Court TV Presents A Killer Lineup

By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, January 12, 2006

PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 11

When Court TV first approached cult film director John Waters about playing the role of the "Groom Reaper," the host of its first scripted series, dramatizing actual marriages that ended in murder, he thought they'd asked him to play the "Groom Raper."

Either way, he told TV critics at Winter Press Tour 2006, he would have said yes.

Instead he will be seen at the opening of each episode of " 'Til Death Do Us Part," attending the wedding of the happy couple, then guiding viewers through scenes from the doomed marriage until they find out how and why one spouse whacked the other.

Despite the disappointment, Baltimorean Waters -- best known for such flicks as "Pink Flamingos," "Polyester" and "Hairspray" -- says he's happy to be part of the show because he hates weddings and hopes that if the show is a hit no one will ever invite him to one again.

" 'Til Death Do Us Part," envisioned as a series of mini horror movies, was created by Jeff Lieberman, a cult icon of the horror flick genre whose works include "Squirm," "Blue Sunshine," "Just Before Dawn" and who can forget "Satan's Little Helper."

Lieberman declined to discuss whether he picked Waters to tap into his reputation as a purveyor of bad taste. He said he was looking for "the irony that's built into the idea of it all . . . that marriages that end in spousal murder . . . started out in a beautiful, loving relationship defined by a wedding. . . . It's not the Groom Reaper's fault that these people do this, so I don't think it's in bad taste, no."

"It's a thin line these days, as you all know, between bad and good taste," Waters chimed in.

Another critic wondered how, given that the show had a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek going on, they'd deal with the fact that "so many marriages involve spousal abuse when there's a murder involved."

"I am not interested in doing any story that involves physical spousal abuse," Lieberman shot back. "I don't think it's entertaining."

Even Waters sensed the absurdity of that statement:

"I'd rather be abused than murdered," he said. When John Waters becomes the voice of reason, it's time for us all to throw away our Thorazine.

"And think about it: If they really were abused, they would not be convicted of murder," Lieberman added, which was so sweet and naive and so not what you'd expect from a horror flick director.

Court TV CEO Henry Schleiff, noticing all the red flags flying around, jumped in:

"I think it's a really good question, fine line between good and bad taste, fine line between how you tell these stories without glorifying spousal abuse in any respect," he said. "The important thing is, besides having a very active Web site -- we're going to treat some of these issues on that -- we think we have a pretty good reputation on that score. But most importantly, I think what you see substantively, all humor aside, is that these people are caught, punished and sometimes executed for these heinous crimes."

* * *

Author James Ellroy wants you to think he is one seriously messed-up guy with a compulsive need to shock and a Norman Batesian obsession with his dead mother, who was strangled when he was just a boy.

Naturally, Court TV asked him to revisit his mother's murder for an episode of its new series "America's Crime Writers: Murder They Wrote." He's one of five crime writers the cable network has recruited to share their insights on mysteries that have fascinated and touched them in some way, through actual footage and first-person accounts. The others are Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Michael Connelly and Lisa Scottoline.

Sitting onstage in front of two large bookcases tastefully filled with copies of their novels, bottles of what appeared to be poison, carved heads, something floating in a pickling jar, and stuffed crows -- such a cliche -- the writers took turns doing the blah, blah, blah about his or her murder of choice for the TV critics.

Aside from Ellroy, they spoke rationally about the real-life murders they had picked and why, and mentioned how happy they were to get out of the little "burrow" in which they're holed up for hours, slaves to their art. If they'd been more observant, they'd have noticed how pasty the critics are, owing to the endless hours they spent in their little burrows watching TV shows and writing reviews, and they would have realized how that pity party would not play well here. They're not that observant -- which is interesting, since they're crime writers.

Anyway, Ellroy kicked off his blah, blah by calling the critics "peepers, prowlers, pederasts, [knickers enthusiasts], "punks and pimps" -- no doubt mistaking the gathering for a James Ellroy convention.

(In fairness, he also referred to himself as "the deliriously dystopian and darkly defined demon dog of American literature" and his colleagues on stage as "the greatest one-room aggregation of degenerates since the last Bush Cabinet meeting." Still, it's hard to warm up to a guy who's just called you a knicker enthusiast and a pimp.)

The skinny bald 57-year-old author, who sported small round glasses, a dark jacket, red shirt, khaki pants, maroon socks, brown shoes and a scowl, told critics that he was just 10 when his mother was killed in a "[poop]hole suburb 12 miles southeast of here."

"My bereavement was complex and ambiguous and she hot-wired me to sex and to crime in all its forms," he said, on a roll.

"She owns me. She claimed me in her death and she runs my life and serves as my muse to this day."

When he tried to solve her murder in the '90s and write a book about it, it was "a big media event," he assured the critics, but he and the retired L.A. County sheriff's homicide detective who was working with him did not discover who killed her, which, Ellroy added philosophically, "doesn't matter because closure is [horseradish] and I would love to find the man who invented closure and shove a giant closure plaque up his [heinie]."

Ellroy wanted to be sure the critics knew that his segment of the series will differ from those of the other four writers in that he will be "the complete on-camera host and I will script and narrate the entire program as well as appear on camera throughout the entire show."

"This show is in essence a paraphrase of my best-selling, award-winning 1996 memoir 'My Dark Places' -- you have that book in your press kits," he said, sounding for all the world like he was on a home shopping network.

When one critic asked why the writers thought viewers seemed so fixated by murder stories, like the Laci Peterson case that played endlessly on cable news networks to high ratings, Ellroy said, "We want to touch the darkness of crime and retain our immunity."

Another wondered about "the reality of serial killers versus the fiction of it."

Ellroy assured them "serial killers are a statistically minuscule anomaly" and that "your chances of running into a crazed, [nonsensical unprintable] are somewhere between slim and none -- you are much more likely to run into some lunatic crackhead who will knife your [heinie] for 20 bucks.

"Serial killers distance us as viewers because of their basic outlandishness and their statistical rarity," he continued. "They allow us to live in the fatuous notion of closure by their basic extremity."

At the end of which, Court TV's Schleiff assured critics that while Ellroy is going to host, write and produce his segment, "we will be editing his segment."