegas. Because the country was instead gorging on Domino’s pizza, it bombed. He lost $1.5 million.
- June 17, 1994, was a busy day in sports. For the first (and only) time, the soccer World Cup opened in the United States. (This was the World Cup where Andres Escobar would score an own goal that led to his murder.) The New York Rangers returned home to a ticker-tape parade after their first Stanley Cup victory since 1940. Arnold Palmer played his last round of professional golf at the U.S. Open. And the Knicks won game five of the NBA finals against the Houston Rockets. All of this is chronicled in the terrific tone-poem documentary, June 17th, 1994 (part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series), directed by Brett Morgen. If that name sounds familiar, he’s also the guy who directed the recent Kurt Cobain biopic, Montage of Heck.
- Some people born in 1994: Justin Bieber, Dakota Fanning, Harry Styles.
- The placement of “Sabotage” in this episode is hilarious and perfectly of-the-moment. In 1994, the song was actually nominated for five MTV Video Music Awards. But it lost all five — three to Aerosmith’s “Cryin'” and two to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” In the spirit of nostalgia for that year, I have composed my dream “O.J. Simpson Soundtrack” Spotify playlist, comprised of singles from 1994.
Next week: Episode 3: The Dream Team!
Rex Sorgatz is living the dream team @fimoculous.
