Years ago, while doing my civic duty in a Brooklyn courthouse, I was amused to be asked during jury selection if I watched “The Wire.” The lawyer explained that people’s understanding of what constituted evidence, guilt and crime were often tilted by the kind of media they watched. I did watch “The Wire.” I was dismissed.
That experience came to mind while viewing “The Jinx: Part Two,” the follow-up series to Andrew Jarecki’s hit HBO original that’s largely responsible for the general public’s awareness of the real estate heir and convicted murderer Robert Durst. In the 2015 finale of “The Jinx,” Durst infamously said on a hot mic — seemingly by accident — that he’d murdered his best friend, Susan Berman; his wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, who had disappeared; and his neighbor Morris Black.
The most recent episode of the new show focuses on Berman and a prosecutor’s argument that she helped Durst cover up Kathie’s death by posing as the dead woman on a phone call. The prosecution said Durst killed Berman in 2000 to keep the secret from getting out.
Durst’s defense attorney, David Chesnoff, says on-camera that he was “salivating” because he believed they had “a tremendous reasonable doubt argument.” That is not surprising. What’s interesting is the tack he took.
Chesnoff is shown in court thunderously defending Durst to the jury, saying that the theory that Berman posed as Kathie Durst “was spun from whole cloth.” He adds, “It began in part as the result of a fictional movie that Jarecki made.” Fictional, he emphasizes twice more, and really leans into that angle, bringing it up several more times, including on a slide that reads, “The evidence will show that the prosecution’s case is based on speculation, a flawed investigation, and their work with Hollywood producers.”
If you don’t really know, or remember, what Chesnoff is talking about, the episode doesn’t make it all that clear. What he’s pointing to is “All Good Things,” Jarecki’s 2010 drama about a real estate heir named David Marks (Ryan Gosling), whose wife, Katie (Kirsten Dunst), mysteriously disappears. Marks is obviously modeled on Robert Durst, and Katie on Kathie. Berman’s stand-in, Deborah Lehrman, is played by Lily Rabe. As Chesnoff talks in the “Jinx” episode, red carpet footage from the “All Good Things” premiere briefly appears, as do clips of Lehrman posing as Katie and making a call from a pay phone.
The “Jinx” episode moves on, but I got stuck on the “All Good Things” question because that movie is, frankly, very strange. It’s not even the movie itself that’s odd — it’s a middling drama with some unsurprisingly great acting from Gosling and Dunst and smaller roles for heavyweights like Frank Langella and Philip Baker Hall. If you didn’t know it was based on a true story, you’d probably think it was just a story about a troubled creep with a bad haircut.
But now, after the Durst story has been thoroughly rehashed both in court and on HBO, “All Good Things” seems downright bizarre. The screenplay, by Marcus Hinchey and the “Jinx” producer Marc Smerling, hews surprisingly close to the story as told by other interviewees. It posits that Marks, a.k.a. Durst, had a messed-up childhood that thwarted adult attempts at intimacy and, ultimately, led him to murder Katie, Lehrman and his neighbor (in the movie, the wondrously named Malvern Bump).
Certainly true crime stories have been adapted for the screen many times. What’s wild about this one is that Durst himself watched “All Good Things” and decided that he liked it. After years of refusing to talk to the news media, he contacted Jarecki and said he’d be willing to sit down for interviews. In a very real sense, “All Good Things” is the reason “The Jinx” even exists.
But the strangest part — I can’t wrap my head around it — is that Durst offered to record a commentary track for the DVD release of “All Good Things.” On it, he mostly concurs with the order of events, while never admitting outright to the murders. He agrees that a disturbing scene in which Marks grabs Katie’s hair and virtually drags her out of a family party actually happened; he says that one scene, in which Katie flees to a neighbor’s home during a fight, is “more or less accurate.” His only real quibble is the suggestion that he killed the family dog.
This is the kind of move calculated to baffle, and the more you try to explain it, the less sense it makes. Was Durst aware of how this looked? Did he have a screw or two loose? Had he simply lived his life in the kind of ultrarich world that can free one from the bounds of time, space and logic? Or did he simply think he was smarter than everyone else and could never really get caught?
“The Jinx: Part Two” goes a long way toward suggesting those last two questions, combined, provide the answer. After all, five years after “All Good Things,” he was the star of an HBO documentary series, one he clearly thought would not indict him. He was so wealthy that his friends, whether they liked him or not, were willing to turn a blind eye to whatever they might suspect in order to stay in his good graces. Why wouldn’t you think you were invincible?
The new show returns us to the “Jinx” courtroom scene, too. If you watched a movie about yourself and the crimes you may have committed, and you called up the director and said you’d like to chat, and you recorded a very complimentary commentary track, then a lawyer’s argument that it’s just a story someone made up doesn’t hold as much water. It’s indisputably true that media and entertainment influence the way juries view cases — that’s just part of a human-based justice system.
But entertainment doesn’t exist in a parallel dimension. It weaves through society at large, influencing how we view one another and, more important, ourselves. Even if we’re jurors. Even if we’re Robert Durst.
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