Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 14, 1994 TAG: 9404140309
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
NBC, for example, has done a rush-rush job on ``The Tonya & Nancy Story,'' about Olympic skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, and the movie will air April 30. ``NBC Productions has been able to put a production schedule together that affords us a strong shot at being on the air first,'' boasts NBC vice president Lindy DeKoven.
In television more than ever, they don't want it good, they want it now.
For the May ratings Sweeps, CBS plans a two-part, four-hour miniseries called ``Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills.'' It airs on May 24 and 25. But unlike NBC, CBS will not be first on the air with this one. A Fox quickie on the same case, ``Honor Thy Father & Mother: The True Story of the Menendez Murders,'' airs Monday.
Since the Menendez story isn't over yet, there could be more films. The cases against both Erik and Lyle Menendez ended in January in mistrials. Two juries in suburban Los Angeles failed to reach verdicts against either young man in the savage shotgun killings of their parents that occurred in Beverly Hills on Aug. 20, 1989.
Both lads confessed guilt in tapes obtained by the prosecution. But their defense was something novel in American jurisprudence. They were saying, in effect: Yes, we murdered our parents, but they had it coming. It was claimed and arduously detailed during the six-month trial that both Erik and Lyle had been the victims of sexual abuse and that they feared their tyrannical father might murder them for threatening to tell the world of the abuse.
What a ghastly story, anyway you look at it, and America has been looking at it for months and months. The Fox movie version, based on a book by two reporters who covered the case, is quick and cheap and not necessarily the ``true story'' since it takes both sides, prosecution and defense. Erik and Lyle are depicted as shallow spoiled brats and glibly fluent liars, but in flashbacks we are led to believe that their tales of abuse are indeed true.
The trials ended in hung juries and the movie is likely to end in a hung audience. Even so, ``Honor Thy Father & Mother'' is at least fairly engrossing and a notch above sleaze. The two brothers are well cast, at least to look at them: David Beron as Erik, 18 when the murders were committed, and Billy Warlock as Lyle, then 21.
As the film opens, the murders have just been committed. The boys rush out of their palatial home and dispose of the weapons and their blood-splattered clothing. Then they go off on shopping sprees, even while claiming the mob murdered their parents and that they are in mourning. They buy $14,000 worth of Rolex watches and a $90,000 Porsche.
They're like kids in a candy store - kids who just killed the candymakers in cold blood.
Jose and Kitty Mendendez are played by James Farentino, in a shiny black wig, and Jill Clayburgh, who isn't seen until the second half of the movie when her flashbacks kick in. Kitty is depicted as a pathetic neglected wife often under the influence of pills and booze. There is no suggestion in the movie, as there was at the trial, that she, too, made sexual advances to her sons.
Even inebriated, Kitty has moments of lucidity, as when she notes late in the movie: ``This family is a bunch of losers - losers with money. That's the worst kind.''
The movie works as a kind of ultimate dysfunctional family portrait. They might have called it ``Menendez Family Values.'' What's utterly lacking is social perspective, any sense of how the case and the bizarre defense are comments on the moral squalor of our time.
Dominick Dunne has written about this and other troubling aspects of the case in brilliant pieces for Vanity Fair. Dunne deals with ideas; the Fox movie is not interested in those. It is interested only in murder, and possibly in making the point that rotten parents can, and sometimes do, produce rotten kids.
by CNB