Reviews and articles say the HBO Phil Spector movie begins with the following disclaimer…
This is a work of fiction. It's not "based on a true story." It is a drama inspired by actual persons in a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor comment upon the trial or its outcome.
The film by David Mamet — who is fast becoming one of my least-favorite writers — then proceeds to make the case that Phil Spector didn't kill Lana Clarkson and that her death was somewhere between a suicide and an accident, emphasis on the first. Mamet has stated his belief that if Spector wasn't so famous, he never would have been charged with a crime.
I don't buy any of that. Phil Spector had a history of waving guns at people — especially women who wanted to leave his Alhambra mansion before he was ready for them to leave — and being generally irrational. I knew Lana Clarkson casually, know a lot of people who knew her well, and the notion that she killed herself because she was depressed about turning 40, as Mamet's film posits, has zero basis in reality. It's just something a lawyer made up because he didn't have any sort of viable defense and he had to say something.
I understand and in some cases have no problem with the intermingling of fiction and fact; of a writer devising dialogue and twisting known truths in telling a tale of real people. If someone hired me to write a boffo box-office screenplay about Martin Van Buren, I'd probably invent all sorts of things that didn't happen…maybe argue that ol' Marty was an alien from another world with the ability to do martial arts and make women's tops disappear. But I wouldn't do that with a story people cared about or as a propaganda effort to hope I could get the world to believe it. That was my objection to Oliver Stone's JFK, a dishonest effort (I thought) to blur fact and fantasy because sticking to facts would not "sell" people on what Stone wanted to believe but could not prove without fibbing.
It's one thing to say "Here's a version I believe of what really happened." It's another to cobble up a meld of truth, lies and spin, make it look as much like reality as you can and then try to escape responsibility for the fiction you inject by saying, as Mamet does, this is "…neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor comment upon the trial or its outcome." Clearly, Al Pacino is trying to replicate the actual person. Clearly, a filmmaker who believes Spector was convicted because of his fame — in a state where fame is usually a "Get Out of Jail Free" card — is trying to comment on the trial and its outcome.
That's as much as I want to say before I see the film…which I may not be able to do. It might be a wonderful viewing experience, as most of Pacino's performances usually are. I just think it's kinda disingenuous to base a movie on a true story, warp that true story into something that isn't true, then hide behind the excuse which will go largely unnoticed that it was never meant to be a true story. It's also cowardly to trash a lovely lady as you try to rehabilitate the image of the psycho who murdered her.