The movie
Show notes
Dear pals, If you listen to the friends of OJ Simpson for long enough, you get the impression that the football superstar, suspected murderer and convicted armed robber has never told the truth in his life. Oral evidence of this abounds throughout the seven-plus hours that make up Ezra Edelman’s multifaceted portrait of “the Juice”, Made in America , all from the mouths of people who claim to have known Simpson well. From denying wrongdoing and selling his friends out during his school days to openly using “spare” golf balls as a full-grown man, the first 45 years of Simpson’s life seems essentially to have geared up to denying, in a court of law and on internationally-broadcast television—and with all the evidence stacked against him—that he had brutally murdered two people. Edelman’s 2016 film is, among many other things, about truth itself. Though that sounds painfully trite, the way the theme is approached in this case remains subtle and fascinating. The film—more popularly known for its broadcast format as a five-part “event” miniseries—is Edelman’s third as director and takes on the familiar style of his chosen genre, the sports documentary. New talking head interviews are interspersed with archive footage to construct an accessible picture of the figure under discussion and, in keeping with genre trends of its decade, voiceover narration is eschewed entirely—lending a flavour of horse’s-mouth authenticity. But the way Edelman uses his ever-expanding run time to twist and interrogate his own authority as a journalist makes Made in America a cut above even the very best of his fellow ESPN 30 for 30 series instalments. Edelman, as we mention in the podcast, reportedly began this project with the same opinion that he—along with much of America’s Black population—had reportedly held in the mid 1990s: that OJ was somehow set up and persecuted for his rarefied status as a powerful and influential Black man. As Edelman proves by the end of his own film, this notion o
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