It’s just about wallowing in the misery of somebody else’s tragedy without any larger purpose.”
He added: “I do think there’s a lot of irresponsible true crime being done where there’s no larger social justice message or there’s not a larger commentary on society. The true-crime thing makes me a little nervous because I think of myself more as a social justice filmmaker spending a lot of time in the crime space.” “I’m described as a true-crime pioneer,” he acknowledged.
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His recent body of work comprises several TV docu-series about sensational crimes, including “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,” “Unspeakable Crime: The Killing of Jessica Chambers” and “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.” But call him a true-crime filmmaker and he bristles. “The storytelling is so preoccupied with lurid crime details, it rarely pulls back to study larger dynamics.”Įven Berlinger has reservations about the genre. “At its worst, the true-crime genre is law enforcement propaganda,” he continued. Some feel the true-crime genre gets in the way as well - of other kinds of documentary and of storytelling in general. They accept seemingly every explanation except the simplest one. They obsess over a piece of elevator surveillance footage, seeing proof of evidence tampering where none existed. That’s not really the case in “Cecil.” The sleuths go after a death metal artist and ruin his life with false accusations (a touch of satanic panic with echoes of “Paradise Lost,” in which the prosecution uses the West Memphis Three’s taste in heavy metal to help build its case). “People can see that these kinds of investigations by regular people can lead to some positive outcomes,” he said. But Berlinger remembers those who went online, pre-social media, and provided important information about the West Memphis Three. This would seem to be a far cry from “Cecil Hotel,” whose eight-year-old central mystery can be solved by anyone with an internet connection. Berlinger and Sinofsky made three “Paradise Lost” films altogether, and the teenagers, widely known as the West Memphis Three, were eventually set free. In 1996, he and Sinofsky released “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” which interrogated the circumstantial evidence that put three Arkansas teenagers in prison, accused of killing and mutilating three young children. In 1992, he and Bruce Sinofsky debuted “Brother’s Keeper,” the wrenching tale of a barely literate farmer accused of murdering his own brother. “I wanted the viewer to really experience it the way the web sleuths did in terms of putting together information and the rabbit holes they went down.”īerlinger, who frequently works with Netflix but also does projects with other networks, has been at this for a while, since well before true crime documentaries flooded the airwaves and streaming platforms. “The sleuths are very integral to the structure of the show because what’s interesting for me is perception,” Berlinger said in a telephone interview last week.
Wait, it’s just like that one horror movie. One by one they bear witness to what they haven’t seen, peering out from their computer screens and offering explanations and verdicts. Located in the city’s drug-and-crime-infested Skid Row area, and known for its history of horrors, the Cecil has stories to tell. One is the title character, the towering Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
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On Netflix, you can watch the four-part “Night Stalker,” about the Los Angeles serial killer Richard Ramirez, and then click over to the four-episode “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” in which Ramirez makes a cameo.īut “Crime Scene,” directed by the true-crime veteran Joe Berlinger, has some other guest stars, and they make the enterprise a little different than most. They tend to showcase humanity’s worst, there’s a seemingly endless supply, and they’re generally so repetitive that it’s hard to tell one from another. It’s hard to find much that is redeeming in true-crime documentaries these days.
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This article contains mild spoilers for the Netflix series “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel”
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