There is nothing small about the masterful “O.J.: Made In America” (which topped our list of The 22 Best Documentaries Of 2016). An eight-hour epic, the film is a complex and insightful journey into celebrity and race in America, all told through the story of O.J. Simpson, who reached the highest peaks and lowest valleys in pop culture across many decades of public life. It’s a tremendous achievement, and sitting at home watching the five-part documentary, one can easily take for granted how much work went into the years-long process to make the movie. However, a new oral history by Wired takes a fascinating look at the many pieces that needed to be pulled together to make the project a reality.
Director Ezra Edelman, along with ESPN executives and people on his team share their stories about working on ‘Made In America,’ and if you thought the documentary was long, it’s a mere fraction of what they had to boil down into a narrative.
“It’s probably 800 hours total, if we’re talking about interviews and archival footage,” producer Caroline Waterlow said about the footage the editing team had to wrangle.
“It felt infinite,” editor Bret Granato added. “It’s like looking at the sun, though, you don’t want to ever look at the big picture. You trust the process. My job is to create as compelling a five-minute thing as I can, and then take a step back and see if it connects. But I would’ve melted if I’d actually thought about what we were trying to do. It’s too much to comprehend.”
What emerges in the portrait of the film is a team that were remarkably well organized, and tremendously tenacious when it came to doing everything possible to realize Edelman’s vision. The project spread over years, but just when they were nearing the finish line, something happened: FX‘s “The People v O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” Based on Jeffrey Toobin‘s book “Run Of His Life,” which was part of the research materials for ‘Made In America’ (and the author was interviewed for the doc too), there was some concern that the series might take away the spotlight from Edelman’s efforts.
“To be honest, there were concurrent documentary projects that were being done that were causing a lot more stress than that. Having said that when you’re making this huge thing and you find out someone else is doing a 10-hour series nominally about the same thing, you’re like ‘What the fuck?’ But you can only worry about it so much. I’ll admit to being personally not thrilled,” the director said. “What are the odds? When we went to the [Television Critics Association presentation] in January to basically publicly announce the existence of this film three weeks before Sundance, all the journalists in the room had already seen the first six episodes of the FX series and they were all telling us how incredible it was.”
“My legitimate fear was: Here is a 10-hour television series about O.J., about the trial, it’s going to be on television before ours will be out in the world, I don’t know that people have that appetite to watch another huge thing about O.J.,” he added. “That’s why it was important for me for it to screen at Sundance, because that was before it was on TV. That way it was clear we weren’t drafting off of the success of that. That made me feel OK. Frankly, that did—I can now say—absolutely whet the appetite and re-engage people with this story in a way that they wanted the non-fiction narrative. It worked.”
There’s absolutely no doubt about that — the documentary came out of Sundance with huge buzz. One of the best films of the year and an Oscar contender, “O.J.: Made In America” is now on home video. Don’t miss it, and be sure read Wired‘s full story about the making of the series.
