When my business manager first offered to create a movie and TV review blog for me, I was thinking it would be a fun opportunity for me to write posts about whatever vintage title I felt like at random times. However, Jeff pointed out that if I want to be relevant and build an audience, I need to write about current stuff, adding that people aren’t going to care about titles that came out 10 years ago. I suppose that’s a magnitude truer for stuff that came out 100 years ago, which, being myself, I could still want to write about at any given time.
Thus I came up with my blog’s current format of doing reviews in pairs. There have been cases like this one and this one where I worked backwards – happened to watch a great film and THEN found something contemporary with which to combine it. Now I realized I can even cross stuff off the list of things I’ve always wanted to watch and feel like I’m doing work LOL. This really was a perfect year to finally get to Fatal Vision, as in 2019 there’s also been a miniseries about four hours long, telling the story of a notorious real-life trial for a violent crime where the guilt or innocence is hotly debated to this day.
This is also a great month this year for this pair of posts, as When You See Us is nominated for some major awards at the Emmys coming up Sunday and Fatal Vision was also nominated for some its year, winning Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Special for Karl Malden.
The main reason for my longstanding interest in Fatal Vision isn’t the acclaim though – it’s the subject matter.
I first heard of the protagonist when I was seven years old and walked into the den while my parents were watching a 60 Minutes piece discussing a man with the last name “MacDonald”. I’m impressed my dad correctly inferred exactly what I was thinking – he explained that they weren’t talking about Ronald but rather a guy named Jeffrey accused of killing his family. I was too little to care much about this but could tell there was controversy surrounding the situation and the guy was in a lot of pain.
I then learned more about the case six years later, when I was reading in the Sunday paper (for any Generation Z people reading, yes I’m old enough to have grown up reading newspapers) about the release of Fatal Justice, essentially a rebuttal to Fatal Vision. It talked about how MacDonald didn’t get a fair trail and was railroaded.
That was author Jerry Potter’s stance anyway. The book was not a bestseller like its predecessor and drew middling reviews. It’s not even in print anymore.
My next exposure was the now-defunct website crimelibrary.com, which included the MacDonald cases among its significant true crimes stories. The author, with incredible passion, talked about Jeffrey as a magnificent man in a beautiful marriage with his wife Collette whose future was taken away by a horrible tragedy, compounded by the damage done to him thanks to Fatal Vision’s unscrupulous author Joe McGinnis.
The combination of these things led to Jeffrey MacDonald’s vindication becoming one of my biggest longings in the whole world. Year after year I went to his team’s official website, hoping to FINALLY see the good news that he’d been exonerated or at least granted a new trial.
In the fall of 2012, when legendary Errol Morris released his new book A Wilderness of Error talking about the miscarriage of justice suffered by MacDonald and at the same time there was a long-awaited hearing on whether DNA testing of hairs found at the crime scene justified a new trial, I was thinking the moment had AT LONG LAST arrived.
Nope. I read various comments on articles regarding both developments, and not only were people still overwhelmingly convinced he’s guilty, I was finding out ALL sorts of facts that hadn’t been shared at Crime Library that made me question my previous beliefs.
The final nail in the coffin regarding my support of Dr. MacDonald’s exoneration came two years later, when I read both the transcript of an online chat Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten had with readers about this issue and an article he wrote regarding a lengthy conversation with Brian Murtaugh, a major prosecutor on the case.
I wrote Weingarten thanking him for being able to fully change my mind on an issue I’d been so passionate regarding, and in his response he recommended reading Fatal Vision.
I might, as I definitely loved the miniseries!
It’s interesting that the book led to the lawsuit MacDonald v. McGinnis and MacDonald actually attempted to keep NBC from broadcasting this when they did in 1984, as it’s a really balanced portrait. If you’re not already convinced of his guilt or innocence, you won’t be by the miniseries. It simply lays out the facts:
- MacDonald was a really charismatic, brilliant, and beloved guy.
- He spoiled his kids.
- He was a serial adulterer.
- There was plenty of circumstantial but no concrete evidence he committed the murders.
- There was ample circumstantial AND concrete evidence that his story of what did happen was a lie.
- There is no way he would have ever been charged if he actually acted like a grieving husband and father instead of a narcissist.
- His father-in-law was almost singlehandedly responsible for the indictment ultimately happening.
As the father-in-law, Freddy Kassab, former Academy Award winner Malden really earned his Emmy. We initially see the tender love between Freddy and Jeff, how it almost abruptly turns to utter thirst for blood, and how the conflict continues without end due to Freddy’s dogged determination. It depends on your view of the case which man is the protagonist and which man is the antagonist, but either way Malden’s excellence is matched by Gary Cole’s as Dr. MacDonald. A man who didn’t get into acting until his late 20s, and had only one obscure TV movie to his name at the time, Cole really hit the jackpot landing this part. 35 years later, he’s become an Ed Begley, Jr. type actor in that he’s seemingly guest-starred on EVERYTHING. He’s gotten his own Emmy nomination for his recurring role on Veep and of course he has become iconic on the sliver screen, specifically for his part as Lumbergh in Office Space. Yet this remains the meatiest part he has ever gotten and he knocks it out of the park. The other two name actors in this piece, Eva Marie Saint and Andy Griffith, bring great heart to the proceedings as Collette’s mother and a kind but weary prosecutor, respectively.
Deserving just as much praise as the cast is the score. While to some people the scary pounding music might sound over the top (and was the type of music actually parodied in the “Don’t” fake trailer in Grindhouse) it was commonplace in the 70s and early 80s and makes this film buff feel like he’s transported back in time. 🙂 It’s used appropriately here, adding chills to scenes dealing directly with the slaughters. The cinematography is also great, giving us a haunting look then and having it starkly contrast the bright sun when Dr. MacDonald has quickly moved on with his life and is living in a waterfront condo by his boat. The whole series is edited together beautifully and guided perfectly by director David Greene, an Emmy winner for his work on other legendary miniseries such as Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man.
I’m amazed this miniseries, as popular and acclaimed as it was, never got a digital release, either physical or streaming. If you want to watch it your options are basically get a copy of the out-of-print VHS (and find a working player, LOL) or watch it on YouTube. The good thing is that at least a couple of people have uploaded full, uninterrupted versions on YouTube. Well, the one I watched was technically interrupted by commercials, as the YouTuber uploaded their personal VHS recording of when Fatal Vision aired on TV, but as a lover of pop culture history I thought it was awesome getting to watch all those commercials from 1984!
Anyway, watch this however you can. It’s mesmerizing.
Agree? Disagree? Feel free to comment.
Bottom line: Did I mention it’s mesmerizing?
%
Recent Comments