Pistorius Trial Imitating Art?

The other day I was intrigued by a news item about the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who is currently on trial for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. A South African journalist published the allegation that Pistorius had secretly received, before his trial began, acting lessons from a close friend. News (and gossip) sites are trying to confirm or bust the story. According to behaviorists who claim to know these things, Pistorius's natural personality would make him react with anger and hostility to stuff going on at the trial, so if he could get himself to appear sad and distraught instead, the judge might go easier on him. If you've looked in on any of the news about the trial, you know that Pistorius wept and retched a fair amount of the time.

I don't know enough about the story to have an opinion, but I'm keeping my eye on it, because my novel The Actress is based on exactly such a premise: Unsympathetic defendant gets secret acting lessons, in hopes of influencing the jury.

I remember when the idea came. I was sitting on the couch with my beloved partner Marcia, watching a true-crime program about a woman who had been on trial (in the U.S.) for the murder of her young son. I don't know whether she did it or not, but she was convicted. Several of the jurors were interviewed later, and they said things like: "I don't know, I just didn't like the way she was. She didn't seem sorry that her son was dead. She just didn't act how you'd expect." None of them said anything about the evidence; it was all about the affect of the accused.

Marcia and I were appalled. Holy crap, was that all it took to get convicted? We started to think about the opposite: Is that all it would take to get off?

Marcia said, "You should write a novel about a murder defendant who gets acting lessons during the trial."

I was like, "Yeah!"

This was years after O.J. Simpson's acquittal for the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend, which to some people seemed based on either O.J.'s star power or feelings of payback for the Rodney King case rather than the facts. (Here again, I don't know whether he did it or not.)

The point is, I started looking into the fickleness of juries. It's enough to turn your blood into ice tea. One of the theoretical advantages of jury trials is that it's supposed to be harder to bribe, fool, or intimidate 12 people instead of one judge. Maybe, maybe not.

I developed a mystery story based on the secret-acting-lessons idea and wrote the novel. It was good enough to get me representation and a two-book hardcover deal with a major publisher (St. Martin's Minotaur / Macmillan). But when my agent tried to get a British publisher interested in the UK rights, they said things like, "It's a wee bit too high-concept for us." Which is publisher-speak for outlandish, implausible. No, thanks, they said.

And here we are with today's headlines. Different? Outlandish? Implausible? You be the judge.

[Photo of reflection of Los Angeles by ES]

Tell us what you think! To post your ideas / comments, all of which I read and try to respond to, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Ava, Frank, O.J., and me

For me, inspiration is the juice that you get from an experience that leads you from where you were a minute ago to someplace bigger, deeper, more intense. It doesn't necessarily have to be a good or positive experience.

Inspiration, for sure, can be a cliché: the beach at sunset, reading a poem about roses, listening to 'Light My Fire' on your headphones.

I find tremendous inspiration in the city of Los Angeles, and that's why I set one of my mystery series there, starting with THE ACTRESS. Oh, God, the pace, the energy, the history of it all---glamour, crime, innovation, disaster, sex, rags to riches to rags.

I lived on the West Coast for 17 years, and have spent lots of time in L.A. It's an infuriating place---all those people trying to drive on the same road you are, the asbestos-like smog, the on-the-makeness, the crime (which is just a particularly lousy way to be on the make), the poison oak in Griffith Park.

But! How sublime is the epicenter of American culture! Arguable? I simply say: the movies, custom cars, surfing, Watts Towers, and the weather.

[I took the above photo at the Griffith Observatory. Love that Greek key detailing.]

When I was in university, I got into reading Joan Didion, whose writing about L.A. I admired so much: so incisive, so caustic, so elegiac. Yes, somehow L.A. died for Joan, and she moved to New York, the next best thing.

Well, L.A. sure isn't dead for everybody.

One of the most intense experiences I've had in Los Angeles was in the summer of 1995, when the O.J. Simpson murder trial was saturating the city like creosote on a wharf piling. I flew into LAX and boarded the rental car shuttle bus, en route to a business meeting. The driver, a broad-shouldered black guy, greeted each of us with a cold stare. Once seated, I realized that the bus radio was tuned to the live broadcast of the Simpson trial. Every single passenger on that bus was white. We were all these little white businesspeople with our briefcases, and he was this stone-silent black guy with his hands gripping the wheel, and we all listened to the trial together, without anyone uttering a word, for the ten-minute ride to the car lot.

More recently, I was invited to dinner to a house in the Hollywood hills. My friend, an actor, and his wife were house- and dog-sitting for a director they knew, and they wanted some company, and I was in town. So my companion and I drove up those narrow twisting streets, and found our friends in an aerie above the city with purple evening coming on. The house had this tremendous aura of swank, with warm maple wood floors and ten-foot-high chiffon drapes screening the narrow deck. I remarked on a framed photograph of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra on a wall.

"Oh, yeah, Ava used to own this place," I was told. "The current owners keep that picture."

Immediately my glamour glands started to pump, and I smelled the lipstick and the spilled Scotch and the cigarette smoke, and the split-level house came almost alive. We drank wine in the billowing sensuous privacy of the deck. The wind picked up and night came down, and we talked and laughed about a thousand things.

I'm looking forward to being in Los Angeles this weekend (Writer's Digest conference) and the next (workshops sponsored by Kleis TV). Details at my web site. It would be great if you could join me.

Is there a particular place that gets your creative juices going?

Tell me what you think! To post your ideas / comments, all of which I read and try to respond to, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.