New York City needs to do more than simply admit error in case of the wrongly-convicted, wrongly-imprisoned Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam. Nine years ago the five filed a federal lawsuit against the city, seeking $50 million each in damages or $250 million total. “If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys,” I wrote seven weeks ago.

I came to this conclusion after seeing Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case, at the Telluride Film Festival. Earlier this month the N.Y. Times reported that “lawyers for New York City want to explore if much of the film’s unpublished interviews and unreleased footage might help them” defend against the above-mentioned lawsuit. Let’s hope that they lose and that the five receive full financial compensation.

But at the same time let’s not go overboard with praise for The Central Park Five, which I don’t feel is honest and inquisitive enough to warrant Oscar consideration. Its heart is in the right place, but its embrace of a rotely compassionate liberal approach to the facts is, in my view, overly emphatic as it either ignores or fails to sufficiently explore certain points. A real-deal doc exposes all the facts of a given situation as much as possible, warts and all & let the chips fall. By my sights The Central Park Five doesn’t do this. Instead it pushes an argument against the wrongness of the city’s prosecution of the five youths (which we all agree with) and offers a pat, incomplete portrait of the five as well as the 1989 rape victim, Trisha Meili.

I spelled this out in my 9.3.12 Telluride piece, titled “Incomplete, Less Than Forthcoming.” Here are the basic points:

* “The five unjustly convicted youths were not blameless angels, although the film tries to indicate this. They were part of a roving gang that was harassing and beating the crap out of anyone they happened to encounter. The five say in the film that they were just watching this activity and going ‘wow,’ but I don’t believe in my gut they were just onlookers. It was the metaphor of a sizable gang of black kids hurting victims at random and the inflaming of this by the media and politicians that got the five convicted as much as anything else, and I resented the film trying to sidestep the likelihood that they were bad-ass teenagers at the time who were up to no good.”

* “It was one thing when one mentally challenged defendant in the West Memphis Three case confessed to having killed three boys, but the mind reels at the idea of four guys who weren’t mentally challenged confessing to the Central Park rape, and with their parents or guardians in the room! Four kids plus four guardian/parents — that’s eight instances of massive stupidity. The kids had been grilled and pressured by NYPD detectives because they’d been involved in a ‘wilding’ incident that same night in which a gang of about 30 kids from their general neighborhood had randomly attacked and beaten up a couple of victims inside the park. But the absurdity of four kids confessing en masse to something they didn’t do because they were tired and wanted to go home is mind-boggling. And the filmmakers barely touch this. It is simply explained that the confessions were coerced. Madness.”

* “Not only does Trishna Meili not speak to the filmmakers, but a photo of her isn’t even used, despite her having written a book, ‘I Am The Central Park Jogger.’ Her injuries were so severe and traumatizing that she’s never been able to remember the incident, but to not even explain the whys and wherefores of her absence from the film seems strange. She may not have wanted to be in the film, okay, but why not at least explain that? And why wouldn’t she want to be in the film if she’d written a book about the attack and her recovery? The film doesn’t even run a pertinent quote or two from her book. Incomplete and irksome.”

I got into trouble (i.e., accused of insensitivity by liberal p.c. bullies) when I explained my final dispute, so let me try and explain a little better this time:

* Why was the victim, Trisha Meili, jogging in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm? I know New York City and that is flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk in the late ’80s (when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan “was a completely schizophrenic and divided city”), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. When Meili was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2007, Winfrey said the following: “When I first heard about you, I thought, ‘Why were you running alone in Central Park at night?'” ** And no one in the film even mentions this, not even anecdotally. This was my very first thought when I heard the facts of the case. Five year olds who’ve had Grimm Fairy Tales read to them know that wolves lurk in the forest in the black of night.

These shortcomings aside The Central Park Five is a thorough-minded, well-ordered and commendable exploration of a miscarriage of justice. It’s certainly worth seeing. But it indulges in too much sidestepping to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature.

** Meili responded to Winfrey as follows: “You’re not the first person to say that. For me, running was a release at the end of the day, and I had this feeling that, ‘Hey, I have every right to run where I want, when I want.’ Wells response: Of course she had that right. Just like a visitor to the Florida Everglades has the right to go wading in the swamps with alligators swimming about.

“I’d been running in the park for two years,” Meili went on. “It was not a smart thing to do. Believe me, I’m not sitting here trying to justify it. Yet that is absolutely no justification for what happened to me.” Wells response: Of course not. No one’s talking about blaming the victim for anything. The point is simply “what constitutes common sense and what doesn’t?”

“But the idea of running alone in Central Park is a foreign concept to me,” Winfrey responded. “You had to be the kind of person who either thought you were invincible or who was just nuts.”

