The Michael Jackson trial in Santa Maria, California, is actually an autopsy. Anyone with a pocketful of perspective understands that the King of Pop has already died a slow public death, remembered less and less for his musical gifts, recognized more for his eccentricities. The best that can be said about this is that it makes most of us happy to be neither rich nor famous.
Autopsies on TV are hot these days (see Law & Order, CSI, HBO’s Autopsy and so on). And luckily for viewers, not even a crab-apple superior court judge can keep Jackson’s salacious postmortem off the air entirely. Using fresh-from-the-courthouse transcripts—they’re public records, you know—and a cast of look-alikes, the E! network’s The Michael Jackson Trial: An E! News Presentation has become an instant basic-cable addiction by delivering the juiciest bits of each day’s proceedings as live-action re-enactments. The producers may have stopped short of building a scale model of the courthouse parking lot, but they do take the trouble to re-create a gallery of faux courtroom spectators. On a sunny spring day in Los Angeles, a visitor from Minnesota was among them.
The actor who plays Michael Jackson is Edward Moss. Unlike the rest of the cast, he has his own dressing room, in which his makeup and fake hair are applied. On camera, he’s pretty much restricted to occupying his seat at the defense table, silent and vaguely wounded-looking. Between takes, he’s very chatty, flirting with a few girls in the gallery and drawing pictures of his fellow cast members. There’s banter among the lot of them; sometimes they take congenial swipes at one another in character.
Because the court transcripts come straight from Santa Maria as soon as they’re released, and because the program is on deadline to assemble each episode as quickly as possible, an actor may not receive his lines for a particular scene until moments before the cameras and teleprompters roll. There are lots of stops and starts, perhaps more than usual, since the production is shooting as little as thirty seconds of testimony at a time. At a couple of points, everyone takes a break simply because there are no freshly edited scenes to shoot. The actual script pages arrive in chunks throughout the evening, presumably after somebody somewhere has pored over the day’s unabridged record and selected which segments are best for prime time.
Some casting has to be done on the fly, too, since it’s tough to say how many or what kinds of actors might be needed until it’s known who actually testified that day. Numerous witnesses have been auditioned right there on the set. But there’s also a lot of downtime. The chatter gets heavy between takes. Cast members and the extras in the gallery volley opinions about the actual trial; a few of the latter even talk to themselves. Others read or doze off. A director frequently asks actors to simmer down (or wake up) and focus as the evening wears on.
On a first take, when the script reveals some new juicy bit of testimony, someone might let loose a bona fide gasp or a click of the tongue. One wonders if the same is true at the crowded courthouse about three hours to the north, and if not, whether the actors here might be corrupting the reenactment, or slandering someone by not looking or behaving like their real-life counterparts.
The Michael Jackson Trial has a few key advantages over most television shows. For one, the dialogue is unimpeachable, coming as it does from court stenographers instead of screenwriters. For another, the characters, including a global pop icon who’s better known than any pope or president, were fully developed from the outset. Not even the sexy coroners on CSI enjoy such assets.
As the night drags on, a bewigged actor named Rigg Kennedy, who is playing defense attorney Thomas Mesereau Jr., echoes an objection that took place in the real world several hours ago. The visitor realizes with a sinking feeling that she’s missing CSI.—Sarah Benedict
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