Take Five: 'O.J.: Made in America' Producer Caroline Waterlow

06.10.2016

ESPN's five part docuseries O.J.: Made in America, directed by Peabody and Emmy winner Ezra Edelman, couldn't be better timed.

Thanks to shows such as Serial, Making a Murderer and The Jinx, audiences' thirst for true-crime documentaries has never been greater. Following FX's lightning rod of a miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson, audiences' thirst for more Juice hasn't been this high since 1994.

Brief talked with Emmy Award-winning producer Caroline Waterlow ( Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush) about the undertaking of such a massive project, what it's like to work in the golden age of documentaries and how important the life and trial of O.J. Simpson is to American culture and history.

Where were you during the Ford Bronco chase?

I was in college, doing a summer internship in Washington. I remember I was in this house with a whole bunch of students, watching the Bronco chase on TV. I didn't grow up in a big sports household, but I was super aware of him as a personality: this good looking guy on commercials, TV shows and movies. I was shocked by the whole situation. Obviously there's been a lot written and televised about O.J. Simpson over the past twenty years. What differentiates O.J.: Made in America?

Ezra Edelman and I remember who he was. But some of the younger people who worked with us on our projects were in their early 20's and didn't know who he was prior to the murders. You realize how quickly a generation grows up and things are forgotten. When you're making a historical documentary, you're always in the beginning asking yourself: why are we telling the story? Time and time again, I'm hearing, 'I never understood why the murders were such a big deal. I never understood why the trial took over American culture the way it did.' We knew the larger audience needed to fall in love with O.J. prior to getting to the murders. There's three hours of film before we get to them. That was really important.

This is a massive undertaking. It's like five movies. What was the process like getting this off the ground?

It's normally a challenge getting something funded, pitching it, and then getting people to believe in it and we were lucky because ESPN had the vision and energy to invest in something that had a bigger canvas and wanted to do a bigger 30 for 30 style story. They had worked with Ezra and clearly believed in him. We didn't develop this for three years and then pitch it. They came to Ezra.

It started out as a five-hour thing, and then we cut an eight-hour rough cut, and were struggling with, what's the three hours you can live without? It was clear it was going to be hard to live without a huge chunk of it. They, thank goodness, said, let's just go for it, and make it this really big thing. In the age of binge-watching, I often think, if we had done this five years ago, would people be as enthusiastic about watching 7.5 hours? I don't know. I think it's just a style of viewing now, that people are up for it.

You mentioned binge culture. We're also in a post-Making a Murderer and Jinx world. How has that changed your job?

I wish we could say we saw this trend coming and knew this could hit at a moment. When you start making a film, and culturally, these things start happening, it's weird. But it makes you feel like you're onto something. I don't know that I fully understand why there is that trend.

I think it's connected to the fact there are so many platforms now. You're not boxed into these traditional ways of showing things. It's such a pleasure as a filmmaker, particularly with a documentary, where it's so painful being told you have to cut something down. 'People don't watch things that are longer than nine minutes!' It's nice to flesh this person out and see what it was like to live in LA in the 60s or 70s, and form a real experience with the people in the story as opposed to reducing them to one dimensional characters. You need to understand what it was like being an O.J. fan, a football fan, and how shocked you were. It's more experiential and having the freedom to let that play out is so awesome.

There's some validation there. For the longest time, documentaries were niche.

Totally. Documentaries were always perceived as this PBS-y source that may be boring, like eating your vegetables. It's something you know you should watch, but it's not necessarily entertainment.

Now we've got this hybrid world where we can tell stories in a different way. It's definitely a great time to be working in documentaries. With the O.J. story, people are hungering for real information. You think you know the O.J. story because you watched a lot of tabloid news coverage, you saw it on the cover of a million magazines. You have a lot of half information. People are excited to have it grounded in a real story with real information.

O.J. is just as relevant today as he was in 1967 or 1994. Why do you think that is?

An LA city councilman said 'there's no more powerful narrative in America than race.' O.J. symbolizes race through all these different eras and is this person we're able to grab onto to be able to talk about these things.

When you hear in the film that the use of choke holds killed a lot of African-American suspects in LA in the 80s, it's like, what's going on in Baltimore right now? Even domestic violence, which is always the part of the story that got lost in the trial, we're not a whole lot better about dealing with domestic violence. The social issues haven't changed that much. Talking about it in the context of O.J. is a way to talk about it, because these are difficult things to grapple with.

Hopefully it starts a lot of conversation. There are things you can't possibly understand unless you have walked in someone's shoes and you hope by viewing these things, particularly in a time, instead of the 80s where we weren't nationally united on these things. Now someone goes on Twitter and becomes part of a larger movement. If you didn't live in LA, you didn't know what was going on in LA. Even if you did live in that city, you weren't probably connected to it. It was easy to not know about things. That's something Ezra felt strongly about. You can't possibly get to a place to try to understand that verdict unless you've understood what's gone on for thirty years beforehand. Understanding begins when O.J.: Made in America premieres with part 1 on Saturday, June 11 at 9 p.m. ET on ABC, with all subsequent installments airing on ESPN, starting with Part 2 on Tuesday, June 14 at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN.

[All images courtesy of ESPN Films]