“I wouldn’t say I was nuts,” Meili replied. “Maybe I thought I was invincible.”

It was announced today that Ava DuVernay will write and direct a five-episode Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case of ’89. I don’t know, man. Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary, was one thing (i.e., not without problems but compelling). But a dramatic miniseries will be a whole ‘nother challenge.

The case was about the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female stockbroker, in Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89. Five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were wrongly prosecuted and falsely imprisoned, only to be exonerated and freed several years later. A flat-out expression of racist hysteria and institutional corruption.

Duvernay is facing two significant problems in terms of her main characters — the five alleged assailants and Meili. If DuVernay fudges, sidesteps or fabricates (as she did with her depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma), she’s going to run into trouble.

Problem #1: The teenagers who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home.

How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Problem #2: The victim’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was almost as stupid. I lived in New York City in the early ’80s so don’t tell me — what Meili did was flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

How do you dramatize Meili’s late-night jogging without the audience thinking “wait…is she an idiot?

Despite what happened in Chicago’s Loop district last weekend, which was basically sporadic violent chaos by roving mobs of urban youths, nobody’s allowed to sound too angry or draconian. Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson warned against demonizing the hordes who smashed car and store windows, beat people up, started bonfires, clashed with cops, etc.

“In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend,” Johnson said. “It is unacceptable and has no place in our city, [but] it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”

Translation: “Many non-white Chicago kids have been leading difficult lives and are understandably hot-tempered and economically frustrated, so we don’t want to racially simplify matters if they trash the Loop district and bust a few heads. We can’t tolerate this kind of thing, but at the same time we need to try and turn the other cheek because decades of political white power structure oppression have had an unfortunate effect.”

Chicago Tribune editorial: “Mr. Mayor-elect, this is not going to work.”

Everyone understands that they’re not allowed to say anything that even vaguely resembles alarmist sentiments heard in early April of 2010 after incidents of “wilding” in Times Square, and certainly nothing that resembles what Orange Plague and other riled-up, short-tempered Manhattanites said about the Central Park Five incident (and the wilding that preceded it) in 1989.

Imagine an alternate universe in which Jared Kushner had the agency and the character to answer the questions posed by AXIOS’s Jonathan Swan with absolute honesty. Instead of the laughably deceitful responses that Kushner gave to Swan, especially about whether he had ever seen Donald Trump do or say anything racist.

Kushner doesn’t have genuine candor in him, but in another world he could have said, “Of course my father-in-law is a racist. A racist and — let’s be frank — a rank, salivating sociopath. You’re asking me to confirm what has been fairly obvious for decades, and patently obvious since he became an Obama birther a decade ago?

“White men of my father-in-law’s generation, particularly those raised in the working-class cultures of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island of the ’50s and ’60s, have racism in their bones. Listen to Travis Bickle‘s narration in Taxi Driver. Listen to that psychotic character played by Martin Scorsese in the back seat of Bickle’s cab when they’re looking up at that windowshade with the silhouettes. That kind of thinking was all over the place when my father-in-law was young. Hell, it was all over the place 30 years ago when he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five. 20th Century New York City was throbbing with racism.

“Things are obviously different now in the blue cities and suburbs, but my father-in-law is nothing if not avaricious and opportunistic and practical-minded, and his main base of support consists of rural lowbrows and none-too-brights. Remember that woman in the red-T-shirt who told John McCain during the ’08 campaign that she thought Obama was an Arab? His core supporters are the dregs of society who want him to push back against the ‘other’, the non-white invaders, the immigrants, the multiculturals.

“C’mon, Jonathan…who is my father-in-law if not the Last Angry White Guy who’s stamping his feet and saying ‘no, no, no’ to the cultural and economic changes that the blues have embraced and run with over the last half-century and especially the last 20 or 25 years?

“The boomer-aged, Fox News-watching rurals see their white heritage…everything that this country used to be from the late ’40s to the early ’90s or thereabouts…they can feel it all slipping away. This and that old-fashioned notion of job security and homogenous communities…all that good-old-America stuff that Michael Moore has spoken of when describing the Michigan he knew as a kid.

“And my father-in-law’s only chance of electoral support is to appeal to these sad people. You can look at me cross-eyed and say you don’t approve, but that’s the cultural and mathematical reality.

“These slow-boaters — some call them bumblefucks — don’t care if my father-in-law is a fiendish autocrat and a submental sociopath. They don’t give a damn if he’s an American Mussolini. They just want him to protect their communities, save their bloodlines, and try and preserve at least a semblance of the America they once knew.”

In yesterday’s thread about Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us, “Mr. F” said something that I regarded as borderline astonishing. “Now matter how often I see it,” he said, “I remain amazed at Wells’ ability to criticize a character or person for acting differently than he would.”

