Cochran calling Rhames to stand
Explosive issues raised by trial not addressed, actor sez
Rhames (“Mission: Impossible 2”) said he will portray the silver-tongued defense attorney before going off to portray former heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in “Night Train,” the Paramount film that William Friedkin will direct inin the fall from a script by Shane Salerno.
Rhames won a Golden Globe in 1998 for HBO’s “Don King: Only in America.” He gave the award to Lemmon, saying that the latter, nommed for his work in “Twelve Angry Men,” deserved it for his body of work.”
While it would seem America has had its fill of the trial that ended in the acquittal of the former Heisman Trophy winner on double murder charges, Rhames said that none of the explosive issues raised by the trial have been addressed, which drove him to want to explore Cochran’s controversial legacy as the lawyer who got Simpson freed by drawing on race-based distrust of the criminal justice system.
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“The thing for me is that Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana are the producers, Norman Mailer is writing the script, and that’s not a bad group of people,” said Rhames, a versatile actor who just finished the Showtime telepic “Holiday Heart,” in which he plays a drag queen who takes in a crack addict and her son and then raises the boy.
Rhames feels the recent racial tensions and incidents of violence by police against African-Americans make a behind-the-scenes investigation of the Simpson trial worthwhile.
“What I find in America is that an unarmed man in New York can be shot 41 times by cops, and it’s called an accident and everybody goes free, another man is assaulted with a toilet plunger, there’s the Rodney King beating, and other incidents which make me think that, as an African-American male, I’m in trouble. And I’m factoring in my experiences of being stopped by police officers in California before I was known. It colors how you look at someone like Johnnie, and how the media and the world in general dealt with the O.J. case and how he was perceived by minorities.
“I don’t know if O.J. did it or not. I felt the evidence pointed to him being guilty, but when I saw Mark Fuhrman and heard this guy saying ‘nigger’ this or that, and pleading the Fifth Amendment, to me it would have been no different if the defendant was Jewish and the cop who found the glove was a former Nazi. This will force America to hold a mirror up to its nature, and confront what racism is there.”
Rhames sees some parallels between Cochran and King, the boxing promoter he portrayed for HBO: “Some saw King as a hero, others as a villain, and I look at Cochran in a similar way. I’ll read all the testimony, the books, and interviews Cochran gave to get his perspective.”
CBS set up the Lawrence Schiller book “American Tragedy” with Schiller as director after his other recent crime tale, “Perfect Murder” (on the JonBenet Ramsey case) became a ratings grabber for the network. Schiller helmed that one, and previously worked with Mailer on the 1982 TV adaptation of the novelist’s landmark book “The Executioner’s Song,” which starred Tommy Lee Jones.
The network is reportedly eyeing Jones for the role of F. Lee Bailey, with rumors circulating in TV circles last week of offers out to Jones for Bailey, Stanley Tucci to play Robert Shapiro and Harvey Keitel and Bruno Kirby for Barry Scheck. It’s unclear whether any of those names will actually participate, and Schiller was unavailable to comment. Rhames is repped by William Morris’ Lee Stollman and Jeff Hunter.