Mr. F was apparently serious. He was saying that the correct way to watch a drama is to immerse yourself in the basics (story, character, milieu, tone) but without drawing upon your own life experience for perspective or judgment.

Maintain a strict distance, Mr. F was saying. By all means submit to whatever the characters are going through, all the while considering their various motives, dreams, delusions and appetites. But do so impersonally. You’ll only muck things up if you merge the story with your own saga or knowledge of how life works. Turn off your mind, forget what you know, dumb yourself down.

Let me explain something very clearly: I’ve always put myself into the narrative and especially the shoes of various characters, and I always ask myself “is this how I’d play my cards?” Or “is this how I’d react?” If not, I say “what then are their motives for acting in a way that I don’t agree with? Why would they behave in a way that seems a little outside my realm or which doesn’t seem to make basic sense?”

I’ve been watching films, plays and TV dramas this way for decades…hell, since I was seven or eight years old. I have an idea that tens of millions of others do the same.

Going back to the eras of Aeschylus, Agathon and Sophocles the basic task of drama has always been to merge the proverbial audience member with the experience, mindset and emotional leanings of the lead character[s]. The idea has always been to “walk a mile in these characters’ shoes, and once you’ve gotten to know them decide for yourself if he/she is living her life sensibly or radically or dangerously or brilliantly or something in between.”

If you don’t use your own life experience to assess the wisdom or bravery of a given character, to determine whether he/she is acting foolishly or clumsily or with enviable political skills…if you’re not bringing what you know into a narrative and making assessments of various characters based on what you’d do or wouldn’t do if you were in their shoes…if you’re not engaging with a drama as a human being with memories, emotions and regrets of your own then what the hell are you doing?

Mr. F. feels that the best way to watch a film is to adopt the mentality of a cupcake or a toaster or a chunk of mozzarella cheese.

Mr. F quote: “It’s a mistake if you’re evaluating character choices based on what you would do, assuming it’s clear from the narrative why they’re doing what they’re doing…it’s just empathy.”

HE to Mr. F: You can’t have empathy without feelings of allegiance or identification or at least understanding. You have to be persuaded to emotionally join this or that character’s team, even if they may not the nicest people you’re ever met. Failing that you have to be persuaded that a character’s reasons for doing what he/she does at least makes sense to them. That’s almost always what you get when the screenplay is first-rate.

Sasha Stone quote: “You can’t put yourself in their shoes. You just can’t. Not possible.”

She meant the unjustly prosecuted and jailed Central Park Five. My suburban whitebread experience, Sasha was saying, makes me incapable of understanding anything about these guys — what they were about or what was driving them onward or whatever. They might as well be microbes from the Planet Jupiter, Sasha basically meant.

Well, bullshit to that. The screenplay and the acting in When They See Us happen to be good enough to allow me to relate, to discover parallels between what these poor guys went through and my own experiences and understandings. This is what makes a film good. Either you build bridges between the audience and the characters or you don’t.

Today I began watching Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us (Netflix), a four-part dramatization of the Central Park jogger case, or more precisely the racist hysteria and grotesque injustice that the case triggered.

I’ve only seen two episodes, but I know a highly realistic, absorbing, triple-A effort when I see one — well written, believably acted and generally humming with honesty, authenticity and the application of high craft.

I can’t say it’s Duvernay’s best narrative feature so far, but it probably is. I decided not to see A Wrinkle To Time (everyone said it was an absolute nightmare) but When They See Us is more complex and highly charged than 2012’s Middle of Nowhere (which I’m a big fan of), and more even-steven and less weighted than the five-year-old Selma (which I was okay with as far as it went)

In line with Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, Duvernay’s focus is on the wrongful railroading, conviction and imprisonment of five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — over the assault and rape of stockbroker Trisha Meili in a northern region of Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89.

The five defendants didn’t help their situation by offering coerced, wholly imaginary confessions to NYPD detectives. Nor did it help that earlier that evening they were part of a “wilding” gang that had harassed random victims. The bottom line is that the the cops, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Donald Trump and especially the press all succumbed to varying forms of racist shorthand and unwarranted presumptions.

Despite a lack of hard evidence (the DNA collected at the crime scene didn’t match any of the suspects, and indicated that it had come from a single assailant), questionable testimony and the fact that all five were innocent, they were nonetheless found guilty and went to jail for several years.

After the actual culprit confessed, the five defendants’ convictions were vacated by New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada on 12.19.02. The five sued New York City; they were finally awarded $41 million in 2014.

Two years ago I theorized that Duvernay’s film would be facing two major issues, story-wise. As it turns out only one of these remain, at least in my head.

Problem #1: The teens who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home. How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Duvernay shows that the five were interrogated half to death and to the point of absolute frenzy and exhaustion by city detectives. I was still having a hard time understanding how they could have been persuaded to invent fake testimony against each other, but I have a better idea now of how intense and punishing the atmosphere was.

Problem #2: Trisha Meili’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was \flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

Duvernay basically agrees with this viewpoint, and conveys it by having Manhattan district attorney sex-crimes chief Linda Fairstein (Felicity Huffman) look around the crime scene and say “what the fuck was she doing here?”

Evidence of Donald Trump‘s racism has been so abundant over the last three and a half to four years (not to mention the Central Park Five statements that he made 30 years ago) that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say except “what else is new?” But every so often a quote will come along that renews the revulsion. Not among the Trump faithful, of course. Semi-normal people, I mean.

In a day-old Atlantic article titled “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry,” white nationalist figurehead Richard Spencer says that August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville “would not have occurred without Trump” becoming president.

Spencer, the rally’s organizer and the guy who coined the term “alt-right,” said it “really was because of [Trump’s] campaign and this new potential for a nationalist candidate who was resonating with the public in a very intense way. [The] alt-right found something in Trump. He changed the paradigm and made this kind of public presence of the alt-right possible.”

The Charlottesville rally led to the murder of Heather Heyer, caused by a white racist who plowed through a crowd of liberal counter-protestors with his car. The same day Trump deplored the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” A few days later he re-stated there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Three observations about Ava Duvernay‘s When They See Us (Netflix, 5.31).

One, the biggest dramatic problem in this five-part dramatic reenactment of the 1989 Central Park Jogger case, which I wrote about when it was first announced 19 months ago, is the bizarre police confessions by the five alleged (and later exonerated) assailants despite being with parents and/or guardians. How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Two, one of the ogres behind these “forced” confessions was Linda Fairstein, head of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex-crimes unit from ’76 to ’02, and whose office supervised the 1990 prosecution of the Central Park Jogger case. Wiki excerpt: In a settlement lawsuit it was claimed that Fairstein, with the assistance of the detectives at the 20th precinct, coerced false confessions from the five arrested teenagers following 30 straight hours of interrogation and intimidation.”

Three, who plays Fairstein in DuVernay’s re-telling? None other than Felicity Huffman, fresh off her involvement in the recent college entrance-exam cheating scandal.

Netflix will debut Ava DuVernay‘s When They See Us, a five-part dramatic reenactment of the 1989 Central Park Jogger case, on 5.31.19. I wrote about the DuVernay project when it was first announced 19 months ago,

Excerpt: “Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary, was one thing (i.e., not without problems but compelling). But a dramatic miniseries will be a whole ‘nother challenge.

“The case was about the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female stockbroker, in Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89. Five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were wrongly prosecuted and falsely imprisoned, only to be exonerated and freed several years later.

“The whole episode was a clear expression of racist hysteria (particularly on Donald Trump‘s part) and institutional corruption.

“Duvernay is nonetheless facing two significant problems in terms of her main characters — one being the bizarre police confessions by the five alleged assailants.

“If DuVernay fudges, sidesteps or fabricates (as she did to some extent with her depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson‘s actions in Selma), she’s going to run into trouble.”

The wrongly convicted and imprisoned Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — have reportedly agreed to a settlement of close to $40 million. The five, railroaded into convictions for having sexually assaulted 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili while she jogged in Central Park, will each receive about $1 million for each year they were behind bars.

The settlement, reported yesterday by the N.Y. Times, was nudged along by Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had promised to reach a “swift settlement” once he took office.

On 10.30.12 I posted the following: “New York City needs to do more than simply admit error in case of the Central Park Five. Nine years ago the five filed a federal lawsuit against the city, seeking $50 million each in damages or $250 million total. If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys.

At the end of his review of Ken and Sarah Burns’ The Central Park Five, New Yorker critic David Denby writes that news of the innocence of the five defendants in the 1989 Central Park rape case “got nowhere near the attention that the professions of their guilt did. Few people seemed to want to know. The five men initiated a civil lawsuit against the city that has dragged on for nearly a decade. This movie should hasten some sort of final reckoning.”

That’s a chickenshit way of putting it. There’s absolutely no logical way to dispute that the defendants, now in their late 30s, are entitled to be compensated for being railroaded into jail and having their youth destroyed by a racist and callous justice system. And yet Denby and his editors decided to beat around the bush with a namby-pamby generality.

Here’s how I put it on 10.30: “New York City needs to do more than simply admit error in case of the wrongly-convicted, wrongly-imprisoned Central Park Five — Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam. Nine years ago the five filed a federal lawsuit against the city, seeking $50 million each in damages or $250 million total. If anyone deserves to be financially compensated for a perversion of justice, it’s these guys. Let’s hope that the five full financial compensation.”